I had a basic Casio (until my daughter made off with it) that sat on my desk beside my TI-89. For quick calculations I much preferred the Casio with its large clear numbers and nicer buttons. Plus it did various higher mathematical things fairly well. The key though is to read the manual as doing somethings such as working with polynomials was just weird.
I think that I will go buy another as I do miss it.
The thing that amazes me about Germany's solar is that they have accomplished so much while being quite close to the North Pole. They seem to know that every watt not Generated by imported fuel is a boon to their economy as that money can circulate at least one more time before leaving. One thing that many people don't connect is that Germany began their quest for alternate energy shortly after a dispute between Russia and the Ukraine nearly cut off all their natural gas. I suspect that they had an all hands on board meeting where they said, this can't happen again, we must not be dependent on any single external resource like that.
The key is that far less money now leaves Germany to go to various oil producing countries. So if you don't save money on the surface when you dig deep you will find that keeping the money circulating in your own economy is far better for your economy. This is why the US economy, despite its many structural problems, will thrive over the next decade due to the huge increase in domestic oil production combined with greater fuel economy. That is the US will send far less money to the middle east, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc, while keeping it domestically.
I would much rather see the money go to something like a darpa challenge. This way anybody can join the party. The reality in the US is that a few well lobbied organizations will scoop up all that money. But then they will have to spend it on making reports and whatnot to show that they spent it properly. In Canada if they had a battery project, all the money would go to a few politically connected companies in either Quebec or in the Ottawa area.
I love when something thinks that they "own" their human capital and then that capital gets up and leaves. This is a story that I wish would happen on a daily basis.
The Germans are spending tens of Billions getting batteries into homes to smooth out solar power. Their idea is simple; by encouraging people to actually buy the stuff it will create a market and get the companies moving on research and development. I am willing to bet that 90% of the American money will go to a select group of companies and universities that lobbied hard for that money. Then over the next few years we will read in Popular Science and here on Slashdot about "BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH! New battery tech is 100x better and 100x cheaper!!!" but when you read the article it will be a pile of hype over a test-tube battery that is the size of a postage stamp that can barely power an LED and requires 3 hours of CERN LHC time to make.
The real (boring) article will be about a German factory employing 8,000 people that is selling 3 billion in home batteries per year that work quite well and provide good value to their customers.
I really really really hate apps that try to pull stunts like grabbing GPS data when they don't need it, call home for no reason that benefits me, or runs when I didn't run it.
The worst apps that I frequently see are the crap ones that the phone companies seem to put on Android phones. The bastards who make those apps know that people hate them because they make them near impossible to remove.
The other good reason to uninstall an app is when they push in-app-purchases way too hard. I don't know how many apps that I have installed where the "free" app was basically worthless without the IAP.
The last reason that I frequently uninstall an app is when it makes me uselessly create an account. I don't understand this as 100% of the time I either use mailinator.com or a crap hotmail address along with the most crude and insulting usernames possible. These MBA people must not check to see if their 100,000 users are mostly fake and that the 100,000 emails they sent to the users were read more by their own marketing people than actual users.
I have wanted to love wxWidgets but I keep going back to QT. Now that QT is allowing you to port to Android and iOS I am not sure that I will ever take another crack at WX.
Other multi platform GUI'ish things that I like are OpenFrameworks (main complaint is that it runs hot) and cocos2d-x which allowed me to turf Objective-C on iOS.
This is where capacity becomes interesting. Nearly all the cars that people drive to work then spend the day just sitting there. If enough hire cars were available to drive everyone at rush hour they would them mostly sit idle for the day. In theory then most car companies would then have to charge almost as much to drive you to work as it would for you to own the car outright.
Thus for commuting the robot car would have to be something different to reduce ownership. Something like mini-buses that people would call for the ultimate in car pooling.
The driverless advantages for commuters will probably be somewhat different. Traffic is largely slowed to the pace of the worst drivers (including a stop from accidents) plus driverless cars should result in much higher speed limits if any limits continue to exist. Again with no crap drivers and higher limits traffic should flow far faster; plus with near bumper to bumper driving the capacity of existing roads should be much higher.
So a commuter might still have to own their car but will be able to travel faster and with far less stress. This last is important as it has be discovered that driving stress is some of the worst to the continuously variable nature of driving. It isn't the same guy cutting you off; and while traffic patterns are fairly regular it isn't enough to become something you can ignore. For instance how much have you fumed as you slowly drove past mile after mile of construction cones only to find few construction workers effectively doing nothing? Or the thousand other petty stresses of driving at rush hour. With driverless cars you will pull out your book, sleep, or catch up on Breaking Bad.
