This is, of course, completely anecdotal but a number of years ago I had a room-mate from mainland China who was a doctoral student in a STEM field at a major nationally ranked university in the area. One time, he described his undergrad university back in China where, supposedly, they had a significant department focused around automation. He said that the students used to, jokingly, call it the "Department of De-Automation" because what they would do is take western automation technology and intentionally dumb it down so that it didn't end up eliminating too many jobs...
Yea, I find it a little funny (in a sad, depressing, sort of way). We have a short memory as a country/culture. Most people today don't realize that these are the exact same arguments slave owners used to use to justify the continuance of slavery (and, almost certainly, then used to justify the sharecropping system after slavery was ended). Instead of "I can't find American's to do the job", they used to argue "I won't be able to find a white person to do the job". It's all complete bullshit.
The simple fact is, if you're not paying someone enough to live off of and/or you are putting them in a work environment that will literally destroy their body over their career then you are just vermin living off the misery of others. A great example of this was, a while back, when Steven Colbert spoke about illegal immigration in front of a congressional committee. It was posted to YouTube because it was a rare opportunity to hear him speak out of character but what really got my attention was the gentleman who spoke immediately after him. The guy in question was an illegal immigrant rights/labor activist who was there to protest the horrible working conditions (extreme temperatures without adequate water; poor medical services in case of emergencies such as heat stroke or heat related heart attacks; too many hours of work to be healthy; etc.). You know, all those things that make these into jobs "American's don't want/won't do"... It's not that the illegal immigrants want to do them (in those conditions and at that pay) any more than the Americans do, it just that in the case of the illegal immigrants, the farm owners can prey on their higher level of desperation.
It's not about alternatives. You're not entitled to alternative ways to put other children at risk by exposing them to your un-vaccinated spawn. Frankly, you shouldn't even be entitled to bring them out in public as long as they're a threat to other children or anyone else who couldn't get vaccinated for some other reason outside of their control. Willful ignorance should come this a heavy cost.
I think you're comparing apples to oranges. For every example like the ones you gave, there seem to be just as many like jetpacks and the flying car that have just never happened long, long after everyone assumed they should.
The way I see it, the difference is all about how clearly dangerous experimentation in a certain field happens to be to human lives and how much infrastructure needs to be built out to make a given iteration of the tech useful. Computer and telecommunications tend to evolve extremely quickly because they are widely assumed to be harmless to humans and because they don't usually need lots of infrastructure build-out. You'll note that in the few places where infrastructure build-out IS required (broadband and wide-area wireless communications) the time between iterations seems almost glacial in comparison to the rest of the industry.
While the kind of implant tech described in the article doesn't require lots of physical infrastructure build-out, it does involve lots and lots of human medical testing. To make matters even worse, the kind of medical testing (surgical experimentation on the brain) is the most complex and risky in the entire field of medicine. In such a field, by it's very nature, moving a single iteration of tech from prototype to commercial product can take a decade or more at it's best.
The claim they're trying to make (right, wrong, or otherwise) is that the sub-systems used in the development of this system have already been proven to be so uneconomical that developing a new system, using more modern technology, would produce a more cost-effective system in the end. Furthermore, (and ironically, considering the claim you're making in your last sentence) they are inferring that the only reason these existing sub-systems are being championed is that they represent products already being produced in the congressional districts of US politicians and, thus, the people pushing for them only really care about the jobs and don't care about the actual costs involved.
Again, I'm not suggesting that they are factual correct in their argument. I'm just trying to clarify their position as I see it.
From what I took away from the WUWT article, it seems that the crux of their "argument" is that there's a possible chance you might have enough consecutive days of "just enough" wind and/or "not enough" wind that your back-up energy storage system will be empty when you have an additional day(s) of "not enough" wind (thus leading to black-outs or brown outs). Of course, what they seem to be ignoring, even if the original writers of the paper didn't take this into account and didn't include enough over-capacity in the turbine system to make this almost impossible, is that the energy industry has had proven solutions to this problem for a very long time. As it is, it's very common for power plants to have a set of back-up natural gas generators to provide power in down times. They're relatively cheap up-front; drop in;in; still relatively cheap to operate (if not as cheap in the long-haul); and they should last almost forever if they're well maintained and only run in emergencies.
