Most jobs from 50-100 years ago have already been mostly automated. Computers, every more automated large scale assembly lines, self serve kiosks, pneumatic nail guns, etc. have all reduced the need for labor and increased productivity.
From a distance you would think that if you were 4x more productive you would be working only 10 hours a week rather than 40 (or be making 4x as much in real terms). The reality however is that most gains show up as higher profits for capital owners. Wages have stagnated, benefits have eroded, and work hours have not budged. The linkage between productivity and quality of life is broken for wage earners like never before. Meanwhile the top few percent, and especially the top 0.1% have become mind blowingly rich and powerful. So powerful they can keep people from voting themselves shorter hours, higher wages, or better safety nets. We have the entire Fox News propaganda channel helping get gullible folks to vote against their own economic interests and to support the idea of a xenophobic police state.
It is cheaper to buy a few senators, or your own news network than to pay a proper share of taxes today.
Very soon capital owners will need fewer and fewer workers than are available and have thus shown no willingness to stop shredding the safety nets. If the rabble become too desperate and realize how little their elected representatives can actually afford to care for them it will rapidly turn into pitchfork time. Judging by the militarization of the police, I suspect that the rich and powerful already see the writing on the wall and have started preparing for it. Inequality like we already have is unsustainable, and as a country you basically end up either going the social-democracy route like a lot of Europe with high taxes on the wealthy to support a good society for all, or you go police state like a lot of "democratic" dictatorships around the world. I am guessing we are headed for the latter, and are closer than most care to admit.
Increasingly companies with deep pockets can evade the law through continual delays, impediments, and endless appeals, twisting the law to delay justice until it is moot. If a company like Uber can delay their judgement day a few years through these vile tactics it lets them illegally get the leg up on competitors and an opportunity to lobby for rule changes or even stack a few legislatures with candidates more favorable to them. Basically illegal actors can stay solvent longer than justice can stay effective.
I'd like to see the right to a speedy trial applied in BOTH directions. The public who is impacted should have a right for these sort of asshats to be tried in a time effective fashion. A burglar doesn't politely asked to hand over any evidence in his house some time in the next year or two, why should these modern bandits get so much more benefit simply because they are huge?
Background noise of the universe is 3 Kelvin (K). Your TV antenna sees the ground as much as the air, so sees about 150 K (half from the 300 K ground and half from the 3 K sky). The first amplifier is probably 5-6 dB NF, so it has a noise temperature of about 800 K. So out of the total noise temperature of 950 K, about 0.15% is the background noise of the universe.
What if both sources use white noise generated using the same LFSR taps from publically available sources (i.e. match and engineering texts), or both used the same software program to generate the psuedo-random samples? Most white noise is far from truly as random as you think if you dig into the details.
Should white noise from non-novel generators even be copyrightable at all?
If we could actually be sure the targets were kept foreign, sure. Instead we have ample evidence that the NSA has cast a much wider net, and undermined much of our infrastructure to assure they can gain access. The result is a porous compute infrastructure that keeps being broken. Now we will never know how many exploits were intentionally placed, but any non-zero number is too many. With no trust I see a brain drain there as a net positive until the organization has a real come-to-jesus moment and stops sweeping up the citizenry in their dragnet operations.
If Google doesn't pay, then the citizens have to pick up the slack. I'm rather tired of the "Government can do no good" argument. Go move to Somalia if you don't want a government on your back.
The reality is that a larger prosperous country cannot stand without a functioning and funded government. Relying on roving militias for education, healthcare, judicial services, etc is impractical.
A few years back VR was going to revolutionize and transform and all that mumbo jumbo. It arrived to a "meh". The hype has not panned out into sales or adoption rates and nobody talks about VR much or gets very excited any more.
Before that it was 3D TV's.
Autonomous cars are similarly awesome cool technology in search of a point. I don't dispute that huge amazing strides have been made in the field, but all the predictions of personal car ownership's impending illegality are about as believable as the hype around VR and 3D TV's. Even if we all assume cars roll out with spotless safety it does not automatically follow that a real honest to god business case will appear as well. Articles like this just back up that autonomous cars are in their spaghetti on the wall phase. The tech is so cool that it just has to revolutionize the world, so you get this wild predictions as people contort themselves to imagine a future in which the revolution has already come to pass.