That said, there will be a reduction through the simple fact that the care hire companies can dedicate near 100% of their fleet to commuters during rush hour. Plus another reduction since you can potentially share a car with other people after commuting. This doesn't really work if your commute is huge but a 15 minute commute would not preclude sending the car home for the kids to use or a spouse with different working hours.
As I said, for urban car owners driverless cars will certainly result in much lower car ownership. For suburban car owners maybe/maybe not and for rural car owners probably not much change at all.
If all the cars on the road are driverless then the car companies will probably start giving away full liability as part of the purchase. They will have a full record of any accident with all the cameras and whatnot plus an active interest in analyzing any accident so as to upgrade their software to prevent it from happening again. Plus driverless cars will basically stop causing accidents pushing the laws to eliminate the fundamentally homicidal act of driving a manual car. All that will be left to insure will be fire/theft/trees falling so your car will need about as much insurance as your woodshed. This does not bode well for the car insurance industry as even theft will be significantly reduced if the cars are heavily computerized.
But the other factor will be that for many urban people cheaper and driverless taxis will reduce car ownership. It probably won't eliminate it but a two or three car family might drop to a single car.
Personally my limited driving pretty well justifies switching to all taxis right now so if taxis plummeted in price then it would be a no brainer.
The question of driverless cars is not even a when; now I wonder how long before the last person gets a automobile driver's license in North America?
There is a twitter account that I have wanted for a long time. I rounded up a bunch of friends to report it for spam as its only posting from a long time ago is a "Make money fast" posting. But nope, they haven't done a thing about it. I suspect that it is a "live" account. My guess is that if they were to go through and kill all the dead accounts they would be facing incorrect headlines such as "Users abandoning Twitter, 10% lost in this month alone."
In many ways it is going to be the third world that loses the most due to robots. In that we will have robots do what we are presently having the third world do. Farmers in my area (far from any source of illegals) complain that they can't get people to work the fields. The end result is that lower cost produce that can be grown locally ends up being imported. The same with manufacturing. We don't want to make things far away, we just want them made cheaply. But again as my point shows, a robot has an advantage of making things reliably. Thus you are not just looking at the wage vs ownership costs but you are looking at having a reliable product that doesn't lose you the occasional customer and get bad reviews.
But a whole other economic factor with localized automation is that you simplify and shorten the logistics chain. If you have to bid against the whole world for a distant product, then ship it through many ports and vehicles, and then finally deal with it locally you have many costs and risks that something will go wrong ranging from a shipping problem to the huge shipping delay giving you less flexibility when it comes to responding to market demand. For instance if you think pink is going to be the colour in vogue this spring the pink clothing had better be getting loaded on the ships right now and you had better be correct about pink being the colour. But if you are able to robotically manufacture it in a nearby business park you make what you need, shortly before when you need it and as you need it. So if pink turns out to be a bust you will have very little failed pink fashion to dispose of. Thus the cost of the robotics does not need to exactly match the human cost.
Then you get benefits such as local produce can be more frangible in that it does not need to be a tasteless variety that can ship halfway around the globe. Often the tastier varieties are shorter lived and can take less jostling.
And the most important thing of all is that money that doesn't leave your local economy is then has a chance to be spent at least one more time locally. This makes that money "worth" more. A good example of this right now will be the economic impact of the US becoming energy independent in the next few years. That is some huge number of billions not leaving the US for countries that the US doesn't even like that much.
But what dulls this economic benefit is that normally if local farms were to boom there would be a huge number of people employed. But this time around it will be mostly only those with the capital to buy the robots that will benefit. If anything employment numbers will go down as a very small number become fantastically wealthy.
I don't think that people realize the tsunami of change that is coming through automation. Basically if you do something repetitive and with a basic set of rules then your job is probably going bye bye. A list of jobs that comes to mind, almost all assembly line manufacturing, warehouse work, much in the way of machining, much in the way of welding, some construction such as many parts of the road construction business, cleaning, waiters, cooks, security, almost all of agriculture, things like baggage handling, most retail work such as stocking shelves, checkouts, and of course many driving jobs such as trucking, taxi, pizza delivery.
This all comes down to three simple questions, can it be done better, more reliably, and cheaper?
Each of these questions will have interesting twists. I suspect that in the above case of the robot trucks that they will occasionally screw up and not want to cross a puddle or some stupidity but that over all costs will drop and consistent productivity will be, on average, much higher. The same with say replacing a cook with a robot; it might not be better than the best cooks but as long as it is better than average, costs less, and the owner doesn't have to worry about it showing up on time then bye bye cooks.
