There are four things government is in a position to do better than anyone else: military defense, law enforcement, public works, and the erosion of liberty.
I don't know, the experience with company towns makes me think big business can do erosion of liberty on par with the government and with greater efficiency.
1.) There's not a lot of "optimizing" to be done since they overlap in most areas already. 2.) Sprint is a mixture of CDMA and LTE. T-Mobile is a mixture of GSM (HSPA) and a smattering of LTE. That's plenty of different technologies to support which means you might not even be able to ditch your overlapping tower leases, which is the main cost savings when consolidating carriers. 3.) Why do you think Sprint and T-Mobile are significantly cheaper than AT&T and Verizon? Because they spend much less on their networks, especially once you get outside the big cities. If Google were to actually improve their networks to the point of being competitive with the "big two," they couldn't afford to offer plans at these prices.
I think of optimizing as:
* Sunset CDMA support. Gone in 18 months. Shift everything to GSM/LTE. T-Mobile's network is there already, Sprint halfway. Too bad so sad for low end consumers hanging onto CDMA devices. * In areas with maximal overlap, eliminating both CDMA and duplicated services may allow for better coverage in areas where both carriers have weaker coverage. If you can eliminate 40% of your coverage because its duplicated you should be able to expand your coverage by 20% at about the same cost basis. I don't think they would have to immediately become ATT/VZW sized in coverage, even small improvements would help.
4.) The last two times somebody tried to buy T-Mobile, (AT&T in 2011 and Sprint just last year - remember that?) the FCC smacked them down on anti-trust concerns over having only three nationwide carriers. Not likely to change, especially given that Google has its own anti-trust issues from time to time...
Depends on how Google did it. I think if they did it with transparency as a wholly-owned but independent subsidiary that was device and service agnostic (ie, not favoring Android or Google products) and did it with the same kind of "new pricing model" fanfare they might gain some traction. I think people are almost as sick of cell phone gouging as they are of cable gouging and there may be some approval for a combination that was poised to break the model. Just combining Sprint and T-Mobile as yet another cell phone company operating the same way as ever isn't appealing. Creating a real competitor doing this differently is.
Google should just buy Sprint and T-Mobile, merge their networks to optimize their coverage footprints and backhaul and then sell this plan to anyone and any device.
Is it biology and psychopharmacology that are the limits on our drug development or is it some kind of bullshit puritanism that's opposed to success/wins/gains without the concomitant misery and suffering?
The drugs we have for feeling good, being productive, or increasing our sociability are just OK at best and kind of shitty at worst. The "productive" drugs (amphetamines, anti-narcoleptics, cocaine) tend to be somewhat-to-a-lot addictive and can produce psychosis and/or overdose death at the shitty end of the spectrum. The feel-good drugs (tranquilizers, barbiturates, opiates) also tend to be addictive, potentially deadly or induce depression. Sociability drugs are a mess, too -- alcohol, MDMA, cocaine all have serious drawbacks.
Of all the common drugs, only marijuana seems to escape most of the problems, although it has a habit-forming potential which will keep you stuck in mom's basement being a slug and watching Netflix or playing Xbox.
Why aren't we developing improved drugs that solve these problems -- reduce the risk of dependence, prevent overdose, basically provide as much of the desired effect with as little drawbacks as possible so that we don't have to have a ridiculous control regime, prisons, health problems, etc and people can take them as desired for their benefits without any significant downsides?
Provide a limited marginal utility of amount -- ie, the first N units provide most of the effect, taking more is just a waste because the effect tops out. I think Butalbital sort of does this by including low doses of naloxone, so that if its injected the naloxone inhibits the opioid effect. Couple this with a limited useful frequency -- the longer it has been since you last used the drug, the greater the effect, and the more often you take it decreases the effect.
I'm too lazy to add anchor tags, but here are some references for you.
The UCDavis study is the best description of this -- when actually tested in scenarios designed to expose false positive results, that's EXACTLY what happened -- the dogs alerted in every place they shouldn't have and where the handler was given cues that the dogs would alert, the dogs were MORE likely to alert.
This is a huge problem with using dogs. It's not that dogs aren't good at sniff detection, its that dogs are so inclined to please their handlers that even when the handlers aren't purposefully lying they are still signaling their dogs that they should find something. So how do you separate out the dog actually sniffing out drugs versus the experienced profiling of the handler who expects their target to have drugs, gets a false alert from the dog and then discovers drugs from a hand search?
