The problem is that you are still talking new cars and new car pricing. I think that it is possible that >95% of new vehicles in 2030 will be EV's. But there is no way we'll see anything close to 50% of the vehicles on the road being EV's by that time. It's simply a numbers game and people just don't replace their vehicles frequently enough to hit that kind of target even if all new vehicles were EV's. The only way it'd be possible that I can see would be if the cost of new EV's was low enough to compete favorably with the huge supply of used ICEV's on the road.
I'm a fan of EV's. I own stock in an EV company. I want an EV as my daily driver. That said I drive a Toyota that is over a decade old and will likely continue as my daily driver for another decade at the least. The operating and ownership costs for that car are so low that there is no practical reason to replace it. Sure an EV would have lower costs but I'd actually have to spend a huge chunk of money for that. I'm better off milking every last economical mile out of my current car, in the meantime the costs for EV's will get lower and their features better. When I do eventually replace it I imagine I'll be able to get a 500 mile charge, super car like performance, and just maybe a high quality auto pilot feature all for the price of a luxury sedan.
If I were rich I'd be driving a Tesla already. Sadly I'm not and I'm stuck making car decisions based on personal finance choices.
I'm not sold on legislative groups taking that kind of action. Those representatives are still largely dependent on an electorate and most of the population I can't see switching to EVs when they are still so expensive. I wouldn't expect that kind of uptake to happen until we start seeing used EV's suitable for city driving available in the $5000 or less range. I think we'll see those of us in the higher income brackets switching much earlier, but that'll just push even more perfectly usable ICE vehicles into the market that the poor/working poor will snap up and likely continue using for decades.
That is all great stuff, but the problem is that only some relatively small fraction of car buyers purchase new cars. Additionally if EV's do wind up being more reliable for longer than it is very likely that we won't see them changing hands as much, so it'll take longer for them to percolate down to the chunk of the population that buys cars with cash or personal loans. That could also be slowed by the value of EV's not dropping as rapidly as with ICE vehicles.
Then there is the matter of the rate at which vehicles are replaced. A news blerb I just perused said we had about 253 million cars on the road, and only about 10 to 12 million of them get scrapped per year. I presume that the big automakers actually sell more than that each year by some fraction. If we went with the crazy premise that the automakers started only selling EV's as of the beginning of this year then we might be on track to have 60% of the cars on the road being EV's in 2030.
The comparison of the shift from horses to cars isn't really applicable to ICE vs EV's. The automobile outclassed horses to such a degree that it was an obvious choice for everyone that could afford it. Yet automobiles were still relatively inexpensive at the time compared to factory workers wages when you looked at what they offered. EV's of today, and likely the future, just don't offer the same kind of drastic advantage over an ICE. From what you've posted even you aren't projecting them to be available as apple to apple competitors until 2023. And even then that is for the new car market, when the huge majority of people are driving vehicles a decade or more old.
I couldn't agree more on Space Odyssey. I read the book and loved it, then watched the movie and wished I could have 3 hours or my life back. I really liked HAL 9000 in the movie but that was about it. I can understand how impressive some of the technical stuff was, and I get that it was meant to be artistic. It's like I went to a fine restaurant but instead of being trusted with my own utensils the chef periodically comes out of the kitchen and spoon feeds me a bite every five minutes over the course of three hours.
The most memorable bit was a 15 minute scene where a space ship is landing. It's memorable because nothing happens of any importance whatsoever and I kept watching it because surely something had to be about to happen which would warrant actually filming the scene. But nope, apparently they had made the models for this scene in their spare time or something and just had to use it in the movie.
I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that the US is the only place with systemic race problems. I think the reason we don't hear more about it is that the US is more diverse than many other countries do to the nature of it's colonization and formation. Regardless of whether or not others are doing better or worse though we can definitely improve and should fight for that.
Some of the examples cited in an article about this that I was reading earlier today seemed a little frivolous. Such as facial recognition systems that couldn't recognize the face of a black woman. To me that sounds like a limitation of the way the software is coded and how it extrapolates borders of objects from a camera feed, maybe depth perception as well. Meanwhile the system that rates people on their likelihood of re-offending, which ProPublica reported on, is a very obvious case of racist outcomes as a result of racist laws and enforcement providing a racist data set.