But again the key is that robots will be so much better at certain things as to make them far more valuable then a simple spreadsheet analysis might indicate. In the case of a robot cook, if it is always preparing food in an extremely consistent way and always there then you might think that it isn't much better than a chef who only misses 2 days a year and only has 2 off days per year. But the reality is that an off day or a long wait due to a missing cook could kill off a few regular customers resulting in a much larger loss than the few nights directly impacted.
The next impact will be that robots have the ultimate case of OCD. So if you want you could have the robots go out into the field and pick the bugs, one at a time, off your plants. This is simply something that humans won't do as they would lose their minds. The same with things like cooking. A robot could place exactly 23 onions onto a certain dish placed in (artistically designed) exacting locations. A table in the restaurant could be told that their meals will be ready in 6 minutes 3 seconds as the chef has plotted the temperatures of the meat and knows exactly how long each step is going to take.
A simple example of this sort of variation having an impact can be observed with the medical helicopters that fly over my house. One of the pilots sets the collective wrong and the helicopter is noisy. He also is ponderous about leaving the helipad and flies fairly slowly. The other pilot lifts off and in one nice smooth movement turns, speeds up, retracts the gear, and is off like a flash. The landings are basically the same thing in reverse. I suspect the patient survival rates between the two pilots is very different.
I have the same thermocouples that they are using and those things are ferociously inefficient. So the question is how effective is the cooling effect as compared to the huge amount of heat that would pour off the other side of the thing? I am not saying that it doesn't work but their device does have the necessary heat sink which also might be a wee bit problematic in that it will be both warm and cumbersome.
I think that 3D printing is going to get interesting in that it will potentially allow an engineer to design a part, then hand it over to an artist and have the 3D software restrain the artist with certain parameters such as size, stress, mass, materials, etc. But then the artist can take, say, a very pedestrian looking hinge and make it a work of art all the while not increasing the cost or reducing the functionality.
Then the artist can hand it back to the engineer who will double check that the functionality has not been compromised.
The key to all this being that 3D printing a flatish surface that is 3 cubic inches will be nearly the same cost as printing a patterned or otherwise more intricate surface that is also 3 cubic inches.
I would love to have a technically minded on staff artist to make everything I build more beautiful.
But if during a plague I had the choice between having a population of vaccine experts and a population of poets I know which I would prefer. But a healthy society ideally can manage to support both.
I know a guy who did his architecture thesis on the problem of most architects being only artists and not engineers. There is a famous story attributed to many architects where a couple had a fancy house designed by a famous architect and it leaked horribly. So they called him to the house and with the plans on a table near a huge puddle on the marble floor out asked him to fix it. So he folded the plans into a paper boat and floated it on the puddle saying, I am an artist not a contractor.
If they get rid of what works the next thing you know the Pentagon will prioritize the capture of the rebel leader Louis Riel before the Saskatchewan Rebellion spreads to the central US.
Testing and feature prioritization, how innovative! I am actually not being sarcastic. So many big projects push testing off as a "waste of resources" and absolutely don't prioritize features. For instance I don't know how many government web sites have a "Message from the...(fill in organization head)" front and center of the front page of the website. I am willing to bet that less than 1% of people actually click on that. Then after that you often find news about awards and other ribbon cutting crap that the leaders feature in. And hidden away in the corners are the stuff that people actually want.
So with so many projects you have too many cooks who have their own internal priorities and the result is the wonderful British expression, A Dog's Breakfast.
It doesn't even need to be a crime. In Britain I believe the moat repair was a legitimate expense. But under government information control it would be released under some bland category such as "Maintaining constituency premises" but when people found out it was for a moat repair they humiliated the guy in the press every day.
Recently the premier of Ontario was chiding a consultant of some sort for billing the province 91 cents for parking when they are paying him over $500,000 per year. Her suggestion was that his expense was legitimate but showed that his heart was in the wrong place.
To me you can only have true democracy if the government can't hide anything. I think that the freedom of information act should cover basically everything including phone calls. There might be a few areas where privacy may be for a greater good in areas like personal medical records; as people might not get treatment for embarrassing diseases. Even military secrecy needs to be cut way back so as to avoid stupid things like the F-35 project.
Over and over governments have fallen and change has been driven when secrets become known. This is because information is the only real source of power. Controlling what information gets out, and what information you have is real power. Any person who has been in government or even a large organization quickly realizes this and those who thrive in these organizations have taken this to heart.
So this is why governments spend so much effort in "massaging" information and are happy to have things kept secret for a hundred different reasons such as "privacy" or "security" but the simple truth is that once the population has this information they now have the power and this is the scariest of all scenarios for people who want power.
