I don't like nuclear because it's cheaper to run an unsafe plant than a safe one.
Agreed. This is the fundamental problem with the technology. It's true to an extent for fossil fuels too but the consequences of releasing some extra pollutants from a coal fired plant are in most cases unarguably less serious than a significant radiation release from a fission powered plant. While nuclear largely has a good safety record overall and it has some compelling advantages, it's hard to ignore the fact that there is money to be made in cutting corners given the potentially catastrophic consequences of a failure.
I've long argued that the right dug in their heels and let the left dictate ideas and solutions.
Probably a good point. If the political right REALLY believed in self reliance then they should be pushing for distributed renewable power. Why depend on the power company and government regulators when you can have a solar array or wind turbine and a battery pack and provide most/all of your own power? But instead they persist in acting as thralls to large corporations. Makes very little sense until you realize they don't really believe in self reliance at all.
The climate deniers are the one's making it political. But because they have that's the reality we have to deal with. We can pretend it isn't political or we can deal with the fact that it is and get on with fixing the problem.
Also, I would argue that neither side is actually arguing with facts.
Nonsense. The scientists are arguing with almost nothing BUT facts. The fact that a bunch of mostly right wing fossil fuel shills are standing in the way of those facts is plain enough to see. One side has facts and scientific data. The other has economic self interest and little else. The notion that both sides aren't arguing with facts is just nonsense.
Wouldn't that strategy play directly into the "it's a money grab conspiracy" argument?
Not if you show them how THEY can be the ones to grab the money.
Other fields of scientific research -- paleontology, astronomy, etc. -- don't have to sell themselves with economic windfall arguments.
They don't have to because they don't threaten anyone's meal ticket.
Framing this as a moral argument is understandable but ultimately futile in my opinion. If we really do need to act in a short amount of time then you have to convince people that either they are in imminent danger (difficult in this case) or that they can profit from solving the problem. Point out how all those displaced coal workers can make even more money building wind turbines. That sort of thing. Work on making distributed solar so economically attractive that people stop caring about the oil companies. Work on their economic incentives to move things in the right direction.
No really, stop tickling my sides. Skeptical Science, a shill front organisation for rent-seeking environmentalists.
Even if that is true it doesn't mean the data they are presenting is wrong. Prove the data wrong or shut up and go away.
It does matter though, imho. It matters for reasons of integrity, especially public trust in science.
The only lack of integrity is coming from the climate change deniers. They refuse to engage in a honest debate about or honest analysis of the evidence. Many of them have clear conflicts of interest (fossil fuel industry ties, etc) and don't even pretend to hide them. All the scientists are doing is presenting the evidence which is mountainous in volume at this point and growing all the time. If the climate deniers had an actual evidence based case they could easily cut through the BS by presenting actual evidence contradicting the current science models. They have no such evidence so they are making a political argument instead of a scientific one.
Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere
Nobody who is actually informed about the issue agrees with you. Heck the US Department of Defense disagrees with you. Please explain how even the more modest of predicted consequences such as rising sea levels, food supply disruptions, extreme weather events, melting ice caps, etc are beneficial to earth.
especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
Umm, what? The biosphere "quite likes CO2"? Are you trolling or just ignorant? We're releasing billions of tons of CO2 that has been sequestered out of the atmosphere for millions of years and you're arguing that's somehow a good thing? Support your (absurd) statement with a viable hypothesis and actual data.
Aren't they talking about data taken on ships by physically reading thermometers to an accuracy less than the claimed effect?
It isn't about the accuracy. It's about what is actually being measured. It's like the difference between trying to do astronomy in the middle of a light polluted city versus doing it in a dark and remote desert with calm dry air. You're trying to look at the same thing but the noise in the measurements is quite different and has to be accounted for.
Climate scientists haven't established Human caused global warming is real.
You are wrong. It's not even really a debate among climate scientists at this point. So far all the data seems to clearly show that humans are a key factor in recent climate change. And even just on the face of it the notion that we could be dumping so many billions of tons of CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere without any effect or consequence is just absurd. If you want to argue that we are still pinning down the exact extent of the effect of our activities then you might have an argument. But to pretend that our activities have had no effect on global climate is ridiculous.
That said, it doesn't really matter anyway. Even if hypothetically speaking humans weren't responsible at all for climate change we still would need to take action to deal with the reality of it. It's going to affect food supplies, energy resources, ecosystems, pollution, geopolitics, etc. The US Department of Defense (hardly a bastion of liberal thinking) considers it real and a significant threat to national security.
So far we just have a gently upward trend starting about 400 years ago, very similar to the previous upward trends that were entirely natural.
Yeah sorry but the data is just a tad more complicated than your little made up and cherry picked sound bite.
Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers' e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists' supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements. Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data.
Most people wouldn't understand the data if you clubbed them over the head with it. Doubly so for politicians with no scientific training. The problem in the argument is that one side of this argument isn't arguing with facts and is actually incentivized to demonize any data that contradicts their pre-determined conclusions. They see the argument in one of two ways (sometimes both). A) They see climate change data as a threat to their personal interests - usually financial ones. If you are a politician sponsored by a fossil fuel company, this threatens your self interest. B) They see the climate change argument as something coming from the Other. It's a tribal thing - that Other group supports it ergo it must be bad. Often they frame it as a conspiracy despite the absurdity of that statement.
