A free market requires dozens of competing participants, you will never get a free market with only 3-4 players like Comcast or AT&T, it's impossible.
Actually there have been studies done (and covered on Slashdot years ago), and the results were a competitive market emerges if there are a minimum of 4 competitors. It doesn't require dozens. It does, however, require that all 4 competitors be perfectly substitutable. For example, a Big Mac, a Whopper, and whatever the equivalents are from Carls Jr. and Wendy's are all perfectly substitutable in this context, though obviously not identical. A cable modem and a wireless data plan are not substitutable, no matter how hard Comcast and AT&T lie about it. Unfortunately, that hasn't prevented Congress and both the current and previous FCC's from believing the lie.
Yeah, but the extension cord limits range to a few hundred yards.
I've got two extension cords. Twice the range! At this rate I'll have a flying car with a range that covers the city after just a few hundred dollars at the hardware store!
And without good audits, neither microsoft, nor the victim/user will know they are gone until they pop up in the competitors (China's) products...
This is the damning part. Industrial espionage from China is something of a constant thing these days, but when you run your own servers (and haven't outsourced administration to incompetents), you can see the attempts happening and have at least some chance of detecting and stopping a breach.
When the servers storing your company's most valuable data aren't even yours, you haven't the slightest idea what's happening to them. You may not even know where they are. And even while you may think you know, they may have rearranged things without telling you and you still don't know where they are. Repeat that process a few times and suddenly your entire business (in Ohio) grinds to a halt because of a typhoon in Malaysia. Surprise, Microsoft outsourced an entire datacenter.
MBA's are goddamned stupid. IT is a core competency of every business now. You either do it yourself and do it well or you will be bitten on the ass, one way or another. Outsourcing IT is like outsourcing your filing system 50 years ago. Insanity.
I work for a very large organization here and I had no problem negotiating with them and getting what I wanted pay wise
Usually what you're negotiating in that circumstance is for the job title that pays what you want. So you're a Software Developer III instead of a Software Developer II. You'd better believe that you're making the same $Alpha that every other Software Developer III makes from your employer.
If not for the "gougers", the drugs would not have been available.
Bullshit. Again. University professors did the basic biological research to understand the causes of the diseases. University professors did the initial in vitro experiments to determine what drugs might be useful. University hospitals did the first animal trials to see if the drugs would work. University hospitals did the first, second, and third level clinical trials to further refine the drugs. Only THEN does a for-profit pharmaceutical company swoop in and license the result.
We are talking about rare drugs for rare disorders. Pharmaceutical companies do not pay for research into rare diseases. They could give a fuck about rare diseases, unless and until someone else does all the hard work for them. There's not enough market. The research they pay for is finding a way to file a bullshit patent extension for one of their existing mass market products. Then they pay more for the marketing than they did for the research.
The sooner you pass away, the better for all concerned — including, nay beginning with (!), your closest relatives.
Go fuck yourself you lying thieving sociopathic asshole.
The problem is not that we put profit ahead of lives but rather that we haven't fixed health care so it properly comes under traditional market forces.
When are you braindead idiots going to get it? When the choice is pay or die, there is no market! Goddamnit, how stupid can you possibly be? Markets require choice. Healthcare is not optional. End of discussion. Healthcare can not be managed via a market.
If you've fallen off your roof and broken your leg and nicked your femoral artery, do you:
a) Methodically call up each of the six independent healthcare providers in your area and ask them for their up-front pricing for repairing your artery and setting your broken leg, then carefully research their quality of care online, paying appropriate attention to their average outcomes specifically for treating a broken leg before calling back your provider of choice and making a reservation for them to come and get you; or
b) Dial 911, frantically convey your situation, and pray the EMTs get to you before you bleed the fuck out?
I'm gonna guess option b). And if in some fever dream, you really think you'd pursue option a), I hope you fall off your fucking roof.
God DAMN I'm sick of you anonymous, cowardly fucks. You know your psychopathic ideas are wrong, or you'd post with an account and accept the downmods you deserve.