As I said, just look at the history of leaks, in the UK you had ministers that were terrible and people wanted them gone, yet they not only stayed but were regularly re-elected because people didn't have the solid information that could sway an electorate. Then the expenses scandal came out with solid information about people lying, cheating, and repairing their moats and in a flash they were gone. Prior to the leak the public was fed a filtered version of the MP expenses. In the US you had Nixon get turfed from office when he lost control of the information. The key being concrete evidence of what was happening in the oval office. The media loves their dueling opinions but people can tell the differences between narrative, opinion, and cold hard facts. I very much doubt these bozos care one iota about the whole protecting the country part of these revelations but they do care about losing their ability to spy on anyone who is making them look bad or getting in the way of their rich friends. And they really hate the fact that these revelations prove them to be liars themselves.
But the worst part for these people is that the media is no longer just a few media barons that they can be clubby with. In years past they may very well have been able to keep a lid on this through that alone. But now the traditional media is no longer local. So even if none of the press in one country runs a story other countries' press cores will and then there are the million micro media sites. They will all run with anything they can get their hands on.
You are correct. I am referring to the perception of many artistic types, especially literary types; so I agree and would state that good programmers are technicians whereas great programmers are artists. If anything it is the patterns within this art that allow us to fluently use a device that we have never seen before that was handed to us by someone who was unable to even turn it on. We all know that rebooting solves so many problems and can even hazard guesses as to what is happening but still proceed with the incantation of reboot everything.
But where non-technical people start to get suspicious is when we start to combine different knowledge areas. I was at a person's house when they spilled pop into their keyboard which stopped working. So I immediately unplugged it and ran it under a tap, then swung it around my head, then poured rubbing alcohol into it, then swung it around my head a bit more, then put it into a garbage bag with a half box of cheap rice, and then told them to leave it there overnight. They thought that I had gone quite mad.
I explained that even getting the pop out would not be enough because the sugar would concentrate and gum up the keys plus the phosphoric acid would probably do a number on the circuits over the next few days, plus the solution would conduct electricity, while the water would wash away the pop, and the alcohol would displace the water, not rust the circuits, and evaporate more quickly, the rice would then speed up the evaporation of any water that was left behind.
They were incredulous that a programmer could know so much electronics, physics and chemistry.
The next day it was with smug satisfaction that when they plugged the keyboard back in that it didn't work. I came by knowing that it should and found that they had plugged it into the network port. It worked plus it was cleaner than ever.
The saying that any technology sufficiently advanced will appear to be magic seems to apply now to a fair chunk of the population. We technical types are working with magic; dark and powerful magic; hence the dark arts.
I find many people who have an "artistic" background simply don't understand us technical types. This lack of understanding seems to frustrate them. I think that technically minded people don't mind not knowing the details of other technical areas, as they know that they could learn them if they cared to. But for artistic types they see technical stuff as a dark art. This leads to a huge source of frustration when they have to step into our area such as working a ticket kiosk, their laptops, their home router, the dashboard in their cars, or write articles about things like thorium reactors.
After a while they start to think that the various bad interface designs are a conspiracy against them; this is only compounded when a technical type reaches over and helps them with a flick of a single switch, and when asked why couldn't it have been designed better it becomes obvious that the technical person is hunting for a way to not say, "They assumed that you had at least a double digit IQ." and then it becomes hatred.
Another source of frustration is the implied knowledge that the world could get by with far far fewer artists but not with far fewer engineers. It might be a less colourful world but the engines of civilization need engineers.
A lesser known fact involving the economics of electric cars is that by using electricity you typically are using a locally generated energy source. If this is combined with renewable energy sources such as solar panels on your house the economics become even more interesting. The key to all this being that money normally spent "fueling" traditional vehicles often leaves the country or even the continent completely. By switching to a more local source of energy this money is freed to be potentially spent on local goods. While this sucks for the oil producing areas and countries it really works for the vast majority of countries that import massive amounts of vehicle fuel.
The above only applies to those areas that are able to source their energy locally.
Why this economic fact is important is that it must be taken into consideration when looking at the cost of improving the grid or even putting solar on people's houses. The benefits of not exporting your money can easily outweigh a fairly sizable margin in the cost of fueling the vehicles.
Some small countries with bounties of sun and no fossil fuels will really win when the combination of cheaper batteries and better solar cells become available.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the concept of an oil war will be gone in 20 years.
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I had a basic Casio (until my daughter made off with it) that sat on my desk beside my TI-89. For quick calculations I much preferred the Casio with its large clear numbers and nicer buttons. Plus it did various higher mathematical things fairly well. The key though is to read the manual as doing somethings such as working with polynomials was just weird.