In 10 or even 20 years we'll see autonomous taxis and delivery trucks, but I am betting that almost every household will still have 2-5 cars sitting out front, and that outside of the densest city centers we will hardly see a dent in personal car ownership rates.
Welcome to At-Will employment. If you want someone to stay you are welcome to give them incentives and a high salary. Employers who offer no job security and then turn around to bitch that some underpaid underling leaves as soon as they can get a less crappy job with a higher salary deserve ZERO sympathy. Eff em.
Maybe they should be honest and put "Looking for a well educated naive soul to toil endlessly for a below market salary with industry trailing benefits." in the job post.
If a manager considers your age a disqualifying factor they are practicing age discrimination. Full stop. Its valid to worry about how someone's career goals match the position, but simply assuming someone older than you wants your job is not legal, and says a lot about you and your company.
I am in an odd corner of the tech field, and currently am the second youngest person in our team of ~20 folks, and I am over 40. As the team leader (not quite a manger, and want to keep it that way) I've interviewed and recommended hiring folks close to 20 years older than me. Frankly if one of them wanted my duties I'd happily hand them over. Our long term issue is that our funding model makes us seek out a minimum of 15 years experience for all hires. We have no entry level track, nor do we have lower level folks to hand off the simpler work to. Most designers with 15 years experience are also still designers for some good reason, such as they prefer designing, or have personalities that would not be good a good fit for management. We are hurting for folks with management ambitions regardless of age.
I live in both camps. Android 7.0 phone, old ipod touch for music, and ipad on the couch for casual browsing. The wife is fully Apple.
My ipod is old and stuck at iOS 6, which hardly matters as I rarely use if for anyting but listening to tunes on my bike commute each day. The amazing thing is that while I use my iPad with iOS 11 daily, I still find iOS 6 refreshing and more intuitive to do stuff when I do need to change something on the relic. What happened?
iTunes is a disasterous mess that pushes iMusic relentlessly and makes stuff like turning on/off shuffle mode a major hassle. It has on a few occasions created duplicates and triplicates of my songs or playlists through no apparent action on my part. Cleaning this up is a pain.
Podcast functionality became a hassle to the point that I don't bother anymore back in iOS 10.
Mail keeps stalling for hours a day, and periodically wipes out 1-3 years of messages before re-populating. Slowly.
Safari still is only about half a browser, and many websites for doing anything real still have limitations or broken functionality after ALL these years.
Android is not perfect, but I'd argue it has improved to at least the level where Apple has degraded to in terms to usability. Apple seems to have gone on a binge of adding features for headline's sake, despite touch interfaces sucking for complexity, and seems to have given up on whatever QA/QC standards they used to have.
I'd argue that in >95% of cases there is no point to making most widgets internet connected or "smart" in the first place. I'm still in awe that anyone ever wasted money on a web connected fridge. WTF?
Sadly, many of these widhets have been designed to be badly hobbled or non-functional if they are NOT connected to servers via the internet. I see orphaning of products as a real scourge on the world. Widgets that used to last a decade or more are now "smart", but useless after a year or three when the company loses interest or dies and shuts down its servers, or when some giant security exploit comes out after the support life has ended.
Clearly crypto coins, and now crypto cats are the wave of the future and will displace real money/cats in the future. Animal control is run by the government and can be used to STEAL your hard earned real cat. A crypto cat is clearly better in every way*.
*The ability to pet your crypto cat will come some day in the future.
We got here by you dolts continuing to use those products.
I quit Facebook. I don't use Twitter. I don't use Google Docs. I barely use my Gmail account, and keep really personal stuff out of email and messaging systems in general. I use my phone mostly as a phone and a calculator and install very little on it, I frankly overbought my phone as it was the cheapest way to get non-junk with vanilla Android at the time. I don't rely on Cloud stuff more than I am forced to, rather I keep my stuff local and don't use non-standalone products for anything I care about. I keep hard copy backups of really important stuff like tax records.
It is not hard, but people need to actually vote with their feet. Instead they pine about the fjords every time a new line is crosses and carry on shoveling their personal life details to these unholy behemoths. So frankly we as a society are where we deserve to be.
More features crammed in to add "Wow" factor to announements has been the drive for a while now. Modern UI look is valued above intuitive usability.