I don't think we CAN know if it was a legitimate signal from the dog or just the officer's experience that $Socialtype or $MinorityMember is very likely to have drugs.
It gets much, much worse if you take away the assumption that the cops/handler are 100% honest all the time. Do you really think that there isn't even some deliberate dishonesty with dogs? The worst outcome for the cops has been "well, the dog knows you had something in here but since I didn't find anything I'll let you go". The best outcome for the cops is that they get away with an illegal search that results in an arrest and conviction based on a dog's behavior that is beyond question, because, you know, dogs are so good at sniffing and its "a well established tool in our legal system and for good reason."
I've been saying that for a decade now - the middle class as we know it today essentially didn't exist within living memory. (That's changing as the Greatest Generation dies off, but my point stands.) It's a product of the post-WWII explosion in technology and consumer demand. But it's the set of conditions that most living Westerners grew up in, and thus they take it for granted that it's theirs by right.
I would back date the origin to something closer to the late 19th century as urbanization and cities grew. You had increasing agricultural efficiency allowing more people to live away from the land and more and larger business organizations that required "white collar" jobs to manage the organization -- clerks, accountants, record-keepers, etc.
You might make an argument that could possibly stretch this kind of middle-class into the 18th century but the further back you go the fewer large business organizations you have requiring the kind of white collar employee base to make them run.
[...]. not automation (robots, etc... what's usually thought of as automation), but the microprocessor revolution. High skill jobs, formerly requiring college trained professionals (engineers and accountants for example), have vanished at a frightening rate.
I'm kind of using the generic term of automation versus specific technologies that physically automate mechanical tasks, such as robots. The PC is the biggest automater -- I heard a fascinating podcast on the development of the spreadsheet application. They interviewed retired accountants describing the work involved in creating paper spreadsheets for very basic cost modeling, the kind of thing that would be a 1 hour throwaway task in Excel now. IIRC, they even interviewed an accountant who was an early PC spreadsheet adopter that managed to make huge money charging for the time to do it the old fashioned way when he was really doing it on a computer, billing a dozen hours of work for an hour of actual labor with a PC.
That was short lived, but a great example of how PCs in many ways decimated a field as a single accountant could now do the work of many. I think they said that long-term it didn't hurt that much because as the ease of which you could create sophisticated models in PC applications became understood, the same number of accountants were now doing vastly more complex accounting jobs.
Ironically, I think the increasing sophistication of business modeling has had a side effect of making businesses much more efficient and allowed them to cut costs, including a lot of jobs.
But who's making money off those smartphone games at $1 a pop? All we hear about is how nobody makes money on them.
I've heard more than a few serious economists (ie, real academics who aren't mass-media brand names) sound kind of nervous about automation's role in shrinking the number of jobs. Few of them seem ready to entirely disown the notion that automating one set of tasks frees up labor for new economic expansions where the tasks can't be easily automated.
Where they seem to get nervous is over the fact that the jobs increasingly eliminated by automation are jobs that previously required a lot of education and were high wage, white collar jobs. And they're not being replaced by new jobs of the same type, they're being replaced by low-wage jobs that require hard to automate manual skills -- when they're being replaced at all.
The new high wage white collar jobs being produced often require the kind of extensive training and experience extremely difficult for mid-career professionals to obtain, which is compounded by the rate of jobs being automated.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the notion of a broad middle class is a kind of historical accident caused by the confluence of growth in technology, wide and cheap resource availability and high labor demand. We may be nearing the end of the middle class as we've known it and mostly like it, and returning to a more historical pattern of broad poverty and narrow wealth.
I'm spoiled because back in my university days, I worked as a projectionist at a revival house for seven years and got the most thorough education in film history one could ever hope for.
Minneapolis had a theater like that, the Uptown. New schedule came out every month, and a good chunk of the month was different movies on different days, sometimes even different movies at different showings. Occasionally there would be a theme (eg, Tommy and Quadrophenia in one evening) and once in a blue moon a movie would span a weekend if it was new/popular. The movies were all manner of genres, from foreign to documentary to arthouse (Jim Jarmusch, etc) to revival showings. Quite often the films shown were unobtainable on VHS. Rocky Horror at midnight on the weekends.
And it was a great theater, interior-wise -- very art deco and with a balcony you could still use (my favorite spot, the railing was a great footrest). The audio was just OK but the projection was good.
The theater is still there, but its kind of the first run theater for an arthouse chain and shows usually one movie for a week or so, usually a bigger release film.
