Every form of energy has an environmental cost, the cost of making windmills and solar panels are mostly hidden in China, so Al Gore and his buddies can pretend that the cost doesn't exist.
That would be a great argument except the majority of wind turbines used in the US are also made in the the US these days and the plenty are exported as well.
I bet there are other toxic lakes just outside the processing plants that make solar panels too, since China currently doesn't care much about pollution.
I've been to China. They care about the pollution plenty. They also care about trying raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. You think doing that while protecting the environment is an easy thing to do? It's easy to sit in the cheap seats and decry what they are doing but claiming they don't care is simply not fair or true.
We're able to produce most of what we use, including rare earth minerals, without creating toxic sludge lakes. The only reason we send all of these industries to China is to because their lax environmental and labor laws allow cheaper production, and thus higher profit margins.
Not correct, or at least not completely true. The primary reason China has captured a lot of manufacturing business is because they have a large supply of cheap labor. And most of the reason it is cheap is precisely because the supply is so large - economics 101 stuff. Lots of laborers competing for jobs keeps wages suppressed. You are correct however that lax environmental policies do play a role in some industries as well. Stuff like glass, steel, etc can be pretty rough on the environment and not having to pay for these externalities can be a competitive advantage. China doesn't have a bad pollution problem just by coincidence. That is the result of decades of sacrificing the environment to boost wages and build industry. (It also has a lot to do with the number of dirty coal fired power plants they use)
Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all.
Depends strongly on what exactly you are producing. I run a manufacturing company. Whether something costs more to make in China versus the US depends primarily on the labor content of what is being produced. Labor intensive goods tend to get produced in low labor cost countries. Capital intensive goods tend to get produced in capital efficient (usually high labor cost) countries. It's obviously not quite that simple but it's a good first approximation. Stuff that can be automated or which has a lot of IP content tends to stay domestic. Stuff that requires the lowest possible labor costs tends to migrate elsewhere.
The outsourcing of manufacturing hasn't even significantly dropped retail prices much, though profit margins (and net profits) are at record highs across most industries.
Hasn't dropped retail prices much? A quick trip through Walmart should disabuse you of that notion. I've quoted jobs for stuff that is sold through Walmart. The target prices sometimes were below our cost of materials. Much of that cost savings is being passed on precisely because that is Walmart's business model - to be a price leader you have to pass on savings to customers or someone else will. If you think manufacturers are keeping all those profits from offshoring then you are very, very mistaken.
Profit margins are sometimes higher on domestically manufactured goods because of selection bias. The companies that are left are generally those which are not in labor intensive industries where offshoring makes sense due to intense price competition. The ones that are left are those that can for one reason or another protect their margins. Sometimes through IP, sometimes through capital efficiency, sometimes through automation, sometimes due to customer requirements, sometimes due to regulations. The US manufacturing sector is roughly the same size as China's when measured in dollars so plenty of stuff gets made here. Just not your McDonalds happy meal toys.
As wearable fitness devices become popular, we're seeing the beginning of a change in how untrained people can monitor their own health.
There has never been anything preventing this. You do not need a wearable fitness device to monitor your health. It might be helpful in some cases but the benefit is mostly marginal.
On top of that, we also have access now to powerful data-sharing tools — if a patient has the means and the interest to look at the data from a doctor's medical scans, she can.
There are very few people who have the training to really comprehend most medical scans. Even if they think they know what a particular piece means (which they usually do not) they likely will have no idea what the implications are regarding disease process or treatment. Even trained medical professionals like most nurses and EMTs aren't trained beyond the screamingly obvious stuff. Anything subtle is going to pass them by. So you'll have a bunch of untrained lay-people "reading" their medical scans and freaking out about a bunch of stuff they don't understand and/or misinterpret based on something they read on WebMD or Wikipedia.
I think a patient being involved in their medical care is a great thing but let's not pretend that a fitbit and an internet connection is comparable to 4 years of medical school.
There is still plenty of money when it comes to bombing brown people on the other side of the planet, but not enough for scientific research, infrastructure, or anything else that benefits the entire country.
Funding on a large scale generally only comes if either A) people are scared of something or B) people think they can make a buck. Option A is why we went to the moon. However right now the big scary thing is "terrorism" and a space program isn't vital to dealing with that. Option B applies to NASA but only indirectly to most firms outside of NASA. NASA is a research organization so they cannot predict what economic benefits will flow from their work because economic benefits from basic research are fundamentally unknowable in advance. Worse, the benefits from basic research generally take longer than the election cycle so politicians are unlikely to be interested. Most US research funding comes from fear of things that might kill us or hurt us. Defense, disease, energy, etc.