If only K of something — anything, from LeBron's sneakers to life-saving medicines — is available despite there being N people desiring it, then whichever way you pick to distribute it:
Lottery Charge the highest price at which there are still willing buyers
blah blah blah
I can't even be bothered to quote all this drivel. What are you babbling about? Once drug research is complete, production is ALWAYS cheap. We're talking about chemical processes here. If you want more of a drug, you just use a bigger vat to make it. For those drugs with particularly nitpicky production methods (and those are few and far between, because a significant fraction of the research is about making production cheap and easy), just buy a second small vat.
When it comes to drugs, K >= N, always. Drugs where research hasn't progressed to the stage where production is cheap aren't even submitted to the FDA. No drug company on Earth will spin up a massively expensive, difficult production process if they have any choice. And before you jump on that, they've bought and paid for more than enough politicians to have all the choice they'll ever need.
No, this is gouging, plain and simple. When the marketing budget is much bigger than the research budget, and the production budget is lost in the noise, it's gouging.
"It perpetuates discrimination," James said. "And it has an effect on their pensions as well."
Now I know they're blowing smoke up my ass. Pensions? What pensions? I've heard of this mythical beast. I've never seen it. Boomers got pensions. I'm Gen-X. The pensions were gone, gone gone by the time I entered the workforce.
And that's definitely not how it happens. Businesses by and large no longer negotiate. At least, big businesses. They know what they're going to pay and that's it. There is no discussion. If you ask for more, they will simply say no (speaking from experience). HR has a schedule: job title X with Y years of experience and Z tenure gets salary Alpha, and that's an end of it. They do this specifically to avoid discrimination lawsuits. If women in the company have lower average salaries than men, it's invariably because they have y experience, where y < the Y the men have.
I say we forget trying to sequester carbon. Instead, we should create artificial hurricanes. This will have two effects: more transfer of heat from the surface to the upper atmosphere where it can be radiated to space, and since hurricanes are massive heat engines, we can just use them as power plants.
You think you're being facetious, but the Vortex Engine people are quite serious, and even have funding now. Artificial tornadoes, rather than hurricanes, but very much the same idea.
Of course, as proposed, it's supposed to work as an adjunct to an existing power plant, and what these lunatics forget is how loud a tornado is. Even though the local coal power plant is outside the metro area, it's not so far outside that a funnel cloud beside it wouldn't be both visible and audible from everywhere in the city. So not happening....
After climate change the next extinction level problem is the Y10K problem. When four digit years need to be expanded to five digit years.
Nah. The next extinction level problem is the 2038 problem. It actually strongly resembles the Y2K problem in that there are oodles and oodles of bits of embedded electronics that people have forgotten exist that count time with a 32 bit time_t. Tons of 20 and 30 and 40 year old industrial processes are controlled by embedded systems that are going to lose their tiny minds. These are boards that no one dares to replace because they're not entirely sure what they do anymore. The developer is dead, the documentation is lost, and it Just Works. And replacing it requires hiring both an expensive electrical engineer and an expensive software engineer, to design and build and test and install a fix for something that.. isn't broken? Yeah, it'll be a great time to be an electronics consultant. In 2035.
That most SJWs are women and are mostly targeting men has a lot to do with the vitriol that is spewed about SJWs. A lot of guys are just too old fashioned to want to here criticism from a woman.
Uhm. Are they? How do you know? Is OrangeTide a masculine or feminine name? Neither. I have no idea if the majority of SJWs who post on the Internet are women or not. Being an "old fashioned" person, I tend to think they're all men, because when I started using the Internet, everybody was male.
According to random Internet site, 66.2% of the female gender people in the Americas use the Internet compared to 65.8% of the male gender people. So if I'm just picking odds here, most SJWs might be female. By a margin of 0.5%. I'm going to guess that there are significant factors that skew SJWs to one sex or another, but I have no idea what they might be or what the actual skew is. How do you know?
Woops. Ajit Pai outed Verizon's business plan. Those delusional mooks think they can out-Google Google by sucking in even more data than Google. I don't think Verizon and Comcast wanted him to actually repeat the bullshit reasoning they gave him in their policy paper that he's slavishly adopting. So hard to bribe good help these days...
The value of IoT is explicitly not derived by normal exchanges of value for cash it's derived by leveraging the customer on the back end to sell their data and push advertising.
If that were true, the devices would cost a lot less. A dumb light switch costs 46 cents. A "smart" light switch costs $46.
