Which is proof of what exactly? It certainly didn't prove that you either did or did not have a laptop bomb. Which is exactly why pretty much no airport security bothers with such a useless bit of red tape.
It can prove that you ran out the battery on the 17 hour flight to Tel Aviv
What the hell are you talking about? Turning on a laptop doesn't prove ANYTHING about whether or not the device is a bomb. If it turns on it could either be a bomb or not. If it doesn't turn on it still could be a bomb or not. It proves absolutely nothing except for the fact that it's a laptop that turns on (or not). It's nothing but security theater. If you want to check if a laptop is a bomb, you need tests that actually can verify the presence (or absence) of explosives.
No, that's why they used to make you turn on electronics (prove it had a fuctioning battery instead of a block of explosive.)
A) They almost never make you turn any device on. B) Turning it on does not in any way prove that there is not ALSO an explosive in the device. C) If it was a serious risk then they would prohibit carrying laptops or they would take more serious precautions than what they actually do.
The reason they stopped is people having electronics became the not the exception and checking every device can power on was wasting enough time the airlines complained.
Which is proof that it is not actually a significant security risk. If it was a serious risk they wouldn't have changed the policy.
I'll address this specific case. The laptop has a significant battery that is very dense, and consequently fairly opaque to xray.
Lots of things have very big batteries besides laptops. People routinely ship items that are dense and opaque to xrays including metal boxes and actual weapons.
The battery is very easy to replace with a nicely shaped chunk of semtek with a blasting cap inserted inside.
You do not need a laptop to accomplish that. Giving laptops special scrutiny is remarkably stupid.
Of all the crap, the concern about laptops is completely reasonable.
No it isn't. It's nonsense. If someone wanted to sneak an explosive through, there are plenty of ways to do it that do not involve a laptop. Laptops are merely one vector among many possible threats.
I'd rather spend the money on something else... although if I COULD get any car I wanted and money wasn't an issue- it'd be the Rivian Truck.
Only style critique I have of the Rivian trucks is those headlights are UGLY. I have no idea why they thought that was a good look. Maybe they work great but they look like shit. Functionally it seems like a good truck presuming the build quality and interior functions are up to par.
I don't think you have really "tested" an EV unless you have lived with it for a month in -30C weather.
Perhaps not but where I live -30C (-22F) is a fairly routine occurrence and I drive an EV in such weather. I'm pretty sure the weather in Norway is at least as cold if not worse. It's certainly further north by a substantial distance.
They may be someday. They already are better than some human drivers. There are some people who really should not be allowed to drive and many people drive impaired/distracted with some regularity. Currently your hypothetical average human driver is probably still better than even the best machine driver but the machine's are getting better and human drivers are not. Eventually it seems probable that machine drivers will be safer than most (or all) human drivers. Exactly when that happens is unclear but within my lifetime seems reasonable.
Before self-driving cars are ready, they must be able to avoid jumping into the same lane as active oncoming traffic while traveling down a road or highway, even if the road markings are confusing or in error.
Umm, you do know that humans routinely are involved in head on collisions (about 10% of all fatal accidents are head on) and people voluntarily jump into the oncoming traffic lanes all the time for various reasons. Humans are also routinely confused by bad road markings - even good drivers. You seem to be under the delusion that humans do a good job avoiding these problems when the data clearly shows that humans are really quite bad at it to the tune of about 40,000 deaths per year in the US alone.
Air passengers at a growing number of U.S. airports will no longer need to remove electronics, liquids, and other items from their carry-on luggage at security checkpoints as the Transportation Security Administration rolls out new technology.
We never NEEDED to in the first place. That was just a bit of security theater against conveniently unspecified "threats". Just like the liquid restrictions. It made no sense that laptops were somehow special devices that had to be scanned differently from every other piece of electronics sent through the scanner.
Yes, I'm sure you can, idiots will always exist, but I bet you can't find anything that will systemically cause human drivers to.
Want to bet? All it takes is a badly labeled street sign in the right place and most humans will be fooled at least once. Naturally the failure modes for humans are different from machines but we have 40,000 deaths from auto accidents each year that prove that humans aren't especially safe or reliable drivers.
Furthermore you are aware that software can be upgraded, right? Every machine can learn from the errors of every other machine. You can make a machine less idiotic - humans not so much. When Tesla or some other auto maker finds a bug it is quite possible to push the fix out to every car and completely eliminate that error mode going forward. Humans do nearly so easily learn from the mistakes other drivers. Some in fact are quite obstinate about not changing. See the resistance by many to wearing seat belts.