While I'm sure there are some people who use the current crop of PCIe SSDs to max out databases, builds or whatever, the number of people for whom it makes a real difference is pretty small. For the overwhelming number of people there's just another, different bottleneck they're now hitting or the speed difference isn't noticeable.
It currently seems to be hitting a bit of a benchmark-mania where people run disk benchmarks just for the numbers without any actual improvement in usable performance in most areas.
Obviously there are roads and common areas to take into consideration, but that seems really huge. My entire lot size is 6500 square feet with about a 1100 sq ft. foundation house (2000 sq ft finished) sitting on it. That 6500 sq ft. includes driveway, garage, yard, basically everything I have title to.
These properties don't sound like "affordable" houses at all, it sounds like solidly middle class for most areas and probably luxurious for that area. I would generally expect an "affordable" development to have much higher density.
Apple is also purported to be building their own electric car, but I don't think either Apple or Google want to be in the car *manufacturing* business. That is messy, labor/union intensive and involves a whole lot of engineering and regulatory crap they know nothing about.
They want to be suppliers to whoever IS building the cars. Building your own skunkworks vehicle gives you a shiny to show off but more importantly gives you a lot of engineering exposure to the internals that you wouldn't know about otherwise.
The ISP service is mostly a race to the bottom without the ability to manipulate the market via monopoly power, including blocking competition at the local level, extorting content providers you don't own to pay you for service delivery (a second time, really, since you already billed your customer for delivery of bits).
TV service via cable is a dead business. Streaming is killing it and if Comcast, et al, wasn't choking high speed Internet and restricting content providers from streaming their own content it would be dying even faster. HBO is already escaping this market.
Content is where the money is, but even there you have to wonder. It doesn't take a whole lot of realignment at the content creation level to leave NBC-Universal in a bidding war with Netflix for new shows. If Netflix or Amazon can come to the production house with the same sized check as a network, why should the show go on a network?
I don't know why the north couldn't grow its own fruit and vegetables in those high tech vertical hydroponic gardens that use LED lighting. It might actually be a wash with the cost of shipping perishables and greatly cut what amounts to exporting water in the form of high-water-content agricultural products.
I think you're off base when it comes to avacados, aren't they supposed to be really good fats? Besides, fat isn't what makes you fat, it's bulk consumption of shit carbohydrates.
I imagine Facebook will eventually eliminate "Most Recent" as an option -- they really want to structure the feed like a TV channel, with content you want from your friends interspersed with a bunch of paid promotion junk content you can't avoid.
They don't even seem to respect "I don't want to see this..." now -- I have blocked "Timehop" (really, your post was dumb the first time around, it's no better 3 years later) a dozen times and it keeps showing up.
I wish it was somehow smarter about hiding categories of content.
My neighbor frequently shares pages/people's posts about New Agey kinds of food topics -- "10 reasons why boiled kale improves your aura". I use the "Hide all from Melanie Stargazer" option to block it, but there doesn't seem to be a way to train Facebook to block other similar pages/content types.
My guess is many of these shares are from people trying to make a career out of being digital holistic gurus of some kind and pay Facebook to promote their posts. But I wish I could train it to identify this category of post and just never see it again.
I also feel like I've blocked countless radio station shares, which must also be paying to promote their content. But I don't want to see clickbait from "101.3 The Wave" or any other station I've never heard of.
Still another is the mass tag shared post, often from an organization/entity -- "Foo Bar with Manny Smith and 47 others". I'm pretty sure the mass tagging is done to develop maximum exposure, but it seems to abuse the putative social intent of tagging a post as identifying people actually with the poster.
Yet another annoyance is the phenomenon of people posting replies that contain ONLY people's names as tags. Occasionally I want to see the comments to a post, but often the majority are just name tagging. There should be a way to hide those so that only the people tagged and/or their friends (depending on security settings) see them.
I'm not sure why the submitter/story takes a conspiratorial tone about surge pricing but then proceeds to basically explain that surge pricing successfully solves two of three scarcity problems.
The most immediate way to increase supply is to reallocate available resources to where demand is higher. You WANT cars on the road now to go where there is greater demand.
Price increaes help reduce demand from people with lower priority travel requirements and allow those with higher priority travel obtain transportation by allowing them to use willingness to pay a signal of their greater needs.
The only thing it appears to be failing at is increasing the aggregate supply. Uber many need to provide an additional incentive to draw in inactive drivers, like some kind of bonus for drivers inactive for the N previous hours to become active again (such as guaranteeing at least one surge priced fare if surge pricing stops before they can obtain a fare within some time window, even if Uber has to cover the differential).