They're gouging you on the initial purchase and selling your data.
Which is probably true, since "a smart home" is defined by most people as "All (or most of) my lights and devices connected to an automation system and controllable." At $30-45 per light switch, power outlet, or device-controller, it adds up quickly in even a small home. (My home is not small, and I would easily go over $5k if I wanted to swap out just switches)
Agreed, though I would say the survey isn't a lie. It is indeed a matter of definition, and most people are underestimating the cost to have a full smart home, at current prices. The per socket, per switch, and per fixture cost is outrageous.
the average person starts with just 4 smart devices, and spends about $200.
Yeah, starts with a hub (Usually just under $100 by itself) and a couple of lights or sensors. They generally expand beyond that.
Do they, though? I have a sneaking suspicion a great many people never do. A smart home sounds great, but you don't get a smart home for $200; you get 2, maybe 3 controllable devices, and you quickly decide that you're not getting anything remotely like the utility you'd expect for the price.
A bog standard 15 amp duplex outlet is 37 cents—37 cents!—if you buy a 10 pack from Home Depot. A bog standard 15 amp single switch is 46 cents when you buy a 10 pack. "Smart home" devices are literally 100 times more expensive. Being able to program on and off times for fixtures and outlets is nice, but it isn't 100 times as nice. Being able to arbitrarily assign and reassign any switch to control any fixture or outlet sounds nice, but it also isn't 100 times as nice, and most "smart" switches don't even have such an option. You don't even get an occupancy sensor for your $46.00. Hell, you don't even get a dimmer for that. Plus "smart" switches have weird arbitrary restrictions, like only 12 devices supported at once. And "smart" switches have a 1 year warranty, while that 46 cent switch will last three lifetimes. Meanwhile, even if the "smart" switch doesn't fail after the warranty expires, you know the manufacturer is going to abandon the Android app required to access the "smart" capabilities after one, maybe two versions if you're lucky.
I would very much like a smart home, but I have a long list of requirements before I would do it. Current prices are a giant barrier. Duplex outlets need to be no more than $3 each if I buy a 10 pack. Switches need to be no more than $15, and I'm only paying that much if it comes with an LED dimmer, a photocell, and a temperature sensor. I want arbitrary switch assignment. I want IEEE 802.11 or IEEE 802.15.4. I want no "smart hub" requirement. I want no device count limit. I want open source software for Windows, MacOSX, Linux, iOS, and Android that's secure and doesn't suck. I want totally optional cloud connectivity. I want a 10 year warranty. I also want a damn pony.....
Somehow I doubt I'm going to get any of these things, especially the price points. Current smart home devices are apparently handcrafted in small batches by gnome artisans. Even though I could afford it, I'm completely unwilling to pay artisan prices. The utility simply isn't there.
Back when I was a teenager I played with X10 stuff a bit. As a teenager it seemed cool that I could turn lamps and radios on and off through my computer.
Then the novelty wore off and I realized that at least for those things in the room with me, controlling them remotely didn't matter, and for those few things that could benefit me to be controlled in some fashion, it wasn't in the cards.
I've used X-10 to control anywhere from 2 to 9 lamps for the last 15 years. Mostly just 2. I've gotten so accustomed to the lamps turning on and off automatically in the evening that if something goes wrong and it doesn't work, for whatever reason, it's mildly shocking.
I like it because, being computer controlled, it can be more sophisticated than a dumb timer. I've got a cron job that launches a tiny program that recalculates sundown at my latitude each day and issues the turn-on command appropriately. Considering I got all the X-10 equipment for $10 per pack of 4 items (one RS-232 transmitter, one receiver that can control one socket, one lamp control that listens to the receiver, and one remote), it was a bargain, and a very nice convenience. But it would be better with a light sensor, which wasn't an option at the time, and I was only willing to do it at all because of the promotional pricing. I would never buy more pieces at full price. $45 per socket is far far too expensive, especially for a somewhat unreliable system with absolutely no security. The relatively large wall wart external box is also a major turnoff, and makes it impossible to control both wall sockets since it's polarity-sensitive.
...and I can turn down my thermostat easily enough on my own.