So in either case you have people who have no incentive whatsoever to acknowledge the data because it threatens what they hold dear. Rationality plays no role in it. The best way to combat this is to frame the argument in such a way as to align their incentives with the data. Point out how much money there is to be made/saved by working on the problem. Put it front and center as an economic issue. Figure out how to align solutions to the problem with economic and political self interest. Until you do that you're going to have this problem of certain politically powerful factions sticking their fingers in their ears and getting in the way.
Getting sick of having to sort through what is and isn't sold by amazon anymore.
If you are a prime member you just look for items labeled prime. That means Amazon stocks and ship it. Whether they are the ones actually selling it makes no difference at that point. It might not actually be Amazon owned inventory but it becomes a distinction without a difference.
If I wanted to deal with some shady 3rd party, I'd be going to their store or their website.
I've bought plenty of stuff from third parties through Amazon without any problems. On the rare occasions when there has been an issue Amazon has taken care of it no questions asked every single time. Last year I had about 150 deliveries from Amazon and maybe 30-40 of those were third party purchases. Sometimes the shipping took some extra time but I didn't have a single problem otherwise.
Also if you enjoy that experience, let me introduce you to Ebay...
The shopping experience on Amazon is NOTHING like eBay. I used to make my living selling stuff on eBay so I know better than most. I shop a lot on Amazon because they make it pretty much the least painful shopping experience I've ever had. Prices are (usually) decent, deliver is quick, most things are available, ordering is easy and returns (if necessary) are painless.
If you go to the theater to see a movie it is because you REALLY want to see it.
No, it's for one of two reasons. It's a movie I want to see ON A BIG SCREEN and/or I'm going to the movie theater because I'm on a date. There are no other reasons. You go to a theater because the can provide an experience I cannot get at home. Theaters provide that - a huge screen and a great sound system at minimum. Often they have other amenities as well. If my only goal was merely to watch the movie then there would never be a reason to go to the theater.
Screaming kids, people getting up and squeezing out through the row of seats, and then back again later, and cell phones, and people talking, and telling their life story, along with narrating the film, people kicking the back of your seat, throwing popcorn . . .
You need to find yourself a better theater mate. None of that describes the experience I've had in any movie theater in recent memory. Once in a while someone gets up - not a big deal. I've never had anyone kick the back of my seat. I can't remember the last time someone talked loud enough for me to care during the movie. Certainly no screaming kids and the few times I've seen little kids get fussy the parents hustled them out quickly enough. I've never seen anyone throwing popcorn. Most people are pretty respectful and are just there to have a good time. You have a vision of theaters that is disconnected from the reality of them.
They won't for long if they keep pissing off their highest revenue-generating customers.
I'm curious who you think those "highest revenue-generating customers" actually are. I'm willing to be it isn't who you think it is. Just because you buy a Mac Pro every few years doesn't make you a "highest revenue customer". Well over 50% of Apples revenues come from the iPhone and you can tell that Apple's focus is more on that product than any other. Also the customers generating the most revenue are very likely to be a different group than the most profitable customers. At the end of the day it's profits, not revenues that matter.
Only because you are going for snark rather than comprehension. I'll give you an example. Solve this problem in a generalized proof and there is a Nobel prize in economics waiting for you.
My company makes wire harnesses. How much does it cost to make a wire harness? Sounds easy enough right? Cost of material, cost of labor to build it, plus time spent engineering and selling it, etc. Problem is that there are a lot of costs you cannot easily assign. We make hundreds of wire harnesses. How much of the electric bill do we assign to the cost of each one? How much administrative time was spent on it? How much of the CEO's salary to you allocate to each product and what metric are you going to use to divide up the cost? These are called indirect costs and rationally allocating these costs accurately to each product is a profession unto itself. Coming up with an answer that is better than an educated guess is nearly impossible for all but the most trivial cases. People have tried with things like Activity Based Costing and other methods but there is no method available that doesn't eventually involved significant guesswork and lots of assumptions that may or may not hold water.
Given sufficient data from 1000 companies, et cetera.
That is the key word. Sufficient. You will NEVER get sufficient data from even one company much less thousands. You would have to somehow pull every bit of institutional knowledge out of the heads of the people working there because I assure you that plenty of important stuff isn't written down anywhere. You could train an AI to do many useful things but the notion that you are going to replace the profession of accounting with AI within the lifetime of anyone reading this is approximately as absurd as thinking we are going to colonize Pluto in the same time period.
Then why don't you give at least one specific example.
I gave several. Read them. Furthermore if you cannot figure out what a human can do that Watson cannot on your own then I'm not sure what I can do to help you.
And this is where a system like Watson shines. While you may be able to fall back on personal experience to make these judgement calls, Watson can easily run thousands of simulations on each set of numbers, based on real world possibilities. You will always be making a guess based on what might happen, but Watson will come close to knowing what will happen.
Put succinctly you are saying that Watson can (almost) predict the future. Really? I want whatever you are smoking because it's obviously good stuff. Sorry but there is no AI in existence that is even close to as capable as you are implying and certainly none flexible enough to actually manage a real world business. First off, Watson IS NOT an AI capable of making reliable judgements and you would be a weapon's grade idiot to trust it to run your company without a human looking over it's shoulder even if it could - which it cannot. Tools like Watson are useful for decision support and routine transactions. Those are useful things but only a subset of what accountants do. They advise people by gathering and presenting pertenent data and handle mundane well defined tasks. If you actually tried to replace human judgement with AI given the state of the art you would be out of business faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit" or "IRS audit". Second, a system like Watson would be absolutely terrible at dealing with the ever shifting work flows and problems that arise in a real company. Riddle me this. How is Watson going to deal with a customer calling on the telephone to complain because they were shorted on a shipment because some idiot in shipping put the a different customers parts in their shipment? Even if Watson could handle that problem (which it cannot) you still would need people to sort it out. Why? Because only an idiot would ask a customer to talk to a computer to solve such a problem.