The only conspiracy in my mind with surge pricing would be if Uber enables it WITHOUT a concurrent increase in demand. If they are just enabling it because its raining even if there's no increase in demand, they're just opportunistically increasing fares. I might buy into the notion that they may be predictively enabling surge pricing IF they coud produce the data that says that some event X results in a Y percent demand increase historically; in that case they may actually be signalling additional supply and doing some good.
The beer may have been better over there 30 years ago, but there's no way that's true now. In most places in the US you can't swing a dead cat without hitting half a dozen craft brewers making outstanding beer. You literally can't sample what's available in liquor stores fast enough and a lot of it is really good.
I don't know if this is a trend that has been embraced by Ireland or not, but I would imagine that in many Irish brands suffer from what many "traditional" European beer brands are no different than most American beer brands -- owned by conglomerates, brewed on industrial scales. Maybe it makes you feel more exclusive to drink Harp over Buweiser, but I'm pretty sure its moslty psychological.
They're not as fast as these drives but it looks to me like flash vendors are kind of inventing a new category of benchmarking stroke artistry around storage.
I can't even begin to imagine what usage advantage is to be gained from some of these over the more traditional SATA SSDs outside of very marginal activities, except for benchmark chasers.
Argentina really only has its internal politics to blame. Unlike the rest of Latin America, they weren't just a hacienda for United Fruit agricultural exports, they had a large, Eurocentric population (and in the first half of the 20th century, probably a European *educated* population) and a reasonable basis for creating a self-sustaining internal economy neither overdependent nor incapable of exports or imports.
Extractive economies, especially oil states, never seem to use the financial windfall to develop non-oil economies. It's almost always used for dubious modernization efforts (ie, building underutilized skyscraper cities), buying poltiical loyalty, building up an unsustainable and outsized military or subsidizing prices for staple foods, fuel and substandard housing.
All of these probably have convincing arguments -- you can't attract business without modern office space (and bonus, we get to develop a construction sector that can build more than cinderblock and tin shacks), you need political stability to develop an economy, you need military security from your neighbor (plus developing military bases furthers your construction industry goals, making weapons improves your manufacturing base), and making food, fuel and housing available *now* is both popular and a humanist policy.
But they almost never develop sustainable *economies* that do anything else. I can't think of one thing Saudi Arabia does besides sell oil and they have probably taken in a trillion dollars in profit. Given quite literally "more money than God" why haven't they been able to buy their way into pharma, water purification, semiconductors, information technology, polymers, agriculture, shipbuilding, or any other industry that has grown up in the last 75 years? They have been politically stable, have good trade relations with the West and are at the geographic crossroads between the East and West.
Yet all they have to show for it is a bloated aristocracy, ridiculous overbuilt cities, a high tech military they can barely operate let alone fix or make parts for.
I think the fear aspect is hard to over state, especially if a threat of violence is made and especially if the threat of violence is actually demonstrated with even the slightest show of *actual* violence coupled with an obvious power imbalence, like a larger, stronger man grabbing a woman by the neck.
I don't remember where I read it or even if it is actually true, but I have read that women's vaginas respond physically to accomodate intercourse even when they don't want it, some kind of leftover (well, leftover in a modern sense) mechanism to protect them from serious injury from forced intercourse.
If that's true, then the enitre response pattern I hypothesized about the woman I originally posted about makes sense and is believable.
I think strange, convulsive, politics could be a major component of this. Argentina in particular could have been on par with Western Europe if it wasn't for the poltiical insanity from the 1950s onward.
When they build tunnels for trains now, don't they use those giant boring machines that excavacte the tunnel and line it with concrete now? The machines I think are giant not because of the digging itself but because they're usually boring a tunnel big enough to run a parallel set of subway-sized cars through. Add in cathedral-sized chambers for regular stops and its easy to see why its so expensive.
What would happen if they scaled that same excavation technology down so that the tunnel was something like 2 meters in diamater for a miniature train capable of just carrying parcels? The trains could run on rubber wheels following the tunnel. The cars could be flatbeds that carry miniature containers which could be inserted and removed via basically elevator shafts that grabbed them from above, eliminating the need for significant excavations for stations.
Powering it would be another issue, but maybe they could be powered by battery packs swapped at container insertion points or some kind of induction power cable pulled through the tunnel.
Slashdot Mirror
There are four things government is in a position to do better than anyone else: military defense, law enforcement, public works, and the erosion of liberty.
I don't know, the experience with company towns makes me think big business can do erosion of liberty on par with the government and with greater efficiency.
