As we automate, communism becomes almost a requirement. Capitalism will not survive our current path of evolution. Already America, the beacon of capitalism is forced to eliminate massive numbers of people from the work force by maintaining a huge military, an enormous TSA, gigantic bureaucracies, a massive prison system, etc... if the US government canâ€(TM)t build a capitalistic society without massive socialist programs, what about China, India and other countries?
We will have to embrace communism and live something of the Wall-E life of people generally producing and contributing nothing before we adapt the system to let people like me work because we enjoy it and let everyone else live a perpetual vacation.
Next time you visit a Walmart or similar store, count the massive amount of crap that exists for no other reason the producing eventual toxic landfill because we need to make sure people produce crap so other people can sell crap so other people will buy crap simply because we need to support capitalism.
I bought a BMW i3 recently, 2 years ago I think. I expect it to my last car. It has almost no corrosible parts and once self driving ride sharing happens, Iâ€(TM)ll leave it parked most of the year. Even now, lots of people in cities are using car sharing instead of owning vehicles. This means jobs for mechanics, parking attendants, car assembly line workers, etc... will disappear. Once an app for farm vehicle sharing comes around, there will be a similar trend in rural areas.
Information sciences will destroy capitalism.
So, once that happens, money will have far less value. And to be fair, China or some other country willing to embrace communist ethics sooner will invest the time and materials to send us to the moon, Mars and beyond. The U.S. will fail because there is an inherent belief that competition is better than cooperation in America.
Iâ€(TM)ve been talking with my kids about the value of micro houses instead of contemporary home ownership. They agree that the only reason you really need so much space is because of all the useless crap we collect. They donâ€(TM)t need book shelves as they have ebooks and libraries. They donâ€(TM)t need desks as they have laptops. They donâ€(TM)t need a 75†TV because the room is small enough to enjoy a 40â€. I believe their generation will favor living in structures similar to â€oethe stacks†from Ready Player One. Theyâ€(TM)ll need less money, theyâ€(TM)ll buy less crap, theyâ€(TM)ll use less energy, theyâ€(TM)ll generate less trash. Theyâ€(TM)ll depend on communal resources as opposed to personally owned. If they use clothing rental instead of ownership, they can avoid having so much crap theyâ€(TM)ll never wear.
I grew up when IBM was the most amazing company in computing. They did big and small and you could walk into a store and buy a computer with the name IBM on it. When the PS/2 came out, I spent years drooling and wishing I could get one of those. I'm sure a PS/2 Model 50 with a 286 would have made my life worth living.
Then IBM progressively decided that they wanted to blacklist all the people like me. I have absolutely no idea where to start if I wanted to start doing anything with IBM today. I've honestly tried too. I have been trying to get myself a CICS environment to develop software for as I'm building a system which could benefit from it. The problem is, I don't want to be stuck in a room with sales people. I just want to download an image and try it out. I want an environment which can run on my laptop which I can develop on over the summer while on a train ride across Europe. I've been told I can use Hercules, but I can't figure out where to start. The entire IBM community is completely closed off and people act so superior as though "You could do this, but it's too hard for you".
So, instead I'm building my own OLTP system based on Couchbase instead of DB2 and using OpenFaas (and extending the hell out of it) instead of CICS.
I made this little rant to explain why I've never considered using Watson.
If I'm going to develop a system on an AI technology, even if it's inferior and years behind, I'll use Microsoft, Google or Amazon's solutions. The reason is that all 3 of them are approachable. It's possible for me with a free account as a developer to do what I need to do and then check the code into our corporate codebase and send the business people in rooms together and sign contracts. I don't need to sign my life away only to feel locked into a technology which may or may not be able to do what I need. I can actually make hobby projects and experiment with the technologies outside the IBM world, learn them and then use them.
I honestly always thought Watson was cool and I've had uses for the technology I'm sure. I also have 7 digit budgets to spend on technologies I need. But I doubt the money will ever get to IBM because I'm pretty scared of them. What's worse is that I'm scared that if I let them in the door, they won't be happy with the money I'm offering, but instead will bully me and my bosses into signing contracts that are 10 times bigger because they're goal is to milk us for everything. I've always heard that everyone who ever used IBM was really happy until they realized they were paying $5 million for a web site.
Well... I'm off to write my OLTP... I wish everyone involved luck.
The JIT takes intermediate code and compiled it to native code. By making it that the JIT canâ€(TM)t generate the harmful code, the problem goes away. This is and always was the flaw with JavaScript. Exploits found in any engine that can allow code to be transmitted and executed on a foreign system has always been a security problem. The expertise in compiler development doesnâ€(TM)t always mirror the knowledge required to consider the exploit paths. Therefore, itâ€(TM)s unlikely all possible means of blocking these attacks will be found until they are first exploited. Even today, many of the best compiler developers can tell you absolutely everything a SPARC or a MIPS would do, but only a small number of engineers could explain the pipeline prior to speculative bytecode recompilation on x64 CPUs.
The engineers developing compiler optimizations for a JIT very likely does not always have the knowledge required to identify paths maliciPIs hackers might exploit the compiled code.
Code signing is a means of mitigating native code exploits. Of course, we all know people are not quite ready for things like Windows S. Though the Mac world embraces this environment.
Microsoftâ€(TM)s efforts to move almost entirely to managed code is a great step in the right direction. As RyuJIT gets even better, it will become the default for everything.
Finally, virtual machines. To handle these issues in that environment may sound impossible, but if you absolutely must run VMs which in theory would allow almost random strangers to provision their own insecure VMs to hack other users VMs, then realize that VMware and everyone else has implemented dynamic recompilers (JITs) for processing hardware emulation for a long time. VMware for example intercepts code targeting I/O operations that are based on legacy x86 I/O by recompiling the code as trapping I/O calls has never been supported. This is how legacy VMs are able to identify virtual hard drive parameters through sequential calls to inb against a virtualized CMOS chip.
By extending the JIT to support binary oriented regular expressions to identify malicious strings of code during dynamic recompilation, an anti malware system could be built. The downside of course is that performance will take a beating. This is simply to be expected, virtualization was always a stupid idea for anyone using it as anything more than a transitioning platform.
What naziâ€(TM)s, and most other insane groups have always had in common is that they consolidated power and attempted to narrow their nations to a single party who could unilaterally make decisions without checks and balances.
While I have absolutely no respect for any political parties and especially no respect for people who seem to believe that other parties are wrong because their party is right, I will point out that a the Republican Party of the 21st century more closely mirrors all the â€oeevil parties†you mentioned above.
Newt Gingrich actually ran for office by bragging that his greatest accomplishment on behalf of the nation and the party was to nearly tip the balance of power entirely in one direction. If he succeeded, the republicans could have acted unilaterally to eliminate opposition which he also expressed as a goal.
I am sooooo glad that Iâ€(TM)m not living in America anymore. I now live in a country with so many political parties that theyâ€(TM)re basically meaningless.
Are you by any chance in favor of a country where passing laws (and even constitutional changes) can be accomplished without any debate because a single party believes that the other party is evil and shouldnâ€(TM)t have a voice? If so, you seem to be a supporter of the right team.
Are you suggesting that the data set involved could have more than just one variable involved?
Let me check though... otherwise the people tested were all identical clones living in a bubble right? Please tell me there were no other variables beyond Mediterranean and low-fat. Or wealth.
People didn't cheat at all on the diets did they?
Some of the people weren't secretly women?
None of the men at risk of heart disease died from getting lap dances from strippers?
I did read some nutritional research once which I did consider to be well written and properly researched.
It appears that ingesting sufficient doses of cyanide is guaranteed to bring an end to all back aches and migraines.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support this in any way whatsoever.
As with this study, it's utter rubbish. We're studying a machine with countless variables over extended periods of time. We're experimenting purely with the fuel provided by the observed audience. We then measure statistics as if the only variable different between these massively complex organisms is Mediterranean vs. a low fat diet. We monitor superficial data to identify whether it's effective.
Even if this was a reasonable method of performing science, we're also assuming the data set is not flawed. For example. how many of the men on these diets followed them strictly when their wives weren't watching?
This entire form of research is medicine, it's not science. It's not real science. It's a pseudo-science which applies a mockery of scientific method and presents massive amounts of flawed research as being meaningful in some way or another.