This all said, I am far from an AI believer.
No you are an AI worshiper. You think AI is some magical fairy dust you can sprinkle on a profession and make all the people somehow redundant. Problem is that you don't understand the technology at all. You don't know what it is, what it does, or how it would impact the real world. Worse you understand even less about the field of accounting and how it works. You think it's some sort of rigidly deterministic job where there is an easy answer to every question. You seriously have no idea what you are talking about.
Well, you do realize, that capacity (natgas or whatever) sitting idle (not making money) is seriously expensive, right?
Using fossil fuels sources and not forcing them to pay the full cost of the pollution and carbon they generate is even more expensive in the long run. Fossil fuels are what should be the alternative break-glass-in-case-of-emergency fuel source. They're useful but dirty and we should be trying to minimize their use as fast as possible.
That's why solar _must_ be cheap for markets to clear - one needs a backup to use it.
Every source of power needs backup. Powerplants of every description have to be idled for maintenance now and then. Storms knock out parts of the grid. Demand sometimes exceeds local supply. Solar is nothing fundamentally different in that regard.
On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.
Doesn't have to be. When you have a big storm that knocks down the power grid would you rather have some power for part of the day or no power for any of the day? Having solar cells on your roof insulates you from some of those problems. Furthermore solar cells still work even when the weather is bad and it is cloudy. Not as well of course but it doesn't have to be a bright clear day for them to provide some utility.
That said it's a moot point. Not like the grid is going away and you have the option of a generator for local emergency power. Germany generates something like 20-30% of their power from solar and they are routinely cloudy there.
Right now, most of the world's energy usage isn't electricity. We heat homes and businesses with natural gas and heating oil, transportation is by diesel and gasoline.
True but it doesn't have to remain that way in the long term. If we have efficient and clean electric power then there will be plenty of incentive to convert those fossil fuel systems to electric ones. Won't happen overnight but if the economics are right it WILL happen.
Ever heard of a battery? Plus just because you use solar during the day doesn't preclude you from using other sources of energy when it isn't available.
One of the best things about solar is that solar is particularly useful for air conditioning and refrigeration. Peak costs for those systems are highest when the sun shines the strongest for obvious reasons. A solar array can flatten those costs out very nicely. Honestly it's a mystery to me why every grocery store doesn't have a solar array on their roof. On days where there is lots of sun they'll get lots of solar power and when it isn't shining so strongly they probably don't need as much solar.
Does Apple's patent enable the distinction b/w a driver and passenger?
I'm not convinced it should matter. The question is whether passenger's "rights" to use their phone are more important than the safety of other drivers on the road. I would argue that safety is paramount in that context if we can actually prevent distracted driving. Until we can come up with a more fine grained solution, disable them all if that is the only safe option. Nobody's civil rights are being violated here and we've proven VERY clearly that we as a group cannot be trusted to leave the phone alone while driving. If someone can figure out a reliable way to disable only the driver's phone then we should do that but since we (so far) cannot we need to do the next best thing. I don't see any credible argument that your right to use your phone should supersede my right to use a motorway in reasonable safety. As the saying goes, your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.
This is a clear cut case of irresponsibility on the part of the driver who was driving distracted.
Completely correct. However unfortunately that doesn't bring people who are killed back to life. For better or worse we have to look for ways to solve problems like drunk or distracted driving that will prevent the accident from happening. Just punishing the offenders after the fact demonstrably doesn't fix the problem. Despite decades of strong drunk driving laws we still have thousands of fatalities every year from people driving drunk. People are still dying even in the face of laws prohibiting using phones while driving.
The end-game is a society completely risk adverse to rocking the boat or trying anything new from fear of completely manufactured legal attacks.
So we're supposed to just be ok with people dying because some asshat couldn't be bothered to get off the road before using Facetime? Look, I think this lawsuit sounds highly sketchy too but it is a real problem in need of a real solution. Maybe we should disable all calls and texts to/from a phone which is determined to be within a moving vehicle. (yes even the passengers - suck it up, You and your passengers can wait a few minutes for their call.) If it's important to speak to someone, pull off to the side of the road and put the car in park. We've clearly proven that we cannot be trusted to handle phones responsibly in a car. Don't like that solution? Fine, come up with a better one. I'm all ears, believe me. But the status quo isn't acceptable. Douchbag lawsuits obviously aren't the solution so what is?
t seems to me to be some kind of logical fallacy to think that something new will not happen because it has not happened in the past.
What about humans and their ability to problem solve and create and build has changed? The reason I don't see any reason to worry about "robots" taking all our jobs is because NOTHING has changed about the ability of humans to adapt to new circumstances. Nobody has been able to make a coherent argument detailing why humans will not be able to continue to create new industries and new technologies and new products in the future. I don't pretend to know what those new economies will look like with any great precision. What I do know is that people are smart, creative and that there is literally an entire universe worth of useful and valuable things to do. All we are doing is economically climbing higher up Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
It reminds me of the historical observation that generals are always fighting the last war.
You didn't finish your thought. Just because generals are still thinking about the last war doesn't mean they don't adapt to the new one when it starts. Yes there will be new challenges we haven't though of in the future. That's ALWAYS been the case. There are threats to humanity but economic collapse from runaway automation is among the more absurdly unlikely ones.
