I find modern thinking, and I hate to say this, but particularly from women, is that you should embrace your feelings and let them control you.
That's not quite right. The idea is that you should express your feelings in order to process them. The main difference between Eastern and Western philosophies here is that in the East you do the processing internally, in the West you do it with your friends or on daytime TV.
Yes, and in Star Wars you grab your light sabre and mow down a village of sand people or a room full of younglings.:) Your phrasing of the idea is more correct than mine, but I don't buy the logic that if you don't express it, then you can't process it. I think you can be aware of your feelings and "process" them without telling them to someone else. It's called mindfulness. I see a lot of people expressing their feelings all over facebook, and I'm not sure they're better off for it. Telling a friend about your feelings who then goes and tells someone else is unfortunately common, as is someone reading someone else's diary. I see some colleagues expressing their feelings over email in a very inappropriate manner. I think people who can learn to avoid inappropriate expression of their feelings do better as adults. Expressing your feelings often results in giving someone else something to use against you later.
Encouraging people to express their emotions is sometimes a way of encouraging them to share weaknesses with you. My wife is a big proponent of "expressing to process" but then I overheard a discussion she had with a friend. The friend said that she'd been talking to a man, that he'd gotten very emotional and started tearing up, and then she'd felt very uncomfortable, and then both women agreed it just wasn't socially acceptable for men to do that. That it was "really weird." So here's a person who watched a man express his emotion, and then related that story to another woman in a way that made him seem weak. Wasn't he supposed to express his emotion so he could process it? What if he'd expressed an even more socially inappropriate emotion like anger or lust? Would someone record video of it now and stream it live to shame them? That's why I don't buy it.
I'm not a big fan of The Force Awakens as a movie, and I definitely think the directing/acting in episodes 1 thru 3 was terrible (save for Anakin's mother). However, my kids love episode 1 with young Anakin and Jar-Jar, and my daughter loves episode 7 with a new female hero. She's watched the entire clone wars animated series, and what I particularly like about the whole Star Wars franchise is that it has this very childish quality to get kids interested, but there's a lot of hooks into real life history and politics. It's a good starting point for many discussions.
For instance, there's this whole Clone Wars arc about Mandalore being a (mostly) pacifist society who stayed neutral in the war. At other points they're dealing with refugees from the war. When I was a kid I found out that storm troopers were a real thing in Nazi Germany, and that prompted me to go and learn more about it. Of course there's the whole idea that Palpatine created a climate of fear in the Republic so he could convince the senate to grant him emergency powers, which he then uses to turn the government into a dictatorship. Padme's line, "So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause" is chilling. The fact that these important ideas are discussed in a kids' movie is a really great tool for me, as a parent, to start interesting discussions with my kids.
I also like how it introduces this (mostly Eastern) idea that you need to be mindful of your feelings and not let them control you. I find modern thinking, and I hate to say this, but particularly from women, is that you should embrace your feelings and let them control you. This idea that somehow whatever your feelings make you do is good because emotion = good is just opposite of my experience in general. I want my kids to be self-aware. Notice when you're angry. Accept it but don't let it control you, or you'll regret it later.
As a father, I really get the idea that Lucas created Star Wars for his kids, and I can excuse most of the flaws because as much as those of us who grew up with episodes 4 thru 6 hate on the prequels, kids really do like them.
It's not really fair to compare anything to a Steve Jobs product. He had the ability to create products with fewer compromises. He started from the idea, "this is what a customer would like to buy," rather than, "this is what our company makes." Even Apple can't make a Steve Jobs product anymore.
In that sense, Bezos did a similar thing when he sent his team back to the drawing board to make one-click purchasing actually work, and Amazon does really well in reducing barriers to purchasing because that's what gets customers to buy. The question is, can Amazon be the place where a sizeable chunk of people buy groceries? Sure, if it's more convenient for a large enough number of people, like scan a UPC off the back of a cereal box, and it shows up at the end of the day today at my house, ready for breakfast tomorrow. People say that's impossible. A Steve Jobs *knows* if it's possible, and if it is then won't stop pushing until his company makes it happen.