In the early days people marveled how 3 year old kids could figure out an iphone without any help. Now it has been bloated and obsfucated, gestures have gotten too numerous and complex. It has become too complex for what it is.
Lost in all of this is "It just works." Sadly, it doesn't. My itunes library is a mess thanks to automagic crap that randomly duplicated songs, changing an album already playing to shuffle or not shuffle is gone (WTF?). So many other little niggles abound.
I prefer my ~8 year old ipod stuck on iOS6 over my ipad for playing music, and marvel at how much nicer it is to use every time I get int it (mostly it lives in my bike bag for playing music to my ear buds).
Meh. 300k transactions a day for Bitcoin, versus billions of transactions per day in assorted fiat currency.
Bubble. Bubble. Bubble.
I will not be the bigger fool on this one.
Also, explain to me why Bitcoin will survive but not Dogecoin, Etherium, Litecoin, etc, etc? Why are the arguments for blockchain technology in any way going to mitigate the likelihood that a blockchain future will not include any of the current round of crypto assets? If the US government produced USAcoin and outlawed transactions in existing black market shadow currencies, would their value not plummet?
+1. Basically the rich can afford to have free speech, often using their companies as megaphones for their political whims. The rest of us underlings have a lot less freedom to go to political rallies, or openly involve ourselves in politics in a public way. At-will employment makes it fine for your HR department to dismiss you if they disagree with your involvement in the countries political process. We have seen the result, most legislation tilts towards more rights and tax cuts for corporate interests, and eroding rights and tax situations for the worker bees.
Slashdot Mirror
I ride my bike and garage my car most of the time you insensitive clod.
Can't wait till get have to have our papers on us every time we travel. Maybe we can give arm bands to identify those we are supposed to be scared of?
Most jobs from 50-100 years ago have already been mostly automated. Computers, every more automated large scale assembly lines, self serve kiosks, pneumatic nail guns, etc. have all reduced the need for labor and increased productivity.
From a distance you would think that if you were 4x more productive you would be working only 10 hours a week rather than 40 (or be making 4x as much in real terms). The reality however is that most gains show up as higher profits for capital owners. Wages have stagnated, benefits have eroded, and work hours have not budged. The linkage between productivity and quality of life is broken for wage earners like never before. Meanwhile the top few percent, and especially the top 0.1% have become mind blowingly rich and powerful. So powerful they can keep people from voting themselves shorter hours, higher wages, or better safety nets. We have the entire Fox News propaganda channel helping get gullible folks to vote against their own economic interests and to support the idea of a xenophobic police state.
It is cheaper to buy a few senators, or your own news network than to pay a proper share of taxes today.
Very soon capital owners will need fewer and fewer workers than are available and have thus shown no willingness to stop shredding the safety nets. If the rabble become too desperate and realize how little their elected representatives can actually afford to care for them it will rapidly turn into pitchfork time. Judging by the militarization of the police, I suspect that the rich and powerful already see the writing on the wall and have started preparing for it. Inequality like we already have is unsustainable, and as a country you basically end up either going the social-democracy route like a lot of Europe with high taxes on the wealthy to support a good society for all, or you go police state like a lot of "democratic" dictatorships around the world. I am guessing we are headed for the latter, and are closer than most care to admit.
Cost to buy 1 satoshi is 220,000 satoshies.
Step 3: Profit!
Increasingly companies with deep pockets can evade the law through continual delays, impediments, and endless appeals, twisting the law to delay justice until it is moot. If a company like Uber can delay their judgement day a few years through these vile tactics it lets them illegally get the leg up on competitors and an opportunity to lobby for rule changes or even stack a few legislatures with candidates more favorable to them. Basically illegal actors can stay solvent longer than justice can stay effective.
I'd like to see the right to a speedy trial applied in BOTH directions. The public who is impacted should have a right for these sort of asshats to be tried in a time effective fashion. A burglar doesn't politely asked to hand over any evidence in his house some time in the next year or two, why should these modern bandits get so much more benefit simply because they are huge?
Background noise of the universe is 3 Kelvin (K). Your TV antenna sees the ground as much as the air, so sees about 150 K (half from the 300 K ground and half from the 3 K sky). The first amplifier is probably 5-6 dB NF, so it has a noise temperature of about 800 K. So out of the total noise temperature of 950 K, about 0.15% is the background noise of the universe.