The difference being a human that sees lane markers leading into active oncoming traffic will decide there are shenigans and not follow.
I guarantee you I can find examples of humans would would be fooled. There are a LOT of humans that are quite easy to mislead and all humans can be mislead sometimes. The only difference is that the tactics that fool a human will usually be different than those that fool a machine but make no mistake that both can be fooled. There are plenty of examples of people very dutifully following the instructions from their GPS into trouble despite it being painfully obvious that the GPS instructions were faulty in some way.
Your notion that people are harder to fool is not entirely supported by the facts.
This is not 'a machine can be fooled like a human', it's a reminder that the machine is still a *lot* dumber than a human.
That depends very much on the human in question. I will be happy to introduce you to some humans I know who should not be permitted to drive on public roads. I'm pretty sure you know some like this as well. Not all humans are "smarter" than machines for driving purposes even today. Your average human almost certainly is a better driver than the current state of the art machine but some machines have already surpassed some humans and they are getting better all the time while human drivers aren't.
Norway has severe weather, sub zero temperatures for much of the year, heavy snow, and people need to travel long distances. All the things that people say make EVs unsuitable.
People who say such things are people who do not own and/or have not driven EVs. Yes there are some infrastructure issues for long distance travel still to be ironed out but the solutions are in sight. Furthermore in the mean time if I really need to drive a long distance I still own a gas powered truck or I can easily rent a car for a very reasonable price for my rare trip longer than the 238 mile range of my EV. It's not like the gasoline infrastructure is going to disappear any time soon.
I own an EV (Chevy Bolt) and honestly I don't see myself buying a non-EV or plug in hybrid ever again if I have a choice. I've owned a number of hatchbacks over the years including some hot hatches and the Bolt is just in a different league in most respects from similar cars. It's more far fuel efficient, smoother to drive, quieter, accelerates better at any speed than all but the most ridiculous of hot hatches, requires FAR less maintenance, eliminates gas station stops, is more fun to drive, and the list goes on. Even if you ignore the eco stuff altogether, it's just a better car in most ways than its ICE equivalents. The cold does impact its range some but not enough to really cause any serious problems except in the rarest of corner cases. Put some good snow tires on just like any other car and it's fine in the bad weather. In fact it's better in the snow than my previous hatchback (a VW Golf GL) by quite a lot.
I'm anxiously awaiting companies to start releasing electrified pickups and EVs with at least 50-100 miles of electric range or preferably completely EV. I'm watching the Rivian and Tesla offerings closely and hoping they motivate Ford/GM/FCA to get seriously busy with EV versions of their trucks too.
You seem to think that our economy is based on "making stuff". But manufacturing is only 12% of the economy.
12% of the US economy. That is not true globally.
The most valuable companies in the world do no manufacturing.
Want to bet on that? Of the 10 largest companies in the world by revenue, the only one in the top ten that arguably isn't a manufacturer is Walmart and their business is almost exclusively selling manufactured goods made by other companies. Yes oil and gas is wildly valuable and processing fossil fuels IS manufacturing.
If you are measuring by market cap you still have lots of companies that make some/most of their revenue via manufacturing. The top ten there includes Berkshire Hathaway, Johnson and Johnson, Apple, Amazon and Alibaba who all either make stuff themselves or sell manufactured goods made by others.
You'll hear the meme that the US doesn't manufacture anymore which is simply not true at all. The US manufacturing sector is worth about $3 Trillion annually which by itself would one of the top 7 economies in the world.
If suddenly, machines could make everything we currently make, there would be little change in our economy.
Machines CAN make much of it. What they cannot do is make it economically. The limitations on automation are not primarily physical. They are economic. Automation carries large up front costs which require substantial production volume and/or value to recoup. There are and will remain no lack of labor intensive products where it makes no economic sense to automate. Nobody is going to buy a machine that costs more to operate than it does to hire a person.
Great, that's a real help in cases where it isn't possible to know in advance what the safe speed is, if there even is one, which is essentially all cases.
It's generally very easy to tell what a safe speed is. Doesn't mean you can't be wrong sometimes but it's not hard to tell if you have any meaningful experience as a driver. And the fact remains that if you cause an accident you were wrong. Driving is an inherently risky endeavor. If you cannot handle this fact then yes you should not drive.