I'd think that space vs. tab use is highly dependent on which programming language you're using, and I'd also think that language is correlated with earnings, so I highly doubt this conclusion (if they're trying to conclude anything). Correlation is not causation.
To be fair, they're not necessarily moving a 4 to 6 km/s relative to each other. If they're in "similar orbits" then the relative speed is much lower. I still wouldn't want the ISS to get hit by a satellite at any speed, but unless it was in a retrograde orbit, it's nowhere near that fast (in retrograde, it would be 8-12 km/s).
In these cases (clothes and dishes) the manufacturers of such items have mostly made things that are compatible with those devices. On the other hand, we haven't reached a point where any furniture manufacturers are making things that are marketed as "robot vacuum compatible". Plus, if you have to buy a $500 robot vacuum every year or two, that money can get me a long way towards a weekly cleaning service that's going to do a lot more thorough job, especially in some places in the US where inexpensive (and often illegal immigrant) labor is available for such jobs.
If you look at all the comments on RobotShop.com about the Neato robots, you'll see a lot of 5-star comments that say things like, "it gets stuck every so often," or "it seems to climb the sloped leg of my table" or "I really love this robot, but of course you still need to vacuum with an upright once a week." Heck I only vacuum once a week with an upright even now, so if I have to go chasing a robot vacuum around every couple days then it's definitely not saving me time, though perhaps it keeps the place a bit cleaner in the in-between days. I'm happy with how clean the house is now, but I want to spend less time vacuuming.
Like most successful automation, it works well if you can plan the activity to suit the tool. For instance, at home I just don't buy clothes that I can't wash in a washing machine, or dishes that I can't wash in a dishwasher. Once you're willing to make compromises, then automation offers some significant advantages. In this case, if you planned your vegetable garden around this, it could work well.
Of course people don't want to compromise. I think a major reason that Roomba's are more of a toy is people aren't willing to take the step of changing their living area to work well with a robot vacuum.
From the study: 1 unit is 10mL or 8g of alcohol. 14 units (UK guidance per week for men an women) is 4 pints of high strength beer (5.2%) or 5 large glasses of 14% wine. 24.5 units (US guidance for men) is equivalent to 7 pints of beer or 9 glasses of wine.
I can see why it shouldn't be removed, because it's not inciting violence. However, isn't this the kind of stuff that should fall under the "fake news" category, or similar? Nothing wrong with tagging it as "fake", "incorrect", "urban legend", "failed fact check", etc., and including a link to some reliable material that debunks it.
It's not just the border, and it's not just if you happen to look middle-eastern. Friends of ours in Canada who don't look at all "foreign" were at a party store in the Southern US, got carded, and when they pulled out their Canadian ID, the proprietor said, "sorry, we only serve American citizens here." Yeah, it's anecdotal.
We also have a Canadian friend who was stopped at the border for a "random" search, goes into the counter and had her keys in her hand. She placed the keys on the counter for a moment, and the border agent grabs the keychain which had a USB drive on it, sticks it in his PC (which is just a dumb thing to do anyway) and when he realized it was an encrypted drive, demanded her password. This was a problem because the drive contained confidential medical data (she works in the medical profession). She provided the explanation that it would be unethical of her to do that, so he takes it in the back for half an hour, hands it back and says, "OK." Probably used a program on it, or made a copy for later decryption, or maybe his boss decided they could continue.
We have a trip planned to the US later this year. If we didn't already have plans, we would've made plans to go somewhere else. Not because we have anything to hide, but just because I fear some wacko will be emboldened by all the anti-foreigner rhetoric. It's kind of hard to fly under the radar when you have Canadian plates on your car. I've been to the US literally thousands of times, the last big trip was 2 years ago. Previously it's always been a friendly place to visit.