The same way, if I remember correctly, that he was "sure" that the Citizen's United ruling wouldn't lead to a massive increase in private/corporate money influencing the US election system...
If what is said in the summary is true, we're past the point of a "strong risk" of it not ending well and are well into that being a reality. Apparently, this genius radio engineer was also causing interference for the two-way radio systems used by first-responders.
He's screwed because he's a complete moron. He's just another asshole with anger management issues and/or delusions of grandeur who decided to grant himself law enforcement powers. Not only did he block cellphones but, apparently, he was also interfering with the radio communications of first-responders. It'd be like someone driving up onto a busy sidewalk for a chance to get photographic evidence of someone jaywalking...
Not that this has anything to do with the actual topic of this story, but I don't think that's an accurate description of the situation. We're not being bred for slavery because (even if they were morally willing to) the ruling class no longer has a need for slaves in the long-term (the only time-frame that a "breeding program" would actually be useful). Automation will be the new "slavery" without all the nagging ethical issues of real slavery. It will leave only the most "interesting" jobs remaining (before strong AI, if it's actually possible, replaces even those jobs) which the small portion of the population comprising the ruling class will be able to perform as hobbies to feed their intellectual curiosity/egos.
If anything, we are being obsoleted and the present struggle is between those of the ruling classes that have ethics/morals and those that don't over what to do with the excess of humans that will soon no longer be needed. The ones with ethics/morals will push for more socialization, education, and birth control adoption while the ones without morals/ethics will be more inclined to focus all excess resources/energy towards personal profits and ego driven vanity projects while letting the masses starve. They'll push for the use of highly automated police/military forces to put down any civil/political unrest.
What in the world makes you think a criminal background check isn't relevant? You want convicted sexual predators driving taxis around? How about people that have been convicted of fraud? You want them being responsible for operating the meter in an honest manner? There are enough issues with slimy/fraudulent practices in taxis services as it is, now you want to do away with the criminal background checks entirely? You're nuts.
Also, you seem to have completely ignored the third issue at stake here: insurance. Personal auto insurance != commercial auto insurance. The moment your insurance company finds out you were driving people around for profit at the time of your accident they will, completely legitimately, refuse to pay out any claims. While it's completely fine that you don't get paid after committing insurance fraud (which IS what you're doing when you violate your CLEARLY WRITTEN insurance contract to drive for profit) the important thing here is that anyone you've hurt (such as your fares and/or whatever/whoever you hit) are now left with no way to be compensated unless they can squeeze the money out of you. Since it's unlikely that people like Warren Buffet or Donald Trump are going to be Ubering in their Bentley, this means that those people are almost certainly screwed.
Actually, it's an even worse comparison than that. Not only does it not disrupt major industries that employee large numbers of people and, more importantly, keep a large number of wealthy people wealthy but the nuclear disarmament process has provided a source of plentiful, already mostly processed, fuel for the nuclear power industry. For a while now, many US nuclear plants have been running off of fuel sold to them by the Russians and gotten from dismantled nuclear weapons stocks (though, last I heard that supply was finally running out). This means that, unlike with the global warming debate, the entrenched industry types have a good reason to actually support the process rather than work to stop it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is, of course, completely anecdotal but a number of years ago I had a room-mate from mainland China who was a doctoral student in a STEM field at a major nationally ranked university in the area. One time, he described his undergrad university back in China where, supposedly, they had a significant department focused around automation. He said that the students used to, jokingly, call it the "Department of De-Automation" because what they would do is take western automation technology and intentionally dumb it down so that it didn't end up eliminating too many jobs...