So if you want to increase NASA's budget you need to either A) scare congress about some threat or B) find some way to make economic benefits from research flow more quickly. In either case the benefits will need to flow in a time shorter than an election cycle most likely.
Stupid question. It's not only possible, it's easy. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account and frankly it hasn't mattered a bit. Those services offer me nothing I value. If someone thinks you are odd or "recoils in horror" that you don't bother with Facebook then that tells you everything you need to know about them right there. Someone who looks down on you for ignoring the latest fad is an idiot you probably don't need to associate with. You don't actually need to know the banal details of everyone's Facebook account to have an active social life.
You do not need Facebook to have friends. Nobody really cares what you say on Twitter. You can get a job without LinkedIn. Plenty of ways to share photos without Instagram.
Have we forgotten how to function without Facebook?
No. Seriously Facebook is NOT and never has been a necessity for most people. If Facebook entertains you then by all means have at it but it is unequivocally not a necessity. Email might almost be a necessity though even that is debatable.
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density.
Why the assumption that rush hour will disappear? If everyone continues to go to work at roughly the same time then the roadways will be crowded. Automation *might* alleviate this somewhat but I really cannot envision it disappearing entirely. The cars still take up physical space and the safety margins required won't be drastically less then they are now. Plus populations continue to grow so any efficiency gains are going to mitigated by larger numbers of people on the road over time. The human population has nearly doubled in my lifetime with little indication it is slowing.
I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".
Do you think the laws of physics will be repealed as well? Traffic density will have a minimum largely dictated by the traction of tires to the road. Ice will still be slippery and stuff will unexpectedly cross the road and potholes will still pop tires, etc. Computers can have faster reaction times but that doesn't mean cars can stop or maneuver instantly. Several thousand kilograms isn't super maneuverable no matter who is driving. The tighter you pack traffic the more accidents *will* occur, with or without a driver.
I think driverless cars have huge potential benefits but I think touting them as the solution to traffic congestion is rather over-sold.
You seem obsessed with robots but also seem to have no actual experience with any of those industries. There is no such thing as a robotic hospital. Fully automated factories are science fiction. Just because some jobs in a particular industry can be automated/roboticized does not mean that most of the rest will be.
Do you think that warehouses suddenly will become fully automated just because there are some stocking robots available? Do you have even the vaguest concept of how much an ASRS (automated storage and retrieval system) costs and how inflexible they are? Every one of your examples is a tiny little niche within a much larger industry. There is a place for robotics and automation but it isn't going to suddenly allow everyone to start telecommuting to work.
Robots are NOT going to replace people in most jobs any time soon for both economic and technical reasons. For a robot to replace a human worker it has to be both A) less expensive and B) equally or more flexible. And in some jobs even if the robot were cheaper people would reject it anyway. I will happily invite you to my company. We manufacture wire harnesses. The most basic machine that can do the simplest products we make will cost $1 million each which makes zero economic sense given the volumes of products we make. Most of the products we make cannot be economically automated at all and probably won't be in my lifetime. And even if they could be automated I would still need people on site to tend to the machines.
There is a value on your time. But it is demonstrably not your hourly rate on your job unless you are actually taking time away from your job. The rate is something different.
On a salary, the money keeps rolling in on a regular basis. If I squander a bit of it, I'll get more with the next paycheck. If I squander my time, it's gone for ever.
You haven't thought through the full implications of that statement. Earning a paycheck is essentially trading time for money. If you squander the money you earned, the time you spent earning it is wasted at the same time. The only difference is that the waste is time shifted but it is still wasted time that you will never, ever recover.
People like to ride horses too but you don't see many of those around these days do you? For most people cars are an expensive tool and little more.
There is also a tremendous social good to the population interacting with each other by driving.
Not really following the logic of this. Yeah people like cars but there are plenty of ways to be social that do not involve cars.
But they never will. It is once again naive science fiction-ism perpetrated by those who desire to make money off a forced change for no good reason.
No good reason? How about tens of thousands of auto fatalities per year? How about drunk driving or texting while driving or sleepy driving no longer being an issue? How about the lost opportunity cost of the billions of man-hours spent driving instead of doing something else even marginally more productive? How about the fact that a huge percentage of the driving public is demonstrably incompetent at driving?
There are TONS of good reasons to automate transportation. If you can't think of any then you really haven't given the matter any real thought.
Now, planes flying themselves, that would be good considering recent headlines.
Quite a few planes are already highly automated. Big airliners aren't far from being able to handle the entire flight without a pilot actually being technically necessary for routine flights. Autopilot and navigation has been routine for a long time now and a lot of the technology for drones is easily transferable to manned flight. Heck the space shuttle and most space flight is essentially fully automated - the "pilot" is mostly just a backup system.