I actually do work on safety-critical systems for industry, including software, and I wouldn't say there's anything ethically complex about it. It basically comes down to: stop the machine in a control reliable way if there's a chance of human injury, and make sure your system detects any single safety component failure without compromising the ability to stop the machine. If you're having the machine decide if it's better to chop off this person's fingers or that person's fingers, you've failed at your job. I realize software for self-driving cars would be different, but that's because cars are grandfathered-in death-traps. The fact that a person can jump out in front of a moving vehicle means the system of vehicles and roads, as designed, would never be allowed to be created today. There are many things in our life like this, such as toasters and table saws.
I know that to someone who has never been in a plant before, what you say sounds reasonable, but to someone like me, who works with automation every day, your comment is just laughable. Yes, some time in the future we'll be able to manufacture a significant portion of our products in "lights-out" factories, but we are nowhere near that level of automation now, and even so, you still need to provide for routine maintenance. That means protecting those maintenance people, and that means just as much safety systems as we have now.
The problem is in MTBF (mean time between failures). A $100 proximity sensor in an industrial environment has a certain lifetime curve. These are good "non-contact" sensors we're talking about so they actually last a long time compared to older style mechanical sensors, but even so, they eventually stop working in one of several ways: they fail to turn on, or fail to turn off, or start to get slower turning on or off, or their detection range starts to get longer or shorter. A typical automation cell uses dozens of these sensors (plus lots of other equipment, but let's focus on proximity sensors for a moment). With dozens of these sensors one will fail every couple months, and it might not be the sensor - sometimes it's the wire, particularly if it's attached to a moving axis and has to bend over and over all day. Even high flex cables in expensive cable chains eventually wear out. Wireless sensors seems like a solution, but we've had those for years now, but the wireless technology is still a bit flaky in industrial environments so we only use those where running wires in really prohibitive. Plus you usually still need to have a power wire anyway, but at least you can power a dozen sensors over one wire. Anyway, these sensors in a typical cell fail once every couple months and need replacement.
Now to take that automation cell from 80 or 90% automation level to 100% automation level might take 5 or 10 times as much automation to deal with all the exceptional cases that we currently rely on humans to deal with, like grippers that wear out, or recovering from power brown-outs, or a bolt breaking, or having to grind off a burr that a human can do easily but a machine would have a very hard time with. We frequently come up with a problem that it's prohibitively expensive for a machine to handle and our solution is "detect it, stop the machine, and alert an operator to come over and deal with it." Now going from 80% automation to 90% automation might take 3 times as much equipment and sensors and so on, but going from 90% to 95% might take 3 times as much again, and so on. Your dream of 100% automation is generally out-of-reach in the real world. Plus, when you multiply the number of sensors by 3 or 10 you get 3 or 10 times as many sensor failures, so you end up needing more costly downtime for repairs. Not to mention you just multiplied the number of $100 sensors and $40 cables plus installation time by 10. At some level, you end up with diminishing returns, and there are lots of smart people working right now to push the limits of automation right up to the point of those diminishing returns. I'm one of those people, and I'm telling you that we're a long way off.
While you can land an industrial robot on a wooden pallet for $50,000, the minimum integration cost is going to be another $100,000 on top of that, once you get cell safety systems, guarding, tooling and auxiliary equipment in place. But yeah, otherwise I'm in complete agreement with you.
I particularly enjoyed Paul Graham's "Hackers & Painters". It's a collection of his essays, which are also available on his site, but I did enjoy the book format.
That sounds about right to me. People focused on productivity probably don't bother with facebook accounts or anything. It's too big a waste of time. I also turned off email notifications and I leave my phone on airplane mode most of the time. Interruptions are a real time waster.
I maintain a large-ish enterprisey system, most of which is written in C#. I use the functional features of C# every day. However, I would caution you against lumping all functional features under a single heading of "functional programming" because you can look at each feature independently and decide whether you want to use it.
For me, I definitely use immutability, both in combination with dependency injection for my service classes, but also in many of my data structures. For instance, I might have a module that pulls a bunch of state from the database and then organizes it into a projection, such as a forecast of material usage. That forecast is immutable. I then (optionally) have the ability to cache that either locally in the program, or cache it to the database, but when I bring it back it's still immutable, so that data with that ID never changes, and none of the consumers of that data need to worry about it changing. In some cases that means I can safely split the further processing of that data across multiple threads rather easily.