I'm always amused by the importance that people place on having a security clearance from the government, like it's a badge of pride. They seem to have this belief that they've been investigated and found to be super trustworthy people. Like an official certification of worthiness. In reality the whole purpose of a security clearance is to ensure that a person isn't already or likely to be vulnerable to blackmail, paltry bribes, or a bout of guilty conscious. And of course, despite that whole process, people are just people and even the NSA has historically made errors in this area, Snowden being the most obvious example.
EV's have more flexibility in location of the radiator but I believe some if not all still have them. The battery packs have to be climate controlled to stay stable and the cooling is most efficiently handled via water cooling using a radiator. Aerodynamics are important to gas powered vehicles but arguably more important for EV's because of the range constraints from using a battery. Whereas putting a larger fuel tank in a gas powered car is trivial both in difficulty and expense.
Just knowing where the money is going can help a lot because you then will have that in mind whenever you're spending money. Years ago I analyzed my spending for the previous 6 months and realized I was eating a significant chunk of my paycheck by going out for lunch everyday. So I started packing leftovers for lunch 4/5 days a week and started saving $200 a month on that alone. I was still spending money for food to eat but the cost for food you prepare yourself is a small fraction of what you pay for even cheap food from a chain restaurant.
Yes and no. I grew up in a part of the country where we had four seasons and pipes could burst from low temperatures. However houses were built with that kind of weather in mind so you usually only heard of pipes bursting when somebody did something wrong like leaving a door open overnight. My Father did that once, forgetting to check that a basement door he used was latched. The next day he went down to his shop to find that a pipe that ran very close to the door had burst. Not that the pipe was all that well protected to begin with as only a cinder block wall separated it from the exterior, no insulation or anything. Now I live in a different part of the country that really only has two seasons and whenever the temperature is predicted to get anywhere near 20F there is all kinds of panic about winterizing exterior faucets and leaving a sink dripping through the night to prevent burst pipes. The building codes here just don't account for the fact that it might possibly get cold in the winter. My Sister in law had a pipe burst just a couple years ago because it had been run through an attic crawl space above the insulation.
I think it's like when my son has a toolbox with only a hammer in it. He attempts to resolve all problems with the hammer instead of considering other possibilities. In a business having employees who all have a common background and education is great when the focus is very narrow and all of your projects are suited well to your hammer. If you want to expand your list of prospective lines of business you would be well advised to add more tools. This doesn't mean you throw out the hammer and abandon all the projects which are suited to it. Instead you add other tools, which could even be more hammers that are better suited for slightly different tasks.
There is of course another completely different angle they could be chasing. The more homogeneous your staff is the more likely that anyone that is different will be poorly treated. An employee that has been the subject of abuse from other employees is more likely to take action which could cost you money or outright destroy the company.
As an anecdote, my Father was once hired by a business specializing in mainframe software. When he was hired he was the only person with any computer programming education at time of hire. The owner had deliberately been hiring people with a variety of backgrounds because he wanted them to develop software and systems that his competitors wouldn't have even thought of. The strategy worked and the company was successful enough to be snapped up by another much larger company.
I have a hard time believing the work ethic complaint. Ever since I entered the job market in the 90's the mantra has perpetually been "do more with less!" I have an in-law uncle that apparently started working as a dishwasher in a national chain restaurant, and within 8 years was a vice president of the same chain. That was back in the 70's and 80's, I can't even fathom how that would have been possible without him being the one extremely hard worker and everyone else around him being perpetual slackers.
I guess it would depend on the shop, but from what I've seen operators usually are responsible for making alterations to the program to get the part to fit the requirements. There is a lot of knowledge that goes into the process. I had an uncle that was a CNC operator and there was a lot more to it than baby sitting a machine that cost more than my house. Yes, a lot of what my uncle did could be automated but how expensive and adaptable is that going to be. With a perfect program your CNC machine might put out perfect parts for the first few runs. Eventually though the tools start to wear and replacing them outright is cost prohibitive, so the program has to be altered to produce parts that will pass QC while using the same tool. That might mean altering the cutting speed, pathing of the cutting head, or maybe both. Perhaps the blanks aren't actually of identical hardness, they might be lose enough to meet the customers requirements but off by enough to change the output product if the program isn't altered.
All of that is obviously automated away when the production run is going to be large enough. I would wager that most CNC Operators are employed in smaller shops where they are producing custom parts made for specific orders in quantities ranging from 1 to thousands.