Let's be clear about some things. We have absolutely no clue how the human body works. The human body does evolve a little here and there, but it's not like computer science where 10 years can mean a total reinvention of the system. Consider just the evolutionary differences that made Africans and Norwegians different and how long it took before we diverged from being little better than monkeys to two more or less different species and yet, we still share more than enough traits to swap internal organs between the bodies of an African jungle king and a Norwegian Viking (they still exist... Thursday and Friday nights in downtown Oslo.. generally after 11pm).
If we understood anything about how the human body actually worked, we wouldn't need to publish new editions of biochemistry and organic chemistry books. I read these every few years and often it feels like each new copy is telling me the previous edition was entirely wrong.
We're guessing our way through this.
From a scientific aspect, we have almost no real information on how a human cell produces energy. We have medical knowledge, but that means "We don't know shit, but it seems to work for us". We lack any real understanding of the basics of how a living cell from any organism works. We barely have the slightest idea how two cells will interact with one another.
Let's consider this... we don't even have the slightest idea what actually happens when you chew and swallow and the food hits your stomach. We don't know how the cells in your stomach acids will interact with the items you place in your stomach. And we certainly don't know which chemical and physical reactions are actually healthy or not.
We have medical knowledge which is
"We tried this... people died... we think it could be bad"
"We tried this... people seemed to die less. We have no idea why. We think it could be 'not bad' but only a schmuck would say so"
"We tried this... the person turned orange... he became president... he competed with the North Korean leader over who had the most ridiculous hair... we believe it could be bad"
Scientific knowledge is when we can say
"This complex object... such as an organic compound is made of these simple compounds"
"When exposed to this type of radiation, the compound mutates in this way"
"Here is the math to explicitly describe the transformation as well as rate of change from the initial state to the altered state"
"Here is the computer simulation of the mutation"
That is science. Medicine which is a bunch of "Let's poke it and see what happens" kind of nonsense is one step short of political science in idiocy.
That said, I'm extremely happy there are lots of people practicing medicine... they may be scientific idiots, but I'm really happy they experiment with different methods of keeping people alive until the scientists actually devise proper solutions using proper science to problems.
Yet, we are omnivores now and have been for millions of years. Now, I'm certainly no expert and clearly lack the education to speak as an informed individual on this topic (that was prefacing the word which comes next...) but, I like to think that I'm not entirely clueless.
Wouldn't a species living as omnivores for millions of years eventually experience evolutionary changes such as instincts to hunt as well as gather. Or possibly experience digestion system changes to handle consumption and processing of animal tissues? We have lots of organs and nasty gooey things in our bodies that facilitate energy production from meats. I'd imagine those wouldn't be there if they weren't part of our evolutionary design.
Regardless of which diet is healthier, we've evolved to process a greater spectrum of food sources. It's like when car companies were focused on developing vehicles that were able to operate on gas, alcohol or whatever else. The biproducts were different, but the vehicles were able to extra energy from a greater set of sources. It didn't mean people driving those cars absolutely had to switch to alternative fuels. Only that they weren't limited to one or the other.
I would regard a vehicle that provides a greater diversity of sources of fuel for energy production to be an improvement. I would consider an animal with such abilities to be the same, an improvement.
The consequences are simple... people will either have to create new jobs based on vanity as we'll cover necessity. Or we'll have to work towards some form of communism.
There is such a thing as an "eye brow plucking shop"... no shit... it exists.. they're all over and they exist because we ran out of jobs that meet the needs of the people and now we focus instead on making people into social workers for the elderly and unemployed.
I've been waiting 5 years to buy a new Mac... the ones I had were good enough and little by little I started using my PCs instead and now I almost never use my Macs.
See, the Mac Book Pro is a horrible machine. I mean even the fanbois I know and love hate the new keyboard and touch bar. It's a punishment to use those machines.
The MacBook is just too little to be useful for more than youtube and e-mail.
The MacBook air is 13" and has a shitty screen and horrible battery life. Where's the 11" with great battery? And let's not forget that the CPU and graphics are a few too many generations behind.
The Mac Pro just isn't even a machine worth looking at. It's too old and even when it was new it was basically a fixed configuration machine that you couldn't upgrade the graphics in so it was a poor investment.
iMac. I suppose it's not a bad machine, but I have no idea what I would use something like that for. It's kinda big and ugly and it takes up a huge amount of space. At least the Surface Studio offers some utility for such a huge and space sucking screen by giving it pen and touch, but... I mean ugh... I'm sure there's someone out there somewhere who could probably figure out what it's supposed to be good for. I haven't actually ever seen one outside of the store.
Then there's the Mac Mini... the greatest computer Apple ever made. I can hide it under the desk and connect it to my Wacom 27" Cintiq and it was beautiful... but it's OLD!!! and it's SLOW!!! and it's WIMPY!!! If Intel... the company that practically defines the term "Uncool" can make a Hades Canyon NUC that size with that much CPU and that much graphics power for that price... where is Apple? Where is the Mac Mini to rule all Mac Minis? Apple could be selling the perfect gaming and graphics powerhouse mini PC and instead they're selling the crap that time forgot.
No... My 2012 MacBook Air was good enough to hold me over as I became a PC guy. I don't know if I'll ever buy a Mac again. I think Apple has told me somewhere along the lines that I'm simply not attractive enough to use them anymore.
I am at a division of a mega-corporation we have been a Cisco Gold Partner for years.
Recently, we shut down most of our data center business because there's no value in it anymore. We sold off or laid off most of the data center workers and we were one of the biggest in the country a few years ago. What's funny is that 4 years ago, people said cloud would never take over... the developers apparently didn't agree and while no one in their right minds would us IaaS in the cloud because it's expensive and stupid, SaaS took over most of the stuff and business software was placed on PaaS. So, there's simply no reason anyone would run a data center in-house anymore unless they would rather spend years and years supporting legacy systems as opposed to investing in progressively moving to more modern systems. I will admit though that the selection of PaaS is still weak. They're either highly proprietary or too "first gen" to invest in at this time... at least when thinking 20 years ahead.
We also were the country's #1 Cisco Unified Communication's partner. That means telephones and video conferencing. We are shutting down that entire division because it's not interesting anymore. As soon as virtual switchboard applications were supported on mobile devices and integrated with telephone providers, we no longer needed or wanted desktop phones. And since Skype for business is so much better than the Cisco offerings, we don't even use the Cisco stuff in-house, we just use Skype. So why waste money on Cisco UC solutions anymore. Of course, we also use Facetime and Google Hangouts and whatever. There are hundreds of apps out there.
Both data center and UC died in two years.
I think the next thing to go will be wireless networking and all the infrastructure associated with it. The prices on 4G LTE are a little high now. 40GB/month still costs about $50-60 a user, but that includes telephone and messaging as well. But it costs $40 for 15GB which is basically a base business user plan. If we add $10-$20 a month per user, for a 5000 employees, that's $50,000 a month. And of course if you have 5000 employees, you'll negotiate better prices than that.
So, at $50,000 a month, it costs $1.8 million for 36 months or $600,000 a year for enough LTE to replace your enterprise wireless network.
Consider an organization with 5,000 employees will likely have 500 access points to support them spread across buildings and locations. A Cisco 3802 sells for about $750 in this market (the one I measured the cost of LTE in) and that would be $375,000 for access points, two Cisco 5520 controllers would cost about $50,000 for that many access points. Then there's Cisco Prime and licenses for the access points. Let's assume we're running the professional version. So between software, licenses, additional data center resources, that's about another $300,000. Let's assume at least $1 million so far given my rounding errors.
Then you need to have networking ports with enough capacity to handle the wireless. You'll also need a WAN solution to provide office connectivity to transport the data. You'll also need edge security solutions at every site able to secure the access points and the switches. Let's assume the additional infrastructure cost for that same 36 months will be about half a million.
Then you need consultants and installers and cablers, You need software updates, security patches, operations... I'll place that at about $1.2 million.
So... to run your own wireless network, there is probably about $3 million vs. $1.8 million to just pay for more bandwidth on LTE. Thanks to MDM solutions, it's becoming easier and easier to support desktop devices via LTE as well.
So... we expect when 5G comes out, bandwidth will be even cheaper. Always on laptops are shipping more and more already.
Wireless networking will be dead and it will also decimate about 30-50% of the wired networking market.
