Look at billionaires who still work 40-80 hours a week. They don't need a cent of their extra pay.
People will still want to work even if they have a guaranteed income. We need that sense of purpose and belonging. Beyond that, many technical jobs cannot be done sustainably at a mere handful of hours a day. Fewer years of 30-50 hours a week might be feasible, but there is a lot of work that cannot be split among people and cannot keep the workers technically sharp when done for too few hours a week.
We have seen several years already of adding connectivity for marketing's sake alone, and with some well known disastrous results. Problems come in two camps, only the first being security of cheap poorly designed widgets. The second is plain old functionality, which is what will ultimately keep IoT from becoming truly ubiquitous and ingrained.
Even if (big IF) security was tied up with a bow, the utility side is a big one. Fly by night companies stop support for products and shut off servers within months to at most a year or two of selling a widget. Once sales drop off and they focus efforts on the next shiny object the incentive to maintain the old is just gone. Having an internet connected meat thermometer sounds great until you bust it out the next summer and find it no longer works because ACME.com is out of business or stopped supporting your MeatWand 2000.
Layered on top is the need to get the widget online and keep it online. Bashing in your WiFi password into every widget coming through the door is both a hassle and a source of fear. Want to figure out how to change your passwords on EVERY widget that uses electricity in your house if you change ISP's and get a new router? I certainly don't want to be unable to run a load of laundry to toast toast because there is an internet outage. Connectivity must then optional, and most widgets cannot be enhanced in any useful way beyond their bare utility by being connected. Most of the enhancements are of novelty value at best.
I have been annoyed for a while with what they have done to music on iOS since they integrated streaming. It is hard to do something as simple as switch to shuffle on a currently playing playlist for Pete's sake. Then I took my old ipod touch that is stuck at iOS 6 on a road trip. Holy cow did things "Just work". I'd forgotten just how bad iOS had gotten that I could easily do more of what I wanted on a widget I've barely used in 2 years than on the iPad I use almost daily.
I'd rather have fewer gimmicks that worked really well than heaps of buggy features I never use.
I don't even get t-shirts anymore, or even the pint for a pint of ice cream. Going through all that hassle and resulting few days of reduced activity/fatigue only to see my blood sold for a profit to the rich is BS. Give me a cut or I am done.
I have never been paid for my blood donations. I found the use of my freely donated blood for cosmetic surgery to be unnerving, but acceptable. Now that profiteering has decided to dip into the game, I want a cut. Why should I give away my valuable life blood for a mere T-shirt (and I haven't even gotten one of those is over a decade)?
This. I got tired of crappy movies, and on the whole if RT gives a good score and the genre is what I am in the mood for I rarely get let down. The few times I ignored bad ratings for a sequel or a favorite actor I have ended up kicking myself for wasting 2 hours of my life.
Like most things in life I need a way to quickly weed out most of the bad choices. Finding the optimal choice, or a hidden gem just isn't worth the headache and time unless I want to start treating movies as hobby instead of entertainment. RT is very useful, even if a few movies end up getting the short end of the stick (a nice reversal).
Some of this is build-it-and-they-will-come. Why would a studio go to the effort to architect their game for 6+ cores if that is 1% of your customer base? It likely makes the most sense to make sure your game is usable on 2 cores, and scaleable to 4 to satisfy the vast majority of your paying customers. But if 6-8 cores become the norm, you would be a fool not to make use of that capability if you can do so.
So while I agree that existing games will not see any improvement, I can see patches and new titles quickly making use of the rising median core count in the near future.
Propulsive braking for the moon? Barely, as the way we've gotten there so far involves mostly getting close and having moon's gravity pull the craft into orbit. Most of the energy used is to get out of earth's gravity well. Returning to earth requires dissipating all the regained kinetic energy as you fall back into earth's gravity well.
Glorious. I can imagine my bike commute now, with an added dozen or so bridges to navigate so that the cars can save 5-10 minutes. Now if these are on major thoroughfares you have to make them tall enough for large trucks (~20' clearance). Such beasts are probably a few million $$$ each, and you'd need one every city block. Taxes to pay for them and keep them upgraded would be bigly yuge. You'd also need to tear down the corner businesses and houses to make room for the ramps and elevators needed to make all of them accessible and bike friendly.
Guess what a lot of drivers would do with their 5-10 minutes of save time? Many would end up just living 5-10 minutes further out where they can get more house/$.
