I don't buy it. Those "poor" human beings WON'T be jobless, unless they just don't want to work...just like there's no shortage of programming jobs despite 90+% of the job having been already taken over by automated programming tools.
Your main point is spot on. But there is one misconception regarding monopolies.
Being a monopoly does not mean that there are no competitors. Rather, it means that you dominate a market to the point that other businesses or customers can't afford to NOT be your customer.
For example, if you are a typical mom-and-pop shop, you'd better be listed on Google Maps. If you're not on Google Maps, I won't find you, it's that simple. Sure, you can go to Bing Maps, but the vast majority of the market won't bother to do that. They'll just move on to the next business that IS on Google.
Microsoft was once ordered to decouple Internet Explorer from Windows, forced by the courts to allow users to choose other browsers. Sure, there were other operating systems, but for most people, Windows was the only one that mattered.
We programmers have been automating our own tasks for decades.
First, we created assembly language to make it easier to generate machine code. We created compilers to automatically generate many op codes with a single line. We created form designers to take the drudgery out of positioning controls on a window. We created methods of sharing components via NuGet or other repositories so we didn't have to re-create components every time we needed them. We learned how to automate unit and integration testing of our software. We learned how to automate deployment of new versions of our code.
In one day, I can write more USEFUL code than a programmer in the 1960s could write in a month. But somehow, there's still PLENTY of work for all of us programmers to do. Most every programming shop or department has a backlog measured in YEARS.
As with programming, if we automate more of our non-programming chores, we won't all be out of work. We'll just be able to get more done, things we couldn't even have imagined getting done years ago.
Who pays for tariffs? Yeah, it's you and me, the people who buy refrigerators and solar panels. It's our prices that are going to go up. Whirlpool and other US manufacturers will profit, because they will get to raise their prices thanks to the tariffs. You and I, not so much.
IQ focuses on a very narrow measure of intelligence: prowess in things like match, science, and reasoning. Good leaders need much more than this. They also need prowess in dealing with politics, getting people to be enthusiastic about their work, dealing with difficult people.
Often, those with very high IQs have specialized (intentionally or not) in only the traditional subjects measured by IQ. It's no accident that many brilliant people have trouble with human relationships.
To a degree, mental energy and skill in areas of human relationships can take away from "IQ," but also makes a person a better overall leader.
So you're a big company, and you don't want trouble from the government. Of course you're going to do something, if you can, to make yourself look good!
But notice how all these announcements are about bonuses, not pay raises. A bonus is just a one-time event, pay raises keep on giving, month after month. These companies aren't really putting their money where their mouth is, they just want to make a splash in the news.
You're right, I didn't list drawbacks of fossil fuels, because the story was about renewable energy. The drawbacks of fossil fuels are widely known: air pollution, accidents that foul rivers and oceans, minor earthquakes.
With that said, I think fossil fuels can be a part of a diverse energy future. We should reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but not necessarily eliminate it.
You can nit-pick the negative effects of specific items on my list, but regardless, there are drawbacks to any energy source, at large enough scale.
Even more important than "renewable" energy is diversity of energy sources. Every source of energy has its drawbacks:
- Hydroelectric dams are "renewable" and fossil-free. But they disrupt river life. - Wind farms kill birds and (in some people's view) ruin landscapes. - Nuclear energy creates waste products that are very, very hard to safely dispose of, and create risks of leaking in natural disasters. - Solar energy farms require a lot of land, and endanger and displace wildlife. - Tidal-powered turbines kill marine life.
Any energy source, if replicated at extremely large scales, will have major undesirable side effects. If instead we have a wide array of sources, each one's negative impacts won't be as widespread.
Just like with investing money...don't put all your eggs in one basket.
I predict that this concept will ring alarm bells for a lot of normal traffic.
My company uses Trend Antivirus. In their wisdom, they turned on the "heuristic" behavior detection mode. Now, every time our software team writes software that renames a file, it has to be excluded from Trend's scanners. Apparently, ransomware does a lot of file renaming, therefore, any software that renames a lot of files is suspect.
So far, anti-malware isn't very good at detecting "suspicious" patterns, in my experience.
Make it simple. How about restricting the length of a district boundary to no more than, say, 4x the maximum distance across the district. Maybe there's a better number than 4, but having a clear ratio would limit the number of twists and turns the boundary can make. It's not possible to completely eliminate gerrymandering, but this kind of restriction would at least minimize it.
The trouble with "independent" committees is that nobody is really impartial. Those committees are made up of people who do have political persuasions, because everybody has political persuasions. This leads to political parties doing whatever they can to get their people on the committees.