Actually, yes, I believe Tesla is much closer than 22 years away from having a self-driving truck. Far more than a self-driving car at least.
Trucks drive a lot differently than cars. Most truck driving is highway driving. A large part of truck driving... especially the type that is is associated with jobs counts is logistical from business park to business park. It is entirely possible and likely that companies that are moving stuff from docks to warehouse or warehouse to warehouse can very easily be made self-driving friendly.
Also, with the exception of managing traffic diversions due to construction (which I haven't seen yet on self driving vehicles), trucks can make the majority of their transit in the a single lane on the highway.
Also, it could be possible for a business to arise for "last mile operators" who are vehicle operators that are responsible for navigating populated areas in trucks. As such, they would assist the truck from the loading dock to the highway and then be picked up by a shuttle bus. Then they could be delivered by a shuttle bus to the highway and assist trucks the last mile to the unloading docks.
I am very much under the belief that we will accomplish self-driving trucks long before we achieve self-driving vehicles that could navigate my neighborhood.
Norway thrives because Norway is a country about the size of California or maybe the American west coast states and also has a manageable population size. In America, it's possible to manage states the size of California without too much difficulty because the people of the state are all somewhat similar and carry common interests. If California were in charge of their own national budget, they could maybe manage to resolve water problems for example. But as part of a much larger country, the people of the country as a whole have to agree that there's value in spending money to solve California's problems.
Here in Norway, a nation-wide company like Telenor (former national telecom monopoly) has to deliver the same service to 95% of all houses if they deliver to one. This would and could not work in the U.S.
There is no way in hell that a California company would invest in delivering fiber to a trailer home in Goldsboro North Carolina. Not only would it be a waste of money for them, but there's no bond between the people. There's nothing in this world that makes the people in California believe that Goldsboro North Carolina are even from the same planet or species as they are. On the other hand they would invest in providing fiber to some weird ass farm along U.S. I5 run by a guy who actually was stupid enough to think that farming in Death Valley would be a smart idea. This is because they're closer to home. There's a good chance that farmer just moved from Goldsboro the year before, but there's a sense of unity or family.
American service providers have to cover too much area and too many people. If I were a NY company, I would not prioritize California. In fact, I'd more or less ignore them because they have the audacity to call something with pineapple on it pizza. For that alone, I would invest in any venture that would cause California to wash away into the ocean.
In Norway, if someone suggested that tax payer money from people in Oslo should be invested in expanding the fiber network to the Sami in Finnmark, the answer would be "Of course... why shouldn't it be?"
In America if someone suggested that tax payer money in Delaware should be used to provide fiber access to trailer homes in Louisiana, there would be public outrage. Hell, they'd probably complain if the Delaware money was used to help Maryland.
It's a different world. You can't compare America an Norway... ever. Norway is a first world country with an educated population that sees themselves as a single country. The U.S. is absolutely nothing like that.
Norway no longer has POTS/PSTN. If you want an analog telephone line, you'll have to get a SIP to Analog box. Some providers will even provide G.711 if you need the full bandwidth.
When Norway privatized the national telephone company back in 1999 or something like that, part of the agreement was that any service they provide to one Norwegian house they have to provide to 95% of Norwegian households. So there are 5% which were a little screwed. Then companies in those areas popped up pretty quick. So, companies like Eltele can provide Internet access to a Sami hut in the middle of Finnmark.
Also, at this time, almost all electric companies in Norway are also fiber delivery companies, more or less every house in Norway that has electricity either already has access to fiber or will eventually have access to fiber as there has be major investments in upgrading the power grid which also means upgrading the fiber.
My power company rents space in my condo complex for housing their switches. So I'm precisely 51 meters of fiber from the central. In our basement, we have multiple 100Gb/s links that are scheduled for upgrade to 400Gb/s soon. I only pay for 40Mb/s because why pay for more? But with a phone call I can get gigabit. Within a week, I could have multiple 10Gb/s uplinks.
I was working with a Tier-1 service provider who negotiated a deal with Netflix where the provider paid Netflix in order to host a CDN in order to reduce cross Atlantic traffic. It was an easy choice. NetFlix would get rack space for their servers with direct attachments at 250 POPs around the world so they would no longer have to stream over the cross-atlantic and cross-pacific fibers. And Netflix was paid for the privilege.
Youtube is Google. Google has deals with service providers around the world to scratch each others backs. If you have 10,000 customers or more, Google will place caching servers in your network to reduce your uplink costs if you provide the racks, power, etc... If you're smaller than 10,000 customers, closer to 5,000 or so, you could probably negotiate to pay Google to put a few servers there. I think there are probably also circumstances where if you Google services like DNS, they'll pay you for your customer data.
Akamai has had deals like this for decades as well.
YouTube and NetFlix actually don't pay nearly as much for bandwidth as you'd think. In addition, Google has their own fibers (even across the oceans) for running their networks and providing caching.
Economics and history suggests that the most motivated people are the the people most willing to abandon their old lives and risk everything to establish themselves somewhere else that offers better opportunity for them to succeed.
As such, the most motivated people will relocate to be whether the greatest opportunity is.
This brings :
- Motivated people
- Opportunistic people
These people will either work as transients, meaning that they will work 2-5 years in the area, earn money and move back with their winnings to settle down. This requires strong markets. For example, if I took a job offer I have in Redmond right now, I would relocate and buy a house immediately. I would stay at my job for long enough for that purchase to show me a solid return on investment which would depend on housing prices rising and therefore screwing all the locals. Then I would sell and leave. The person I sold to would do the same thing.
Or they will settle down.
The transients will come and go and they are a burden on any local economy, but what's important is that many of them will settle in the end. Or at least they'll strengthen the market making the company the area more attractive to draw more people.
Highly motivated people who settle down will raise their children and place importance on their motivations. They'll participate more in schools. They'll provide better tutors for their children. They'll invest more in the local area and improve the infrastructure... and the values of the properties.
And that will draw more people.
The problem is, this cycle of development is excellent for the city but not for the people in the city. Prices rise, inflation is horrendous. I was in Seattle last month for a trade show and I was horrified at how cheap so many things were.
The salaries of all my peers was $150,000+ but the food and prices at Target were suitable for areas with economies closer to $40,000. That means that the people shopping at the stores should be paying more and the stores should be paying their employees more. Instead, they were very definitely minimum wage workers.
That means that the pay gap is INSANE!!! Even with $15 an hour minimum wage, the property values are so ridiculously high that people have to spend an hour commuting or live in squalor to make ends meet. $30,000 a year is simply not enough to survive in Seattle given the relatively small size of the city and the relatively high demand for real estate.
That said, homelessness in Seattle was amazing. There was A LOT of it. I grew up in New York back in the days when trying to get into Grand Central in the morning required carefully climbing over homeless people while attempting to not step in puddles of urine.... The difference is, NYC hasn't been developing... it's a lot of old buildings now. Seattle is under mass construction and is really clean. It seems and feels wrong to have massive urban renewal going on with homeless people just all over the place.
What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg. Someone explained to me that there's a possibility that the city has invested so heavily in caring for the homeless that many homeless people are attracted to the city so they won't have to beg. So it's interesting because homelessness is/was almost a fashion in San Francisco, but now that the system is even better (it seems) in Seattle, the homeless are migrating to the better system.
Sorry for the long reply it was fun to research as I was writing it.
I risk a possible new tangent (sadly I use message forums as a public diary.. or is a diarrhea to organize my thoughts)
A VM doesn't actually require a hypervisor:)
What's really cool about the architecture of WSL is that it is kinda a VM and almost even a hypervisor:)
If we were to suggest that a hypervisor provides APIs to a guest virtual machine through simulation of hardware or that a hypervisor provides the principle of a system call through a virtual memory protection exception as opposed to a software interrupt... then a hypervisor is really nothing more than an OS kernel that exposes APIs to programs that actually think they're running on bare metal. Of course, as soon as we install native drivers on the guest virtual machine so that it's speaking via an explicit virtualization API to the host as opposed to simulated hardware which is trapped by the hypervisor, then it's really no longer a hypervisor itself.
So I think the moral of that story is that even VMware which is fatalistically a hypervisor is not really a hypervisor in a true sense anymore.