As for your other point, there are a handful of major highways in the area that I don't ride my bike on, in fact my current commute doesn't cross any major highways. When I take my kid to the zoo along a highway on my bike there is a dedicated bike path parallel to the existing highway, and I have to cross only two overpasses in 9 miles. Crossing the dozen or so intersections with lights with steep bike ramps with a toddler in the back would be hell.
Personally I would like to see the costs of driving go up to encourage people to buy closer to work, drive less, and to encourage higher density building practices. Less miles traveled to work means less need to speed up existing roadways. Current gas taxes don't capture nearly all the negative externalities of driving and should go up to cover proper road maintenance and all the overseas adventures that keep help keep the oil flowing.
I would welcome management that was actually in tune with our password insanity. Some logins are 3 months, some never, and most have different sets of rules as to min or max length, characters, etc.
I have different logins/passwords for: Windows Linux Travel Payroll Proxy Training (forgot) IM (forgot) Our internal Facebook clone (forgot) VPN Internal cloud storage (forgot) Building entry code Laptop encryption and a couple more (counted 14 total a while back, but now I forgot some).
Guess how many of those are good and strong and not following a clear pattern?
I see no point to this. Far more useful would be to make it easier to apply preset restricted profiles for kids and grandparents. But that is already served by just buying them a tablet and putting their router on Xmas light timer to cycle off/on nightly.
Dropping revenue means they need to squeeze the remaining schlubs by playing more ads, and increasing monthly fees. No dropping of revenue can be tolerated by these guys.
I know it will still be years off, but I still welcome their impending demise.
Yep. Worked at a company selling stuff to Apple. You had to prove you had the spare manufacturing capacity to deliver their highly custom chip to even compete. The losers who didn't win that spot on the board were left with a manufacturing floor that was half or more idle until at least the following year. A lot of their special requirements made the final chip totally un-sellable to anyone except Apple, and you often had to turn away business to keep that manufacturing capacity open.
It was clear a few year back that they were starting to bankrupt too many vendors such that many sockets were only getting 1 real vendor, and maybe one half hearted effort by a second. Apple really, really likes to have at least two viable sources for every part in case one runs into issues as things ramp, but they also refused to pay NRE during the design stage. Quite the bunch of schisters. Glad i am no longer at their beck and call.
It took a couple CRAP android phones before realizing just how fragmented and wild west the android market was. You have to pay a large premium to get a phone with just stock android on it, and even them security updates are more miss than hit. My wife's iphone has been trouble free, and there was no hand wringing about how the manufacturer might have added in their own crappy malware laden junk apps on top of the OS. So less choice, but fewer worries, and more of a guaranteed experience. It does seem like quality of software has waned for Apple these days, I've had to google simple crap like how to shuffle songs since they mangled the music interface badly to make way for their streaming crap.
I won't get into the PC/Mac side, Apple has seemingly all but raised the white flag for their Mac's. $250B in the bank and they can't update them except on the leap years. A decent mini-tower with current hardware and only a fair Apple tax might entice me to take another look, but that is verboten at Apple it seems.
Most employment agreements are such that the company owns it even if it is outside of normal hours. So inventions you come up with on your own time are not yours.
I guess my gripe is that most companies expect a blurring of your work/personal time when it is in their favor. It is far to common for a boss to call someone at home, or expect work to occur remotely after hours or on weekends. So morally, the opposite should be true.
Salaried positions do NOT require 8 hours of work, they can't legally. It is the flipside of the no-overtime equation. You have to be paid for days you work, but you are paid to do a job, not work a set number of hours. It gets really fuzzy (usually not in a workers favor), but essentially salaried workers are supposed to have a certain amount of autonomy in how they carry out their work.
In days of yore companies like HP, and Google (somewhat laughably) encouraged outside projects with a notion of 10% of your time being an acceptable amount to spend on non-sanctioned fun projects. Many side and home projects turned into major revenue for the company, or a new business. It was viewed as a good thing. It has become much more restricted and legalistic these days.
Saving crap piles of money makes dealing with ALL of those issues much easier, they are not reasons to avoid savings. Money in the bank gives you options if you get sick, or family has a disaster. Living paycheck to paycheck makes minor medical or job problems an instant emergency. Not being able to keep your job because you get sick without large savings can be quickly ruinous.
Becoming financially independent and retiring early gives you more time to cook healthy food and exercise more, not to mention huge reductions health destroying stress. Chances of major illnesses can be reduced greatly as a result.
I've already been through a year long unemployment episode, and never want to be at the whim of an employer for my livelihood again.
Seriously, the math is not hard. Live a simple life that concentrates on happiness instead of stuff, and make saving a healthy percentage of your income. You will be financially independent and have the option to retire well before 50.