Lets for a moment ignore the fact that speed is not THE cause of most road fatalities
Actually it is but not in the way you are probably thinking. My grandfather once pointed out to me a logically airtight fact. If you are the vehicle operator of a vehicle that causes any accident there is one inescapable truth in every case - you were driving too fast for the conditions. Those conditions include the mental state of the vehicle operator as well as weather, traffic, and the rest. This is always true even when other factors are in play as well (which there often are). If you hit something unintentionally at any speed (even at 1kph), it is ALWAYS true that you were driving too fast for the conditions. Sometimes the only safe speed is 0. If you are drunk any you hit something, being drunk is obviously causal but equally true is the fact that you were driving too fast for the conditions. You should have not moved the vehicle. You cannot hit something if you are not moving. A vehicle moving sufficiently slowly (possibly 0kph) by definition cannot cause a fatality.
Bear in mind that police can issue tickets for reckless driving at speeds well below the legal limit for a given stretch of road if the conditions warrant. Speed limits only apply when conditions are "normal". Once something changes "normal" (weather, impairment, distraction, disability, etc) then speed absolutely becomes a consideration.
You know that when you drive faster in Germany than 130 KMH, the insurance will not cover you. Even if it is legal to do so in some places.
That makes way too much sense. There really is almost never any practical reason to drive faster than that so it probably should require a special insurance rider (with a large fee of course) and a good explanation if you wish to drive faster. The only exception I can think of is for first responders in an emergency - an ambulance should have no fixed limit if you get what I'm saying. It always puzzles me when car companies make cars that can drive 300kph or some other ridiculous speed that nobody either can or should actually reach on any public road. Honestly I'd be fine with a hard limit of 130kph or similar for any car on a public road.
Last week, a press release went out to tech and music reporters claiming that little-known startup Endel had become the "first-ever algorithm to sign [a] major label deal" with Warner Music.
Captain Pedantic here. I know what they meant but an algorithm cannot sign a deal of any sort. Only people can sign deals. The owner of the algorithm can sign a deal but the algorithm cannot legally, physically, or logically sign any contract except under human supervision. Warner signed a deal with the developers/owners of said algorithm, not the algorithm itself.
Seriously? You still believe that Copyright "protects artists"?
Absolutely. Not even a debate. That doesn't mean it also isn't being abused widely as well. Those are not orthogonal concepts. Same thing for patents. Yes they protect inventors. Yes they are also being abused by large corporations and patent trolls.
Copyright is a *distributor's privilege*! To take power *away* from artists. By the same distributors that regularly try to *lower* the meaningless peanuts that artists get from the cake.
That is only true if the creator of the copyrighted work grants a distributor such rights. Don't sign a bad contract with a distributor an it isn't a problem.
If you had ever been an artist, you'll know that they get their money from gigs and merchandising, and it has been shown time and time again, that if they just share all their works as a form of marketing, they make *more* money, than they ever did from copyright!
Umm, you do realize not every "artist" is a musician right? What you are describing has nothing to do with most forms of copyrighted works. Sure the music industry is pretty fucked up in a lot of ways but you can't take that industry and generalize it to all uses of copyright. And even as screwed up as the music industry is, copyright still does protect artists from rampant plagiarism of their work. The fact that musicians tend to fritter away the benefit they get from copyright by signing one sided deals with scummy media companies is a separate issue.
If we move to permanent DST, my sunrise will be around 10 am in the winter. I'll hate that more than spending a few minutes changing the clocks.
So what? It also means you'll have an hour of extra daylight at the end of the day and that is more useful to most people. I get up, drive to work and spend the next 8-10 hours indoors. Most people do something similar. I don't give a shit if it is pitch black out until I'm ready to leave work for the day. Give me the daylight when I can do something useful with it.
You DO realize that there are places of the world where the time zone DOESN'T change, right? They effectively are on "permanent DST" such as Arizona, Hawaii, etc.
You have that backwards. They are permanently NOT on DST. They are on standard time year round. DST gets you an extra hour of daylight in the evening. No state in the USA is legally permitted to be on DST all year under current law. Standard time is what we get in the winter. DST is the act of advancing clocks forward an hour in the summer.
Disagree. Permanent standard time makes no sense. I want maximal daylight in the evening when it is actually useful to the most people including myself. That means DST year round makes more sense.
There is a standard, and it's called solar noon. Aim for that, and then adjust your schedule accordingly rather than pretend that the clock must decide your schedule.