On the other hand, pico processes are processes which run on top of "Library OS" which provides an API to guest processes such as WSL. Now that API will be much smoother and more tightly controlled than a hypervisor. Instead of emulating legacy HW and trapping calls to it, Library OS can do things like say "allocate memory" and it will be done. But for the most part, it's actually very definitely a virtual machine:)
It's really funny. Library OS implements an insanely lightweight method of providing virtualization in the exact same way that Linux containers might.
So... while it seems I'm being stubborn... that whole assembling my thoughts was fun. I appreciate the opportunity you provided me.
And yet, you allow companies like Walmart to intentionally and legally pay their employees wages clearly marked as poverty and then additionally allow them to have departments to help them apply for government subsidy effectively making employed people beggars. All the while, the shareholders of that same company is paying dividends equal to approximately the same value they force the people to beg for.
Oh... and there's a minimum wage which allows systematical impoverishment of the working person. Anyone working in a minimum wage career is worth precisely that value... the government regulated and mandated minimum wage which is a way the employer can say
"If the government will legally allow me to pay you less, I will" and also says
"There's no point in me treating you well, you don't even respect yourself to get a job working for someone who respects you" followed by
"There's no point in you changing jobs, you're a minimum wage worker today and every other job you'd get is also minimum wage or close to it."
and also
"Of course I respect you... I don't want you to suffer, instead of $7.15 an hour, we'll pay you $9 and hour! Yes, I know that's still way below poverty levels, but you're worth it!"
Oh... should we talk about overdraft fees that banks place on poor people to exploit them. It's a systematical means of attacking the poor and exploiting them.
How about the justice and prison system which takes Americans who don't seem to live up to the standards of "we think he'll be an asset to the country" and then fosters to the systematic production of career criminals and prisoners since the poor people are basically not worth anything other than a means to provide jobs in former coal towns at prisons.
Dude... not a pot shot... America is a second world possibly third world country. You treat your poor worse than you treat your live stock. And the funny part is, it's so important that you do that it would be almost impossible to change it now. Just imagine how completely screwed the entire country would be if the U.S. actually converted their penal facilities to correctional facilities. The job market would be flooded, the millions of people employed directly or indirectly by the prison systems would be out of work. Then there would be the fact that places like Dairy Queen wouldn't be legally allowed to turn people down for jobs.
The entire U.S. economy would collapse if you didn't treat your poor people so badly. It's disgusting.
As for you not needing to carry cash... I'm very excited for you. In fact, many poor people don't need to any more since they now have fancy cards that let them buy food without having to use paper food stamps anymore. Isn't that nifty!!! This way, a Walmart employee can work a 12 hour shift desperately hoping to make ends-meet and then use their food-stamp benefit card on their way out to buy frozen food with so many preservatives that they'll get fat just smelling it while it's still frozen.
Of course then you have to consider that those people have to use cash because the overdraft fee they got nail by for seeing whether they have money or not is still lingering on their bank account from last week and if they transfer money into their bank account, the fee will eat it up. So when they go to the "Pay day loan" shop which will legally loan you money for the week at only 30% interest, they need to ask for it in cash because of that looming $75 fee they paid because they were down to $0.50 and they used the ATM in the mall to check whether they had enough money before using it and the machine charged $2 to check.
Yeh... it must be nice to be wealthy enough to be the father of 5 in the mid-west where you can go to Walmart and see the minimum wage beggars as if they were in a zoo. It must also be nice to be a father of 5 in the mid-west where you bring your kids to eat happy meals and play on the play ground while the an
Strange, over here, the bank simply extends credit from the machine and stores the transaction. I think if it's a large transaction, it may be necessary to call the bank and get an approval code though. As I mentioned I've never encountered it over 1500NOK
They are still part of the calculation system. For example, if I were to order resistors from Elfa in Sweden, each on would cost about 0.03SEK. But the smallest purchasable unit of anything is far less than that. Even then, at the grocery store today, my bill was 500.21NOK for a bag of groceries. Since I paid by card, the.21 could be charged. But you can't possibly buy anything in the store for less than a few crowns... as such, the transaction fee would certainly be covered.
Nope... not an issue of where I got my education. The reason things like Bitcoin gained value is because people were able to market it to the masses through crowd sourcing (or modern day mob mentality) and as people began to have faith in its inherent value, they were willing to exchange other currencies for it.
Scandinavia can not suffer a one-week power outage except in a war time catastrophe and even that would be exceptional. Unlike third-world countries like the American north-east, the power grids are highly redundant and highly distributed. It is possible for small areas to suffer outages, but in Norway and Sweden which are about as big as the entire American east, they are extremely well built.
There are occasional pressures placed on the grids which are a little humorous. For example, Brønnøysund Norway which houses the national business registry and is located in one of the most impressively difficult locations geographically on Norway's west coast can see brown outs when the ovens for metal production in Mo i Rana fire up. This is because of the absolutely immense load placed on the grid by that process and because it's very difficult to extend other segments of the grid into the area.
That said, in Norway or Sweden unless there is a war, even if it's the middle of winter in the mountains, a one week power outage would be extremely unlikely. Even in a war, it would be surprising if there was a long term power outage. In my neighborhood for example, if we suffered a long term power outage, within 100 meters of my house is enough sources of energy to begin a long term production of energy within a few days. It would take years to consume more fuel than I could produce and I'm within Oslo. And it would take very little time to get local stores up and running as well.
So, we're back to what would cause the electronics to fail. That would mean that the national clearing houses would lack the ability to process their payments and perform transactions. This would make the money limited in its scope and it would retain local value. But in countries like Sweden and Norway which are not self-sufficient or even close to it, trade is critical. If you can't pay for what you're importing, you'll need to be extended credit. If you can't process payments with your national clearing houses, you'll have to exchange alternative forms of payments. The government may have these means, but Sweden and Norway have their own currencies and therefore would be required at a national level to negotiate Euro or Dollars because their own money can't be consumed.
So if money is not able to be used, people will in fact lost faith in it.
That said, I'm internally familiar with the national clearing houses in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. There are some weaknesses which could be exploited in their systems because of IT people being idiots. But to give an example of Scandinavian thinking. I was teaching a networking fundamentals course to a major Scandinavian tier-1 telecom provider and they told me I could skip the chapter on security because no one would want to do any harm to them.
Also, in Scandinavia let me make it clear... it would take something truly and absolutely massive to make it impossible to accept electronic payments. This is not the U.S.. This is not the Third World. If there's a disaster which needs to be handled, it get's handled. People don't stand around looking stupid talking to the BBC or CNN. I think it would take a nuclear bomb or an EMP on that scale to even cause a hiccough to Scandinavia. I think that here in Norway, if there was a major incident, engineers and makers will start converging enmass on city center and quickly start planning on how to bring systems back up.
Norway has more knowledge in power production than most any other country in the world. Sweden is generally within the top three countries world wide in building telecommunication networks. Now consider the humans the US waste on things like their military and the TSA. Scandinavia
When the electronics fail, we have far deeper rooted problems to deal with. Money is barely the start of it.
Money has value because we trust the issuer of that money. This is why for some time we wouldn't want Iceland crowns in our pockets.
If we lose the electronics, it will be due to a failure by the issuer of that currency to do their jobs. This means that even if the paper theoretically has some value to it, that paper's value would collapse quickly because the country issuing it would no longer be able to manage their debts to other countries. As such, the market would collapse the money would be useless anyway. The paper money would only buy a few days of relief before the absolute downfall.
This is why it's nice to have things like Paypal and other services which could also collapse, but if for example the entire Norwegian economy collapsed, I always have a few hundred bucks in my Paypal account and I have some prepaid credit cards here and there as well.
People who would keep cash around to be prepared are also people who would keep alternative payment forms around. My in-laws have a few bars of silver in a safe somewhere. People who aren't prepared would be purely at the mercy of support from the national guards.
Slashdot Mirror
As we automate, communism becomes almost a requirement. Capitalism will not survive our current path of evolution. Already America, the beacon of capitalism is forced to eliminate massive numbers of people from the work force by maintaining a huge military, an enormous TSA, gigantic bureaucracies, a massive prison system, etc... if the US government canâ€(TM)t build a capitalistic society without massive socialist programs, what about China, India and other countries?
We will have to embrace communism and live something of the Wall-E life of people generally producing and contributing nothing before we adapt the system to let people like me work because we enjoy it and let everyone else live a perpetual vacation.