Blaming criminals for committing criminal acts is perfectly fine. Getting worked up because the criminal is particularly clever is just a waste of your time and energy. I'm glad to see that you have learned from that experience. The thing is though that it is people who think about how something like that could be executed that we should be putting to work on finding ways to secure IT systems against such threats. In the case of corrupted backups the easy solution is to test backups regularly so that the exposure is limited.
Like I said, variety suffers, but it isn't so bad as many might think. The last time I lived in a town so small that it didn't have any cultural diversity in eateries the population for the village was 1500. And frankly that was because the diversity there was severely lacking in all ways, there were only 4 or 5 non-Caucasian students in a high school of 450 kids.
I'll grant you restaurant variety will suffer the smaller the town. That said I live in a place with a population of less than half a million and we've got several Thai places, numerous Korean joints, at least one Japanese eatery I'm aware of, and a couple Indian places. Honestly if there is anything we're really lacking it's good ethnic European foods.
We've got museums and a quality playhouse that puts on shows regularly. Little to no pro sports teams thankfully, though the plague of collegiate sports abounds. There is at least one orchestra in town I can remember hearing about though I haven't really thought of going to see one since grade school.
You don't have to live on the coasts to get cities large enough to support multiple large employers. My current commute is about 7 minutes and the weekly breakdown of my housing and utility expenses is easily under $250. I'm thinking about moving a littler further out of town which will increase my commute to about 15 minutes, but should minimally affect my living costs.
You could sabotage that process in advance by using some kind of custom firmware on the control board for the disk, I imagine. Though doing that could be very difficult to do without being disastrously obvious. Specifically I'm thinking your new firmware expects a handshake of some sort but doesn't initiate that and behaves like it's full of corrupted data for reads, and whenever it's instructed to read without having received the handshake it takes the opportunity to overwrite the existing data.
Unless the write blocker sits between the control board and the drive it'd be useless in that scenario. They could swap the control board for another from an identical drive but they'd have to realize they needed to do that in the first place before any evidence is destroyed. And it seems improbable that Law Enforcement agencies would swap control boards preemptively on hard drives because the logistics of keeping enough boards on hand would be incredible.
I was pondering a similar thought myself. If the universe continues its expansion outpacing the speed of light, shouldn't it eventually be possible for a particle of two atoms to to be the only existent particle within its visible universe. Whatever heat it had at the beginning I would expect it to lose to radiative cooling over time. Since there wouldn't be any other particles in the observable universe there shouldn't be anything to heat our particle by radiating back at it.
Commercials on Youtube??? What kind of Philistine doesn't use adblock or whatever. I don't think I've seen a commercial on Youtube within this decade that wasn't actually the content I was looking for.
I'll grant you that it's dickish to suggest that childless people shouldn't receive SS benefits. We are all part of society, and that societies stability relies in part on maintaining a population that fluctuates slowly if at all. Wild swings in population are problematic even if in the short term they are beneficial sometimes. For instance the baby boomer generation was good at times because it provided an immense amount of man power to get things done. But now that they are entering retirement it's going to hurt in a number of ways like putting a heavy load on SS and the healthcare system, We don't need everyone to have children so long as some people like having children and can raise extras.
By the way, as a parent I can safely say that all children are brats and bullies at some point. All you can do is keep working on them and try to moderate it so that they don't turn out permanently like that. Of course there is only so much you can do and eventually they make their own choices. I come from a "large" family of six kids and I think my parents did a decent job. But I suspect two of my siblings get all their news from infowars when the most inflammatory programming my parents ever ascribed to was 60 minutes.
On the contrary various law enforcement agencies actively avoid hiring people who are deemed too smart. The authorities who wield law enforcement agencies don't really want the front line troops thinking about the laws they are tasked to enforce, they just want it done. The last time I looked into working in Law Enforcement, the pay was actually pretty good considering the low hiring requirements. I actually applied for a job, but took a different job offer that came along first, they took more than six months to notify me they were interested after I took the civil service exam.
Higher pay is definitely one of the hurdles to getting people to work in the public sector in general. Though the life sucking nature of bureaucracy surrounding the most minor bits of work is probably more of a problem.