Evidently you've never had an actual job because companies are mostly quite inflexible about the hours they expect you to work. They aren't going to collectively coordinate to change their hours of operation for your personal convenience. Easier to change the clock than to convince everyone to voluntarily change their hours of operation.
Solar noon is an arbitrary decision about timekeeping. It has no inherent causal relationship to human activity schedules. We can just as easily define 11am or 1pm to be "noon" as 12am and it would be just as valid a choice.
One Thing was that DST was created to save energy, but was not adopted by all countries in the beginning.
Energy savings might have been a goal originally but that goal seems to be largely a failure or at least any benefits seem marginal. However DST does have the positive social benefit of maximizing daylight hours in the evening when it's of benefit to the majority of people. For various reasons the middle of our daylight hours no longer matches people's schedule. For most people the middle of their day is somewhere around 1-2pm. Most adults go to bed sometime between 9-11pm and they finish work some time around 4-5pm. The choice of mid-solar day being noon is an arbitrary choice as is the choice of mid-working day. Having daylight for the maximal amount of that period after work is hugely helpful so putting mid-day (noon) a little later is pretty helpful. I suspect if you took a poll and asked most people if they would prefer it dark in the morning or in the evening, most would prefer the later.
About 1.5 million workers in Britain are at high risk of losing their jobs to automation, according to government estimates, with women and those in part-time work most affected
They are at risk for losing their CURRENT job. The question they conveniently do not ask is what new jobs will be created by the automation. Automation very rarely takes jobs without creating new ones somewhere else. The computer I'm typing this on is a perfect example. It's clearly automation. We no longer have large secretarial pools working on typewriters and taking shorthand and distributing memos. But the PC clearly has been a net job creator. Vast swaths of our economy are busy doing jobs that didn't even exist 40 years ago. Industrial robots do the same thing. They take away certain types of assembly line jobs but they facilitate jobs managing, repairing, the robots as well as warehousing, transport, logistics, marketing, sales, etc for the extra production volume that they create. The net effect is usually more jobs when all the dust settles. Of course some people experience some rough times in the transition but the evidence shows that they mostly figure it out and find new work elsewhere. People are very adaptable - far more so than any machine we can design.
Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation.
It's been this way since the start of the industrial revolution and even before. Some jobs get automated by new technology and those people have to find or create new jobs. As a species we're quite good at that. Generally the automation enables jobs that didn't exist previously. If you need evidence look at the very device you are using to read these very words. Smartphones are a multi-billion dollar business that didn't even exist 20 years ago. The web didn't even exist 30 years ago yet you'd be hard pressed to argue it hasn't been a net creator of jobs and prosperity. (note I didn't say a uniform creator of prosperity) That's not to say there aren't some bumps and bruises along the way for some people but in the end our society ends up better off pretty much every time.
There is this fear that somehow this time it will be different. That somehow devices have finally gotten clever enough to replace people permanently with nothing left for people to do. Problem with that idea is that it presumes there is a finite amount of economically useful work which is an idea that has never been true in the history of man. It also presumes that we have no control over automation politically, economically, or physically which also isn't true. One of our defining traits is that we are tool makers. Our tools enable us to do more than we could do without them. Instead of just making a product we use machines to help us make it so we can spend more time selling it or improving it or funding it.
I think I'll make my own smaller one that doesn't ever challenge my broader views and just wants to argue the finer details that we can all agree are difficult to get right.
It's adorable that you think people use social media to broaden their views. How impressively optimistic of you.
Never mind that exactly the opposite tends to happen and most people demonstrably seek out channels to reinforce their existing views and confirmation bias.
A photon as a particle will travel in a straight line as you classically think, however it is also a wave and has uncertainty according to Heisenberg uncertainty.
This is true but not relevant to this particular discussion. A photon from Betelgeuse does not diffuse to both Alpha Centauri and our Sun in any practical sense. It's not a useful exercise to treat the uncertainty in the position of a photon in units of light years. Remember we are talking about photons we've actually observed through our eyes or through out measuring equipment.
If you constrain the photons position, say by emitting it from a point and passing it through an arbitrarily small orifice, cementing position, momentum blows up and spreads it out.
It doesn't spread out to distances measured in light years. And we are constraining the photon's position because we have observed it.
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Israel made me turn my laptop on.