Next time you visit a Walmart or similar store, count the massive amount of crap that exists for no other reason the producing eventual toxic landfill because we need to make sure people produce crap so other people can sell crap so other people will buy crap simply because we need to support capitalism.
I bought a BMW i3 recently, 2 years ago I think. I expect it to my last car. It has almost no corrosible parts and once self driving ride sharing happens, Iâ€(TM)ll leave it parked most of the year. Even now, lots of people in cities are using car sharing instead of owning vehicles. This means jobs for mechanics, parking attendants, car assembly line workers, etc... will disappear. Once an app for farm vehicle sharing comes around, there will be a similar trend in rural areas.
Information sciences will destroy capitalism.
So, once that happens, money will have far less value. And to be fair, China or some other country willing to embrace communist ethics sooner will invest the time and materials to send us to the moon, Mars and beyond. The U.S. will fail because there is an inherent belief that competition is better than cooperation in America.
Iâ€(TM)ve been talking with my kids about the value of micro houses instead of contemporary home ownership. They agree that the only reason you really need so much space is because of all the useless crap we collect. They donâ€(TM)t need book shelves as they have ebooks and libraries. They donâ€(TM)t need desks as they have laptops. They donâ€(TM)t need a 75†TV because the room is small enough to enjoy a 40â€. I believe their generation will favor living in structures similar to â€oethe stacks†from Ready Player One. Theyâ€(TM)ll need less money, theyâ€(TM)ll buy less crap, theyâ€(TM)ll use less energy, theyâ€(TM)ll generate less trash. Theyâ€(TM)ll depend on communal resources as opposed to personally owned. If they use clothing rental instead of ownership, they can avoid having so much crap theyâ€(TM)ll never wear.
No, I think cost will not be an issue. Time will.
I grew up when IBM was the most amazing company in computing. They did big and small and you could walk into a store and buy a computer with the name IBM on it. When the PS/2 came out, I spent years drooling and wishing I could get one of those. I'm sure a PS/2 Model 50 with a 286 would have made my life worth living.
... I wish everyone involved luck.
Then IBM progressively decided that they wanted to blacklist all the people like me. I have absolutely no idea where to start if I wanted to start doing anything with IBM today. I've honestly tried too. I have been trying to get myself a CICS environment to develop software for as I'm building a system which could benefit from it. The problem is, I don't want to be stuck in a room with sales people. I just want to download an image and try it out. I want an environment which can run on my laptop which I can develop on over the summer while on a train ride across Europe. I've been told I can use Hercules, but I can't figure out where to start. The entire IBM community is completely closed off and people act so superior as though "You could do this, but it's too hard for you".
So, instead I'm building my own OLTP system based on Couchbase instead of DB2 and using OpenFaas (and extending the hell out of it) instead of CICS.
I made this little rant to explain why I've never considered using Watson.
If I'm going to develop a system on an AI technology, even if it's inferior and years behind, I'll use Microsoft, Google or Amazon's solutions. The reason is that all 3 of them are approachable. It's possible for me with a free account as a developer to do what I need to do and then check the code into our corporate codebase and send the business people in rooms together and sign contracts. I don't need to sign my life away only to feel locked into a technology which may or may not be able to do what I need. I can actually make hobby projects and experiment with the technologies outside the IBM world, learn them and then use them.
I honestly always thought Watson was cool and I've had uses for the technology I'm sure. I also have 7 digit budgets to spend on technologies I need. But I doubt the money will ever get to IBM because I'm pretty scared of them. What's worse is that I'm scared that if I let them in the door, they won't be happy with the money I'm offering, but instead will bully me and my bosses into signing contracts that are 10 times bigger because they're goal is to milk us for everything. I've always heard that everyone who ever used IBM was really happy until they realized they were paying $5 million for a web site.
Well... I'm off to write my OLTP
The JIT takes intermediate code and compiled it to native code. By making it that the JIT canâ€(TM)t generate the harmful code, the problem goes away. This is and always was the flaw with JavaScript. Exploits found in any engine that can allow code to be transmitted and executed on a foreign system has always been a security problem. The expertise in compiler development doesnâ€(TM)t always mirror the knowledge required to consider the exploit paths. Therefore, itâ€(TM)s unlikely all possible means of blocking these attacks will be found until they are first exploited. Even today, many of the best compiler developers can tell you absolutely everything a SPARC or a MIPS would do, but only a small number of engineers could explain the pipeline prior to speculative bytecode recompilation on x64 CPUs.
The engineers developing compiler optimizations for a JIT very likely does not always have the knowledge required to identify paths maliciPIs hackers might exploit the compiled code.
Code signing is a means of mitigating native code exploits. Of course, we all know people are not quite ready for things like Windows S. Though the Mac world embraces this environment.
Microsoftâ€(TM)s efforts to move almost entirely to managed code is a great step in the right direction. As RyuJIT gets even better, it will become the default for everything.
Finally, virtual machines. To handle these issues in that environment may sound impossible, but if you absolutely must run VMs which in theory would allow almost random strangers to provision their own insecure VMs to hack other users VMs, then realize that VMware and everyone else has implemented dynamic recompilers (JITs) for processing hardware emulation for a long time. VMware for example intercepts code targeting I/O operations that are based on legacy x86 I/O by recompiling the code as trapping I/O calls has never been supported. This is how legacy VMs are able to identify virtual hard drive parameters through sequential calls to inb against a virtualized CMOS chip.
By extending the JIT to support binary oriented regular expressions to identify malicious strings of code during dynamic recompilation, an anti malware system could be built. The downside of course is that performance will take a beating. This is simply to be expected, virtualization was always a stupid idea for anyone using it as anything more than a transitioning platform.
Ok... Iâ€(TM)m stupid for responding.
What naziâ€(TM)s, and most other insane groups have always had in common is that they consolidated power and attempted to narrow their nations to a single party who could unilaterally make decisions without checks and balances.
While I have absolutely no respect for any political parties and especially no respect for people who seem to believe that other parties are wrong because their party is right, I will point out that a the Republican Party of the 21st century more closely mirrors all the â€oeevil parties†you mentioned above.
Newt Gingrich actually ran for office by bragging that his greatest accomplishment on behalf of the nation and the party was to nearly tip the balance of power entirely in one direction. If he succeeded, the republicans could have acted unilaterally to eliminate opposition which he also expressed as a goal.
I am sooooo glad that Iâ€(TM)m not living in America anymore. I now live in a country with so many political parties that theyâ€(TM)re basically meaningless.
Are you by any chance in favor of a country where passing laws (and even constitutional changes) can be accomplished without any debate because a single party believes that the other party is evil and shouldnâ€(TM)t have a voice? If so, you seem to be a supporter of the right team.
Are you suggesting that the data set involved could have more than just one variable involved?
Let me check though... otherwise the people tested were all identical clones living in a bubble right? Please tell me there were no other variables beyond Mediterranean and low-fat. Or wealth.
People didn't cheat at all on the diets did they?
Some of the people weren't secretly women?
None of the men at risk of heart disease died from getting lap dances from strippers?
I did read some nutritional research once which I did consider to be well written and properly researched.
It appears that ingesting sufficient doses of cyanide is guaranteed to bring an end to all back aches and migraines.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support this in any way whatsoever.
As with this study, it's utter rubbish. We're studying a machine with countless variables over extended periods of time. We're experimenting purely with the fuel provided by the observed audience. We then measure statistics as if the only variable different between these massively complex organisms is Mediterranean vs. a low fat diet. We monitor superficial data to identify whether it's effective.
Even if this was a reasonable method of performing science, we're also assuming the data set is not flawed. For example. how many of the men on these diets followed them strictly when their wives weren't watching?
This entire form of research is medicine, it's not science. It's not real science. It's a pseudo-science which applies a mockery of scientific method and presents massive amounts of flawed research as being meaningful in some way or another.
Let's be clear about some things. We have absolutely no clue how the human body works. The human body does evolve a little here and there, but it's not like computer science where 10 years can mean a total reinvention of the system. Consider just the evolutionary differences that made Africans and Norwegians different and how long it took before we diverged from being little better than monkeys to two more or less different species and yet, we still share more than enough traits to swap internal organs between the bodies of an African jungle king and a Norwegian Viking (they still exist... Thursday and Friday nights in downtown Oslo.. generally after 11pm).