I'm curious what you think you can do that Watson can't.
Seriously? Quite a bit actually. I can handle input streams that Watson can't. I can make tools Watson couldn't begin to imagine. I can interact with physical objects without vast amounts of programming. I can deal with humans in a meaningful and human way FAR better than any computer program. I can pass a Turing test. The number of things I can do that Watson cannot is literally too numerous to bother counting. Watson is really just an decision support system with a natural language interface. Very cool but the notion that it could replace me is just laughable.
Accounting is a very rigidly structured practice.
A lot of people think so but they and you are actually completely wrong. There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid. Surprisingly few people actually realize how arbitrary many of the choices that go into accounting actually are. For many there is no objectively right or wrong answer - it's merely a question of preference. Even seemingly simple questions like "when did a sale occur" aren't always actually simple questions with a single possible answer or an objectively best answer. There is a lot of judgement and opinion in those decisions and much of that will not be easy to automate. Don't conflate bookkeeping with accounting. They aren't the same thing. Bookkeeping is something Watson can help out greatly with but it is a small subset of what accounting is.
All IBM really needs to do is let Watson sift through the books of a couple hundred companies and it will easily determine how to best achieve a defined set of objectives for a corporation.
See there is your problem. Every company is unique in some way. There are some commonalities to be sure and regulations in many cases to further make things consistent. But it's actually really hard for even the most sophisticated software to adapt to the unique qualities of each company just like not every human can fit into every company. It's depressing how many seemingly bright people think that running a company is something as deterministic as running some data through a computer program. It's WAY more complicated than you think it is. Just because Watson won a few games of Jeopardy doesn't mean you can make the program the de-facto CEO.
As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people.
You're looking at the wrong scale. You need to look at the whole economy. Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes. Might have taken some of them a few months but eventually they found something else. My company just bought a machine that allows us to manufacture wire leads much faster than we can do it by hand. That doesn't mean that the workers we didn't employ to do that work couldn't find gainful employment elsewhere.
And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.
Again, so what? You've automated some efficiency into an industry that obviously needed it. Some workers will have to do something else. Same story we've been hearing for centuries. It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.
People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future.
Based on what? The fact that you can't imagine what people are going to do if they can't do what they currently are doing? I'm old enough to predate the internet. The World Wide Web was just becoming a thing while I was in college. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, etc all didn't even exist when I was born. Vast swaths of our economy hadn't even been conceived of back then. 40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined. Your argument is really just a failure of your own imagination. People have been making that same argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution and it is just as nonsensical now as it was then.
I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.
Prepare to be surprised then. Your argument has no rational basis. You are extrapolating some micro-trends in your company well beyond any rational justification.
Calm down everyone. This is just a continuation of productivity tools for accounting. Among other things I'm a certified accountant. This is just the next step in automation of accounting and it's a good thing. We used to do all our ledgers by hand. Now we all use software for that and believe me you don't want to go back to the way it was. Very little in accounting is actually value added activity so it is desirable to automate as much of it as possible. If some people lost their jobs doing that it's equivalent to how the PC replaced secretaries 30+ years ago. They were doing a necessary task but one that added little or no value. Most of what accountants do is just keeping track of what happened in a business and keeping the paperwork flowing where it needs to go. This is EXACTLY what we should be automating whenever possible.
I'm sure there are going to be a lot folks loudly proclaiming how we are all doomed and that there won't be any work for anyone left to do. Happens every time there is an advancement in automation and yet every time they are wrong. Yes some people are going to struggle in the short run. That happens with every technological advancement. Eventually they find other useful and valuable things to do and the world moves on. It will be fine.
10$ to get in and the god awful pop was like nearly 10bucks
Nobody forced you to buy a drink. If you don't like the price then don't go. None of us will care I promise you. Personally I enjoy going to the theater now and then. Makes for a nice date night with my wife. And no I don't really care if the popcorn costs $6. If that's too much for your budget then don't buy popcorn. It won't affect the movie one bit.
ill use the above cash and get a hooker
Wow, a $25 hooker. Going to splurge for the AIDS test you will need afterwards?
Just because the entertainment industry is making record breaking money doesn't mean that they are also not losing alot to piracy.
Actually it means EXACTLY that. Piracy is not necessarily a bad thing for the industry and the relationship between piracy and profits is complicated. The simplistic notion that every pirated copy equals a lost sale of equivalent value is demonstrably nonsense. Most pirated content would not have resulting in additional sales. It's been demonstrated that piracy in many cases actually INCREASES sales.
Movie theaters aren't (or shouldn't be) selling a mere viewing of a movie. I can get that without involving them. They have to be selling something I cannot get elsewhere. A huge screen and an awesome sound system that I cannot replicate at home. Smarter theaters like Alamo Draft House sell pretty decent dining as well. Some theaters offer super comfy seats and other amenities. One near me has a bowling alley and bar. Many have video arcades. THAT is what I am paying for and it is not possible to pirate that experience. If all people wanted was to watch the movie on whatever crappy screen I could find then movie theaters would have been out of business a long time ago. Sure piracy might lose a few marginal customers but if their business model was so poor that piracy could make a real dent then they deserve to lose money.
Movie theaters aren't in the business of selling movie viewings. They are in the business of renting large projection and sound systems and providing entertainment. The movie is just the loss leader to get you in the door. It's like Las Vegas. Nobody really needs to go there just to gamble. I have three casinos in my home town. I go there for an experience that I cannot get at those local casinos and that those local casinos cannot really replicate.
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I don't like nuclear because it's cheaper to run an unsafe plant than a safe one.