1.) There's not a lot of "optimizing" to be done since they overlap in most areas already.
2.) Sprint is a mixture of CDMA and LTE. T-Mobile is a mixture of GSM (HSPA) and a smattering of LTE. That's plenty of different technologies to support which means you might not even be able to ditch your overlapping tower leases, which is the main cost savings when consolidating carriers.
3.) Why do you think Sprint and T-Mobile are significantly cheaper than AT&T and Verizon? Because they spend much less on their networks, especially once you get outside the big cities. If Google were to actually improve their networks to the point of being competitive with the "big two," they couldn't afford to offer plans at these prices.
I think of optimizing as:
* Sunset CDMA support. Gone in 18 months. Shift everything to GSM/LTE. T-Mobile's network is there already, Sprint halfway. Too bad so sad for low end consumers hanging onto CDMA devices.
* In areas with maximal overlap, eliminating both CDMA and duplicated services may allow for better coverage in areas where both carriers have weaker coverage. If you can eliminate 40% of your coverage because its duplicated you should be able to expand your coverage by 20% at about the same cost basis. I don't think they would have to immediately become ATT/VZW sized in coverage, even small improvements would help.
4.) The last two times somebody tried to buy T-Mobile, (AT&T in 2011 and Sprint just last year - remember that?) the FCC smacked them down on anti-trust concerns over having only three nationwide carriers. Not likely to change, especially given that Google has its own anti-trust issues from time to time...
Depends on how Google did it. I think if they did it with transparency as a wholly-owned but independent subsidiary that was device and service agnostic (ie, not favoring Android or Google products) and did it with the same kind of "new pricing model" fanfare they might gain some traction. I think people are almost as sick of cell phone gouging as they are of cable gouging and there may be some approval for a combination that was poised to break the model. Just combining Sprint and T-Mobile as yet another cell phone company operating the same way as ever isn't appealing. Creating a real competitor doing this differently is.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
That's great, but you were too soft on millennials. .
Google should just buy Sprint and T-Mobile, merge their networks to optimize their coverage footprints and backhaul and then sell this plan to anyone and any device.
That was covered in a Black Mirror episode where you were punished for not watching advertisements.
Is it biology and psychopharmacology that are the limits on our drug development or is it some kind of bullshit puritanism that's opposed to success/wins/gains without the concomitant misery and suffering?
The drugs we have for feeling good, being productive, or increasing our sociability are just OK at best and kind of shitty at worst. The "productive" drugs (amphetamines, anti-narcoleptics, cocaine) tend to be somewhat-to-a-lot addictive and can produce psychosis and/or overdose death at the shitty end of the spectrum. The feel-good drugs (tranquilizers, barbiturates, opiates) also tend to be addictive, potentially deadly or induce depression. Sociability drugs are a mess, too -- alcohol, MDMA, cocaine all have serious drawbacks.
Of all the common drugs, only marijuana seems to escape most of the problems, although it has a habit-forming potential which will keep you stuck in mom's basement being a slug and watching Netflix or playing Xbox.
Why aren't we developing improved drugs that solve these problems -- reduce the risk of dependence, prevent overdose, basically provide as much of the desired effect with as little drawbacks as possible so that we don't have to have a ridiculous control regime, prisons, health problems, etc and people can take them as desired for their benefits without any significant downsides?
Provide a limited marginal utility of amount -- ie, the first N units provide most of the effect, taking more is just a waste because the effect tops out. I think Butalbital sort of does this by including low doses of naloxone, so that if its injected the naloxone inhibits the opioid effect. Couple this with a limited useful frequency -- the longer it has been since you last used the drug, the greater the effect, and the more often you take it decreases the effect.
Why aren't we creating better, safer drugs?
I'm too lazy to add anchor tags, but here are some references for you.
The UCDavis study is the best description of this -- when actually tested in scenarios designed to expose false positive results, that's EXACTLY what happened -- the dogs alerted in every place they shouldn't have and where the handler was given cues that the dogs would alert, the dogs were MORE likely to alert.
This is a huge problem with using dogs. It's not that dogs aren't good at sniff detection, its that dogs are so inclined to please their handlers that even when the handlers aren't purposefully lying they are still signaling their dogs that they should find something. So how do you separate out the dog actually sniffing out drugs versus the experienced profiling of the handler who expects their target to have drugs, gets a false alert from the dog and then discovers drugs from a hand search?