Mostly because of idiot bosses that think they need to be able to walk up to you and poke you with a stick to make sure you are working.
Frequently true. If you have every managed people you'll quickly find that many of them are very interested in a paycheck but not very interested in actually working for said paycheck. A bit of figurative poking is frequently necessary.
A large number of jobs can be done at home over the network.
And far more cannot be done at home over a network. Retail, medicine, manufacturing, freight, mining, farming, restaurants, refining, and many more are not widely compatible with telecommuting. Programmers and tech workers too often have this ridiculous notion that because it can work well for software development that it makes sense for every other job which is easily and demonstrably not true.
Because lots of things have to be done in person. I run a manufacturing plant. I can assure you that you cannot run a manufacturing plant from your bedroom at home. It's a little hard to run a restaurant while telecommuting. Good luck operating a retail store while telecommuting. Farming? Mining? Medicine? Freight delivery? Most jobs aren't really compatible with telecommuting if you actually give it a moment's thought.
Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
I assure you that that is quite false in the majority of cases. Autonomous transportation is basically like a very small flexible train system that does not require tracks. It's like riding the bus - someone else is doing the driving but you still have to get there for a reason.
No. It's not more efficient. Picking, boxing, and shipping a single bottle of detergent hundreds of miles to your house because you are too lazy to walk two aisles over to the detergent aisle on your regular trip to the grocery store is a waste of the world's resources and generates extra CO2.
So instead the bottle gets picked, palletized and shipped to a resource intensive grocery store near me where I have to drive a several thousand pound vehicle and waste an hour of my time to go get it. There is nothing eco-friendly about me driving to the grocery store. Not that having it delivered is eco-friendly either but the marginal difference in resources between the two is fairly minimal. Not zero but not huge.
Stop assuming everyone goes to the grocery store on a regular basis. Your lifestyle is not the same as everyone else's. No, this button thing doesn't make much sense for most of us (myself included) but there are people who it could make a lot of sense for. Someone who is housebound. Someone who lives in a dense urban area without a car. Someone who prefers a brand not carried by their local stores. Etc. It will make sense for some folks without the word lazy being involved at all. If you were handicapped you might find this sort of service to be a godsend.
I don't like Amazon as a company. I don't like the way they deal with vendors. I really don't like the way they deal with their own employees, down to the recent non-complete agreements for warehouse laborers! As a consumer, I love Amazon, though I do try to not support them.
You sound a little conflicted. If you don't like them then don't do business with them. Nobody will be offended I promise.
Why do I want this button?
Odds are you don't. I can see use cases where this sort of thing might make sense but for most people I don't really see it being practical. I already go to the grocery store about once a week so the convenience value of this button is pretty minimal for me. However I could see it making sense for a busy person who lives somewhere like NYC where getting to the local Costco isn't exactly a sensible use of their time. If you live someplace you don't have a car, or if you aren't mobile, having stuff delivered to you starts to make a lot of sense.
Amazon's deliveries need to be a lot more expensive to justify my spending over an hour of the precious personal time on errands per week.
I shop a ton at Amazon but are you seriously going to claim that your week is SO packed that you don't even have 1 hour to spend grocery shopping? Really? You'd have to be unbelievably busy or ill for me to believe that.
BTW, I'm a cost accountant professionally. Using your hourly billing rate as an opportunity cost only works if you would actually forgo that income if you spent that time doing something other than earning wages. Since most people shop outside of work hours there is no lost wages and so the opportunity cost is much smaller.
I for one was lazy decades before I got my first cellular (and not so smart) phone.
So you admit your are lazy rather than otherwise occupied. Got it.
The only problem is, most of this stuff is cheaper at Costco — when they are having a sale, one can load-up until next year's sale of the same commodity.
Is it truly cheaper at Costco once you factor in all the costs? Are you accounting for your time, gasoline, wear on your car, opportunity cost, membership fees, etc. Are you accounting for the fact that many people don't live conveniently close to a Costco (I'm one of them)? Are you accounting for the fact that many people don't have the storage space or vehicle capacity to transport a pallet of toilet paper to their house? What about those people who don't own a car like many in NYC?
My point is that there is no one size fits all economic answer. Costco is a great solution for many people. I could see these button things working well for a different group of people, particularly urbanites where the "local" Costco might be 30 miles away. If I lived in Manhattan and didn't have a car like a lot of people there Costco is a pretty terrible solution.
First of all, Germany is not replacing nuclear power with coal but with wind and solar.