Or you can choose to save 10% or less, inflate your lifestyle at every raise and work until you are 70+. More likely you will get laid off in your 50's and have to "retire" badly when all you can find is low wage jobs.
Maybe we need low epsilon alternative to fiber for reduced latency? How about games get together and put in some air dielectric coax with repeaters to get some of the ~30% speed loss due to the dielectric constant of glass? How many $M's is it worth to pwn the world?
This. Instead it will be just sort of like winning the lottery. Some of the folks who inflate their lifestyle might end up worse off afterwards when the money stops and they struggle with debt loads they can no longer carry.
In some rural areas we already have a form of UBI, in the form of disability payments. As welfare has been scaled back, those who can no longer work in factories or other manual labor have flooded into disability fall back plan. Judges reasonably go along when confronted with someone who has worked blue-collar their whole life, but can no longer do so, and has almost zero chance of getting a desk job.
I have frontier. Comcast cut our line while installing for our neighbor. Took 3 utilities to graffiti a quarter of our block, now after a week of no internet we have a temporary drop, and have to go through the whole graffiti process to get the real drop. Then someone else has to come and remove the temp drop. Should be right at 10 utility visits just becuase our neighbors (who are moving, WTF?) got cable.
Not sure who sucks the worst in the mess, sort of like arguing about which sewer reeks less.
Funny, for a while our break room had apples and bananas. They sold pretty well. Sadly it did not work well with our model of restocking from Costco every 2-3 weeks. Bananas in particular have about a 2-3 day window at office temperatures in which they are ripe but not over-ripe. Chips and cookies are "good" for months of shelf life.
Thankfully stories like this are a sign that serious air is coming out of the startup bubble. The fervor from just 2-3 years ago has settled down, and now you see at least a little more skepticism when someone pitches iToast type BS.
At this point anything "internet connected" or controlled by an app has lower value to me. I want simple crap that works, with REAL buttons/knobs, can't get malware, doesn't require constant updates, can't get "orphaned". Less is more.
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Look at billionaires who still work 40-80 hours a week. They don't need a cent of their extra pay.
People will still want to work even if they have a guaranteed income. We need that sense of purpose and belonging. Beyond that, many technical jobs cannot be done sustainably at a mere handful of hours a day. Fewer years of 30-50 hours a week might be feasible, but there is a lot of work that cannot be split among people and cannot keep the workers technically sharp when done for too few hours a week.
We have seen several years already of adding connectivity for marketing's sake alone, and with some well known disastrous results. Problems come in two camps, only the first being security of cheap poorly designed widgets. The second is plain old functionality, which is what will ultimately keep IoT from becoming truly ubiquitous and ingrained.
Even if (big IF) security was tied up with a bow, the utility side is a big one. Fly by night companies stop support for products and shut off servers within months to at most a year or two of selling a widget. Once sales drop off and they focus efforts on the next shiny object the incentive to maintain the old is just gone. Having an internet connected meat thermometer sounds great until you bust it out the next summer and find it no longer works because ACME.com is out of business or stopped supporting your MeatWand 2000.
Layered on top is the need to get the widget online and keep it online. Bashing in your WiFi password into every widget coming through the door is both a hassle and a source of fear. Want to figure out how to change your passwords on EVERY widget that uses electricity in your house if you change ISP's and get a new router? I certainly don't want to be unable to run a load of laundry to toast toast because there is an internet outage. Connectivity must then optional, and most widgets cannot be enhanced in any useful way beyond their bare utility by being connected. Most of the enhancements are of novelty value at best.
Strong agreement here.
I have been annoyed for a while with what they have done to music on iOS since they integrated streaming. It is hard to do something as simple as switch to shuffle on a currently playing playlist for Pete's sake. Then I took my old ipod touch that is stuck at iOS 6 on a road trip. Holy cow did things "Just work". I'd forgotten just how bad iOS had gotten that I could easily do more of what I wanted on a widget I've barely used in 2 years than on the iPad I use almost daily.
I'd rather have fewer gimmicks that worked really well than heaps of buggy features I never use.
I don't even get t-shirts anymore, or even the pint for a pint of ice cream. Going through all that hassle and resulting few days of reduced activity/fatigue only to see my blood sold for a profit to the rich is BS. Give me a cut or I am done.
I have never been paid for my blood donations. I found the use of my freely donated blood for cosmetic surgery to be unnerving, but acceptable. Now that profiteering has decided to dip into the game, I want a cut. Why should I give away my valuable life blood for a mere T-shirt (and I haven't even gotten one of those is over a decade)?