I think that I will go buy another as I do miss it.
The thing that amazes me about Germany's solar is that they have accomplished so much while being quite close to the North Pole. They seem to know that every watt not Generated by imported fuel is a boon to their economy as that money can circulate at least one more time before leaving. One thing that many people don't connect is that Germany began their quest for alternate energy shortly after a dispute between Russia and the Ukraine nearly cut off all their natural gas. I suspect that they had an all hands on board meeting where they said, this can't happen again, we must not be dependent on any single external resource like that.
Exactly, and very boring. Not going to make Drudge in a zillion years. But to an economist probably very exciting.
The key is that far less money now leaves Germany to go to various oil producing countries. So if you don't save money on the surface when you dig deep you will find that keeping the money circulating in your own economy is far better for your economy. This is why the US economy, despite its many structural problems, will thrive over the next decade due to the huge increase in domestic oil production combined with greater fuel economy. That is the US will send far less money to the middle east, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc, while keeping it domestically.
I would much rather see the money go to something like a darpa challenge. This way anybody can join the party. The reality in the US is that a few well lobbied organizations will scoop up all that money. But then they will have to spend it on making reports and whatnot to show that they spent it properly. In Canada if they had a battery project, all the money would go to a few politically connected companies in either Quebec or in the Ottawa area.
I love when something thinks that they "own" their human capital and then that capital gets up and leaves. This is a story that I wish would happen on a daily basis.
The Germans are spending tens of Billions getting batteries into homes to smooth out solar power. Their idea is simple; by encouraging people to actually buy the stuff it will create a market and get the companies moving on research and development. I am willing to bet that 90% of the American money will go to a select group of companies and universities that lobbied hard for that money. Then over the next few years we will read in Popular Science and here on Slashdot about "BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH! New battery tech is 100x better and 100x cheaper!!!" but when you read the article it will be a pile of hype over a test-tube battery that is the size of a postage stamp that can barely power an LED and requires 3 hours of CERN LHC time to make.
The real (boring) article will be about a German factory employing 8,000 people that is selling 3 billion in home batteries per year that work quite well and provide good value to their customers.
I really really really hate apps that try to pull stunts like grabbing GPS data when they don't need it, call home for no reason that benefits me, or runs when I didn't run it.
The worst apps that I frequently see are the crap ones that the phone companies seem to put on Android phones. The bastards who make those apps know that people hate them because they make them near impossible to remove.
The other good reason to uninstall an app is when they push in-app-purchases way too hard. I don't know how many apps that I have installed where the "free" app was basically worthless without the IAP.
The last reason that I frequently uninstall an app is when it makes me uselessly create an account. I don't understand this as 100% of the time I either use mailinator.com or a crap hotmail address along with the most crude and insulting usernames possible. These MBA people must not check to see if their 100,000 users are mostly fake and that the 100,000 emails they sent to the users were read more by their own marketing people than actual users.
I would love to see the breakdown(ha ha) by brands. But I would also like to see if they had temperature variations or power cycling stats.
Does a HD that is always on last for more or fewer hours? Ideal temperature? And a hard one to test, vibrations.
I have wanted to love wxWidgets but I keep going back to QT. Now that QT is allowing you to port to Android and iOS I am not sure that I will ever take another crack at WX.
Other multi platform GUI'ish things that I like are OpenFrameworks (main complaint is that it runs hot) and cocos2d-x which allowed me to turf Objective-C on iOS.
This is where capacity becomes interesting. Nearly all the cars that people drive to work then spend the day just sitting there. If enough hire cars were available to drive everyone at rush hour they would them mostly sit idle for the day. In theory then most car companies would then have to charge almost as much to drive you to work as it would for you to own the car outright.
Thus for commuting the robot car would have to be something different to reduce ownership. Something like mini-buses that people would call for the ultimate in car pooling.
The driverless advantages for commuters will probably be somewhat different. Traffic is largely slowed to the pace of the worst drivers (including a stop from accidents) plus driverless cars should result in much higher speed limits if any limits continue to exist. Again with no crap drivers and higher limits traffic should flow far faster; plus with near bumper to bumper driving the capacity of existing roads should be much higher.
So a commuter might still have to own their car but will be able to travel faster and with far less stress. This last is important as it has be discovered that driving stress is some of the worst to the continuously variable nature of driving. It isn't the same guy cutting you off; and while traffic patterns are fairly regular it isn't enough to become something you can ignore. For instance how much have you fumed as you slowly drove past mile after mile of construction cones only to find few construction workers effectively doing nothing? Or the thousand other petty stresses of driving at rush hour. With driverless cars you will pull out your book, sleep, or catch up on Breaking Bad.