What if both sources use white noise generated using the same LFSR taps from publically available sources (i.e. match and engineering texts), or both used the same software program to generate the psuedo-random samples? Most white noise is far from truly as random as you think if you dig into the details.
Should white noise from non-novel generators even be copyrightable at all?
If we could actually be sure the targets were kept foreign, sure. Instead we have ample evidence that the NSA has cast a much wider net, and undermined much of our infrastructure to assure they can gain access. The result is a porous compute infrastructure that keeps being broken. Now we will never know how many exploits were intentionally placed, but any non-zero number is too many. With no trust I see a brain drain there as a net positive until the organization has a real come-to-jesus moment and stops sweeping up the citizenry in their dragnet operations.
If Google doesn't pay, then the citizens have to pick up the slack. I'm rather tired of the "Government can do no good" argument. Go move to Somalia if you don't want a government on your back.
The reality is that a larger prosperous country cannot stand without a functioning and funded government. Relying on roving militias for education, healthcare, judicial services, etc is impractical.
Yes, and income that is unearned should arguably be taxed MORE than income that comes from labor rather than less.
A few years back VR was going to revolutionize and transform and all that mumbo jumbo. It arrived to a "meh". The hype has not panned out into sales or adoption rates and nobody talks about VR much or gets very excited any more.
Before that it was 3D TV's.
Autonomous cars are similarly awesome cool technology in search of a point. I don't dispute that huge amazing strides have been made in the field, but all the predictions of personal car ownership's impending illegality are about as believable as the hype around VR and 3D TV's. Even if we all assume cars roll out with spotless safety it does not automatically follow that a real honest to god business case will appear as well. Articles like this just back up that autonomous cars are in their spaghetti on the wall phase. The tech is so cool that it just has to revolutionize the world, so you get this wild predictions as people contort themselves to imagine a future in which the revolution has already come to pass.
In 10 or even 20 years we'll see autonomous taxis and delivery trucks, but I am betting that almost every household will still have 2-5 cars sitting out front, and that outside of the densest city centers we will hardly see a dent in personal car ownership rates.
+1
Give 2 weeks notice, and if you are up for it offer to continue on longer at an increased hourly rate. Business is business.
Welcome to At-Will employment. If you want someone to stay you are welcome to give them incentives and a high salary. Employers who offer no job security and then turn around to bitch that some underpaid underling leaves as soon as they can get a less crappy job with a higher salary deserve ZERO sympathy. Eff em.
Maybe they should be honest and put "Looking for a well educated naive soul to toil endlessly for a below market salary with industry trailing benefits." in the job post.
If a manager considers your age a disqualifying factor they are practicing age discrimination. Full stop. Its valid to worry about how someone's career goals match the position, but simply assuming someone older than you wants your job is not legal, and says a lot about you and your company.
I am in an odd corner of the tech field, and currently am the second youngest person in our team of ~20 folks, and I am over 40. As the team leader (not quite a manger, and want to keep it that way) I've interviewed and recommended hiring folks close to 20 years older than me. Frankly if one of them wanted my duties I'd happily hand them over. Our long term issue is that our funding model makes us seek out a minimum of 15 years experience for all hires. We have no entry level track, nor do we have lower level folks to hand off the simpler work to. Most designers with 15 years experience are also still designers for some good reason, such as they prefer designing, or have personalities that would not be good a good fit for management. We are hurting for folks with management ambitions regardless of age.
I live in both camps. Android 7.0 phone, old ipod touch for music, and ipad on the couch for casual browsing. The wife is fully Apple.
My ipod is old and stuck at iOS 6, which hardly matters as I rarely use if for anyting but listening to tunes on my bike commute each day. The amazing thing is that while I use my iPad with iOS 11 daily, I still find iOS 6 refreshing and more intuitive to do stuff when I do need to change something on the relic. What happened?
iTunes is a disasterous mess that pushes iMusic relentlessly and makes stuff like turning on/off shuffle mode a major hassle. It has on a few occasions created duplicates and triplicates of my songs or playlists through no apparent action on my part. Cleaning this up is a pain.
Podcast functionality became a hassle to the point that I don't bother anymore back in iOS 10.