Doing more sophisticated work will only serve you so long as you can stay ahead of the pace of automated systems. We've only recently seen computers built that could beat the worlds best Go players, and that is a game of incredible complexity, even though the rules are extraordinarily simple. Speech recognition is a technology that has also advanced significantly in the last couple decades. At some point, possibly in the near future, there won't be any such thing as a task that is too sophisticated for a computer to learn and perform. It's that machine learning bit that is the crux of the problem in my mind. In previous eras of advancement machines have had to be custom built for narrow use cases which required lots of human effort to design, build, configure, and then run. That amount of work was worth it as it allowed for greater production with the same or less manpower. With machine learning though we are heading for an era where a computer could analyze the task to be automated, build the system to do the work, configure and then maintain said system ultimately eliminating the need for human involvement entirely.
The whole situation reminds me of the scene at the end of There Will Be Blood. The religious con man comes to the oil tycoon thinking he has something of value to exchange. The tycoon tells him how he has already sucked that milkshake dry leaving the con man even more destitute than he already was. In the end the only value of the con man to the tycoon is as a live target to take out his anger and frustrations on. The idea of there always being plentiful jobs that are too sophisticated for automation in my mind is like that milkshake which the con man tried to hold in reserve for too long.
I'm not sure about the effectiveness of voting vs commenting on a web forum. In some venues a well written post could change at least a single persons vote. And if it accomplishes that then it has had more impact than your single vote.
That said I agree that a literacy test for voting is a far cry from a reading comprehension test for commenting. When you go to vote you aren't presented with the entire text of proposed law changes or dossiers of politicians history and platform. Instead when you go to vote you are picking your choices from what should be a clearly delineated ballot. Literacy isn't required to understand the issues at hand or pick a favorite politician. The only hint of a valid reason literacy could be required for voting is that you are usually expected to read the ballot, but there are any number of easy workarounds for that.
I can agree with the not branding entire groups of people because of the actions of a few. That said voter fraud would appear to be far less common and less significant than abuses within the intelligence community. Not everyone in those organizations is going to be authoritarians, but they will be much more common simply because of the way recruiting and promotion works.
There was a time, not even a decade ago when I would have been happy to work for any number of federal agencies. These days though I find that I've got a list of acceptable employers and it seems to get smaller and smaller all the time.
I can see this working very well in warehouse conditions. When it comes to delivery people though I'm not so sure. Delivery drivers have to make minor decisions constantly which could pose problems for robots. I mean driving a car isn't technically all that challenging when you look at it simplistically, but the devil is in the details. Delivery drivers do things like identify walkways, door steps, fence gates, and varieties of inclement weather. They then make choices about how to deliver a package or not.
I suppose outfitting them to serve as a telepresence bot when they encounter difficulty could work. I just wonder if it'd be cost effective enough to start the roll out.
It's an entitlement problem. Everyone, myself included, feels entitled to kick back and relax while being entertained when they come home from work these days. The truth is you can spend a couple hours over the course of a week and save a bucket load of money on food. When you plan your meals, something else most people avoid these days, make most of it stuff you can make from cheap ingredients and that freezes well. For instance we might make lasagna or shepherds pie, instead of making a single pan we'll do three or four and freeze the extras. One 9x13 will last two or three meals easily for my family of four. The amount of extra work to go from fixing a single pan to many is very minimal. Then when we realize we don't feel like fixing dinner at the end of a busy day you pull out a freezer pan and put it in the oven, steam some frozen veggies when the oven is nearly done and you're set. Get a large crockpot and learn to use it to fix meals you like with minimal effort. Use a rice cooker to make all the rice dishes you could ever want with minimal effort.
As someone else pointed out you can make bread in a bread maker with only a few minutes of your time. Why are you peeling potatoes? The skin has useful nutrient and fiber value, just cut it up small enough that it's not frustrating to try and eat. Cleaning dishes is a never ending chore just like laundry, and it's just part of adulting. You can minimize the time or pain in doing dishes by using a dishwasher, buying dishes that fit the dishwasher well, run the dishwasher before food gets calcified onto dishes, and cooking one pot meals.
Maybe it's asking too much for adults to act like adults. But they're unlikely to find pity when they are making far higher salaries than their neighbors but trying to live like trust fund kids or people on sitcoms. My father 30 years ago was making double my current salary and we ate out or had delivery once a week if that. So these people can either grow up and realize they're throwing away money trying to live a lifestyle they can't support or continue spending themselves into abject poverty because they're too good to fix their own meals.