Which is proof of what exactly? It certainly didn't prove that you either did or did not have a laptop bomb. Which is exactly why pretty much no airport security bothers with such a useless bit of red tape.
It can prove that you ran out the battery on the 17 hour flight to Tel Aviv
What the hell are you talking about? Turning on a laptop doesn't prove ANYTHING about whether or not the device is a bomb. If it turns on it could either be a bomb or not. If it doesn't turn on it still could be a bomb or not. It proves absolutely nothing except for the fact that it's a laptop that turns on (or not). It's nothing but security theater. If you want to check if a laptop is a bomb, you need tests that actually can verify the presence (or absence) of explosives.
See Israel.
What for? They aren't doing anything special.
No, that's why they used to make you turn on electronics (prove it had a fuctioning battery instead of a block of explosive.)
A) They almost never make you turn any device on.
B) Turning it on does not in any way prove that there is not ALSO an explosive in the device.
C) If it was a serious risk then they would prohibit carrying laptops or they would take more serious precautions than what they actually do.
The reason they stopped is people having electronics became the not the exception and checking every device can power on was wasting enough time the airlines complained.
Which is proof that it is not actually a significant security risk. If it was a serious risk they wouldn't have changed the policy.
I'll address this specific case. The laptop has a significant battery that is very dense, and consequently fairly opaque to xray.
Lots of things have very big batteries besides laptops. People routinely ship items that are dense and opaque to xrays including metal boxes and actual weapons.
The battery is very easy to replace with a nicely shaped chunk of semtek with a blasting cap inserted inside.
You do not need a laptop to accomplish that. Giving laptops special scrutiny is remarkably stupid.
Of all the crap, the concern about laptops is completely reasonable.
No it isn't. It's nonsense. If someone wanted to sneak an explosive through, there are plenty of ways to do it that do not involve a laptop. Laptops are merely one vector among many possible threats.
I'd rather spend the money on something else... although if I COULD get any car I wanted and money wasn't an issue- it'd be the Rivian Truck.
Only style critique I have of the Rivian trucks is those headlights are UGLY. I have no idea why they thought that was a good look. Maybe they work great but they look like shit. Functionally it seems like a good truck presuming the build quality and interior functions are up to par.
I don't think you have really "tested" an EV unless you have lived with it for a month in -30C weather.
Perhaps not but where I live -30C (-22F) is a fairly routine occurrence and I drive an EV in such weather. I'm pretty sure the weather in Norway is at least as cold if not worse. It's certainly further north by a substantial distance.
Yes.... But machines are supposed to be BETTER.
They may be someday. They already are better than some human drivers. There are some people who really should not be allowed to drive and many people drive impaired/distracted with some regularity. Currently your hypothetical average human driver is probably still better than even the best machine driver but the machine's are getting better and human drivers are not. Eventually it seems probable that machine drivers will be safer than most (or all) human drivers. Exactly when that happens is unclear but within my lifetime seems reasonable.
Before self-driving cars are ready, they must be able to avoid jumping into the same lane as active oncoming traffic while traveling down a road or highway, even if the road markings are confusing or in error.
Umm, you do know that humans routinely are involved in head on collisions (about 10% of all fatal accidents are head on) and people voluntarily jump into the oncoming traffic lanes all the time for various reasons. Humans are also routinely confused by bad road markings - even good drivers. You seem to be under the delusion that humans do a good job avoiding these problems when the data clearly shows that humans are really quite bad at it to the tune of about 40,000 deaths per year in the US alone.
Air passengers at a growing number of U.S. airports will no longer need to remove electronics, liquids, and other items from their carry-on luggage at security checkpoints as the Transportation Security Administration rolls out new technology.
We never NEEDED to in the first place. That was just a bit of security theater against conveniently unspecified "threats". Just like the liquid restrictions. It made no sense that laptops were somehow special devices that had to be scanned differently from every other piece of electronics sent through the scanner.
Yes, I'm sure you can, idiots will always exist, but I bet you can't find anything that will systemically cause human drivers to.
Want to bet? All it takes is a badly labeled street sign in the right place and most humans will be fooled at least once. Naturally the failure modes for humans are different from machines but we have 40,000 deaths from auto accidents each year that prove that humans aren't especially safe or reliable drivers.
Furthermore you are aware that software can be upgraded, right? Every machine can learn from the errors of every other machine. You can make a machine less idiotic - humans not so much. When Tesla or some other auto maker finds a bug it is quite possible to push the fix out to every car and completely eliminate that error mode going forward. Humans do nearly so easily learn from the mistakes other drivers. Some in fact are quite obstinate about not changing. See the resistance by many to wearing seat belts.