Creepy stuff.
This. I got tired of crappy movies, and on the whole if RT gives a good score and the genre is what I am in the mood for I rarely get let down. The few times I ignored bad ratings for a sequel or a favorite actor I have ended up kicking myself for wasting 2 hours of my life.
Like most things in life I need a way to quickly weed out most of the bad choices. Finding the optimal choice, or a hidden gem just isn't worth the headache and time unless I want to start treating movies as hobby instead of entertainment. RT is very useful, even if a few movies end up getting the short end of the stick (a nice reversal).
Some of this is build-it-and-they-will-come. Why would a studio go to the effort to architect their game for 6+ cores if that is 1% of your customer base? It likely makes the most sense to make sure your game is usable on 2 cores, and scaleable to 4 to satisfy the vast majority of your paying customers. But if 6-8 cores become the norm, you would be a fool not to make use of that capability if you can do so.
So while I agree that existing games will not see any improvement, I can see patches and new titles quickly making use of the rising median core count in the near future.
This. We gave up privacy so they could sit on their hands? It appears we are only hearing about this so that they can keep their toy.
Show us the intelligence, and then show us proof it actually did some good. We know the answer to the second part already...
Propulsive braking for the moon? Barely, as the way we've gotten there so far involves mostly getting close and having moon's gravity pull the craft into orbit. Most of the energy used is to get out of earth's gravity well. Returning to earth requires dissipating all the regained kinetic energy as you fall back into earth's gravity well.
Glorious. I can imagine my bike commute now, with an added dozen or so bridges to navigate so that the cars can save 5-10 minutes. Now if these are on major thoroughfares you have to make them tall enough for large trucks (~20' clearance). Such beasts are probably a few million $$$ each, and you'd need one every city block. Taxes to pay for them and keep them upgraded would be bigly yuge. You'd also need to tear down the corner businesses and houses to make room for the ramps and elevators needed to make all of them accessible and bike friendly.
Guess what a lot of drivers would do with their 5-10 minutes of save time? Many would end up just living 5-10 minutes further out where they can get more house/$.
As for your other point, there are a handful of major highways in the area that I don't ride my bike on, in fact my current commute doesn't cross any major highways. When I take my kid to the zoo along a highway on my bike there is a dedicated bike path parallel to the existing highway, and I have to cross only two overpasses in 9 miles. Crossing the dozen or so intersections with lights with steep bike ramps with a toddler in the back would be hell.
Personally I would like to see the costs of driving go up to encourage people to buy closer to work, drive less, and to encourage higher density building practices. Less miles traveled to work means less need to speed up existing roadways. Current gas taxes don't capture nearly all the negative externalities of driving and should go up to cover proper road maintenance and all the overseas adventures that keep help keep the oil flowing.
A bridge at every intersection? A handicap accesible, bicycle friendly bridge every few hundred feet in every direction? You are funny.
I would welcome management that was actually in tune with our password insanity. Some logins are 3 months, some never, and most have different sets of rules as to min or max length, characters, etc.
I have different logins/passwords for:
Windows
Linux
Travel
Payroll
Proxy
Training (forgot)
IM (forgot)
Our internal Facebook clone (forgot)
VPN
Internal cloud storage (forgot)
Building entry code
Laptop encryption
and a couple more (counted 14 total a while back, but now I forgot some).
Guess how many of those are good and strong and not following a clear pattern?
I see no point to this. Far more useful would be to make it easier to apply preset restricted profiles for kids and grandparents. But that is already served by just buying them a tablet and putting their router on Xmas light timer to cycle off/on nightly.
Dropping revenue means they need to squeeze the remaining schlubs by playing more ads, and increasing monthly fees. No dropping of revenue can be tolerated by these guys.
I know it will still be years off, but I still welcome their impending demise.
Yep. Worked at a company selling stuff to Apple. You had to prove you had the spare manufacturing capacity to deliver their highly custom chip to even compete. The losers who didn't win that spot on the board were left with a manufacturing floor that was half or more idle until at least the following year. A lot of their special requirements made the final chip totally un-sellable to anyone except Apple, and you often had to turn away business to keep that manufacturing capacity open.
It was clear a few year back that they were starting to bankrupt too many vendors such that many sockets were only getting 1 real vendor, and maybe one half hearted effort by a second. Apple really, really likes to have at least two viable sources for every part in case one runs into issues as things ramp, but they also refused to pay NRE during the design stage. Quite the bunch of schisters. Glad i am no longer at their beck and call.