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The problem is that you are still talking new cars and new car pricing. I think that it is possible that >95% of new vehicles in 2030 will be EV's. But there is no way we'll see anything close to 50% of the vehicles on the road being EV's by that time. It's simply a numbers game and people just don't replace their vehicles frequently enough to hit that kind of target even if all new vehicles were EV's. The only way it'd be possible that I can see would be if the cost of new EV's was low enough to compete favorably with the huge supply of used ICEV's on the road.
I'm a fan of EV's. I own stock in an EV company. I want an EV as my daily driver. That said I drive a Toyota that is over a decade old and will likely continue as my daily driver for another decade at the least. The operating and ownership costs for that car are so low that there is no practical reason to replace it. Sure an EV would have lower costs but I'd actually have to spend a huge chunk of money for that. I'm better off milking every last economical mile out of my current car, in the meantime the costs for EV's will get lower and their features better. When I do eventually replace it I imagine I'll be able to get a 500 mile charge, super car like performance, and just maybe a high quality auto pilot feature all for the price of a luxury sedan.
If I were rich I'd be driving a Tesla already. Sadly I'm not and I'm stuck making car decisions based on personal finance choices.
I'm not sold on legislative groups taking that kind of action. Those representatives are still largely dependent on an electorate and most of the population I can't see switching to EVs when they are still so expensive. I wouldn't expect that kind of uptake to happen until we start seeing used EV's suitable for city driving available in the $5000 or less range. I think we'll see those of us in the higher income brackets switching much earlier, but that'll just push even more perfectly usable ICE vehicles into the market that the poor/working poor will snap up and likely continue using for decades.
That is all great stuff, but the problem is that only some relatively small fraction of car buyers purchase new cars. Additionally if EV's do wind up being more reliable for longer than it is very likely that we won't see them changing hands as much, so it'll take longer for them to percolate down to the chunk of the population that buys cars with cash or personal loans. That could also be slowed by the value of EV's not dropping as rapidly as with ICE vehicles.
Then there is the matter of the rate at which vehicles are replaced. A news blerb I just perused said we had about 253 million cars on the road, and only about 10 to 12 million of them get scrapped per year. I presume that the big automakers actually sell more than that each year by some fraction. If we went with the crazy premise that the automakers started only selling EV's as of the beginning of this year then we might be on track to have 60% of the cars on the road being EV's in 2030.
The comparison of the shift from horses to cars isn't really applicable to ICE vs EV's. The automobile outclassed horses to such a degree that it was an obvious choice for everyone that could afford it. Yet automobiles were still relatively inexpensive at the time compared to factory workers wages when you looked at what they offered. EV's of today, and likely the future, just don't offer the same kind of drastic advantage over an ICE. From what you've posted even you aren't projecting them to be available as apple to apple competitors until 2023. And even then that is for the new car market, when the huge majority of people are driving vehicles a decade or more old.
I couldn't agree more on Space Odyssey. I read the book and loved it, then watched the movie and wished I could have 3 hours or my life back. I really liked HAL 9000 in the movie but that was about it. I can understand how impressive some of the technical stuff was, and I get that it was meant to be artistic. It's like I went to a fine restaurant but instead of being trusted with my own utensils the chef periodically comes out of the kitchen and spoon feeds me a bite every five minutes over the course of three hours.
The most memorable bit was a 15 minute scene where a space ship is landing. It's memorable because nothing happens of any importance whatsoever and I kept watching it because surely something had to be about to happen which would warrant actually filming the scene. But nope, apparently they had made the models for this scene in their spare time or something and just had to use it in the movie.
I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that the US is the only place with systemic race problems. I think the reason we don't hear more about it is that the US is more diverse than many other countries do to the nature of it's colonization and formation. Regardless of whether or not others are doing better or worse though we can definitely improve and should fight for that.
Some of the examples cited in an article about this that I was reading earlier today seemed a little frivolous. Such as facial recognition systems that couldn't recognize the face of a black woman. To me that sounds like a limitation of the way the software is coded and how it extrapolates borders of objects from a camera feed, maybe depth perception as well. Meanwhile the system that rates people on their likelihood of re-offending, which ProPublica reported on, is a very obvious case of racist outcomes as a result of racist laws and enforcement providing a racist data set.