The difference being a human that sees lane markers leading into active oncoming traffic will decide there are shenigans and not follow.
I guarantee you I can find examples of humans would would be fooled. There are a LOT of humans that are quite easy to mislead and all humans can be mislead sometimes. The only difference is that the tactics that fool a human will usually be different than those that fool a machine but make no mistake that both can be fooled. There are plenty of examples of people very dutifully following the instructions from their GPS into trouble despite it being painfully obvious that the GPS instructions were faulty in some way.
Your notion that people are harder to fool is not entirely supported by the facts.
This is not 'a machine can be fooled like a human', it's a reminder that the machine is still a *lot* dumber than a human.
That depends very much on the human in question. I will be happy to introduce you to some humans I know who should not be permitted to drive on public roads. I'm pretty sure you know some like this as well. Not all humans are "smarter" than machines for driving purposes even today. Your average human almost certainly is a better driver than the current state of the art machine but some machines have already surpassed some humans and they are getting better all the time while human drivers aren't.
Norway has severe weather, sub zero temperatures for much of the year, heavy snow, and people need to travel long distances. All the things that people say make EVs unsuitable.
People who say such things are people who do not own and/or have not driven EVs. Yes there are some infrastructure issues for long distance travel still to be ironed out but the solutions are in sight. Furthermore in the mean time if I really need to drive a long distance I still own a gas powered truck or I can easily rent a car for a very reasonable price for my rare trip longer than the 238 mile range of my EV. It's not like the gasoline infrastructure is going to disappear any time soon.
I own an EV (Chevy Bolt) and honestly I don't see myself buying a non-EV or plug in hybrid ever again if I have a choice. I've owned a number of hatchbacks over the years including some hot hatches and the Bolt is just in a different league in most respects from similar cars. It's more far fuel efficient, smoother to drive, quieter, accelerates better at any speed than all but the most ridiculous of hot hatches, requires FAR less maintenance, eliminates gas station stops, is more fun to drive, and the list goes on. Even if you ignore the eco stuff altogether, it's just a better car in most ways than its ICE equivalents. The cold does impact its range some but not enough to really cause any serious problems except in the rarest of corner cases. Put some good snow tires on just like any other car and it's fine in the bad weather. In fact it's better in the snow than my previous hatchback (a VW Golf GL) by quite a lot.
I'm anxiously awaiting companies to start releasing electrified pickups and EVs with at least 50-100 miles of electric range or preferably completely EV. I'm watching the Rivian and Tesla offerings closely and hoping they motivate Ford/GM/FCA to get seriously busy with EV versions of their trucks too.
You seem to think that our economy is based on "making stuff". But manufacturing is only 12% of the economy.
12% of the US economy. That is not true globally.
The most valuable companies in the world do no manufacturing.
Want to bet on that? Of the 10 largest companies in the world by revenue, the only one in the top ten that arguably isn't a manufacturer is Walmart and their business is almost exclusively selling manufactured goods made by other companies. Yes oil and gas is wildly valuable and processing fossil fuels IS manufacturing.
If you are measuring by market cap you still have lots of companies that make some/most of their revenue via manufacturing. The top ten there includes Berkshire Hathaway, Johnson and Johnson, Apple, Amazon and Alibaba who all either make stuff themselves or sell manufactured goods made by others.
You'll hear the meme that the US doesn't manufacture anymore which is simply not true at all. The US manufacturing sector is worth about $3 Trillion annually which by itself would one of the top 7 economies in the world.
If suddenly, machines could make everything we currently make, there would be little change in our economy.
Machines CAN make much of it. What they cannot do is make it economically. The limitations on automation are not primarily physical. They are economic. Automation carries large up front costs which require substantial production volume and/or value to recoup. There are and will remain no lack of labor intensive products where it makes no economic sense to automate. Nobody is going to buy a machine that costs more to operate than it does to hire a person.
Great, that's a real help in cases where it isn't possible to know in advance what the safe speed is, if there even is one, which is essentially all cases.
It's generally very easy to tell what a safe speed is. Doesn't mean you can't be wrong sometimes but it's not hard to tell if you have any meaningful experience as a driver. And the fact remains that if you cause an accident you were wrong. Driving is an inherently risky endeavor. If you cannot handle this fact then yes you should not drive.