If we understood anything about how the human body actually worked, we wouldn't need to publish new editions of biochemistry and organic chemistry books. I read these every few years and often it feels like each new copy is telling me the previous edition was entirely wrong.
We're guessing our way through this.
From a scientific aspect, we have almost no real information on how a human cell produces energy. We have medical knowledge, but that means "We don't know shit, but it seems to work for us". We lack any real understanding of the basics of how a living cell from any organism works. We barely have the slightest idea how two cells will interact with one another.
Let's consider this... we don't even have the slightest idea what actually happens when you chew and swallow and the food hits your stomach. We don't know how the cells in your stomach acids will interact with the items you place in your stomach. And we certainly don't know which chemical and physical reactions are actually healthy or not.
We have medical knowledge which is
"We tried this... people died... we think it could be bad"
"We tried this... people seemed to die less. We have no idea why. We think it could be 'not bad' but only a schmuck would say so"
"We tried this... the person turned orange... he became president... he competed with the North Korean leader over who had the most ridiculous hair... we believe it could be bad"
Scientific knowledge is when we can say
"This complex object... such as an organic compound is made of these simple compounds"
"When exposed to this type of radiation, the compound mutates in this way"
"Here is the math to explicitly describe the transformation as well as rate of change from the initial state to the altered state"
"Here is the computer simulation of the mutation"
That is science. Medicine which is a bunch of "Let's poke it and see what happens" kind of nonsense is one step short of political science in idiocy.
That said, I'm extremely happy there are lots of people practicing medicine... they may be scientific idiots, but I'm really happy they experiment with different methods of keeping people alive until the scientists actually devise proper solutions using proper science to problems.
But to make some absolutely stupid rema
Yet, we are omnivores now and have been for millions of years. Now, I'm certainly no expert and clearly lack the education to speak as an informed individual on this topic (that was prefacing the word which comes next...) but, I like to think that I'm not entirely clueless.
Wouldn't a species living as omnivores for millions of years eventually experience evolutionary changes such as instincts to hunt as well as gather. Or possibly experience digestion system changes to handle consumption and processing of animal tissues? We have lots of organs and nasty gooey things in our bodies that facilitate energy production from meats. I'd imagine those wouldn't be there if they weren't part of our evolutionary design.
Regardless of which diet is healthier, we've evolved to process a greater spectrum of food sources. It's like when car companies were focused on developing vehicles that were able to operate on gas, alcohol or whatever else. The biproducts were different, but the vehicles were able to extra energy from a greater set of sources. It didn't mean people driving those cars absolutely had to switch to alternative fuels. Only that they weren't limited to one or the other.
I would regard a vehicle that provides a greater diversity of sources of fuel for energy production to be an improvement. I would consider an animal with such abilities to be the same, an improvement.
He's no moron. And yes he deserves clog arteries. And he will spend many years working towards earning them by living a life he finds fulfilling.
Would you like to comment on my smoking?
You're so cute...
Hey... did you ever buy one of those really cool mattress gun racks which let's you keep your AR-15 properly accessible next to where you sleep?
BTW... you already shop at plenty of stores which are using Microsoft's systems to track your every movement. Dynamics 365 is a pretty hot product.
I have 6,000 one krone pieces in a some jars. That's about about $800 US. I've been tempted to buy a computer using them
Try another store somewhere else. Maybe you might even find someplace which accept paper checks.
Were you talking about food stamps or cash? Weren't food stamps moved to using some sort of card now?
I wonder if these stores will have payment systems in place to support food stamps.
The consequences are simple... people will either have to create new jobs based on vanity as we'll cover necessity. Or we'll have to work towards some form of communism.
There is such a thing as an "eye brow plucking shop"... no shit... it exists.. they're all over and they exist because we ran out of jobs that meet the needs of the people and now we focus instead on making people into social workers for the elderly and unemployed.
I've been waiting 5 years to buy a new Mac... the ones I had were good enough and little by little I started using my PCs instead and now I almost never use my Macs.
... I mean ugh... I'm sure there's someone out there somewhere who could probably figure out what it's supposed to be good for. I haven't actually ever seen one outside of the store.
See, the Mac Book Pro is a horrible machine. I mean even the fanbois I know and love hate the new keyboard and touch bar. It's a punishment to use those machines.
The MacBook is just too little to be useful for more than youtube and e-mail.
The MacBook air is 13" and has a shitty screen and horrible battery life. Where's the 11" with great battery? And let's not forget that the CPU and graphics are a few too many generations behind.
The Mac Pro just isn't even a machine worth looking at. It's too old and even when it was new it was basically a fixed configuration machine that you couldn't upgrade the graphics in so it was a poor investment.
iMac. I suppose it's not a bad machine, but I have no idea what I would use something like that for. It's kinda big and ugly and it takes up a huge amount of space. At least the Surface Studio offers some utility for such a huge and space sucking screen by giving it pen and touch, but
Then there's the Mac Mini... the greatest computer Apple ever made. I can hide it under the desk and connect it to my Wacom 27" Cintiq and it was beautiful... but it's OLD!!! and it's SLOW!!! and it's WIMPY!!! If Intel... the company that practically defines the term "Uncool" can make a Hades Canyon NUC that size with that much CPU and that much graphics power for that price... where is Apple? Where is the Mac Mini to rule all Mac Minis? Apple could be selling the perfect gaming and graphics powerhouse mini PC and instead they're selling the crap that time forgot.
No... My 2012 MacBook Air was good enough to hold me over as I became a PC guy. I don't know if I'll ever buy a Mac again. I think Apple has told me somewhere along the lines that I'm simply not attractive enough to use them anymore.
I am at a division of a mega-corporation we have been a Cisco Gold Partner for years.
Recently, we shut down most of our data center business because there's no value in it anymore. We sold off or laid off most of the data center workers and we were one of the biggest in the country a few years ago. What's funny is that 4 years ago, people said cloud would never take over... the developers apparently didn't agree and while no one in their right minds would us IaaS in the cloud because it's expensive and stupid, SaaS took over most of the stuff and business software was placed on PaaS. So, there's simply no reason anyone would run a data center in-house anymore unless they would rather spend years and years supporting legacy systems as opposed to investing in progressively moving to more modern systems. I will admit though that the selection of PaaS is still weak. They're either highly proprietary or too "first gen" to invest in at this time... at least when thinking 20 years ahead.
We also were the country's #1 Cisco Unified Communication's partner. That means telephones and video conferencing. We are shutting down that entire division because it's not interesting anymore. As soon as virtual switchboard applications were supported on mobile devices and integrated with telephone providers, we no longer needed or wanted desktop phones. And since Skype for business is so much better than the Cisco offerings, we don't even use the Cisco stuff in-house, we just use Skype. So why waste money on Cisco UC solutions anymore. Of course, we also use Facetime and Google Hangouts and whatever. There are hundreds of apps out there.
Both data center and UC died in two years.
I think the next thing to go will be wireless networking and all the infrastructure associated with it. The prices on 4G LTE are a little high now. 40GB/month still costs about $50-60 a user, but that includes telephone and messaging as well. But it costs $40 for 15GB which is basically a base business user plan. If we add $10-$20 a month per user, for a 5000 employees, that's $50,000 a month. And of course if you have 5000 employees, you'll negotiate better prices than that.
So, at $50,000 a month, it costs $1.8 million for 36 months or $600,000 a year for enough LTE to replace your enterprise wireless network.
Consider an organization with 5,000 employees will likely have 500 access points to support them spread across buildings and locations. A Cisco 3802 sells for about $750 in this market (the one I measured the cost of LTE in) and that would be $375,000 for access points, two Cisco 5520 controllers would cost about $50,000 for that many access points. Then there's Cisco Prime and licenses for the access points. Let's assume we're running the professional version. So between software, licenses, additional data center resources, that's about another $300,000. Let's assume at least $1 million so far given my rounding errors.
Then you need to have networking ports with enough capacity to handle the wireless. You'll also need a WAN solution to provide office connectivity to transport the data. You'll also need edge security solutions at every site able to secure the access points and the switches. Let's assume the additional infrastructure cost for that same 36 months will be about half a million.
Then you need consultants and installers and cablers, You need software updates, security patches, operations... I'll place that at about $1.2 million.