Agreed. This is the fundamental problem with the technology. It's true to an extent for fossil fuels too but the consequences of releasing some extra pollutants from a coal fired plant are in most cases unarguably less serious than a significant radiation release from a fission powered plant. While nuclear largely has a good safety record overall and it has some compelling advantages, it's hard to ignore the fact that there is money to be made in cutting corners given the potentially catastrophic consequences of a failure.
I've long argued that the right dug in their heels and let the left dictate ideas and solutions.
Probably a good point. If the political right REALLY believed in self reliance then they should be pushing for distributed renewable power. Why depend on the power company and government regulators when you can have a solar array or wind turbine and a battery pack and provide most/all of your own power? But instead they persist in acting as thralls to large corporations. Makes very little sense until you realize they don't really believe in self reliance at all.
In other words, it's politicized.
The climate deniers are the one's making it political. But because they have that's the reality we have to deal with. We can pretend it isn't political or we can deal with the fact that it is and get on with fixing the problem.
Also, I would argue that neither side is actually arguing with facts.
Nonsense. The scientists are arguing with almost nothing BUT facts. The fact that a bunch of mostly right wing fossil fuel shills are standing in the way of those facts is plain enough to see. One side has facts and scientific data. The other has economic self interest and little else. The notion that both sides aren't arguing with facts is just nonsense.
Wouldn't that strategy play directly into the "it's a money grab conspiracy" argument?
Not if you show them how THEY can be the ones to grab the money.
Other fields of scientific research -- paleontology, astronomy, etc. -- don't have to sell themselves with economic windfall arguments.
They don't have to because they don't threaten anyone's meal ticket.
Framing this as a moral argument is understandable but ultimately futile in my opinion. If we really do need to act in a short amount of time then you have to convince people that either they are in imminent danger (difficult in this case) or that they can profit from solving the problem. Point out how all those displaced coal workers can make even more money building wind turbines. That sort of thing. Work on making distributed solar so economically attractive that people stop caring about the oil companies. Work on their economic incentives to move things in the right direction.
No really, stop tickling my sides. Skeptical Science, a shill front organisation for rent-seeking environmentalists.
Even if that is true it doesn't mean the data they are presenting is wrong. Prove the data wrong or shut up and go away.
It does matter though, imho. It matters for reasons of integrity, especially public trust in science.
The only lack of integrity is coming from the climate change deniers. They refuse to engage in a honest debate about or honest analysis of the evidence. Many of them have clear conflicts of interest (fossil fuel industry ties, etc) and don't even pretend to hide them. All the scientists are doing is presenting the evidence which is mountainous in volume at this point and growing all the time. If the climate deniers had an actual evidence based case they could easily cut through the BS by presenting actual evidence contradicting the current science models. They have no such evidence so they are making a political argument instead of a scientific one.
Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere
Nobody who is actually informed about the issue agrees with you. Heck the US Department of Defense disagrees with you. Please explain how even the more modest of predicted consequences such as rising sea levels, food supply disruptions, extreme weather events, melting ice caps, etc are beneficial to earth.
especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
Umm, what? The biosphere "quite likes CO2"? Are you trolling or just ignorant? We're releasing billions of tons of CO2 that has been sequestered out of the atmosphere for millions of years and you're arguing that's somehow a good thing? Support your (absurd) statement with a viable hypothesis and actual data.
Aren't they talking about data taken on ships by physically reading thermometers to an accuracy less than the claimed effect?
It isn't about the accuracy. It's about what is actually being measured. It's like the difference between trying to do astronomy in the middle of a light polluted city versus doing it in a dark and remote desert with calm dry air. You're trying to look at the same thing but the noise in the measurements is quite different and has to be accounted for.
Climate scientists haven't established Human caused global warming is real.
You are wrong. It's not even really a debate among climate scientists at this point. So far all the data seems to clearly show that humans are a key factor in recent climate change. And even just on the face of it the notion that we could be dumping so many billions of tons of CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere without any effect or consequence is just absurd. If you want to argue that we are still pinning down the exact extent of the effect of our activities then you might have an argument. But to pretend that our activities have had no effect on global climate is ridiculous.
That said, it doesn't really matter anyway. Even if hypothetically speaking humans weren't responsible at all for climate change we still would need to take action to deal with the reality of it. It's going to affect food supplies, energy resources, ecosystems, pollution, geopolitics, etc. The US Department of Defense (hardly a bastion of liberal thinking) considers it real and a significant threat to national security.
So far we just have a gently upward trend starting about 400 years ago, very similar to the previous upward trends that were entirely natural.
Yeah sorry but the data is just a tad more complicated than your little made up and cherry picked sound bite.
Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers' e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists' supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements. Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data.
Most people wouldn't understand the data if you clubbed them over the head with it. Doubly so for politicians with no scientific training. The problem in the argument is that one side of this argument isn't arguing with facts and is actually incentivized to demonize any data that contradicts their pre-determined conclusions. They see the argument in one of two ways (sometimes both). A) They see climate change data as a threat to their personal interests - usually financial ones. If you are a politician sponsored by a fossil fuel company, this threatens your self interest. B) They see the climate change argument as something coming from the Other. It's a tribal thing - that Other group supports it ergo it must be bad. Often they frame it as a conspiracy despite the absurdity of that statement.