Lets for a moment ignore the fact that speed is not THE cause of most road fatalities
Actually it is but not in the way you are probably thinking. My grandfather once pointed out to me a logically airtight fact. If you are the vehicle operator of a vehicle that causes any accident there is one inescapable truth in every case - you were driving too fast for the conditions. Those conditions include the mental state of the vehicle operator as well as weather, traffic, and the rest. This is always true even when other factors are in play as well (which there often are). If you hit something unintentionally at any speed (even at 1kph), it is ALWAYS true that you were driving too fast for the conditions. Sometimes the only safe speed is 0. If you are drunk any you hit something, being drunk is obviously causal but equally true is the fact that you were driving too fast for the conditions. You should have not moved the vehicle. You cannot hit something if you are not moving. A vehicle moving sufficiently slowly (possibly 0kph) by definition cannot cause a fatality.
Bear in mind that police can issue tickets for reckless driving at speeds well below the legal limit for a given stretch of road if the conditions warrant. Speed limits only apply when conditions are "normal". Once something changes "normal" (weather, impairment, distraction, disability, etc) then speed absolutely becomes a consideration.
You know that when you drive faster in Germany than 130 KMH, the insurance will not cover you. Even if it is legal to do so in some places.
That makes way too much sense. There really is almost never any practical reason to drive faster than that so it probably should require a special insurance rider (with a large fee of course) and a good explanation if you wish to drive faster. The only exception I can think of is for first responders in an emergency - an ambulance should have no fixed limit if you get what I'm saying. It always puzzles me when car companies make cars that can drive 300kph or some other ridiculous speed that nobody either can or should actually reach on any public road. Honestly I'd be fine with a hard limit of 130kph or similar for any car on a public road.
Last week, a press release went out to tech and music reporters claiming that little-known startup Endel had become the "first-ever algorithm to sign [a] major label deal" with Warner Music.
Captain Pedantic here. I know what they meant but an algorithm cannot sign a deal of any sort. Only people can sign deals. The owner of the algorithm can sign a deal but the algorithm cannot legally, physically, or logically sign any contract except under human supervision. Warner signed a deal with the developers/owners of said algorithm, not the algorithm itself.
Seriously? You still believe that Copyright "protects artists"?
Absolutely. Not even a debate. That doesn't mean it also isn't being abused widely as well. Those are not orthogonal concepts. Same thing for patents. Yes they protect inventors. Yes they are also being abused by large corporations and patent trolls.
Copyright is a *distributor's privilege*! To take power *away* from artists. By the same distributors that regularly try to *lower* the meaningless peanuts that artists get from the cake.
That is only true if the creator of the copyrighted work grants a distributor such rights. Don't sign a bad contract with a distributor an it isn't a problem.
If you had ever been an artist, you'll know that they get their money from gigs and merchandising, and it has been shown time and time again, that if they just share all their works as a form of marketing, they make *more* money, than they ever did from copyright!
Umm, you do realize not every "artist" is a musician right? What you are describing has nothing to do with most forms of copyrighted works. Sure the music industry is pretty fucked up in a lot of ways but you can't take that industry and generalize it to all uses of copyright. And even as screwed up as the music industry is, copyright still does protect artists from rampant plagiarism of their work. The fact that musicians tend to fritter away the benefit they get from copyright by signing one sided deals with scummy media companies is a separate issue.
If we move to permanent DST, my sunrise will be around 10 am in the winter. I'll hate that more than spending a few minutes changing the clocks.
So what? It also means you'll have an hour of extra daylight at the end of the day and that is more useful to most people. I get up, drive to work and spend the next 8-10 hours indoors. Most people do something similar. I don't give a shit if it is pitch black out until I'm ready to leave work for the day. Give me the daylight when I can do something useful with it.
You DO realize that there are places of the world where the time zone DOESN'T change, right? They effectively are on "permanent DST" such as Arizona, Hawaii, etc.
You have that backwards. They are permanently NOT on DST. They are on standard time year round. DST gets you an extra hour of daylight in the evening. No state in the USA is legally permitted to be on DST all year under current law. Standard time is what we get in the winter. DST is the act of advancing clocks forward an hour in the summer.
Agreed. Permanent DST makes no sense.
Disagree. Permanent standard time makes no sense. I want maximal daylight in the evening when it is actually useful to the most people including myself. That means DST year round makes more sense.