Also, LINQ is really just a ripoff of Lisp's S-expressions, and I find it extremely useful. If I have a list of anything, and I need to manipulate it into another form, then LINQ allows me to do that without loops and with less complexity. I generally still use loops for modifying data.
LINQ is really a combination of three features: 1) functions as first-class citizens, 2) lambda expressions/syntax, and 3) closures. These are very useful on their own. Being able to take a function as an argument is extremely powerful, and being able to define a function inline when you call that method, and have it capture values from outside that function in the form of a closure -- very powerful.
That doesn't mean there isn't a use for imperative programming, but when I see a colleague filtering a list of objects with a foreach loop, I just cringe. Just use a.Where() clause! Don't be afraid of functional - use it as one more weapon in your arsenal.
When people say "electricity is expensive" I usually say, "compared to what?" Consider that "a healthy well-fed laborer over the course of an 8-hour work shift can sustain an average output of about 75 watts." Source. Over the span of 8 hours, that amounts to 8 * 0.075 = 0.6 kWh. NPR in 2011 (via Google) says the "average price people in the U.S. pay for electricity is about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour." So you can buy 8 hours of human power for a few cents in the form of electricity from the grid. I'm not saying we shouldn't hang our clothes to dry, but I'm saying we shouldn't do that until we have a robot that can do it for us.
If you make $50,000 a year at a 2000 hour per year job, you make $25 per hour, and let's say after tax that's... maybe $18 an hour. That's somewhat typical. I'll be generous and say it only takes you an extra 10 minutes to hang a load and go get it off the line later. That's a sixth of an hour, which should be worth $3 to you in after-tax income. I happen to have an energy monitor installed at my panel, and I can tell you that it takes less than 25 cents of electricity to dry a load. Obviously this varies by where you live, but it's certainly going to be less than $1. Much less than that if you use a gas dryer. We do at least 4 loads a week, typically 5 as we're a family of 5, so that's a savings of around $10 per week, so over $500 per year in time savings. My electric dryer is over 15 years old and it's a very basic two-cycle with moisture sensor type, so probably cost less than $500 new. I think it's a no-brainer to use a clothes dryer.
I live in Canada and I'm male, and when my first kid was born, I told my boss I was thinking of taking time off (6 months). My co-workers suggested this was a bad idea, and my boss (female) said when she'd had her first child, she was working from the hospital and back at work the next week. My wife's employment plans fell through so we decided it wasn't feasible for me to take time off, but it was pretty clear that I was strongly discouraged from doing so. Also, in my current job with maybe 150 employees at this company, I can't give you one instance of a male taking significant time off for a new child. In fact if one of the men takes even a week off, people make comments about it. That's on top of some females here saying, "I'd never let my husband take *my* parental leave." Trust me, Canada still has a ways to go.
That completely ignores the tragedy of the commons. Ten people live around a lake. One guy dumps toxic pollution in the lake and kills all the fish. It doesn't matter how hard the other 9 try to clean up the lake, they'll never keep up with the one guy spewing toxic waste. I suppose they could pay him to not do it, but I don't see why he actually has a right to dump toxic waste in the lake in the first place. Likely they'll just gang up on him and make him stop. Same with carbon emissions... assuming everyone has a right to breath in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide, the total amount being put into the atmosphere is much more than that basic allowance. What gives a few people/companies/nations the right to dump far more than their allotment into the atmosphere? Why should others pay them not to do it? It's a common resource, and has to be managed by agreement, and if we disagree too much, there will be violence to settle it. It's the same as if someone took all the food and didn't leave any for anyone else.
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I find modern thinking, and I hate to say this, but particularly from women, is that you should embrace your feelings and let them control you.