I don't think we CAN know if it was a legitimate signal from the dog or just the officer's experience that $Socialtype or $MinorityMember is very likely to have drugs.
It gets much, much worse if you take away the assumption that the cops/handler are 100% honest all the time. Do you really think that there isn't even some deliberate dishonesty with dogs? The worst outcome for the cops has been "well, the dog knows you had something in here but since I didn't find anything I'll let you go". The best outcome for the cops is that they get away with an illegal search that results in an arrest and conviction based on a dog's behavior that is beyond question, because, you know, dogs are so good at sniffing and its "a well established tool in our legal system and for good reason."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/w...
http://www.cato.org/blog/cleve...
I've been saying that for a decade now - the middle class as we know it today essentially didn't exist within living memory. (That's changing as the Greatest Generation dies off, but my point stands.) It's a product of the post-WWII explosion in technology and consumer demand. But it's the set of conditions that most living Westerners grew up in, and thus they take it for granted that it's theirs by right.
I would back date the origin to something closer to the late 19th century as urbanization and cities grew. You had increasing agricultural efficiency allowing more people to live away from the land and more and larger business organizations that required "white collar" jobs to manage the organization -- clerks, accountants, record-keepers, etc.
You might make an argument that could possibly stretch this kind of middle-class into the 18th century but the further back you go the fewer large business organizations you have requiring the kind of white collar employee base to make them run.
[...]. not automation (robots, etc... what's usually thought of as automation), but the microprocessor revolution. High skill jobs, formerly requiring college trained professionals (engineers and accountants for example), have vanished at a frightening rate.
I'm kind of using the generic term of automation versus specific technologies that physically automate mechanical tasks, such as robots. The PC is the biggest automater -- I heard a fascinating podcast on the development of the spreadsheet application. They interviewed retired accountants describing the work involved in creating paper spreadsheets for very basic cost modeling, the kind of thing that would be a 1 hour throwaway task in Excel now. IIRC, they even interviewed an accountant who was an early PC spreadsheet adopter that managed to make huge money charging for the time to do it the old fashioned way when he was really doing it on a computer, billing a dozen hours of work for an hour of actual labor with a PC.
That was short lived, but a great example of how PCs in many ways decimated a field as a single accountant could now do the work of many. I think they said that long-term it didn't hurt that much because as the ease of which you could create sophisticated models in PC applications became understood, the same number of accountants were now doing vastly more complex accounting jobs.
Ironically, I think the increasing sophistication of business modeling has had a side effect of making businesses much more efficient and allowed them to cut costs, including a lot of jobs.
But who's making money off those smartphone games at $1 a pop? All we hear about is how nobody makes money on them.
I've heard more than a few serious economists (ie, real academics who aren't mass-media brand names) sound kind of nervous about automation's role in shrinking the number of jobs. Few of them seem ready to entirely disown the notion that automating one set of tasks frees up labor for new economic expansions where the tasks can't be easily automated.
Where they seem to get nervous is over the fact that the jobs increasingly eliminated by automation are jobs that previously required a lot of education and were high wage, white collar jobs. And they're not being replaced by new jobs of the same type, they're being replaced by low-wage jobs that require hard to automate manual skills -- when they're being replaced at all.
The new high wage white collar jobs being produced often require the kind of extensive training and experience extremely difficult for mid-career professionals to obtain, which is compounded by the rate of jobs being automated.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the notion of a broad middle class is a kind of historical accident caused by the confluence of growth in technology, wide and cheap resource availability and high labor demand. We may be nearing the end of the middle class as we've known it and mostly like it, and returning to a more historical pattern of broad poverty and narrow wealth.
I'm spoiled because back in my university days, I worked as a projectionist at a revival house for seven years and got the most thorough education in film history one could ever hope for.
Minneapolis had a theater like that, the Uptown. New schedule came out every month, and a good chunk of the month was different movies on different days, sometimes even different movies at different showings. Occasionally there would be a theme (eg, Tommy and Quadrophenia in one evening) and once in a blue moon a movie would span a weekend if it was new/popular. The movies were all manner of genres, from foreign to documentary to arthouse (Jim Jarmusch, etc) to revival showings. Quite often the films shown were unobtainable on VHS. Rocky Horror at midnight on the weekends.
And it was a great theater, interior-wise -- very art deco and with a balcony you could still use (my favorite spot, the railing was a great footrest). The audio was just OK but the projection was good.
The theater is still there, but its kind of the first run theater for an arthouse chain and shows usually one movie for a week or so, usually a bigger release film.