So... to run your own wireless network, there is probably about $3 million vs. $1.8 million to just pay for more bandwidth on LTE. Thanks to MDM solutions, it's becoming easier and easier to support desktop devices via LTE as well.
So... we expect when 5G comes out, bandwidth will be even cheaper. Always on laptops are shipping more and more already.
Wireless networking will be dead and it will also decimate about 30-50% of the wired networking market.
So what about security products...
I can go on an on about this... but the fact
Actually, yes, I believe Tesla is much closer than 22 years away from having a self-driving truck. Far more than a self-driving car at least.
Trucks drive a lot differently than cars. Most truck driving is highway driving. A large part of truck driving... especially the type that is is associated with jobs counts is logistical from business park to business park. It is entirely possible and likely that companies that are moving stuff from docks to warehouse or warehouse to warehouse can very easily be made self-driving friendly.
Also, with the exception of managing traffic diversions due to construction (which I haven't seen yet on self driving vehicles), trucks can make the majority of their transit in the a single lane on the highway.
Also, it could be possible for a business to arise for "last mile operators" who are vehicle operators that are responsible for navigating populated areas in trucks. As such, they would assist the truck from the loading dock to the highway and then be picked up by a shuttle bus. Then they could be delivered by a shuttle bus to the highway and assist trucks the last mile to the unloading docks.
I am very much under the belief that we will accomplish self-driving trucks long before we achieve self-driving vehicles that could navigate my neighborhood.
Much bigger problems than that.
Norway thrives because Norway is a country about the size of California or maybe the American west coast states and also has a manageable population size. In America, it's possible to manage states the size of California without too much difficulty because the people of the state are all somewhat similar and carry common interests. If California were in charge of their own national budget, they could maybe manage to resolve water problems for example. But as part of a much larger country, the people of the country as a whole have to agree that there's value in spending money to solve California's problems.
Here in Norway, a nation-wide company like Telenor (former national telecom monopoly) has to deliver the same service to 95% of all houses if they deliver to one. This would and could not work in the U.S.
There is no way in hell that a California company would invest in delivering fiber to a trailer home in Goldsboro North Carolina. Not only would it be a waste of money for them, but there's no bond between the people. There's nothing in this world that makes the people in California believe that Goldsboro North Carolina are even from the same planet or species as they are. On the other hand they would invest in providing fiber to some weird ass farm along U.S. I5 run by a guy who actually was stupid enough to think that farming in Death Valley would be a smart idea. This is because they're closer to home. There's a good chance that farmer just moved from Goldsboro the year before, but there's a sense of unity or family.
American service providers have to cover too much area and too many people. If I were a NY company, I would not prioritize California. In fact, I'd more or less ignore them because they have the audacity to call something with pineapple on it pizza. For that alone, I would invest in any venture that would cause California to wash away into the ocean.
In Norway, if someone suggested that tax payer money from people in Oslo should be invested in expanding the fiber network to the Sami in Finnmark, the answer would be "Of course... why shouldn't it be?"
In America if someone suggested that tax payer money in Delaware should be used to provide fiber access to trailer homes in Louisiana, there would be public outrage. Hell, they'd probably complain if the Delaware money was used to help Maryland.
It's a different world. You can't compare America an Norway... ever. Norway is a first world country with an educated population that sees themselves as a single country. The U.S. is absolutely nothing like that.
Norway no longer has POTS/PSTN. If you want an analog telephone line, you'll have to get a SIP to Analog box. Some providers will even provide G.711 if you need the full bandwidth.
When Norway privatized the national telephone company back in 1999 or something like that, part of the agreement was that any service they provide to one Norwegian house they have to provide to 95% of Norwegian households. So there are 5% which were a little screwed. Then companies in those areas popped up pretty quick. So, companies like Eltele can provide Internet access to a Sami hut in the middle of Finnmark.
Also, at this time, almost all electric companies in Norway are also fiber delivery companies, more or less every house in Norway that has electricity either already has access to fiber or will eventually have access to fiber as there has be major investments in upgrading the power grid which also means upgrading the fiber.
My power company rents space in my condo complex for housing their switches. So I'm precisely 51 meters of fiber from the central. In our basement, we have multiple 100Gb/s links that are scheduled for upgrade to 400Gb/s soon. I only pay for 40Mb/s because why pay for more? But with a phone call I can get gigabit. Within a week, I could have multiple 10Gb/s uplinks.
Is dial up still available in the U.S. ?
I was working with a Tier-1 service provider who negotiated a deal with Netflix where the provider paid Netflix in order to host a CDN in order to reduce cross Atlantic traffic. It was an easy choice. NetFlix would get rack space for their servers with direct attachments at 250 POPs around the world so they would no longer have to stream over the cross-atlantic and cross-pacific fibers. And Netflix was paid for the privilege.
Youtube is Google. Google has deals with service providers around the world to scratch each others backs. If you have 10,000 customers or more, Google will place caching servers in your network to reduce your uplink costs if you provide the racks, power, etc... If you're smaller than 10,000 customers, closer to 5,000 or so, you could probably negotiate to pay Google to put a few servers there. I think there are probably also circumstances where if you Google services like DNS, they'll pay you for your customer data.
Akamai has had deals like this for decades as well.
YouTube and NetFlix actually don't pay nearly as much for bandwidth as you'd think. In addition, Google has their own fibers (even across the oceans) for running their networks and providing caching.
Economics and history suggests that the most motivated people are the the people most willing to abandon their old lives and risk everything to establish themselves somewhere else that offers better opportunity for them to succeed.
As such, the most motivated people will relocate to be whether the greatest opportunity is.
This brings :
- Motivated people
- Opportunistic people
These people will either work as transients, meaning that they will work 2-5 years in the area, earn money and move back with their winnings to settle down. This requires strong markets. For example, if I took a job offer I have in Redmond right now, I would relocate and buy a house immediately. I would stay at my job for long enough for that purchase to show me a solid return on investment which would depend on housing prices rising and therefore screwing all the locals. Then I would sell and leave. The person I sold to would do the same thing.
Or they will settle down.
The transients will come and go and they are a burden on any local economy, but what's important is that many of them will settle in the end. Or at least they'll strengthen the market making the company the area more attractive to draw more people.
Highly motivated people who settle down will raise their children and place importance on their motivations. They'll participate more in schools. They'll provide better tutors for their children. They'll invest more in the local area and improve the infrastructure... and the values of the properties.
And that will draw more people.
The problem is, this cycle of development is excellent for the city but not for the people in the city. Prices rise, inflation is horrendous. I was in Seattle last month for a trade show and I was horrified at how cheap so many things were.
The salaries of all my peers was $150,000+ but the food and prices at Target were suitable for areas with economies closer to $40,000. That means that the people shopping at the stores should be paying more and the stores should be paying their employees more. Instead, they were very definitely minimum wage workers.
That means that the pay gap is INSANE!!! Even with $15 an hour minimum wage, the property values are so ridiculously high that people have to spend an hour commuting or live in squalor to make ends meet. $30,000 a year is simply not enough to survive in Seattle given the relatively small size of the city and the relatively high demand for real estate.
That said, homelessness in Seattle was amazing. There was A LOT of it. I grew up in New York back in the days when trying to get into Grand Central in the morning required carefully climbing over homeless people while attempting to not step in puddles of urine.... The difference is, NYC hasn't been developing... it's a lot of old buildings now. Seattle is under mass construction and is really clean. It seems and feels wrong to have massive urban renewal going on with homeless people just all over the place.
What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg. Someone explained to me that there's a possibility that the city has invested so heavily in caring for the homeless that many homeless people are attracted to the city so they won't have to beg. So it's interesting because homelessness is/was almost a fashion in San Francisco, but now that the system is even better (it seems) in Seattle, the homeless are migrating to the better system.
Sorry for the long reply it was fun to research as I was writing it.
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I risk a possible new tangent (sadly I use message forums as a public diary.. or is a diarrhea to organize my thoughts)
A VM doesn't actually require a hypervisor
What's really cool about the architecture of WSL is that it is kinda a VM and almost even a hypervisor
If we were to suggest that a hypervisor provides APIs to a guest virtual machine through simulation of hardware or that a hypervisor provides the principle of a system call through a virtual memory protection exception as opposed to a software interrupt... then a hypervisor is really nothing more than an OS kernel that exposes APIs to programs that actually think they're running on bare metal. Of course, as soon as we install native drivers on the guest virtual machine so that it's speaking via an explicit virtualization API to the host as opposed to simulated hardware which is trapped by the hypervisor, then it's really no longer a hypervisor itself.