For that, I have a programmable thermostat, which was included with my new, high efficiency furnace. Very very convenient, and as someone else said, you can get one clever enough to control a heat pump properly. (Mine isn't that smart.)
...and her "Its her turn" campaign slogan just showed how fucking arrogant she was and sealed the deal.
I didn't know that was her official slogan. I thought it was something a PAC thought up. Regardless, it was definitely a joke. It's the Presidency. There are no "turns". Otherwise you and I would get one too.
Me, I refused to vote for Hillary Clinton because I refuse to establish any more political dynasties in the US. Having the Kennedys still around is bad enough. We tried the dynastic thing with Bush, and that didn't go so well. Never again, says I. So I didn't vote for either major party candidate, and my vote literally wasn't counted (write-ins aren't counted at all in my state).
One editor was reported saying, "Yes, we've been beating this horse for twenty years now but rumors of the horse's demise many years prior have been grossly exadurated."
Yep, that looks like the spelling of Slashdot editors. Bravo.
Any of these team or league or school based approaches would have the advantage of allowing a sports fan to only pay for what they care about.
Which is exactly why every sports league is fighting the idea tooth and nail. Their revenues have been artificially inflated for years and years by people paying for something they don't want and don't watch.
Where I am, baseball rules. I'm in a major metro area of nearly 3 million people. The local baseball team is beloved. The local hockey team ekes along. There is no local professional football team. They pulled up stakes and left years ago. The locals don't give a damn about football. But ESPN programming is national, so when it's football season, they're playing football games. Lots of them. Which nobody here wants to see or pay for. But they're paying anyway, because baseball season is just around the corner.
Paying for just the sport you want is going to erode the total revenue of every single professional sport, unless they somehow manage to finagle a price hike into a la carte subscriptions.
We have such a shortage of CNC operators that local companies have teamed up with the VocTech highschool to offer an adult education class. You earn your GED and CNC/welding certifications in 8 weeks (going 2 days a week) and walk out earning $50k/year. CNC have billboards everywhere. $25/hr with 401k, medical, dental and vision.
What's a CNC operator? As I understand it, a CNC operator is just the person who loads the blank into the machine, starts the machine, removes the work product when it's done, and cleans up the mess. They're not the CNC programmer. As such, that sounds like a job that's incredibly easy to automate. As in, there are already off-the-shelf robotics that can do that without issue for weeks at a time.
Blanks are metal and extremely regular, meaning that a manipulator from the '80s has no problem gripping, moving, and placing them accurately without damage. Even if you want flexibility and the ability for a given machine to produce three different work product types from three different blanks in the same day, it's still not even remotely difficult. Clamping the blank into place means tightening a screw clamp, something machines have excelled at since the '70s. Removing a completed piece from the machine means gripping the finished part somewhere, but since the shape of the finished part is perfectly predictable, programming a robot to grip it is no harder than producing the CNC program. No fancy neural net machine vision required. The only hard part would be cleaning up the scraps, and I bet you could retrofit the CNC machine with ramps and chutes that would take care of 90% of the scrap with gravity alone.
McDonald's claims that $15/hr is the threshold where automating away the job makes sense. $25/hr with 401k, medical, dental, and vision? That's $150k/year. That pays for the robot in 2 years, and pays for the installation and programming in another year. CNC operator sounds like a doomed trade to get into, sooner rather than later.
"We're excited to learn this incredibly important new language together. Coding truly is the language of the future."
Training that will last a proverbial 15 minutes should stick like water on a duck in the mind of a 5-year old.
Remember for a moment that this is the same 5 year old who can sing the New Year good wishes song in Mandarin. By all accounts, she has a solid 5-year-old's grasp of the language, even though she's American and has American parents who are not of Chinese descent. This particular 5 year old may surprise you. I expect that by the time Donald Trump leaves office, his granddaughter will have a larger vocabulary than he does, in two different languages.
She just might know how to write a little bit of Python, too.
Slashdot Mirror
A free market requires dozens of competing participants, you will never get a free market with only 3-4 players like Comcast or AT&T, it's impossible.