While I'm sure there are some people who use the current crop of PCIe SSDs to max out databases, builds or whatever, the number of people for whom it makes a real difference is pretty small. For the overwhelming number of people there's just another, different bottleneck they're now hitting or the speed difference isn't noticeable.
It currently seems to be hitting a bit of a benchmark-mania where people run disk benchmarks just for the numbers without any actual improvement in usable performance in most areas.
That works out to 10,000 square feet per home.
Obviously there are roads and common areas to take into consideration, but that seems really huge. My entire lot size is 6500 square feet with about a 1100 sq ft. foundation house (2000 sq ft finished) sitting on it. That 6500 sq ft. includes driveway, garage, yard, basically everything I have title to.
These properties don't sound like "affordable" houses at all, it sounds like solidly middle class for most areas and probably luxurious for that area. I would generally expect an "affordable" development to have much higher density.
Apple is also purported to be building their own electric car, but I don't think either Apple or Google want to be in the car *manufacturing* business. That is messy, labor/union intensive and involves a whole lot of engineering and regulatory crap they know nothing about.
They want to be suppliers to whoever IS building the cars. Building your own skunkworks vehicle gives you a shiny to show off but more importantly gives you a lot of engineering exposure to the internals that you wouldn't know about otherwise.
Love the idea, it will never happen.
The ISP service is mostly a race to the bottom without the ability to manipulate the market via monopoly power, including blocking competition at the local level, extorting content providers you don't own to pay you for service delivery (a second time, really, since you already billed your customer for delivery of bits).
TV service via cable is a dead business. Streaming is killing it and if Comcast, et al, wasn't choking high speed Internet and restricting content providers from streaming their own content it would be dying even faster. HBO is already escaping this market.
Content is where the money is, but even there you have to wonder. It doesn't take a whole lot of realignment at the content creation level to leave NBC-Universal in a bidding war with Netflix for new shows. If Netflix or Amazon can come to the production house with the same sized check as a network, why should the show go on a network?
I don't know why the north couldn't grow its own fruit and vegetables in those high tech vertical hydroponic gardens that use LED lighting. It might actually be a wash with the cost of shipping perishables and greatly cut what amounts to exporting water in the form of high-water-content agricultural products.
I think you're off base when it comes to avacados, aren't they supposed to be really good fats? Besides, fat isn't what makes you fat, it's bulk consumption of shit carbohydrates.
I imagine Facebook will eventually eliminate "Most Recent" as an option -- they really want to structure the feed like a TV channel, with content you want from your friends interspersed with a bunch of paid promotion junk content you can't avoid.
They don't even seem to respect "I don't want to see this..." now -- I have blocked "Timehop" (really, your post was dumb the first time around, it's no better 3 years later) a dozen times and it keeps showing up.
I wish it was somehow smarter about hiding categories of content.
My neighbor frequently shares pages/people's posts about New Agey kinds of food topics -- "10 reasons why boiled kale improves your aura". I use the "Hide all from Melanie Stargazer" option to block it, but there doesn't seem to be a way to train Facebook to block other similar pages/content types.
My guess is many of these shares are from people trying to make a career out of being digital holistic gurus of some kind and pay Facebook to promote their posts. But I wish I could train it to identify this category of post and just never see it again.
I also feel like I've blocked countless radio station shares, which must also be paying to promote their content. But I don't want to see clickbait from "101.3 The Wave" or any other station I've never heard of.
Still another is the mass tag shared post, often from an organization/entity -- "Foo Bar with Manny Smith and 47 others". I'm pretty sure the mass tagging is done to develop maximum exposure, but it seems to abuse the putative social intent of tagging a post as identifying people actually with the poster.
Yet another annoyance is the phenomenon of people posting replies that contain ONLY people's names as tags. Occasionally I want to see the comments to a post, but often the majority are just name tagging. There should be a way to hide those so that only the people tagged and/or their friends (depending on security settings) see them.
I'm not sure why the submitter/story takes a conspiratorial tone about surge pricing but then proceeds to basically explain that surge pricing successfully solves two of three scarcity problems.
The most immediate way to increase supply is to reallocate available resources to where demand is higher. You WANT cars on the road now to go where there is greater demand.
Price increaes help reduce demand from people with lower priority travel requirements and allow those with higher priority travel obtain transportation by allowing them to use willingness to pay a signal of their greater needs.
The only thing it appears to be failing at is increasing the aggregate supply. Uber many need to provide an additional incentive to draw in inactive drivers, like some kind of bonus for drivers inactive for the N previous hours to become active again (such as guaranteeing at least one surge priced fare if surge pricing stops before they can obtain a fare within some time window, even if Uber has to cover the differential).