So I think the moral of that story is that even VMware which is fatalistically a hypervisor is not really a hypervisor in a true sense anymore.
On the other hand, pico processes are processes which run on top of "Library OS" which provides an API to guest processes such as WSL. Now that API will be much smoother and more tightly controlled than a hypervisor. Instead of emulating legacy HW and trapping calls to it, Library OS can do things like say "allocate memory" and it will be done. But for the most part, it's actually very definitely a virtual machine
It's really funny. Library OS implements an insanely lightweight method of providing virtualization in the exact same way that Linux containers might.
So... while it seems I'm being stubborn... that whole assembling my thoughts was fun. I appreciate the opportunity you provided me.
And yet, you allow companies like Walmart to intentionally and legally pay their employees wages clearly marked as poverty and then additionally allow them to have departments to help them apply for government subsidy effectively making employed people beggars. All the while, the shareholders of that same company is paying dividends equal to approximately the same value they force the people to beg for.
Oh... and there's a minimum wage which allows systematical impoverishment of the working person. Anyone working in a minimum wage career is worth precisely that value... the government regulated and mandated minimum wage which is a way the employer can say
"If the government will legally allow me to pay you less, I will"
and also says
"There's no point in me treating you well, you don't even respect yourself to get a job working for someone who respects you"
followed by
"There's no point in you changing jobs, you're a minimum wage worker today and every other job you'd get is also minimum wage or close to it."
and also
"Of course I respect you... I don't want you to suffer, instead of $7.15 an hour, we'll pay you $9 and hour! Yes, I know that's still way below poverty levels, but you're worth it!"
Oh... should we talk about overdraft fees that banks place on poor people to exploit them. It's a systematical means of attacking the poor and exploiting them.
How about the justice and prison system which takes Americans who don't seem to live up to the standards of "we think he'll be an asset to the country" and then fosters to the systematic production of career criminals and prisoners since the poor people are basically not worth anything other than a means to provide jobs in former coal towns at prisons.
Dude... not a pot shot... America is a second world possibly third world country. You treat your poor worse than you treat your live stock. And the funny part is, it's so important that you do that it would be almost impossible to change it now. Just imagine how completely screwed the entire country would be if the U.S. actually converted their penal facilities to correctional facilities. The job market would be flooded, the millions of people employed directly or indirectly by the prison systems would be out of work. Then there would be the fact that places like Dairy Queen wouldn't be legally allowed to turn people down for jobs.
The entire U.S. economy would collapse if you didn't treat your poor people so badly. It's disgusting.
As for you not needing to carry cash... I'm very excited for you. In fact, many poor people don't need to any more since they now have fancy cards that let them buy food without having to use paper food stamps anymore. Isn't that nifty!!! This way, a Walmart employee can work a 12 hour shift desperately hoping to make ends-meet and then use their food-stamp benefit card on their way out to buy frozen food with so many preservatives that they'll get fat just smelling it while it's still frozen.
Of course then you have to consider that those people have to use cash because the overdraft fee they got nail by for seeing whether they have money or not is still lingering on their bank account from last week and if they transfer money into their bank account, the fee will eat it up. So when they go to the "Pay day loan" shop which will legally loan you money for the week at only 30% interest, they need to ask for it in cash because of that looming $75 fee they paid because they were down to $0.50 and they used the ATM in the mall to check whether they had enough money before using it and the machine charged $2 to check.
Yeh... it must be nice to be wealthy enough to be the father of 5 in the mid-west where you can go to Walmart and see the minimum wage beggars as if they were in a zoo. It must also be nice to be a father of 5 in the mid-west where you bring your kids to eat happy meals and play on the play ground while the an
Strange, over here, the bank simply extends credit from the machine and stores the transaction. I think if it's a large transaction, it may be necessary to call the bank and get an approval code though. As I mentioned I've never encountered it over 1500NOK
They are still part of the calculation system. For example, if I were to order resistors from Elfa in Sweden, each on would cost about 0.03SEK. But the smallest purchasable unit of anything is far less than that. Even then, at the grocery store today, my bill was 500.21NOK for a bag of groceries. Since I paid by card, the .21 could be charged. But you can't possibly buy anything in the store for less than a few crowns... as such, the transaction fee would certainly be covered.
Nope... not an issue of where I got my education. The reason things like Bitcoin gained value is because people were able to market it to the masses through crowd sourcing (or modern day mob mentality) and as people began to have faith in its inherent value, they were willing to exchange other currencies for it.
Scandinavia can not suffer a one-week power outage except in a war time catastrophe and even that would be exceptional. Unlike third-world countries like the American north-east, the power grids are highly redundant and highly distributed. It is possible for small areas to suffer outages, but in Norway and Sweden which are about as big as the entire American east, they are extremely well built.
There are occasional pressures placed on the grids which are a little humorous. For example, Brønnøysund Norway which houses the national business registry and is located in one of the most impressively difficult locations geographically on Norway's west coast can see brown outs when the ovens for metal production in Mo i Rana fire up. This is because of the absolutely immense load placed on the grid by that process and because it's very difficult to extend other segments of the grid into the area.
That said, in Norway or Sweden unless there is a war, even if it's the middle of winter in the mountains, a one week power outage would be extremely unlikely. Even in a war, it would be surprising if there was a long term power outage. In my neighborhood for example, if we suffered a long term power outage, within 100 meters of my house is enough sources of energy to begin a long term production of energy within a few days. It would take years to consume more fuel than I could produce and I'm within Oslo. And it would take very little time to get local stores up and running as well.
So, we're back to what would cause the electronics to fail. That would mean that the national clearing houses would lack the ability to process their payments and perform transactions. This would make the money limited in its scope and it would retain local value. But in countries like Sweden and Norway which are not self-sufficient or even close to it, trade is critical. If you can't pay for what you're importing, you'll need to be extended credit. If you can't process payments with your national clearing houses, you'll have to exchange alternative forms of payments. The government may have these means, but Sweden and Norway have their own currencies and therefore would be required at a national level to negotiate Euro or Dollars because their own money can't be consumed.
So if money is not able to be used, people will in fact lost faith in it.
That said, I'm internally familiar with the national clearing houses in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. There are some weaknesses which could be exploited in their systems because of IT people being idiots. But to give an example of Scandinavian thinking. I was teaching a networking fundamentals course to a major Scandinavian tier-1 telecom provider and they told me I could skip the chapter on security because no one would want to do any harm to them.
Also, in Scandinavia let me make it clear... it would take something truly and absolutely massive to make it impossible to accept electronic payments. This is not the U.S.. This is not the Third World. If there's a disaster which needs to be handled, it get's handled. People don't stand around looking stupid talking to the BBC or CNN. I think it would take a nuclear bomb or an EMP on that scale to even cause a hiccough to Scandinavia. I think that here in Norway, if there was a major incident, engineers and makers will start converging enmass on city center and quickly start planning on how to bring systems back up.
Norway has more knowledge in power production than most any other country in the world. Sweden is generally within the top three countries world wide in building telecommunication networks. Now consider the humans the US waste on things like their military and the TSA. Scandinavia
When the electronics fail, we have far deeper rooted problems to deal with. Money is barely the start of it.
Money has value because we trust the issuer of that money. This is why for some time we wouldn't want Iceland crowns in our pockets.
If we lose the electronics, it will be due to a failure by the issuer of that currency to do their jobs. This means that even if the paper theoretically has some value to it, that paper's value would collapse quickly because the country issuing it would no longer be able to manage their debts to other countries. As such, the market would collapse the money would be useless anyway. The paper money would only buy a few days of relief before the absolute downfall.
This is why it's nice to have things like Paypal and other services which could also collapse, but if for example the entire Norwegian economy collapsed, I always have a few hundred bucks in my Paypal account and I have some prepaid credit cards here and there as well.
People who would keep cash around to be prepared are also people who would keep alternative payment forms around. My in-laws have a few bars of silver in a safe somewhere. People who aren't prepared would be purely at the mercy of support from the national guards.