Actually there have been studies done (and covered on Slashdot years ago), and the results were a competitive market emerges if there are a minimum of 4 competitors. It doesn't require dozens. It does, however, require that all 4 competitors be perfectly substitutable. For example, a Big Mac, a Whopper, and whatever the equivalents are from Carls Jr. and Wendy's are all perfectly substitutable in this context, though obviously not identical. A cable modem and a wireless data plan are not substitutable, no matter how hard Comcast and AT&T lie about it. Unfortunately, that hasn't prevented Congress and both the current and previous FCC's from believing the lie.
Yeah, but the extension cord limits range to a few hundred yards.
I've got two extension cords. Twice the range! At this rate I'll have a flying car with a range that covers the city after just a few hundred dollars at the hardware store!
And without good audits, neither microsoft, nor the victim/user will know they are gone until they pop up in the competitors (China's) products...
This is the damning part. Industrial espionage from China is something of a constant thing these days, but when you run your own servers (and haven't outsourced administration to incompetents), you can see the attempts happening and have at least some chance of detecting and stopping a breach.
When the servers storing your company's most valuable data aren't even yours, you haven't the slightest idea what's happening to them. You may not even know where they are. And even while you may think you know, they may have rearranged things without telling you and you still don't know where they are. Repeat that process a few times and suddenly your entire business (in Ohio) grinds to a halt because of a typhoon in Malaysia. Surprise, Microsoft outsourced an entire datacenter.
MBA's are goddamned stupid. IT is a core competency of every business now. You either do it yourself and do it well or you will be bitten on the ass, one way or another. Outsourcing IT is like outsourcing your filing system 50 years ago. Insanity.
...and there are 6 female black software developers?
yes, and 7 of them are in my building right now.
So you're the one hoarding them all. Now we know.
I work for a very large organization here and I had no problem negotiating with them and getting what I wanted pay wise
Usually what you're negotiating in that circumstance is for the job title that pays what you want. So you're a Software Developer III instead of a Software Developer II. You'd better believe that you're making the same $Alpha that every other Software Developer III makes from your employer.
If not for the "gougers", the drugs would not have been available.
Bullshit. Again. University professors did the basic biological research to understand the causes of the diseases. University professors did the initial in vitro experiments to determine what drugs might be useful. University hospitals did the first animal trials to see if the drugs would work. University hospitals did the first, second, and third level clinical trials to further refine the drugs. Only THEN does a for-profit pharmaceutical company swoop in and license the result.
We are talking about rare drugs for rare disorders. Pharmaceutical companies do not pay for research into rare diseases. They could give a fuck about rare diseases, unless and until someone else does all the hard work for them. There's not enough market. The research they pay for is finding a way to file a bullshit patent extension for one of their existing mass market products. Then they pay more for the marketing than they did for the research.
The sooner you pass away, the better for all concerned — including, nay beginning with (!), your closest relatives.
Go fuck yourself you lying thieving sociopathic asshole.
The problem is not that we put profit ahead of lives but rather that we haven't fixed health care so it properly comes under traditional market forces.
When are you braindead idiots going to get it? When the choice is pay or die, there is no market! Goddamnit, how stupid can you possibly be? Markets require choice. Healthcare is not optional. End of discussion. Healthcare can not be managed via a market.
If you've fallen off your roof and broken your leg and nicked your femoral artery, do you:
a) Methodically call up each of the six independent healthcare providers in your area and ask them for their up-front pricing for repairing your artery and setting your broken leg, then carefully research their quality of care online, paying appropriate attention to their average outcomes specifically for treating a broken leg before calling back your provider of choice and making a reservation for them to come and get you; or
b) Dial 911, frantically convey your situation, and pray the EMTs get to you before you bleed the fuck out?
I'm gonna guess option b). And if in some fever dream, you really think you'd pursue option a), I hope you fall off your fucking roof.
God DAMN I'm sick of you anonymous, cowardly fucks. You know your psychopathic ideas are wrong, or you'd post with an account and accept the downmods you deserve.
If only K of something — anything, from LeBron's sneakers to life-saving medicines — is available despite there being N people desiring it, then whichever way you pick to distribute it:
Lottery
Charge the highest price at which there are still willing buyers
blah blah blah
I can't even be bothered to quote all this drivel. What are you babbling about? Once drug research is complete, production is ALWAYS cheap. We're talking about chemical processes here. If you want more of a drug, you just use a bigger vat to make it. For those drugs with particularly nitpicky production methods (and those are few and far between, because a significant fraction of the research is about making production cheap and easy), just buy a second small vat.