So in either case you have people who have no incentive whatsoever to acknowledge the data because it threatens what they hold dear. Rationality plays no role in it. The best way to combat this is to frame the argument in such a way as to align their incentives with the data. Point out how much money there is to be made/saved by working on the problem. Put it front and center as an economic issue. Figure out how to align solutions to the problem with economic and political self interest. Until you do that you're going to have this problem of certain politically powerful factions sticking their fingers in their ears and getting in the way.
Getting sick of having to sort through what is and isn't sold by amazon anymore.
If you are a prime member you just look for items labeled prime. That means Amazon stocks and ship it. Whether they are the ones actually selling it makes no difference at that point. It might not actually be Amazon owned inventory but it becomes a distinction without a difference.
If I wanted to deal with some shady 3rd party, I'd be going to their store or their website.
I've bought plenty of stuff from third parties through Amazon without any problems. On the rare occasions when there has been an issue Amazon has taken care of it no questions asked every single time. Last year I had about 150 deliveries from Amazon and maybe 30-40 of those were third party purchases. Sometimes the shipping took some extra time but I didn't have a single problem otherwise.
Also if you enjoy that experience, let me introduce you to Ebay...
The shopping experience on Amazon is NOTHING like eBay. I used to make my living selling stuff on eBay so I know better than most. I shop a lot on Amazon because they make it pretty much the least painful shopping experience I've ever had. Prices are (usually) decent, deliver is quick, most things are available, ordering is easy and returns (if necessary) are painless.
If you go to the theater to see a movie it is because you REALLY want to see it.
No, it's for one of two reasons. It's a movie I want to see ON A BIG SCREEN and/or I'm going to the movie theater because I'm on a date. There are no other reasons. You go to a theater because the can provide an experience I cannot get at home. Theaters provide that - a huge screen and a great sound system at minimum. Often they have other amenities as well. If my only goal was merely to watch the movie then there would never be a reason to go to the theater.
Screaming kids, people getting up and squeezing out through the row of seats, and then back again later, and cell phones, and people talking, and telling their life story, along with narrating the film, people kicking the back of your seat, throwing popcorn . . .
You need to find yourself a better theater mate. None of that describes the experience I've had in any movie theater in recent memory. Once in a while someone gets up - not a big deal. I've never had anyone kick the back of my seat. I can't remember the last time someone talked loud enough for me to care during the movie. Certainly no screaming kids and the few times I've seen little kids get fussy the parents hustled them out quickly enough. I've never seen anyone throwing popcorn. Most people are pretty respectful and are just there to have a good time. You have a vision of theaters that is disconnected from the reality of them.
They won't for long if they keep pissing off their highest revenue-generating customers.
I'm curious who you think those "highest revenue-generating customers" actually are. I'm willing to be it isn't who you think it is. Just because you buy a Mac Pro every few years doesn't make you a "highest revenue customer". Well over 50% of Apples revenues come from the iPhone and you can tell that Apple's focus is more on that product than any other. Also the customers generating the most revenue are very likely to be a different group than the most profitable customers. At the end of the day it's profits, not revenues that matter.
We just call it 'fraud' and 'tax evasion'.
Only because you are going for snark rather than comprehension. I'll give you an example. Solve this problem in a generalized proof and there is a Nobel prize in economics waiting for you.
My company makes wire harnesses. How much does it cost to make a wire harness? Sounds easy enough right? Cost of material, cost of labor to build it, plus time spent engineering and selling it, etc. Problem is that there are a lot of costs you cannot easily assign. We make hundreds of wire harnesses. How much of the electric bill do we assign to the cost of each one? How much administrative time was spent on it? How much of the CEO's salary to you allocate to each product and what metric are you going to use to divide up the cost? These are called indirect costs and rationally allocating these costs accurately to each product is a profession unto itself. Coming up with an answer that is better than an educated guess is nearly impossible for all but the most trivial cases. People have tried with things like Activity Based Costing and other methods but there is no method available that doesn't eventually involved significant guesswork and lots of assumptions that may or may not hold water.
Given sufficient data from 1000 companies, et cetera.
That is the key word. Sufficient. You will NEVER get sufficient data from even one company much less thousands. You would have to somehow pull every bit of institutional knowledge out of the heads of the people working there because I assure you that plenty of important stuff isn't written down anywhere. You could train an AI to do many useful things but the notion that you are going to replace the profession of accounting with AI within the lifetime of anyone reading this is approximately as absurd as thinking we are going to colonize Pluto in the same time period.
Then why don't you give at least one specific example.
I gave several. Read them. Furthermore if you cannot figure out what a human can do that Watson cannot on your own then I'm not sure what I can do to help you.
And this is where a system like Watson shines. While you may be able to fall back on personal experience to make these judgement calls, Watson can easily run thousands of simulations on each set of numbers, based on real world possibilities. You will always be making a guess based on what might happen, but Watson will come close to knowing what will happen.
Put succinctly you are saying that Watson can (almost) predict the future. Really? I want whatever you are smoking because it's obviously good stuff. Sorry but there is no AI in existence that is even close to as capable as you are implying and certainly none flexible enough to actually manage a real world business. First off, Watson IS NOT an AI capable of making reliable judgements and you would be a weapon's grade idiot to trust it to run your company without a human looking over it's shoulder even if it could - which it cannot. Tools like Watson are useful for decision support and routine transactions. Those are useful things but only a subset of what accountants do. They advise people by gathering and presenting pertenent data and handle mundane well defined tasks. If you actually tried to replace human judgement with AI given the state of the art you would be out of business faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit" or "IRS audit". Second, a system like Watson would be absolutely terrible at dealing with the ever shifting work flows and problems that arise in a real company. Riddle me this. How is Watson going to deal with a customer calling on the telephone to complain because they were shorted on a shipment because some idiot in shipping put the a different customers parts in their shipment? Even if Watson could handle that problem (which it cannot) you still would need people to sort it out. Why? Because only an idiot would ask a customer to talk to a computer to solve such a problem.