That said, there will be a reduction through the simple fact that the care hire companies can dedicate near 100% of their fleet to commuters during rush hour. Plus another reduction since you can potentially share a car with other people after commuting. This doesn't really work if your commute is huge but a 15 minute commute would not preclude sending the car home for the kids to use or a spouse with different working hours.
As I said, for urban car owners driverless cars will certainly result in much lower car ownership. For suburban car owners maybe/maybe not and for rural car owners probably not much change at all.
If all the cars on the road are driverless then the car companies will probably start giving away full liability as part of the purchase. They will have a full record of any accident with all the cameras and whatnot plus an active interest in analyzing any accident so as to upgrade their software to prevent it from happening again. Plus driverless cars will basically stop causing accidents pushing the laws to eliminate the fundamentally homicidal act of driving a manual car. All that will be left to insure will be fire/theft/trees falling so your car will need about as much insurance as your woodshed. This does not bode well for the car insurance industry as even theft will be significantly reduced if the cars are heavily computerized.
But the other factor will be that for many urban people cheaper and driverless taxis will reduce car ownership. It probably won't eliminate it but a two or three car family might drop to a single car.
Personally my limited driving pretty well justifies switching to all taxis right now so if taxis plummeted in price then it would be a no brainer.
The question of driverless cars is not even a when; now I wonder how long before the last person gets a automobile driver's license in North America?
There is a twitter account that I have wanted for a long time. I rounded up a bunch of friends to report it for spam as its only posting from a long time ago is a "Make money fast" posting. But nope, they haven't done a thing about it. I suspect that it is a "live" account. My guess is that if they were to go through and kill all the dead accounts they would be facing incorrect headlines such as "Users abandoning Twitter, 10% lost in this month alone."
In many ways it is going to be the third world that loses the most due to robots. In that we will have robots do what we are presently having the third world do. Farmers in my area (far from any source of illegals) complain that they can't get people to work the fields. The end result is that lower cost produce that can be grown locally ends up being imported. The same with manufacturing. We don't want to make things far away, we just want them made cheaply. But again as my point shows, a robot has an advantage of making things reliably. Thus you are not just looking at the wage vs ownership costs but you are looking at having a reliable product that doesn't lose you the occasional customer and get bad reviews.
But a whole other economic factor with localized automation is that you simplify and shorten the logistics chain. If you have to bid against the whole world for a distant product, then ship it through many ports and vehicles, and then finally deal with it locally you have many costs and risks that something will go wrong ranging from a shipping problem to the huge shipping delay giving you less flexibility when it comes to responding to market demand. For instance if you think pink is going to be the colour in vogue this spring the pink clothing had better be getting loaded on the ships right now and you had better be correct about pink being the colour. But if you are able to robotically manufacture it in a nearby business park you make what you need, shortly before when you need it and as you need it. So if pink turns out to be a bust you will have very little failed pink fashion to dispose of. Thus the cost of the robotics does not need to exactly match the human cost.
Then you get benefits such as local produce can be more frangible in that it does not need to be a tasteless variety that can ship halfway around the globe. Often the tastier varieties are shorter lived and can take less jostling.
And the most important thing of all is that money that doesn't leave your local economy is then has a chance to be spent at least one more time locally. This makes that money "worth" more. A good example of this right now will be the economic impact of the US becoming energy independent in the next few years. That is some huge number of billions not leaving the US for countries that the US doesn't even like that much.
But what dulls this economic benefit is that normally if local farms were to boom there would be a huge number of people employed. But this time around it will be mostly only those with the capital to buy the robots that will benefit. If anything employment numbers will go down as a very small number become fantastically wealthy.
I don't think that people realize the tsunami of change that is coming through automation. Basically if you do something repetitive and with a basic set of rules then your job is probably going bye bye. A list of jobs that comes to mind, almost all assembly line manufacturing, warehouse work, much in the way of machining, much in the way of welding, some construction such as many parts of the road construction business, cleaning, waiters, cooks, security, almost all of agriculture, things like baggage handling, most retail work such as stocking shelves, checkouts, and of course many driving jobs such as trucking, taxi, pizza delivery.
This all comes down to three simple questions, can it be done better, more reliably, and cheaper?
Each of these questions will have interesting twists. I suspect that in the above case of the robot trucks that they will occasionally screw up and not want to cross a puddle or some stupidity but that over all costs will drop and consistent productivity will be, on average, much higher. The same with say replacing a cook with a robot; it might not be better than the best cooks but as long as it is better than average, costs less, and the owner doesn't have to worry about it showing up on time then bye bye cooks.