Setting aside your needless insult, why DO we tend to be attracted to shiny objects? Perhaps it's because at some level, our brains think it might be something important, or dangerous? Our brains have been trained to notice things that might be important to our survival and safety. Anything that is unusual or unexpected might be some sort of threat, leading us to be distracted unnecessarily.
So the alternative, I suppose, would be involuntary commitment to a mental health hospital?
The problem with this is, once a person begins treatment in such a facility, and no longer shows symptoms of insanity (once medicine starts to have an effect), the patient is released. Once released, such patients often stop taking their medicine, and relapse, and return to their insane and/or violent behavior.
So unless the laws are changed to require involuntary commitment for a term equivalent to what a prison sentence would have been, hospitals are not a good solution.
We developers always HATED developing for Internet Explorer. If your site worked in IE8, it broke when IE 9 came out, and then IE 10, 11, and Edge. Now, if you want to support IE, you have to SEPARATELY support each individual version you care about. With Chrome, you could write your code once, and it would pretty much keep working through each new release of the browser.
This pattern FINALLY started to loosen Microsoft's stranglehold on the Enterprise. Business users hated it that they were stuck on, say, IE8 because their enterprise software wouldn't work on any later browsers. Then security issues made it worse--vulnerabilities in older browsers couldn't be eliminated by upgrading. Switching to Chrome, which did a better job of maintaining compatibility, became more and more attractive to big businesses. Once on Chrome, the switch literally saved them tons of money.
If you have a business that depends on your Web site, you don't have the luxury of relying on W3C compliance. You have to actually try to USE your site with all the popular browsers to see if they render properly. If they don't, you tweak your site until it looks good on all of them, even if that means you have to break W3C compliance. The average customer couldn't care less about W3C, they just walk away if your site doesn't work on their browser.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy it. Those "poor" human beings WON'T be jobless, unless they just don't want to work...just like there's no shortage of programming jobs despite 90+% of the job having been already taken over by automated programming tools.
Your main point is spot on. But there is one misconception regarding monopolies.
Being a monopoly does not mean that there are no competitors. Rather, it means that you dominate a market to the point that other businesses or customers can't afford to NOT be your customer.
For example, if you are a typical mom-and-pop shop, you'd better be listed on Google Maps. If you're not on Google Maps, I won't find you, it's that simple. Sure, you can go to Bing Maps, but the vast majority of the market won't bother to do that. They'll just move on to the next business that IS on Google.
Microsoft was once ordered to decouple Internet Explorer from Windows, forced by the courts to allow users to choose other browsers. Sure, there were other operating systems, but for most people, Windows was the only one that mattered.
We programmers have been automating our own tasks for decades.
First, we created assembly language to make it easier to generate machine code.
We created compilers to automatically generate many op codes with a single line.
We created form designers to take the drudgery out of positioning controls on a window.
We created methods of sharing components via NuGet or other repositories so we didn't have to re-create components every time we needed them.
We learned how to automate unit and integration testing of our software.
We learned how to automate deployment of new versions of our code.
In one day, I can write more USEFUL code than a programmer in the 1960s could write in a month. But somehow, there's still PLENTY of work for all of us programmers to do. Most every programming shop or department has a backlog measured in YEARS.
As with programming, if we automate more of our non-programming chores, we won't all be out of work. We'll just be able to get more done, things we couldn't even have imagined getting done years ago.
Who pays for tariffs? Yeah, it's you and me, the people who buy refrigerators and solar panels. It's our prices that are going to go up. Whirlpool and other US manufacturers will profit, because they will get to raise their prices thanks to the tariffs. You and I, not so much.
At 30,000 feet, it's arctic cold no matter where you are in the world.
IQ focuses on a very narrow measure of intelligence: prowess in things like match, science, and reasoning. Good leaders need much more than this. They also need prowess in dealing with politics, getting people to be enthusiastic about their work, dealing with difficult people.
Often, those with very high IQs have specialized (intentionally or not) in only the traditional subjects measured by IQ. It's no accident that many brilliant people have trouble with human relationships.
To a degree, mental energy and skill in areas of human relationships can take away from "IQ," but also makes a person a better overall leader.
100 vs. "several." Which one is the trend here?
Walmart raised their minimum wage by $1. Wow.
So you're a big company, and you don't want trouble from the government. Of course you're going to do something, if you can, to make yourself look good!
But notice how all these announcements are about bonuses, not pay raises. A bonus is just a one-time event, pay raises keep on giving, month after month. These companies aren't really putting their money where their mouth is, they just want to make a splash in the news.
Do you think the AI would be smart enough to skip reading the linked article???