When it comes to drugs, K >= N, always. Drugs where research hasn't progressed to the stage where production is cheap aren't even submitted to the FDA. No drug company on Earth will spin up a massively expensive, difficult production process if they have any choice. And before you jump on that, they've bought and paid for more than enough politicians to have all the choice they'll ever need.
No, this is gouging, plain and simple. When the marketing budget is much bigger than the research budget, and the production budget is lost in the noise, it's gouging.
"It perpetuates discrimination," James said. "And it has an effect on their pensions as well."
Now I know they're blowing smoke up my ass. Pensions? What pensions? I've heard of this mythical beast. I've never seen it. Boomers got pensions. I'm Gen-X. The pensions were gone, gone gone by the time I entered the workforce.
That's how it should happen.
And that's definitely not how it happens. Businesses by and large no longer negotiate. At least, big businesses. They know what they're going to pay and that's it. There is no discussion. If you ask for more, they will simply say no (speaking from experience). HR has a schedule: job title X with Y years of experience and Z tenure gets salary Alpha, and that's an end of it. They do this specifically to avoid discrimination lawsuits. If women in the company have lower average salaries than men, it's invariably because they have y experience, where y < the Y the men have.
I say we forget trying to sequester carbon. Instead, we should create artificial hurricanes. This will have two effects: more transfer of heat from the surface to the upper atmosphere where it can be radiated to space, and since hurricanes are massive heat engines, we can just use them as power plants.
You think you're being facetious, but the Vortex Engine people are quite serious, and even have funding now. Artificial tornadoes, rather than hurricanes, but very much the same idea.
Of course, as proposed, it's supposed to work as an adjunct to an existing power plant, and what these lunatics forget is how loud a tornado is. Even though the local coal power plant is outside the metro area, it's not so far outside that a funnel cloud beside it wouldn't be both visible and audible from everywhere in the city. So not happening....
After climate change the next extinction level problem is the Y10K problem. When four digit years need to be expanded to five digit years.
Nah. The next extinction level problem is the 2038 problem. It actually strongly resembles the Y2K problem in that there are oodles and oodles of bits of embedded electronics that people have forgotten exist that count time with a 32 bit time_t. Tons of 20 and 30 and 40 year old industrial processes are controlled by embedded systems that are going to lose their tiny minds. These are boards that no one dares to replace because they're not entirely sure what they do anymore. The developer is dead, the documentation is lost, and it Just Works. And replacing it requires hiring both an expensive electrical engineer and an expensive software engineer, to design and build and test and install a fix for something that.. isn't broken? Yeah, it'll be a great time to be an electronics consultant. In 2035.
That most SJWs are women and are mostly targeting men has a lot to do with the vitriol that is spewed about SJWs. A lot of guys are just too old fashioned to want to here criticism from a woman.
Uhm. Are they? How do you know? Is OrangeTide a masculine or feminine name? Neither. I have no idea if the majority of SJWs who post on the Internet are women or not. Being an "old fashioned" person, I tend to think they're all men, because when I started using the Internet, everybody was male.
According to random Internet site, 66.2% of the female gender people in the Americas use the Internet compared to 65.8% of the male gender people. So if I'm just picking odds here, most SJWs might be female. By a margin of 0.5%. I'm going to guess that there are significant factors that skew SJWs to one sex or another, but I have no idea what they might be or what the actual skew is. How do you know?
Woops. Ajit Pai outed Verizon's business plan. Those delusional mooks think they can out-Google Google by sucking in even more data than Google. I don't think Verizon and Comcast wanted him to actually repeat the bullshit reasoning they gave him in their policy paper that he's slavishly adopting. So hard to bribe good help these days...
For some reason, corporations prefer to hire expensive white men, rather than cheap black women.
Probably because there were 1.1 million software developers in 2014 and there are 6 female black software developers?
The value of IoT is explicitly not derived by normal exchanges of value for cash it's derived by leveraging the customer on the back end to sell their data and push advertising.