I'm always amused by the importance that people place on having a security clearance from the government, like it's a badge of pride. They seem to have this belief that they've been investigated and found to be super trustworthy people. Like an official certification of worthiness. In reality the whole purpose of a security clearance is to ensure that a person isn't already or likely to be vulnerable to blackmail, paltry bribes, or a bout of guilty conscious. And of course, despite that whole process, people are just people and even the NSA has historically made errors in this area, Snowden being the most obvious example.
EV's have more flexibility in location of the radiator but I believe some if not all still have them. The battery packs have to be climate controlled to stay stable and the cooling is most efficiently handled via water cooling using a radiator. Aerodynamics are important to gas powered vehicles but arguably more important for EV's because of the range constraints from using a battery. Whereas putting a larger fuel tank in a gas powered car is trivial both in difficulty and expense.
Just knowing where the money is going can help a lot because you then will have that in mind whenever you're spending money. Years ago I analyzed my spending for the previous 6 months and realized I was eating a significant chunk of my paycheck by going out for lunch everyday. So I started packing leftovers for lunch 4/5 days a week and started saving $200 a month on that alone. I was still spending money for food to eat but the cost for food you prepare yourself is a small fraction of what you pay for even cheap food from a chain restaurant.
Yes and no. I grew up in a part of the country where we had four seasons and pipes could burst from low temperatures. However houses were built with that kind of weather in mind so you usually only heard of pipes bursting when somebody did something wrong like leaving a door open overnight. My Father did that once, forgetting to check that a basement door he used was latched. The next day he went down to his shop to find that a pipe that ran very close to the door had burst. Not that the pipe was all that well protected to begin with as only a cinder block wall separated it from the exterior, no insulation or anything. Now I live in a different part of the country that really only has two seasons and whenever the temperature is predicted to get anywhere near 20F there is all kinds of panic about winterizing exterior faucets and leaving a sink dripping through the night to prevent burst pipes. The building codes here just don't account for the fact that it might possibly get cold in the winter. My Sister in law had a pipe burst just a couple years ago because it had been run through an attic crawl space above the insulation.
I think it's like when my son has a toolbox with only a hammer in it. He attempts to resolve all problems with the hammer instead of considering other possibilities. In a business having employees who all have a common background and education is great when the focus is very narrow and all of your projects are suited well to your hammer. If you want to expand your list of prospective lines of business you would be well advised to add more tools. This doesn't mean you throw out the hammer and abandon all the projects which are suited to it. Instead you add other tools, which could even be more hammers that are better suited for slightly different tasks.
There is of course another completely different angle they could be chasing. The more homogeneous your staff is the more likely that anyone that is different will be poorly treated. An employee that has been the subject of abuse from other employees is more likely to take action which could cost you money or outright destroy the company.
As an anecdote, my Father was once hired by a business specializing in mainframe software. When he was hired he was the only person with any computer programming education at time of hire. The owner had deliberately been hiring people with a variety of backgrounds because he wanted them to develop software and systems that his competitors wouldn't have even thought of. The strategy worked and the company was successful enough to be snapped up by another much larger company.
I have a hard time believing the work ethic complaint. Ever since I entered the job market in the 90's the mantra has perpetually been "do more with less!" I have an in-law uncle that apparently started working as a dishwasher in a national chain restaurant, and within 8 years was a vice president of the same chain. That was back in the 70's and 80's, I can't even fathom how that would have been possible without him being the one extremely hard worker and everyone else around him being perpetual slackers.
I guess it would depend on the shop, but from what I've seen operators usually are responsible for making alterations to the program to get the part to fit the requirements. There is a lot of knowledge that goes into the process. I had an uncle that was a CNC operator and there was a lot more to it than baby sitting a machine that cost more than my house. Yes, a lot of what my uncle did could be automated but how expensive and adaptable is that going to be. With a perfect program your CNC machine might put out perfect parts for the first few runs. Eventually though the tools start to wear and replacing them outright is cost prohibitive, so the program has to be altered to produce parts that will pass QC while using the same tool. That might mean altering the cutting speed, pathing of the cutting head, or maybe both. Perhaps the blanks aren't actually of identical hardness, they might be lose enough to meet the customers requirements but off by enough to change the output product if the program isn't altered.
All of that is obviously automated away when the production run is going to be large enough. I would wager that most CNC Operators are employed in smaller shops where they are producing custom parts made for specific orders in quantities ranging from 1 to thousands.