But again the key is that robots will be so much better at certain things as to make them far more valuable then a simple spreadsheet analysis might indicate. In the case of a robot cook, if it is always preparing food in an extremely consistent way and always there then you might think that it isn't much better than a chef who only misses 2 days a year and only has 2 off days per year. But the reality is that an off day or a long wait due to a missing cook could kill off a few regular customers resulting in a much larger loss than the few nights directly impacted.
The next impact will be that robots have the ultimate case of OCD. So if you want you could have the robots go out into the field and pick the bugs, one at a time, off your plants. This is simply something that humans won't do as they would lose their minds. The same with things like cooking. A robot could place exactly 23 onions onto a certain dish placed in (artistically designed) exacting locations. A table in the restaurant could be told that their meals will be ready in 6 minutes 3 seconds as the chef has plotted the temperatures of the meat and knows exactly how long each step is going to take.
A simple example of this sort of variation having an impact can be observed with the medical helicopters that fly over my house. One of the pilots sets the collective wrong and the helicopter is noisy. He also is ponderous about leaving the helipad and flies fairly slowly. The other pilot lifts off and in one nice smooth movement turns, speeds up, retracts the gear, and is off like a flash. The landings are basically the same thing in reverse. I suspect the patient survival rates between the two pilots is very different.
I have the same thermocouples that they are using and those things are ferociously inefficient. So the question is how effective is the cooling effect as compared to the huge amount of heat that would pour off the other side of the thing? I am not saying that it doesn't work but their device does have the necessary heat sink which also might be a wee bit problematic in that it will be both warm and cumbersome.
I think that 3D printing is going to get interesting in that it will potentially allow an engineer to design a part, then hand it over to an artist and have the 3D software restrain the artist with certain parameters such as size, stress, mass, materials, etc. But then the artist can take, say, a very pedestrian looking hinge and make it a work of art all the while not increasing the cost or reducing the functionality.
Then the artist can hand it back to the engineer who will double check that the functionality has not been compromised.
The key to all this being that 3D printing a flatish surface that is 3 cubic inches will be nearly the same cost as printing a patterned or otherwise more intricate surface that is also 3 cubic inches.
I would love to have a technically minded on staff artist to make everything I build more beautiful.
But if during a plague I had the choice between having a population of vaccine experts and a population of poets I know which I would prefer. But a healthy society ideally can manage to support both.
I know a guy who did his architecture thesis on the problem of most architects being only artists and not engineers. There is a famous story attributed to many architects where a couple had a fancy house designed by a famous architect and it leaked horribly. So they called him to the house and with the plans on a table near a huge puddle on the marble floor out asked him to fix it. So he folded the plans into a paper boat and floated it on the puddle saying, I am an artist not a contractor.
If they get rid of what works the next thing you know the Pentagon will prioritize the capture of the rebel leader Louis Riel before the Saskatchewan Rebellion spreads to the central US.
Testing and feature prioritization, how innovative! I am actually not being sarcastic. So many big projects push testing off as a "waste of resources" and absolutely don't prioritize features. For instance I don't know how many government web sites have a "Message from the ...(fill in organization head)" front and center of the front page of the website. I am willing to bet that less than 1% of people actually click on that. Then after that you often find news about awards and other ribbon cutting crap that the leaders feature in. And hidden away in the corners are the stuff that people actually want.
So with so many projects you have too many cooks who have their own internal priorities and the result is the wonderful British expression, A Dog's Breakfast.
It doesn't even need to be a crime. In Britain I believe the moat repair was a legitimate expense. But under government information control it would be released under some bland category such as "Maintaining constituency premises" but when people found out it was for a moat repair they humiliated the guy in the press every day.
Recently the premier of Ontario was chiding a consultant of some sort for billing the province 91 cents for parking when they are paying him over $500,000 per year. Her suggestion was that his expense was legitimate but showed that his heart was in the wrong place.
To me you can only have true democracy if the government can't hide anything. I think that the freedom of information act should cover basically everything including phone calls. There might be a few areas where privacy may be for a greater good in areas like personal medical records; as people might not get treatment for embarrassing diseases. Even military secrecy needs to be cut way back so as to avoid stupid things like the F-35 project.
Over and over governments have fallen and change has been driven when secrets become known. This is because information is the only real source of power. Controlling what information gets out, and what information you have is real power. Any person who has been in government or even a large organization quickly realizes this and those who thrive in these organizations have taken this to heart.