If that were true, the devices would cost a lot less. A dumb light switch costs 46 cents. A "smart" light switch costs $46.
They're gouging you on the initial purchase and selling your data.
Which is probably true, since "a smart home" is defined by most people as "All (or most of) my lights and devices connected to an automation system and controllable." At $30-45 per light switch, power outlet, or device-controller, it adds up quickly in even a small home. (My home is not small, and I would easily go over $5k if I wanted to swap out just switches)
Agreed, though I would say the survey isn't a lie. It is indeed a matter of definition, and most people are underestimating the cost to have a full smart home, at current prices. The per socket, per switch, and per fixture cost is outrageous.
the average person starts with just 4 smart devices, and spends about $200.
Yeah, starts with a hub (Usually just under $100 by itself) and a couple of lights or sensors. They generally expand beyond that.
Do they, though? I have a sneaking suspicion a great many people never do. A smart home sounds great, but you don't get a smart home for $200; you get 2, maybe 3 controllable devices, and you quickly decide that you're not getting anything remotely like the utility you'd expect for the price.
A bog standard 15 amp duplex outlet is 37 cents—37 cents!—if you buy a 10 pack from Home Depot. A bog standard 15 amp single switch is 46 cents when you buy a 10 pack. "Smart home" devices are literally 100 times more expensive. Being able to program on and off times for fixtures and outlets is nice, but it isn't 100 times as nice. Being able to arbitrarily assign and reassign any switch to control any fixture or outlet sounds nice, but it also isn't 100 times as nice, and most "smart" switches don't even have such an option. You don't even get an occupancy sensor for your $46.00. Hell, you don't even get a dimmer for that. Plus "smart" switches have weird arbitrary restrictions, like only 12 devices supported at once. And "smart" switches have a 1 year warranty, while that 46 cent switch will last three lifetimes. Meanwhile, even if the "smart" switch doesn't fail after the warranty expires, you know the manufacturer is going to abandon the Android app required to access the "smart" capabilities after one, maybe two versions if you're lucky.
I would very much like a smart home, but I have a long list of requirements before I would do it. Current prices are a giant barrier. Duplex outlets need to be no more than $3 each if I buy a 10 pack. Switches need to be no more than $15, and I'm only paying that much if it comes with an LED dimmer, a photocell, and a temperature sensor. I want arbitrary switch assignment. I want IEEE 802.11 or IEEE 802.15.4. I want no "smart hub" requirement. I want no device count limit. I want open source software for Windows, MacOSX, Linux, iOS, and Android that's secure and doesn't suck. I want totally optional cloud connectivity. I want a 10 year warranty. I also want a damn pony.....
Somehow I doubt I'm going to get any of these things, especially the price points. Current smart home devices are apparently handcrafted in small batches by gnome artisans. Even though I could afford it, I'm completely unwilling to pay artisan prices. The utility simply isn't there.
Back when I was a teenager I played with X10 stuff a bit. As a teenager it seemed cool that I could turn lamps and radios on and off through my computer.
Then the novelty wore off and I realized that at least for those things in the room with me, controlling them remotely didn't matter, and for those few things that could benefit me to be controlled in some fashion, it wasn't in the cards.
I've used X-10 to control anywhere from 2 to 9 lamps for the last 15 years. Mostly just 2. I've gotten so accustomed to the lamps turning on and off automatically in the evening that if something goes wrong and it doesn't work, for whatever reason, it's mildly shocking.
I like it because, being computer controlled, it can be more sophisticated than a dumb timer. I've got a cron job that launches a tiny program that recalculates sundown at my latitude each day and issues the turn-on command appropriately. Considering I got all the X-10 equipment for $10 per pack of 4 items (one RS-232 transmitter, one receiver that can control one socket, one lamp control that listens to the receiver, and one remote), it was a bargain, and a very nice convenience. But it would be better with a light sensor, which wasn't an option at the time, and I was only willing to do it at all because of the promotional pricing. I would never buy more pieces at full price. $45 per socket is far far too expensive, especially for a somewhat unreliable system with absolutely no security. The relatively large wall wart external box is also a major turnoff, and makes it impossible to control both wall sockets since it's polarity-sensitive.
...and I can turn down my thermostat easily enough on my own.