Blaming criminals for committing criminal acts is perfectly fine. Getting worked up because the criminal is particularly clever is just a waste of your time and energy. I'm glad to see that you have learned from that experience. The thing is though that it is people who think about how something like that could be executed that we should be putting to work on finding ways to secure IT systems against such threats. In the case of corrupted backups the easy solution is to test backups regularly so that the exposure is limited.
Like I said, variety suffers, but it isn't so bad as many might think. The last time I lived in a town so small that it didn't have any cultural diversity in eateries the population for the village was 1500. And frankly that was because the diversity there was severely lacking in all ways, there were only 4 or 5 non-Caucasian students in a high school of 450 kids.
I'll grant you restaurant variety will suffer the smaller the town. That said I live in a place with a population of less than half a million and we've got several Thai places, numerous Korean joints, at least one Japanese eatery I'm aware of, and a couple Indian places. Honestly if there is anything we're really lacking it's good ethnic European foods.
We've got museums and a quality playhouse that puts on shows regularly. Little to no pro sports teams thankfully, though the plague of collegiate sports abounds. There is at least one orchestra in town I can remember hearing about though I haven't really thought of going to see one since grade school.
You don't have to live on the coasts to get cities large enough to support multiple large employers. My current commute is about 7 minutes and the weekly breakdown of my housing and utility expenses is easily under $250. I'm thinking about moving a littler further out of town which will increase my commute to about 15 minutes, but should minimally affect my living costs.
You could sabotage that process in advance by using some kind of custom firmware on the control board for the disk, I imagine. Though doing that could be very difficult to do without being disastrously obvious. Specifically I'm thinking your new firmware expects a handshake of some sort but doesn't initiate that and behaves like it's full of corrupted data for reads, and whenever it's instructed to read without having received the handshake it takes the opportunity to overwrite the existing data.
Unless the write blocker sits between the control board and the drive it'd be useless in that scenario. They could swap the control board for another from an identical drive but they'd have to realize they needed to do that in the first place before any evidence is destroyed. And it seems improbable that Law Enforcement agencies would swap control boards preemptively on hard drives because the logistics of keeping enough boards on hand would be incredible.
I was pondering a similar thought myself. If the universe continues its expansion outpacing the speed of light, shouldn't it eventually be possible for a particle of two atoms to to be the only existent particle within its visible universe. Whatever heat it had at the beginning I would expect it to lose to radiative cooling over time. Since there wouldn't be any other particles in the observable universe there shouldn't be anything to heat our particle by radiating back at it.
Commercials on Youtube??? What kind of Philistine doesn't use adblock or whatever. I don't think I've seen a commercial on Youtube within this decade that wasn't actually the content I was looking for.
I'll grant you that it's dickish to suggest that childless people shouldn't receive SS benefits. We are all part of society, and that societies stability relies in part on maintaining a population that fluctuates slowly if at all. Wild swings in population are problematic even if in the short term they are beneficial sometimes. For instance the baby boomer generation was good at times because it provided an immense amount of man power to get things done. But now that they are entering retirement it's going to hurt in a number of ways like putting a heavy load on SS and the healthcare system, We don't need everyone to have children so long as some people like having children and can raise extras.
By the way, as a parent I can safely say that all children are brats and bullies at some point. All you can do is keep working on them and try to moderate it so that they don't turn out permanently like that. Of course there is only so much you can do and eventually they make their own choices. I come from a "large" family of six kids and I think my parents did a decent job. But I suspect two of my siblings get all their news from infowars when the most inflammatory programming my parents ever ascribed to was 60 minutes.
On the contrary various law enforcement agencies actively avoid hiring people who are deemed too smart. The authorities who wield law enforcement agencies don't really want the front line troops thinking about the laws they are tasked to enforce, they just want it done. The last time I looked into working in Law Enforcement, the pay was actually pretty good considering the low hiring requirements. I actually applied for a job, but took a different job offer that came along first, they took more than six months to notify me they were interested after I took the civil service exam.
Higher pay is definitely one of the hurdles to getting people to work in the public sector in general. Though the life sucking nature of bureaucracy surrounding the most minor bits of work is probably more of a problem.