That's not quite right. The idea is that you should express your feelings in order to process them. The main difference between Eastern and Western philosophies here is that in the East you do the processing internally, in the West you do it with your friends or on daytime TV.
Yes, and in Star Wars you grab your light sabre and mow down a village of sand people or a room full of younglings. :) Your phrasing of the idea is more correct than mine, but I don't buy the logic that if you don't express it, then you can't process it. I think you can be aware of your feelings and "process" them without telling them to someone else. It's called mindfulness. I see a lot of people expressing their feelings all over facebook, and I'm not sure they're better off for it. Telling a friend about your feelings who then goes and tells someone else is unfortunately common, as is someone reading someone else's diary. I see some colleagues expressing their feelings over email in a very inappropriate manner. I think people who can learn to avoid inappropriate expression of their feelings do better as adults. Expressing your feelings often results in giving someone else something to use against you later.
Encouraging people to express their emotions is sometimes a way of encouraging them to share weaknesses with you. My wife is a big proponent of "expressing to process" but then I overheard a discussion she had with a friend. The friend said that she'd been talking to a man, that he'd gotten very emotional and started tearing up, and then she'd felt very uncomfortable, and then both women agreed it just wasn't socially acceptable for men to do that. That it was "really weird." So here's a person who watched a man express his emotion, and then related that story to another woman in a way that made him seem weak. Wasn't he supposed to express his emotion so he could process it? What if he'd expressed an even more socially inappropriate emotion like anger or lust? Would someone record video of it now and stream it live to shame them? That's why I don't buy it.
I'm not a big fan of The Force Awakens as a movie, and I definitely think the directing/acting in episodes 1 thru 3 was terrible (save for Anakin's mother). However, my kids love episode 1 with young Anakin and Jar-Jar, and my daughter loves episode 7 with a new female hero. She's watched the entire clone wars animated series, and what I particularly like about the whole Star Wars franchise is that it has this very childish quality to get kids interested, but there's a lot of hooks into real life history and politics. It's a good starting point for many discussions.
For instance, there's this whole Clone Wars arc about Mandalore being a (mostly) pacifist society who stayed neutral in the war. At other points they're dealing with refugees from the war. When I was a kid I found out that storm troopers were a real thing in Nazi Germany, and that prompted me to go and learn more about it. Of course there's the whole idea that Palpatine created a climate of fear in the Republic so he could convince the senate to grant him emergency powers, which he then uses to turn the government into a dictatorship. Padme's line, "So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause" is chilling. The fact that these important ideas are discussed in a kids' movie is a really great tool for me, as a parent, to start interesting discussions with my kids.
I also like how it introduces this (mostly Eastern) idea that you need to be mindful of your feelings and not let them control you. I find modern thinking, and I hate to say this, but particularly from women, is that you should embrace your feelings and let them control you. This idea that somehow whatever your feelings make you do is good because emotion = good is just opposite of my experience in general. I want my kids to be self-aware. Notice when you're angry. Accept it but don't let it control you, or you'll regret it later.
As a father, I really get the idea that Lucas created Star Wars for his kids, and I can excuse most of the flaws because as much as those of us who grew up with episodes 4 thru 6 hate on the prequels, kids really do like them.
It's not really fair to compare anything to a Steve Jobs product. He had the ability to create products with fewer compromises. He started from the idea, "this is what a customer would like to buy," rather than, "this is what our company makes." Even Apple can't make a Steve Jobs product anymore.
In that sense, Bezos did a similar thing when he sent his team back to the drawing board to make one-click purchasing actually work, and Amazon does really well in reducing barriers to purchasing because that's what gets customers to buy. The question is, can Amazon be the place where a sizeable chunk of people buy groceries? Sure, if it's more convenient for a large enough number of people, like scan a UPC off the back of a cereal box, and it shows up at the end of the day today at my house, ready for breakfast tomorrow. People say that's impossible. A Steve Jobs *knows* if it's possible, and if it is then won't stop pushing until his company makes it happen.
The last time they temporarily reduced the rate to repatriate offshore money, almost no companies took advantage of it.