For that, I have a programmable thermostat, which was included with my new, high efficiency furnace. Very very convenient, and as someone else said, you can get one clever enough to control a heat pump properly. (Mine isn't that smart.)
...and her "Its her turn" campaign slogan just showed how fucking arrogant she was and sealed the deal.
I didn't know that was her official slogan. I thought it was something a PAC thought up. Regardless, it was definitely a joke. It's the Presidency. There are no "turns". Otherwise you and I would get one too.
Me, I refused to vote for Hillary Clinton because I refuse to establish any more political dynasties in the US. Having the Kennedys still around is bad enough. We tried the dynastic thing with Bush, and that didn't go so well. Never again, says I. So I didn't vote for either major party candidate, and my vote literally wasn't counted (write-ins aren't counted at all in my state).
In that case nobody should ever emigrate anywhere.
Why did your ancestors go to the country you are in now?
Because their home country had been overrun by Nazis and totally trashed.
One editor was reported saying, "Yes, we've been beating this horse for twenty years now but rumors of the horse's demise many years prior have been grossly exadurated."
Yep, that looks like the spelling of Slashdot editors. Bravo.
Any of these team or league or school based approaches would have the advantage of allowing a sports fan to only pay for what they care about.
Which is exactly why every sports league is fighting the idea tooth and nail. Their revenues have been artificially inflated for years and years by people paying for something they don't want and don't watch.
Where I am, baseball rules. I'm in a major metro area of nearly 3 million people. The local baseball team is beloved. The local hockey team ekes along. There is no local professional football team. They pulled up stakes and left years ago. The locals don't give a damn about football. But ESPN programming is national, so when it's football season, they're playing football games. Lots of them. Which nobody here wants to see or pay for. But they're paying anyway, because baseball season is just around the corner.
Paying for just the sport you want is going to erode the total revenue of every single professional sport, unless they somehow manage to finagle a price hike into a la carte subscriptions.
We have such a shortage of CNC operators that local companies have teamed up with the VocTech highschool to offer an adult education class. You earn your GED and CNC/welding certifications in 8 weeks (going 2 days a week) and walk out earning $50k/year. CNC have billboards everywhere. $25/hr with 401k, medical, dental and vision.
What's a CNC operator? As I understand it, a CNC operator is just the person who loads the blank into the machine, starts the machine, removes the work product when it's done, and cleans up the mess. They're not the CNC programmer. As such, that sounds like a job that's incredibly easy to automate. As in, there are already off-the-shelf robotics that can do that without issue for weeks at a time.
Blanks are metal and extremely regular, meaning that a manipulator from the '80s has no problem gripping, moving, and placing them accurately without damage. Even if you want flexibility and the ability for a given machine to produce three different work product types from three different blanks in the same day, it's still not even remotely difficult. Clamping the blank into place means tightening a screw clamp, something machines have excelled at since the '70s. Removing a completed piece from the machine means gripping the finished part somewhere, but since the shape of the finished part is perfectly predictable, programming a robot to grip it is no harder than producing the CNC program. No fancy neural net machine vision required. The only hard part would be cleaning up the scraps, and I bet you could retrofit the CNC machine with ramps and chutes that would take care of 90% of the scrap with gravity alone.
McDonald's claims that $15/hr is the threshold where automating away the job makes sense. $25/hr with 401k, medical, dental, and vision? That's $150k/year. That pays for the robot in 2 years, and pays for the installation and programming in another year. CNC operator sounds like a doomed trade to get into, sooner rather than later.
Long time ago, someone also told me to dress for the job I want, that's been somewhat successful.
I tried that, but they told me the cape and cowl were not appropriate.
"We're excited to learn this incredibly important new language together. Coding truly is the language of the future."
Training that will last a proverbial 15 minutes should stick like water on a duck in the mind of a 5-year old.
Remember for a moment that this is the same 5 year old who can sing the New Year good wishes song in Mandarin. By all accounts, she has a solid 5-year-old's grasp of the language, even though she's American and has American parents who are not of Chinese descent. This particular 5 year old may surprise you. I expect that by the time Donald Trump leaves office, his granddaughter will have a larger vocabulary than he does, in two different languages.
She just might know how to write a little bit of Python, too.