Yea, I find it a little funny (in a sad, depressing, sort of way). We have a short memory as a country/culture. Most people today don't realize that these are the exact same arguments slave owners used to use to justify the continuance of slavery (and, almost certainly, then used to justify the sharecropping system after slavery was ended). Instead of "I can't find American's to do the job", they used to argue "I won't be able to find a white person to do the job". It's all complete bullshit.
The simple fact is, if you're not paying someone enough to live off of and/or you are putting them in a work environment that will literally destroy their body over their career then you are just vermin living off the misery of others. A great example of this was, a while back, when Steven Colbert spoke about illegal immigration in front of a congressional committee. It was posted to YouTube because it was a rare opportunity to hear him speak out of character but what really got my attention was the gentleman who spoke immediately after him. The guy in question was an illegal immigrant rights/labor activist who was there to protest the horrible working conditions (extreme temperatures without adequate water; poor medical services in case of emergencies such as heat stroke or heat related heart attacks; too many hours of work to be healthy; etc.). You know, all those things that make these into jobs "American's don't want/won't do"... It's not that the illegal immigrants want to do them (in those conditions and at that pay) any more than the Americans do, it just that in the case of the illegal immigrants, the farm owners can prey on their higher level of desperation.
As someone else here pointed out, Guam is even closer to NK than the Aleutians (and, probably, much easier to get to).
It's not about alternatives. You're not entitled to alternative ways to put other children at risk by exposing them to your un-vaccinated spawn. Frankly, you shouldn't even be entitled to bring them out in public as long as they're a threat to other children or anyone else who couldn't get vaccinated for some other reason outside of their control. Willful ignorance should come this a heavy cost.
...and Martin would have been killed my old age before he ever finished the final novel.
It's quite possible that he means they have artificially slowed down the graphics rendering to provide more cycles to the AI.
Remember, this was the first dot com boom. It could, just as easily, have been a case of too many company humvees purchased...
We've had that here in the US for decades. We call it street parking.
Actually, as the proper name they chose for their company it's only one word.
I think you're comparing apples to oranges. For every example like the ones you gave, there seem to be just as many like jetpacks and the flying car that have just never happened long, long after everyone assumed they should.
The way I see it, the difference is all about how clearly dangerous experimentation in a certain field happens to be to human lives and how much infrastructure needs to be built out to make a given iteration of the tech useful. Computer and telecommunications tend to evolve extremely quickly because they are widely assumed to be harmless to humans and because they don't usually need lots of infrastructure build-out. You'll note that in the few places where infrastructure build-out IS required (broadband and wide-area wireless communications) the time between iterations seems almost glacial in comparison to the rest of the industry.
While the kind of implant tech described in the article doesn't require lots of physical infrastructure build-out, it does involve lots and lots of human medical testing. To make matters even worse, the kind of medical testing (surgical experimentation on the brain) is the most complex and risky in the entire field of medicine. In such a field, by it's very nature, moving a single iteration of tech from prototype to commercial product can take a decade or more at it's best.
The claim they're trying to make (right, wrong, or otherwise) is that the sub-systems used in the development of this system have already been proven to be so uneconomical that developing a new system, using more modern technology, would produce a more cost-effective system in the end. Furthermore, (and ironically, considering the claim you're making in your last sentence) they are inferring that the only reason these existing sub-systems are being championed is that they represent products already being produced in the congressional districts of US politicians and, thus, the people pushing for them only really care about the jobs and don't care about the actual costs involved.
Again, I'm not suggesting that they are factual correct in their argument. I'm just trying to clarify their position as I see it.
From what I took away from the WUWT article, it seems that the crux of their "argument" is that there's a possible chance you might have enough consecutive days of "just enough" wind and/or "not enough" wind that your back-up energy storage system will be empty when you have an additional day(s) of "not enough" wind (thus leading to black-outs or brown outs). Of course, what they seem to be ignoring, even if the original writers of the paper didn't take this into account and didn't include enough over-capacity in the turbine system to make this almost impossible, is that the energy industry has had proven solutions to this problem for a very long time. As it is, it's very common for power plants to have a set of back-up natural gas generators to provide power in down times. They're relatively cheap up-front; drop in;in; still relatively cheap to operate (if not as cheap in the long-haul); and they should last almost forever if they're well maintained and only run in emergencies.