I'd think that space vs. tab use is highly dependent on which programming language you're using, and I'd also think that language is correlated with earnings, so I highly doubt this conclusion (if they're trying to conclude anything). Correlation is not causation.
Where Tim and Donald agree is that neither of them or their companies should have to pay US tax.
True, sorry, it was the 10-20,000 mph I should be quoting.
To be fair, they're not necessarily moving a 4 to 6 km/s relative to each other. If they're in "similar orbits" then the relative speed is much lower. I still wouldn't want the ISS to get hit by a satellite at any speed, but unless it was in a retrograde orbit, it's nowhere near that fast (in retrograde, it would be 8-12 km/s).
In these cases (clothes and dishes) the manufacturers of such items have mostly made things that are compatible with those devices. On the other hand, we haven't reached a point where any furniture manufacturers are making things that are marketed as "robot vacuum compatible". Plus, if you have to buy a $500 robot vacuum every year or two, that money can get me a long way towards a weekly cleaning service that's going to do a lot more thorough job, especially in some places in the US where inexpensive (and often illegal immigrant) labor is available for such jobs.
If you look at all the comments on RobotShop.com about the Neato robots, you'll see a lot of 5-star comments that say things like, "it gets stuck every so often," or "it seems to climb the sloped leg of my table" or "I really love this robot, but of course you still need to vacuum with an upright once a week." Heck I only vacuum once a week with an upright even now, so if I have to go chasing a robot vacuum around every couple days then it's definitely not saving me time, though perhaps it keeps the place a bit cleaner in the in-between days. I'm happy with how clean the house is now, but I want to spend less time vacuuming.
Like most successful automation, it works well if you can plan the activity to suit the tool. For instance, at home I just don't buy clothes that I can't wash in a washing machine, or dishes that I can't wash in a dishwasher. Once you're willing to make compromises, then automation offers some significant advantages. In this case, if you planned your vegetable garden around this, it could work well.
Of course people don't want to compromise. I think a major reason that Roomba's are more of a toy is people aren't willing to take the step of changing their living area to work well with a robot vacuum.
From the study: 1 unit is 10mL or 8g of alcohol. 14 units (UK guidance per week for men an women) is 4 pints of high strength beer (5.2%) or 5 large glasses of 14% wine. 24.5 units (US guidance for men) is equivalent to 7 pints of beer or 9 glasses of wine.
Finally, we've found a job the Millennials are willing to do: sit in a chair and bleed while they play on their phones! I kid, I kid... :)
I can see why it shouldn't be removed, because it's not inciting violence. However, isn't this the kind of stuff that should fall under the "fake news" category, or similar? Nothing wrong with tagging it as "fake", "incorrect", "urban legend", "failed fact check", etc., and including a link to some reliable material that debunks it.
It's not just the border, and it's not just if you happen to look middle-eastern. Friends of ours in Canada who don't look at all "foreign" were at a party store in the Southern US, got carded, and when they pulled out their Canadian ID, the proprietor said, "sorry, we only serve American citizens here." Yeah, it's anecdotal.
We also have a Canadian friend who was stopped at the border for a "random" search, goes into the counter and had her keys in her hand. She placed the keys on the counter for a moment, and the border agent grabs the keychain which had a USB drive on it, sticks it in his PC (which is just a dumb thing to do anyway) and when he realized it was an encrypted drive, demanded her password. This was a problem because the drive contained confidential medical data (she works in the medical profession). She provided the explanation that it would be unethical of her to do that, so he takes it in the back for half an hour, hands it back and says, "OK." Probably used a program on it, or made a copy for later decryption, or maybe his boss decided they could continue.
We have a trip planned to the US later this year. If we didn't already have plans, we would've made plans to go somewhere else. Not because we have anything to hide, but just because I fear some wacko will be emboldened by all the anti-foreigner rhetoric. It's kind of hard to fly under the radar when you have Canadian plates on your car. I've been to the US literally thousands of times, the last big trip was 2 years ago. Previously it's always been a friendly place to visit.