This all said, I am far from an AI believer.
No you are an AI worshiper. You think AI is some magical fairy dust you can sprinkle on a profession and make all the people somehow redundant. Problem is that you don't understand the technology at all. You don't know what it is, what it does, or how it would impact the real world. Worse you understand even less about the field of accounting and how it works. You think it's some sort of rigidly deterministic job where there is an easy answer to every question. You seriously have no idea what you are talking about.
Well, you do realize, that capacity (natgas or whatever) sitting idle (not making money) is seriously expensive, right?
Using fossil fuels sources and not forcing them to pay the full cost of the pollution and carbon they generate is even more expensive in the long run. Fossil fuels are what should be the alternative break-glass-in-case-of-emergency fuel source. They're useful but dirty and we should be trying to minimize their use as fast as possible.
That's why solar _must_ be cheap for markets to clear - one needs a backup to use it.
Every source of power needs backup. Powerplants of every description have to be idled for maintenance now and then. Storms knock out parts of the grid. Demand sometimes exceeds local supply. Solar is nothing fundamentally different in that regard.
On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.
Doesn't have to be. When you have a big storm that knocks down the power grid would you rather have some power for part of the day or no power for any of the day? Having solar cells on your roof insulates you from some of those problems. Furthermore solar cells still work even when the weather is bad and it is cloudy. Not as well of course but it doesn't have to be a bright clear day for them to provide some utility.
That said it's a moot point. Not like the grid is going away and you have the option of a generator for local emergency power. Germany generates something like 20-30% of their power from solar and they are routinely cloudy there.
Right now, most of the world's energy usage isn't electricity. We heat homes and businesses with natural gas and heating oil, transportation is by diesel and gasoline.
True but it doesn't have to remain that way in the long term. If we have efficient and clean electric power then there will be plenty of incentive to convert those fossil fuel systems to electric ones. Won't happen overnight but if the economics are right it WILL happen.
What about at night?
Ever heard of a battery? Plus just because you use solar during the day doesn't preclude you from using other sources of energy when it isn't available.
One of the best things about solar is that solar is particularly useful for air conditioning and refrigeration. Peak costs for those systems are highest when the sun shines the strongest for obvious reasons. A solar array can flatten those costs out very nicely. Honestly it's a mystery to me why every grocery store doesn't have a solar array on their roof. On days where there is lots of sun they'll get lots of solar power and when it isn't shining so strongly they probably don't need as much solar.
Does Apple's patent enable the distinction b/w a driver and passenger?
I'm not convinced it should matter. The question is whether passenger's "rights" to use their phone are more important than the safety of other drivers on the road. I would argue that safety is paramount in that context if we can actually prevent distracted driving. Until we can come up with a more fine grained solution, disable them all if that is the only safe option. Nobody's civil rights are being violated here and we've proven VERY clearly that we as a group cannot be trusted to leave the phone alone while driving. If someone can figure out a reliable way to disable only the driver's phone then we should do that but since we (so far) cannot we need to do the next best thing. I don't see any credible argument that your right to use your phone should supersede my right to use a motorway in reasonable safety. As the saying goes, your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.
This is a clear cut case of irresponsibility on the part of the driver who was driving distracted.
Completely correct. However unfortunately that doesn't bring people who are killed back to life. For better or worse we have to look for ways to solve problems like drunk or distracted driving that will prevent the accident from happening. Just punishing the offenders after the fact demonstrably doesn't fix the problem. Despite decades of strong drunk driving laws we still have thousands of fatalities every year from people driving drunk. People are still dying even in the face of laws prohibiting using phones while driving.
The end-game is a society completely risk adverse to rocking the boat or trying anything new from fear of completely manufactured legal attacks.
So we're supposed to just be ok with people dying because some asshat couldn't be bothered to get off the road before using Facetime? Look, I think this lawsuit sounds highly sketchy too but it is a real problem in need of a real solution. Maybe we should disable all calls and texts to/from a phone which is determined to be within a moving vehicle. (yes even the passengers - suck it up, You and your passengers can wait a few minutes for their call.) If it's important to speak to someone, pull off to the side of the road and put the car in park. We've clearly proven that we cannot be trusted to handle phones responsibly in a car. Don't like that solution? Fine, come up with a better one. I'm all ears, believe me. But the status quo isn't acceptable. Douchbag lawsuits obviously aren't the solution so what is?
t seems to me to be some kind of logical fallacy to think that something new will not happen because it has not happened in the past.
What about humans and their ability to problem solve and create and build has changed? The reason I don't see any reason to worry about "robots" taking all our jobs is because NOTHING has changed about the ability of humans to adapt to new circumstances. Nobody has been able to make a coherent argument detailing why humans will not be able to continue to create new industries and new technologies and new products in the future. I don't pretend to know what those new economies will look like with any great precision. What I do know is that people are smart, creative and that there is literally an entire universe worth of useful and valuable things to do. All we are doing is economically climbing higher up Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
It reminds me of the historical observation that generals are always fighting the last war.
You didn't finish your thought. Just because generals are still thinking about the last war doesn't mean they don't adapt to the new one when it starts. Yes there will be new challenges we haven't though of in the future. That's ALWAYS been the case. There are threats to humanity but economic collapse from runaway automation is among the more absurdly unlikely ones.