The only conspiracy in my mind with surge pricing would be if Uber enables it WITHOUT a concurrent increase in demand. If they are just enabling it because its raining even if there's no increase in demand, they're just opportunistically increasing fares. I might buy into the notion that they may be predictively enabling surge pricing IF they coud produce the data that says that some event X results in a Y percent demand increase historically; in that case they may actually be signalling additional supply and doing some good.
The beer may have been better over there 30 years ago, but there's no way that's true now. In most places in the US you can't swing a dead cat without hitting half a dozen craft brewers making outstanding beer. You literally can't sample what's available in liquor stores fast enough and a lot of it is really good.
I don't know if this is a trend that has been embraced by Ireland or not, but I would imagine that in many Irish brands suffer from what many "traditional" European beer brands are no different than most American beer brands -- owned by conglomerates, brewed on industrial scales. Maybe it makes you feel more exclusive to drink Harp over Buweiser, but I'm pretty sure its moslty psychological.
Samsung 850 1 TB drives are about $0.38/GB.
They're not as fast as these drives but it looks to me like flash vendors are kind of inventing a new category of benchmarking stroke artistry around storage.
I can't even begin to imagine what usage advantage is to be gained from some of these over the more traditional SATA SSDs outside of very marginal activities, except for benchmark chasers.
Argentina really only has its internal politics to blame. Unlike the rest of Latin America, they weren't just a hacienda for United Fruit agricultural exports, they had a large, Eurocentric population (and in the first half of the 20th century, probably a European *educated* population) and a reasonable basis for creating a self-sustaining internal economy neither overdependent nor incapable of exports or imports.
Extractive economies, especially oil states, never seem to use the financial windfall to develop non-oil economies. It's almost always used for dubious modernization efforts (ie, building underutilized skyscraper cities), buying poltiical loyalty, building up an unsustainable and outsized military or subsidizing prices for staple foods, fuel and substandard housing.
All of these probably have convincing arguments -- you can't attract business without modern office space (and bonus, we get to develop a construction sector that can build more than cinderblock and tin shacks), you need political stability to develop an economy, you need military security from your neighbor (plus developing military bases furthers your construction industry goals, making weapons improves your manufacturing base), and making food, fuel and housing available *now* is both popular and a humanist policy.
But they almost never develop sustainable *economies* that do anything else. I can't think of one thing Saudi Arabia does besides sell oil and they have probably taken in a trillion dollars in profit. Given quite literally "more money than God" why haven't they been able to buy their way into pharma, water purification, semiconductors, information technology, polymers, agriculture, shipbuilding, or any other industry that has grown up in the last 75 years? They have been politically stable, have good trade relations with the West and are at the geographic crossroads between the East and West.
Yet all they have to show for it is a bloated aristocracy, ridiculous overbuilt cities, a high tech military they can barely operate let alone fix or make parts for.
I think the fear aspect is hard to over state, especially if a threat of violence is made and especially if the threat of violence is actually demonstrated with even the slightest show of *actual* violence coupled with an obvious power imbalence, like a larger, stronger man grabbing a woman by the neck.
I don't remember where I read it or even if it is actually true, but I have read that women's vaginas respond physically to accomodate intercourse even when they don't want it, some kind of leftover (well, leftover in a modern sense) mechanism to protect them from serious injury from forced intercourse.
If that's true, then the enitre response pattern I hypothesized about the woman I originally posted about makes sense and is believable.
I think strange, convulsive, politics could be a major component of this. Argentina in particular could have been on par with Western Europe if it wasn't for the poltiical insanity from the 1950s onward.
When they build tunnels for trains now, don't they use those giant boring machines that excavacte the tunnel and line it with concrete now? The machines I think are giant not because of the digging itself but because they're usually boring a tunnel big enough to run a parallel set of subway-sized cars through. Add in cathedral-sized chambers for regular stops and its easy to see why its so expensive.
What would happen if they scaled that same excavation technology down so that the tunnel was something like 2 meters in diamater for a miniature train capable of just carrying parcels? The trains could run on rubber wheels following the tunnel. The cars could be flatbeds that carry miniature containers which could be inserted and removed via basically elevator shafts that grabbed them from above, eliminating the need for significant excavations for stations.
Powering it would be another issue, but maybe they could be powered by battery packs swapped at container insertion points or some kind of induction power cable pulled through the tunnel.