I actually do work on safety-critical systems for industry, including software, and I wouldn't say there's anything ethically complex about it. It basically comes down to: stop the machine in a control reliable way if there's a chance of human injury, and make sure your system detects any single safety component failure without compromising the ability to stop the machine. If you're having the machine decide if it's better to chop off this person's fingers or that person's fingers, you've failed at your job. I realize software for self-driving cars would be different, but that's because cars are grandfathered-in death-traps. The fact that a person can jump out in front of a moving vehicle means the system of vehicles and roads, as designed, would never be allowed to be created today. There are many things in our life like this, such as toasters and table saws.
I know that to someone who has never been in a plant before, what you say sounds reasonable, but to someone like me, who works with automation every day, your comment is just laughable. Yes, some time in the future we'll be able to manufacture a significant portion of our products in "lights-out" factories, but we are nowhere near that level of automation now, and even so, you still need to provide for routine maintenance. That means protecting those maintenance people, and that means just as much safety systems as we have now.
The problem is in MTBF (mean time between failures). A $100 proximity sensor in an industrial environment has a certain lifetime curve. These are good "non-contact" sensors we're talking about so they actually last a long time compared to older style mechanical sensors, but even so, they eventually stop working in one of several ways: they fail to turn on, or fail to turn off, or start to get slower turning on or off, or their detection range starts to get longer or shorter. A typical automation cell uses dozens of these sensors (plus lots of other equipment, but let's focus on proximity sensors for a moment). With dozens of these sensors one will fail every couple months, and it might not be the sensor - sometimes it's the wire, particularly if it's attached to a moving axis and has to bend over and over all day. Even high flex cables in expensive cable chains eventually wear out. Wireless sensors seems like a solution, but we've had those for years now, but the wireless technology is still a bit flaky in industrial environments so we only use those where running wires in really prohibitive. Plus you usually still need to have a power wire anyway, but at least you can power a dozen sensors over one wire. Anyway, these sensors in a typical cell fail once every couple months and need replacement.
Now to take that automation cell from 80 or 90% automation level to 100% automation level might take 5 or 10 times as much automation to deal with all the exceptional cases that we currently rely on humans to deal with, like grippers that wear out, or recovering from power brown-outs, or a bolt breaking, or having to grind off a burr that a human can do easily but a machine would have a very hard time with. We frequently come up with a problem that it's prohibitively expensive for a machine to handle and our solution is "detect it, stop the machine, and alert an operator to come over and deal with it." Now going from 80% automation to 90% automation might take 3 times as much equipment and sensors and so on, but going from 90% to 95% might take 3 times as much again, and so on. Your dream of 100% automation is generally out-of-reach in the real world. Plus, when you multiply the number of sensors by 3 or 10 you get 3 or 10 times as many sensor failures, so you end up needing more costly downtime for repairs. Not to mention you just multiplied the number of $100 sensors and $40 cables plus installation time by 10. At some level, you end up with diminishing returns, and there are lots of smart people working right now to push the limits of automation right up to the point of those diminishing returns. I'm one of those people, and I'm telling you that we're a long way off.
While you can land an industrial robot on a wooden pallet for $50,000, the minimum integration cost is going to be another $100,000 on top of that, once you get cell safety systems, guarding, tooling and auxiliary equipment in place. But yeah, otherwise I'm in complete agreement with you.
I particularly enjoyed Paul Graham's "Hackers & Painters". It's a collection of his essays, which are also available on his site, but I did enjoy the book format.
That sounds about right to me. People focused on productivity probably don't bother with facebook accounts or anything. It's too big a waste of time. I also turned off email notifications and I leave my phone on airplane mode most of the time. Interruptions are a real time waster.
I maintain a large-ish enterprisey system, most of which is written in C#. I use the functional features of C# every day. However, I would caution you against lumping all functional features under a single heading of "functional programming" because you can look at each feature independently and decide whether you want to use it.