Mail keeps stalling for hours a day, and periodically wipes out 1-3 years of messages before re-populating. Slowly.
Safari still is only about half a browser, and many websites for doing anything real still have limitations or broken functionality after ALL these years.
Android is not perfect, but I'd argue it has improved to at least the level where Apple has degraded to in terms to usability. Apple seems to have gone on a binge of adding features for headline's sake, despite touch interfaces sucking for complexity, and seems to have given up on whatever QA/QC standards they used to have.
I'd argue that in >95% of cases there is no point to making most widgets internet connected or "smart" in the first place. I'm still in awe that anyone ever wasted money on a web connected fridge. WTF?
Sadly, many of these widhets have been designed to be badly hobbled or non-functional if they are NOT connected to servers via the internet. I see orphaning of products as a real scourge on the world. Widgets that used to last a decade or more are now "smart", but useless after a year or three when the company loses interest or dies and shuts down its servers, or when some giant security exploit comes out after the support life has ended.
Agreed. Way too many things are becoming "smart" just for the same of it, but with almost no real increased utility.
Why do I need my meat thermometer to be WiFi connected?!? Worse yet, why is it unusable without a connection. WTF?
One more reason to continue to avoid Zucker-hell
Can you explain why you believe 100k-500k is "almost certain"? It is quite a wide range, and looks like arbitrary round numbers. Why not $1B?
You also call it an investment, I thought its value proposition was as a superior currency to fiat currency?
Funny, I can hand a dude paper cash, or incur a ~2% hidden credit card fee with current archaic cash dollars. Why is Bitcoin better again?
Clearly crypto coins, and now crypto cats are the wave of the future and will displace real money/cats in the future. Animal control is run by the government and can be used to STEAL your hard earned real cat. A crypto cat is clearly better in every way*.
*The ability to pet your crypto cat will come some day in the future.
We got here by you dolts continuing to use those products.
I quit Facebook. I don't use Twitter. I don't use Google Docs. I barely use my Gmail account, and keep really personal stuff out of email and messaging systems in general. I use my phone mostly as a phone and a calculator and install very little on it, I frankly overbought my phone as it was the cheapest way to get non-junk with vanilla Android at the time. I don't rely on Cloud stuff more than I am forced to, rather I keep my stuff local and don't use non-standalone products for anything I care about. I keep hard copy backups of really important stuff like tax records.
It is not hard, but people need to actually vote with their feet. Instead they pine about the fjords every time a new line is crosses and carry on shoveling their personal life details to these unholy behemoths. So frankly we as a society are where we deserve to be.
More features crammed in to add "Wow" factor to announements has been the drive for a while now. Modern UI look is valued above intuitive usability.
In the early days people marveled how 3 year old kids could figure out an iphone without any help. Now it has been bloated and obsfucated, gestures have gotten too numerous and complex. It has become too complex for what it is.
Lost in all of this is "It just works." Sadly, it doesn't. My itunes library is a mess thanks to automagic crap that randomly duplicated songs, changing an album already playing to shuffle or not shuffle is gone (WTF?). So many other little niggles abound.
I prefer my ~8 year old ipod stuck on iOS6 over my ipad for playing music, and marvel at how much nicer it is to use every time I get int it (mostly it lives in my bike bag for playing music to my ear buds).
Meh. 300k transactions a day for Bitcoin, versus billions of transactions per day in assorted fiat currency.
Bubble. Bubble. Bubble.
I will not be the bigger fool on this one.
Also, explain to me why Bitcoin will survive but not Dogecoin, Etherium, Litecoin, etc, etc? Why are the arguments for blockchain technology in any way going to mitigate the likelihood that a blockchain future will not include any of the current round of crypto assets? If the US government produced USAcoin and outlawed transactions in existing black market shadow currencies, would their value not plummet?
+1. Basically the rich can afford to have free speech, often using their companies as megaphones for their political whims. The rest of us underlings have a lot less freedom to go to political rallies, or openly involve ourselves in politics in a public way. At-will employment makes it fine for your HR department to dismiss you if they disagree with your involvement in the countries political process. We have seen the result, most legislation tilts towards more rights and tax cuts for corporate interests, and eroding rights and tax situations for the worker bees.
Try flipping off the president, it could easily cost you your job.