So this is why governments spend so much effort in "massaging" information and are happy to have things kept secret for a hundred different reasons such as "privacy" or "security" but the simple truth is that once the population has this information they now have the power and this is the scariest of all scenarios for people who want power.
As I said, just look at the history of leaks, in the UK you had ministers that were terrible and people wanted them gone, yet they not only stayed but were regularly re-elected because people didn't have the solid information that could sway an electorate. Then the expenses scandal came out with solid information about people lying, cheating, and repairing their moats and in a flash they were gone. Prior to the leak the public was fed a filtered version of the MP expenses. In the US you had Nixon get turfed from office when he lost control of the information. The key being concrete evidence of what was happening in the oval office. The media loves their dueling opinions but people can tell the differences between narrative, opinion, and cold hard facts. I very much doubt these bozos care one iota about the whole protecting the country part of these revelations but they do care about losing their ability to spy on anyone who is making them look bad or getting in the way of their rich friends. And they really hate the fact that these revelations prove them to be liars themselves.
But the worst part for these people is that the media is no longer just a few media barons that they can be clubby with. In years past they may very well have been able to keep a lid on this through that alone. But now the traditional media is no longer local. So even if none of the press in one country runs a story other countries' press cores will and then there are the million micro media sites. They will all run with anything they can get their hands on.
I love it!
You are correct. I am referring to the perception of many artistic types, especially literary types; so I agree and would state that good programmers are technicians whereas great programmers are artists. If anything it is the patterns within this art that allow us to fluently use a device that we have never seen before that was handed to us by someone who was unable to even turn it on. We all know that rebooting solves so many problems and can even hazard guesses as to what is happening but still proceed with the incantation of reboot everything.
But where non-technical people start to get suspicious is when we start to combine different knowledge areas. I was at a person's house when they spilled pop into their keyboard which stopped working. So I immediately unplugged it and ran it under a tap, then swung it around my head, then poured rubbing alcohol into it, then swung it around my head a bit more, then put it into a garbage bag with a half box of cheap rice, and then told them to leave it there overnight. They thought that I had gone quite mad.
I explained that even getting the pop out would not be enough because the sugar would concentrate and gum up the keys plus the phosphoric acid would probably do a number on the circuits over the next few days, plus the solution would conduct electricity, while the water would wash away the pop, and the alcohol would displace the water, not rust the circuits, and evaporate more quickly, the rice would then speed up the evaporation of any water that was left behind.
They were incredulous that a programmer could know so much electronics, physics and chemistry.
The next day it was with smug satisfaction that when they plugged the keyboard back in that it didn't work. I came by knowing that it should and found that they had plugged it into the network port. It worked plus it was cleaner than ever.
The saying that any technology sufficiently advanced will appear to be magic seems to apply now to a fair chunk of the population. We technical types are working with magic; dark and powerful magic; hence the dark arts.
I find many people who have an "artistic" background simply don't understand us technical types. This lack of understanding seems to frustrate them. I think that technically minded people don't mind not knowing the details of other technical areas, as they know that they could learn them if they cared to. But for artistic types they see technical stuff as a dark art. This leads to a huge source of frustration when they have to step into our area such as working a ticket kiosk, their laptops, their home router, the dashboard in their cars, or write articles about things like thorium reactors.
After a while they start to think that the various bad interface designs are a conspiracy against them; this is only compounded when a technical type reaches over and helps them with a flick of a single switch, and when asked why couldn't it have been designed better it becomes obvious that the technical person is hunting for a way to not say, "They assumed that you had at least a double digit IQ." and then it becomes hatred.
Another source of frustration is the implied knowledge that the world could get by with far far fewer artists but not with far fewer engineers. It might be a less colourful world but the engines of civilization need engineers.
A lesser known fact involving the economics of electric cars is that by using electricity you typically are using a locally generated energy source. If this is combined with renewable energy sources such as solar panels on your house the economics become even more interesting. The key to all this being that money normally spent "fueling" traditional vehicles often leaves the country or even the continent completely. By switching to a more local source of energy this money is freed to be potentially spent on local goods. While this sucks for the oil producing areas and countries it really works for the vast majority of countries that import massive amounts of vehicle fuel.
The above only applies to those areas that are able to source their energy locally.
Why this economic fact is important is that it must be taken into consideration when looking at the cost of improving the grid or even putting solar on people's houses. The benefits of not exporting your money can easily outweigh a fairly sizable margin in the cost of fueling the vehicles.
Some small countries with bounties of sun and no fossil fuels will really win when the combination of cheaper batteries and better solar cells become available.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the concept of an oil war will be gone in 20 years.