Mostly commercial free, shows form some providers get "limited" ads at the beginning and end even with the $4 surcharge. WTF?
It took a couple CRAP android phones before realizing just how fragmented and wild west the android market was. You have to pay a large premium to get a phone with just stock android on it, and even them security updates are more miss than hit. My wife's iphone has been trouble free, and there was no hand wringing about how the manufacturer might have added in their own crappy malware laden junk apps on top of the OS. So less choice, but fewer worries, and more of a guaranteed experience. It does seem like quality of software has waned for Apple these days, I've had to google simple crap like how to shuffle songs since they mangled the music interface badly to make way for their streaming crap.
I won't get into the PC/Mac side, Apple has seemingly all but raised the white flag for their Mac's. $250B in the bank and they can't update them except on the leap years. A decent mini-tower with current hardware and only a fair Apple tax might entice me to take another look, but that is verboten at Apple it seems.
Most employment agreements are such that the company owns it even if it is outside of normal hours. So inventions you come up with on your own time are not yours.
I guess my gripe is that most companies expect a blurring of your work/personal time when it is in their favor. It is far to common for a boss to call someone at home, or expect work to occur remotely after hours or on weekends. So morally, the opposite should be true.
Salaried positions do NOT require 8 hours of work, they can't legally. It is the flipside of the no-overtime equation. You have to be paid for days you work, but you are paid to do a job, not work a set number of hours. It gets really fuzzy (usually not in a workers favor), but essentially salaried workers are supposed to have a certain amount of autonomy in how they carry out their work.
In days of yore companies like HP, and Google (somewhat laughably) encouraged outside projects with a notion of 10% of your time being an acceptable amount to spend on non-sanctioned fun projects. Many side and home projects turned into major revenue for the company, or a new business. It was viewed as a good thing. It has become much more restricted and legalistic these days.
Saving crap piles of money makes dealing with ALL of those issues much easier, they are not reasons to avoid savings. Money in the bank gives you options if you get sick, or family has a disaster. Living paycheck to paycheck makes minor medical or job problems an instant emergency. Not being able to keep your job because you get sick without large savings can be quickly ruinous.
Becoming financially independent and retiring early gives you more time to cook healthy food and exercise more, not to mention huge reductions health destroying stress. Chances of major illnesses can be reduced greatly as a result.
I've already been through a year long unemployment episode, and never want to be at the whim of an employer for my livelihood again.
Seriously, the math is not hard. Live a simple life that concentrates on happiness instead of stuff, and make saving a healthy percentage of your income. You will be financially independent and have the option to retire well before 50.
Or you can choose to save 10% or less, inflate your lifestyle at every raise and work until you are 70+. More likely you will get laid off in your 50's and have to "retire" badly when all you can find is low wage jobs.
Maybe we need low epsilon alternative to fiber for reduced latency? How about games get together and put in some air dielectric coax with repeaters to get some of the ~30% speed loss due to the dielectric constant of glass? How many $M's is it worth to pwn the world?
This. Instead it will be just sort of like winning the lottery. Some of the folks who inflate their lifestyle might end up worse off afterwards when the money stops and they struggle with debt loads they can no longer carry.
In some rural areas we already have a form of UBI, in the form of disability payments. As welfare has been scaled back, those who can no longer work in factories or other manual labor have flooded into disability fall back plan. Judges reasonably go along when confronted with someone who has worked blue-collar their whole life, but can no longer do so, and has almost zero chance of getting a desk job.
I have frontier. Comcast cut our line while installing for our neighbor. Took 3 utilities to graffiti a quarter of our block, now after a week of no internet we have a temporary drop, and have to go through the whole graffiti process to get the real drop. Then someone else has to come and remove the temp drop. Should be right at 10 utility visits just becuase our neighbors (who are moving, WTF?) got cable.
Not sure who sucks the worst in the mess, sort of like arguing about which sewer reeks less.
Funny, for a while our break room had apples and bananas. They sold pretty well. Sadly it did not work well with our model of restocking from Costco every 2-3 weeks. Bananas in particular have about a 2-3 day window at office temperatures in which they are ripe but not over-ripe. Chips and cookies are "good" for months of shelf life.
Thankfully stories like this are a sign that serious air is coming out of the startup bubble. The fervor from just 2-3 years ago has settled down, and now you see at least a little more skepticism when someone pitches iToast type BS.
At this point anything "internet connected" or controlled by an app has lower value to me. I want simple crap that works, with REAL buttons/knobs, can't get malware, doesn't require constant updates, can't get "orphaned". Less is more.