For me, I definitely use immutability, both in combination with dependency injection for my service classes, but also in many of my data structures. For instance, I might have a module that pulls a bunch of state from the database and then organizes it into a projection, such as a forecast of material usage. That forecast is immutable. I then (optionally) have the ability to cache that either locally in the program, or cache it to the database, but when I bring it back it's still immutable, so that data with that ID never changes, and none of the consumers of that data need to worry about it changing. In some cases that means I can safely split the further processing of that data across multiple threads rather easily.
Also, LINQ is really just a ripoff of Lisp's S-expressions, and I find it extremely useful. If I have a list of anything, and I need to manipulate it into another form, then LINQ allows me to do that without loops and with less complexity. I generally still use loops for modifying data.
LINQ is really a combination of three features: 1) functions as first-class citizens, 2) lambda expressions/syntax, and 3) closures. These are very useful on their own. Being able to take a function as an argument is extremely powerful, and being able to define a function inline when you call that method, and have it capture values from outside that function in the form of a closure -- very powerful.
That doesn't mean there isn't a use for imperative programming, but when I see a colleague filtering a list of objects with a foreach loop, I just cringe. Just use a .Where() clause! Don't be afraid of functional - use it as one more weapon in your arsenal.
When people say "electricity is expensive" I usually say, "compared to what?" Consider that "a healthy well-fed laborer over the course of an 8-hour work shift can sustain an average output of about 75 watts." Source. Over the span of 8 hours, that amounts to 8 * 0.075 = 0.6 kWh. NPR in 2011 (via Google) says the "average price people in the U.S. pay for electricity is about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour." So you can buy 8 hours of human power for a few cents in the form of electricity from the grid. I'm not saying we shouldn't hang our clothes to dry, but I'm saying we shouldn't do that until we have a robot that can do it for us.
If you make $50,000 a year at a 2000 hour per year job, you make $25 per hour, and let's say after tax that's... maybe $18 an hour. That's somewhat typical. I'll be generous and say it only takes you an extra 10 minutes to hang a load and go get it off the line later. That's a sixth of an hour, which should be worth $3 to you in after-tax income. I happen to have an energy monitor installed at my panel, and I can tell you that it takes less than 25 cents of electricity to dry a load. Obviously this varies by where you live, but it's certainly going to be less than $1. Much less than that if you use a gas dryer. We do at least 4 loads a week, typically 5 as we're a family of 5, so that's a savings of around $10 per week, so over $500 per year in time savings. My electric dryer is over 15 years old and it's a very basic two-cycle with moisture sensor type, so probably cost less than $500 new. I think it's a no-brainer to use a clothes dryer.
I live in Canada and I'm male, and when my first kid was born, I told my boss I was thinking of taking time off (6 months). My co-workers suggested this was a bad idea, and my boss (female) said when she'd had her first child, she was working from the hospital and back at work the next week. My wife's employment plans fell through so we decided it wasn't feasible for me to take time off, but it was pretty clear that I was strongly discouraged from doing so. Also, in my current job with maybe 150 employees at this company, I can't give you one instance of a male taking significant time off for a new child. In fact if one of the men takes even a week off, people make comments about it. That's on top of some females here saying, "I'd never let my husband take *my* parental leave." Trust me, Canada still has a ways to go.
That completely ignores the tragedy of the commons. Ten people live around a lake. One guy dumps toxic pollution in the lake and kills all the fish. It doesn't matter how hard the other 9 try to clean up the lake, they'll never keep up with the one guy spewing toxic waste. I suppose they could pay him to not do it, but I don't see why he actually has a right to dump toxic waste in the lake in the first place. Likely they'll just gang up on him and make him stop. Same with carbon emissions... assuming everyone has a right to breath in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide, the total amount being put into the atmosphere is much more than that basic allowance. What gives a few people/companies/nations the right to dump far more than their allotment into the atmosphere? Why should others pay them not to do it? It's a common resource, and has to be managed by agreement, and if we disagree too much, there will be violence to settle it. It's the same as if someone took all the food and didn't leave any for anyone else.