You're right, I didn't list drawbacks of fossil fuels, because the story was about renewable energy. The drawbacks of fossil fuels are widely known: air pollution, accidents that foul rivers and oceans, minor earthquakes.
With that said, I think fossil fuels can be a part of a diverse energy future. We should reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but not necessarily eliminate it.
You can nit-pick the negative effects of specific items on my list, but regardless, there are drawbacks to any energy source, at large enough scale.
Even more important than "renewable" energy is diversity of energy sources. Every source of energy has its drawbacks:
- Hydroelectric dams are "renewable" and fossil-free. But they disrupt river life.
- Wind farms kill birds and (in some people's view) ruin landscapes.
- Nuclear energy creates waste products that are very, very hard to safely dispose of, and create risks of leaking in natural disasters.
- Solar energy farms require a lot of land, and endanger and displace wildlife.
- Tidal-powered turbines kill marine life.
Any energy source, if replicated at extremely large scales, will have major undesirable side effects. If instead we have a wide array of sources, each one's negative impacts won't be as widespread.
Just like with investing money...don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Then they'll SEE how good its comprehension really is!
I predict that this concept will ring alarm bells for a lot of normal traffic.
My company uses Trend Antivirus. In their wisdom, they turned on the "heuristic" behavior detection mode. Now, every time our software team writes software that renames a file, it has to be excluded from Trend's scanners. Apparently, ransomware does a lot of file renaming, therefore, any software that renames a lot of files is suspect.
So far, anti-malware isn't very good at detecting "suspicious" patterns, in my experience.
A lot of people are happy enough with a tablet or phone.
In the last century, sewing machines were marketed to every family so they could sew their own clothes. Now, only professionals want them.
Computers are following a tried-and-true path like other inventions before it.
You think Windows 7 isn't spyware?
https://www.infoworld.com/arti...
Make it simple. How about restricting the length of a district boundary to no more than, say, 4x the maximum distance across the district. Maybe there's a better number than 4, but having a clear ratio would limit the number of twists and turns the boundary can make. It's not possible to completely eliminate gerrymandering, but this kind of restriction would at least minimize it.
The trouble with "independent" committees is that nobody is really impartial. Those committees are made up of people who do have political persuasions, because everybody has political persuasions. This leads to political parties doing whatever they can to get their people on the committees.
...for a head! Maybe he IS actually a robot!
Setting aside your needless insult, why DO we tend to be attracted to shiny objects? Perhaps it's because at some level, our brains think it might be something important, or dangerous? Our brains have been trained to notice things that might be important to our survival and safety. Anything that is unusual or unexpected might be some sort of threat, leading us to be distracted unnecessarily.
Our "real" human visual algorithms are distracted by bright, shiny objects in a similar way. It's not just AI that can be fooled.
So the alternative, I suppose, would be involuntary commitment to a mental health hospital?
The problem with this is, once a person begins treatment in such a facility, and no longer shows symptoms of insanity (once medicine starts to have an effect), the patient is released. Once released, such patients often stop taking their medicine, and relapse, and return to their insane and/or violent behavior.
So unless the laws are changed to require involuntary commitment for a term equivalent to what a prison sentence would have been, hospitals are not a good solution.
We developers always HATED developing for Internet Explorer. If your site worked in IE8, it broke when IE 9 came out, and then IE 10, 11, and Edge. Now, if you want to support IE, you have to SEPARATELY support each individual version you care about. With Chrome, you could write your code once, and it would pretty much keep working through each new release of the browser.
This pattern FINALLY started to loosen Microsoft's stranglehold on the Enterprise. Business users hated it that they were stuck on, say, IE8 because their enterprise software wouldn't work on any later browsers. Then security issues made it worse--vulnerabilities in older browsers couldn't be eliminated by upgrading. Switching to Chrome, which did a better job of maintaining compatibility, became more and more attractive to big businesses. Once on Chrome, the switch literally saved them tons of money.
If you have a business that depends on your Web site, you don't have the luxury of relying on W3C compliance. You have to actually try to USE your site with all the popular browsers to see if they render properly. If they don't, you tweak your site until it looks good on all of them, even if that means you have to break W3C compliance. The average customer couldn't care less about W3C, they just walk away if your site doesn't work on their browser.
Would you like to elaborate on what those "facts" are that refute the headlines?
Interesting. The Nexus 7 did get several OS updates. Mine started with KitKat, and it was upgraded to Lollipop and several minor updates.
My Moto G (G4) was upgraded from Lollipop to Marshmallow and then Nugat by T-Mobile, so I'm pretty happy with that.