Doing more sophisticated work will only serve you so long as you can stay ahead of the pace of automated systems. We've only recently seen computers built that could beat the worlds best Go players, and that is a game of incredible complexity, even though the rules are extraordinarily simple. Speech recognition is a technology that has also advanced significantly in the last couple decades. At some point, possibly in the near future, there won't be any such thing as a task that is too sophisticated for a computer to learn and perform. It's that machine learning bit that is the crux of the problem in my mind. In previous eras of advancement machines have had to be custom built for narrow use cases which required lots of human effort to design, build, configure, and then run. That amount of work was worth it as it allowed for greater production with the same or less manpower. With machine learning though we are heading for an era where a computer could analyze the task to be automated, build the system to do the work, configure and then maintain said system ultimately eliminating the need for human involvement entirely.
The whole situation reminds me of the scene at the end of There Will Be Blood. The religious con man comes to the oil tycoon thinking he has something of value to exchange. The tycoon tells him how he has already sucked that milkshake dry leaving the con man even more destitute than he already was. In the end the only value of the con man to the tycoon is as a live target to take out his anger and frustrations on. The idea of there always being plentiful jobs that are too sophisticated for automation in my mind is like that milkshake which the con man tried to hold in reserve for too long.
I'm not sure about the effectiveness of voting vs commenting on a web forum. In some venues a well written post could change at least a single persons vote. And if it accomplishes that then it has had more impact than your single vote.
That said I agree that a literacy test for voting is a far cry from a reading comprehension test for commenting. When you go to vote you aren't presented with the entire text of proposed law changes or dossiers of politicians history and platform. Instead when you go to vote you are picking your choices from what should be a clearly delineated ballot. Literacy isn't required to understand the issues at hand or pick a favorite politician. The only hint of a valid reason literacy could be required for voting is that you are usually expected to read the ballot, but there are any number of easy workarounds for that.
I can agree with the not branding entire groups of people because of the actions of a few. That said voter fraud would appear to be far less common and less significant than abuses within the intelligence community. Not everyone in those organizations is going to be authoritarians, but they will be much more common simply because of the way recruiting and promotion works.
There was a time, not even a decade ago when I would have been happy to work for any number of federal agencies. These days though I find that I've got a list of acceptable employers and it seems to get smaller and smaller all the time.
I can see this working very well in warehouse conditions. When it comes to delivery people though I'm not so sure. Delivery drivers have to make minor decisions constantly which could pose problems for robots. I mean driving a car isn't technically all that challenging when you look at it simplistically, but the devil is in the details. Delivery drivers do things like identify walkways, door steps, fence gates, and varieties of inclement weather. They then make choices about how to deliver a package or not.
I suppose outfitting them to serve as a telepresence bot when they encounter difficulty could work. I just wonder if it'd be cost effective enough to start the roll out.
It's an entitlement problem. Everyone, myself included, feels entitled to kick back and relax while being entertained when they come home from work these days. The truth is you can spend a couple hours over the course of a week and save a bucket load of money on food. When you plan your meals, something else most people avoid these days, make most of it stuff you can make from cheap ingredients and that freezes well. For instance we might make lasagna or shepherds pie, instead of making a single pan we'll do three or four and freeze the extras. One 9x13 will last two or three meals easily for my family of four. The amount of extra work to go from fixing a single pan to many is very minimal. Then when we realize we don't feel like fixing dinner at the end of a busy day you pull out a freezer pan and put it in the oven, steam some frozen veggies when the oven is nearly done and you're set. Get a large crockpot and learn to use it to fix meals you like with minimal effort. Use a rice cooker to make all the rice dishes you could ever want with minimal effort.
As someone else pointed out you can make bread in a bread maker with only a few minutes of your time. Why are you peeling potatoes? The skin has useful nutrient and fiber value, just cut it up small enough that it's not frustrating to try and eat. Cleaning dishes is a never ending chore just like laundry, and it's just part of adulting. You can minimize the time or pain in doing dishes by using a dishwasher, buying dishes that fit the dishwasher well, run the dishwasher before food gets calcified onto dishes, and cooking one pot meals.
Maybe it's asking too much for adults to act like adults. But they're unlikely to find pity when they are making far higher salaries than their neighbors but trying to live like trust fund kids or people on sitcoms. My father 30 years ago was making double my current salary and we ate out or had delivery once a week if that. So these people can either grow up and realize they're throwing away money trying to live a lifestyle they can't support or continue spending themselves into abject poverty because they're too good to fix their own meals.