There is a standard, and it's called solar noon. Aim for that, and then adjust your schedule accordingly rather than pretend that the clock must decide your schedule.
Evidently you've never had an actual job because companies are mostly quite inflexible about the hours they expect you to work. They aren't going to collectively coordinate to change their hours of operation for your personal convenience. Easier to change the clock than to convince everyone to voluntarily change their hours of operation.
Solar noon is an arbitrary decision about timekeeping. It has no inherent causal relationship to human activity schedules. We can just as easily define 11am or 1pm to be "noon" as 12am and it would be just as valid a choice.
One Thing was that DST was created to save energy, but was not adopted by all countries in the beginning.
Energy savings might have been a goal originally but that goal seems to be largely a failure or at least any benefits seem marginal. However DST does have the positive social benefit of maximizing daylight hours in the evening when it's of benefit to the majority of people. For various reasons the middle of our daylight hours no longer matches people's schedule. For most people the middle of their day is somewhere around 1-2pm. Most adults go to bed sometime between 9-11pm and they finish work some time around 4-5pm. The choice of mid-solar day being noon is an arbitrary choice as is the choice of mid-working day. Having daylight for the maximal amount of that period after work is hugely helpful so putting mid-day (noon) a little later is pretty helpful. I suspect if you took a poll and asked most people if they would prefer it dark in the morning or in the evening, most would prefer the later.
About 1.5 million workers in Britain are at high risk of losing their jobs to automation, according to government estimates, with women and those in part-time work most affected
They are at risk for losing their CURRENT job. The question they conveniently do not ask is what new jobs will be created by the automation. Automation very rarely takes jobs without creating new ones somewhere else. The computer I'm typing this on is a perfect example. It's clearly automation. We no longer have large secretarial pools working on typewriters and taking shorthand and distributing memos. But the PC clearly has been a net job creator. Vast swaths of our economy are busy doing jobs that didn't even exist 40 years ago. Industrial robots do the same thing. They take away certain types of assembly line jobs but they facilitate jobs managing, repairing, the robots as well as warehousing, transport, logistics, marketing, sales, etc for the extra production volume that they create. The net effect is usually more jobs when all the dust settles. Of course some people experience some rough times in the transition but the evidence shows that they mostly figure it out and find new work elsewhere. People are very adaptable - far more so than any machine we can design.
Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation.
It's been this way since the start of the industrial revolution and even before. Some jobs get automated by new technology and those people have to find or create new jobs. As a species we're quite good at that. Generally the automation enables jobs that didn't exist previously. If you need evidence look at the very device you are using to read these very words. Smartphones are a multi-billion dollar business that didn't even exist 20 years ago. The web didn't even exist 30 years ago yet you'd be hard pressed to argue it hasn't been a net creator of jobs and prosperity. (note I didn't say a uniform creator of prosperity) That's not to say there aren't some bumps and bruises along the way for some people but in the end our society ends up better off pretty much every time.
There is this fear that somehow this time it will be different. That somehow devices have finally gotten clever enough to replace people permanently with nothing left for people to do. Problem with that idea is that it presumes there is a finite amount of economically useful work which is an idea that has never been true in the history of man. It also presumes that we have no control over automation politically, economically, or physically which also isn't true. One of our defining traits is that we are tool makers. Our tools enable us to do more than we could do without them. Instead of just making a product we use machines to help us make it so we can spend more time selling it or improving it or funding it.
I think I'll make my own smaller one that doesn't ever challenge my broader views and just wants to argue the finer details that we can all agree are difficult to get right.
It's adorable that you think people use social media to broaden their views. How impressively optimistic of you.
Never mind that exactly the opposite tends to happen and most people demonstrably seek out channels to reinforce their existing views and confirmation bias.
A photon as a particle will travel in a straight line as you classically think, however it is also a wave and has uncertainty according to Heisenberg uncertainty.
This is true but not relevant to this particular discussion. A photon from Betelgeuse does not diffuse to both Alpha Centauri and our Sun in any practical sense. It's not a useful exercise to treat the uncertainty in the position of a photon in units of light years. Remember we are talking about photons we've actually observed through our eyes or through out measuring equipment.
If you constrain the photons position, say by emitting it from a point and passing it through an arbitrarily small orifice, cementing position, momentum blows up and spreads it out.
It doesn't spread out to distances measured in light years. And we are constraining the photon's position because we have observed it.