The same way, if I remember correctly, that he was "sure" that the Citizen's United ruling wouldn't lead to a massive increase in private/corporate money influencing the US election system...
Uhm, they already do. Here in Chicago, we call it the south side.
You're right, but not for the reason you list. Charlie disbanded in '76 after the fall of Saigon and unification of the North and the South.
If what is said in the summary is true, we're past the point of a "strong risk" of it not ending well and are well into that being a reality. Apparently, this genius radio engineer was also causing interference for the two-way radio systems used by first-responders.
He's screwed because he's a complete moron. He's just another asshole with anger management issues and/or delusions of grandeur who decided to grant himself law enforcement powers. Not only did he block cellphones but, apparently, he was also interfering with the radio communications of first-responders. It'd be like someone driving up onto a busy sidewalk for a chance to get photographic evidence of someone jaywalking...
Not that this has anything to do with the actual topic of this story, but I don't think that's an accurate description of the situation. We're not being bred for slavery because (even if they were morally willing to) the ruling class no longer has a need for slaves in the long-term (the only time-frame that a "breeding program" would actually be useful). Automation will be the new "slavery" without all the nagging ethical issues of real slavery. It will leave only the most "interesting" jobs remaining (before strong AI, if it's actually possible, replaces even those jobs) which the small portion of the population comprising the ruling class will be able to perform as hobbies to feed their intellectual curiosity/egos.
If anything, we are being obsoleted and the present struggle is between those of the ruling classes that have ethics/morals and those that don't over what to do with the excess of humans that will soon no longer be needed. The ones with ethics/morals will push for more socialization, education, and birth control adoption while the ones without morals/ethics will be more inclined to focus all excess resources/energy towards personal profits and ego driven vanity projects while letting the masses starve. They'll push for the use of highly automated police/military forces to put down any civil/political unrest.
The No Snodens Agency.
What in the world makes you think a criminal background check isn't relevant? You want convicted sexual predators driving taxis around? How about people that have been convicted of fraud? You want them being responsible for operating the meter in an honest manner? There are enough issues with slimy/fraudulent practices in taxis services as it is, now you want to do away with the criminal background checks entirely? You're nuts.
Also, you seem to have completely ignored the third issue at stake here: insurance. Personal auto insurance != commercial auto insurance. The moment your insurance company finds out you were driving people around for profit at the time of your accident they will, completely legitimately, refuse to pay out any claims. While it's completely fine that you don't get paid after committing insurance fraud (which IS what you're doing when you violate your CLEARLY WRITTEN insurance contract to drive for profit) the important thing here is that anyone you've hurt (such as your fares and/or whatever/whoever you hit) are now left with no way to be compensated unless they can squeeze the money out of you. Since it's unlikely that people like Warren Buffet or Donald Trump are going to be Ubering in their Bentley, this means that those people are almost certainly screwed.
Probably for the best, Ms. Piggy is violent enough for the two of them.
Since it's a math problem instead of grammar, would that make you an an arithmetic Nazi?
Actually, it's an even worse comparison than that. Not only does it not disrupt major industries that employee large numbers of people and, more importantly, keep a large number of wealthy people wealthy but the nuclear disarmament process has provided a source of plentiful, already mostly processed, fuel for the nuclear power industry. For a while now, many US nuclear plants have been running off of fuel sold to them by the Russians and gotten from dismantled nuclear weapons stocks (though, last I heard that supply was finally running out). This means that, unlike with the global warming debate, the entrenched industry types have a good reason to actually support the process rather than work to stop it.
Rather than Ponzi scheme, the proper term for Kickstarter would probably be "confidence scheme" or "confidence trick".
There's always "Au jus"