I'm curious what you think you can do that Watson can't.
Seriously? Quite a bit actually. I can handle input streams that Watson can't. I can make tools Watson couldn't begin to imagine. I can interact with physical objects without vast amounts of programming. I can deal with humans in a meaningful and human way FAR better than any computer program. I can pass a Turing test. The number of things I can do that Watson cannot is literally too numerous to bother counting. Watson is really just an decision support system with a natural language interface. Very cool but the notion that it could replace me is just laughable.
Accounting is a very rigidly structured practice.
A lot of people think so but they and you are actually completely wrong. There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid. Surprisingly few people actually realize how arbitrary many of the choices that go into accounting actually are. For many there is no objectively right or wrong answer - it's merely a question of preference. Even seemingly simple questions like "when did a sale occur" aren't always actually simple questions with a single possible answer or an objectively best answer. There is a lot of judgement and opinion in those decisions and much of that will not be easy to automate. Don't conflate bookkeeping with accounting. They aren't the same thing. Bookkeeping is something Watson can help out greatly with but it is a small subset of what accounting is.
All IBM really needs to do is let Watson sift through the books of a couple hundred companies and it will easily determine how to best achieve a defined set of objectives for a corporation.
See there is your problem. Every company is unique in some way. There are some commonalities to be sure and regulations in many cases to further make things consistent. But it's actually really hard for even the most sophisticated software to adapt to the unique qualities of each company just like not every human can fit into every company. It's depressing how many seemingly bright people think that running a company is something as deterministic as running some data through a computer program. It's WAY more complicated than you think it is. Just because Watson won a few games of Jeopardy doesn't mean you can make the program the de-facto CEO.
As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people.
You're looking at the wrong scale. You need to look at the whole economy. Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes. Might have taken some of them a few months but eventually they found something else. My company just bought a machine that allows us to manufacture wire leads much faster than we can do it by hand. That doesn't mean that the workers we didn't employ to do that work couldn't find gainful employment elsewhere.
And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.
Again, so what? You've automated some efficiency into an industry that obviously needed it. Some workers will have to do something else. Same story we've been hearing for centuries. It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.
People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future.
Based on what? The fact that you can't imagine what people are going to do if they can't do what they currently are doing? I'm old enough to predate the internet. The World Wide Web was just becoming a thing while I was in college. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, etc all didn't even exist when I was born. Vast swaths of our economy hadn't even been conceived of back then. 40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined. Your argument is really just a failure of your own imagination. People have been making that same argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution and it is just as nonsensical now as it was then.
I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.
Prepare to be surprised then. Your argument has no rational basis. You are extrapolating some micro-trends in your company well beyond any rational justification.
Calm down everyone. This is just a continuation of productivity tools for accounting. Among other things I'm a certified accountant. This is just the next step in automation of accounting and it's a good thing. We used to do all our ledgers by hand. Now we all use software for that and believe me you don't want to go back to the way it was. Very little in accounting is actually value added activity so it is desirable to automate as much of it as possible. If some people lost their jobs doing that it's equivalent to how the PC replaced secretaries 30+ years ago. They were doing a necessary task but one that added little or no value. Most of what accountants do is just keeping track of what happened in a business and keeping the paperwork flowing where it needs to go. This is EXACTLY what we should be automating whenever possible.
I'm sure there are going to be a lot folks loudly proclaiming how we are all doomed and that there won't be any work for anyone left to do. Happens every time there is an advancement in automation and yet every time they are wrong. Yes some people are going to struggle in the short run. That happens with every technological advancement. Eventually they find other useful and valuable things to do and the world moves on. It will be fine.
10$ to get in and the god awful pop was like nearly 10bucks
Nobody forced you to buy a drink. If you don't like the price then don't go. None of us will care I promise you. Personally I enjoy going to the theater now and then. Makes for a nice date night with my wife. And no I don't really care if the popcorn costs $6. If that's too much for your budget then don't buy popcorn. It won't affect the movie one bit.
ill use the above cash and get a hooker
Wow, a $25 hooker. Going to splurge for the AIDS test you will need afterwards?
Just because the entertainment industry is making record breaking money doesn't mean that they are also not losing alot to piracy.
Actually it means EXACTLY that. Piracy is not necessarily a bad thing for the industry and the relationship between piracy and profits is complicated. The simplistic notion that every pirated copy equals a lost sale of equivalent value is demonstrably nonsense. Most pirated content would not have resulting in additional sales. It's been demonstrated that piracy in many cases actually INCREASES sales.
Movie theaters aren't (or shouldn't be) selling a mere viewing of a movie. I can get that without involving them. They have to be selling something I cannot get elsewhere. A huge screen and an awesome sound system that I cannot replicate at home. Smarter theaters like Alamo Draft House sell pretty decent dining as well. Some theaters offer super comfy seats and other amenities. One near me has a bowling alley and bar. Many have video arcades. THAT is what I am paying for and it is not possible to pirate that experience. If all people wanted was to watch the movie on whatever crappy screen I could find then movie theaters would have been out of business a long time ago. Sure piracy might lose a few marginal customers but if their business model was so poor that piracy could make a real dent then they deserve to lose money.
Movie theaters aren't in the business of selling movie viewings. They are in the business of renting large projection and sound systems and providing entertainment. The movie is just the loss leader to get you in the door. It's like Las Vegas. Nobody really needs to go there just to gamble. I have three casinos in my home town. I go there for an experience that I cannot get at those local casinos and that those local casinos cannot really replicate.