Germany has targeted closing all their nuclear plants by 2022, a mere 7 years from now. Nuclear accounts for something like 17-19% of power in Germany. Do you honestly think they are going to install that much renewable capacity AND solve the baseload problem in 7 years without fossil fuels playing a role to get them there? They aren't going to use coal but they are going to use more natural gas" which isn't exactly something to be thrilled about. It's cleaner but not by much.
Secondly, german coal plants filter exhaust.
So do plants in most developed countries.
They basically exhaust cleaner air than they 'breath in', besides CO2.
Complete bullshit. There isn't an operational coal plant in the world that is that clean even if you stupidly ignore the CO2 problem.
Thirdly, the 'idea' that coal emits noticeable radioactivity is a myth from the 1960s/1970s.
A myth you say? Yeah, the facts are not backing you up on that one.
This is why I think it's important for STEM majors to go to a liberal arts school. A school that forces you to do a number of credits from different faculties and will force you to take courses in the social 'sciences,' arts, literature, history philosophy, religion, anthropology, etc.
I have an engineering degree and the college I went to had a general philosophy of trying to make "well rounded" engineers by forcing us to take various liberal arts courses. I don't have an issue with the general idea but I can tell you from first hand experience that colleges that try this almost invariably fail miserably at it. Mine certainly did. I got a great engineering education but humanities? Not so much.
I can assure you that the random smattering of non-STEM courses I took as college grad did not meaningfully expand my mind. I'm kind of a naturally curious person and I learned far more about humanities outside of classes than I ever did in a formal classroom. Forcing engineers to take a few randomly-chosen-whatever-fits-my-schedule courses really doesn't accomplish much. The problem isn't with the concept of learning about disparate subjects, the problem is with the execution of that plan. Learning about engineering by necessity takes up a HUGE amount of the credit hour budget for a degree. There simply isn't a lot of left over curriculum space for a meaningful humanities education to fit in. I do not really see how a school could deliver both a quality engineering AND humanities education in the same four years.
And that method is starting to fall apart as high efficiency and alternative fuel vehicles become more common.
I didn't choose the word fuel by accident. You will note I did not say gasoline or diesel. Fuel can come in the form of stored electrons. You can tax electricity just as easily as gasoline. You can also adjust the tax rate to adjust for improving fuel economy.
How do you expect people to measure their consumption of goods such as public roadways?
Traditionally that is done via a fuel tax. Usage of the roads correlates strongly with the amount of fuel consumed. Lots of public goods can be tracked with a good that correlates strongly with the use of the public good.
Everyone discriminates. You choose physical / personality traits that you require in someone to date / marry / have sex with. You choose your hobbies, bands, etc. You say "I love McDonald's" or "I hate White Castle". EVERYONE DISCRIMINATES.
Not one of those forms of discrimination causes societal harm. Whom you chose to date does NOT cause the same problems as denying someone basic civil rights because they are a woman or a minority. There are some forms of discrimination that are plainly harmful to society so we protect classes of people against discrimination. No it is NOT ok to pass over someone for a job or pay them less because they have a vagina. No it is NOT ok to refuse service to a well behaved patron in a restaurant because of their skin color. Do not confuse basic consumer choices with civil rights.
Then with the Civil Rights movement, they decided that for blacks to have equal rights, business owners had to lose their rights (yeah, I don't get the logic either).
Say what now? You think it is ok for a business owner to refuse service on the basis of skin color? Business owners merely were required to actually follow the constitution (not to mention basic decency) which they could have been doing all along but didn't. "Don't get the logic"? Are you seriously that daft?
The only reason that people currently are opposed to the "religious freedom" law is because they don't like THAT religious view.
100% wrong. These "religious freedom" laws are simply sneaky attempts to enshrine and protect bigotry. Someone's religion should NEVER form a basis to refuse economic transactions because economic transactions are the domain of the state. That is a plain violation of the separation of church and state.
But they see no harm in forcing a religious person to choose between being faithful to God and making their living.
Exactly how is a religious person being harmed here? Harmed in a tangible way that we both can agree is real. A religious person claiming it is a "sin" for them to make a wedding cake for a gay couple is a mental block in their own head. This is nothing more than an attempt to justify a bigoted fear response. This sort of bogus argument is why we have separation of church and state in the first place. Economic transactions are the domain of the state and personal religious preferences should have NO bearing on them at all. Ever.
As far as I can tell, that prioritization is itself a religious judgment. It's saying that it's more wrong to refuse to blaspheme, than to blaspheme.
A religious person's imaginary rules for themselves are not and never should become my problem. If they want to live their life putting crazy imaginary restrictions on what they are ok with doing, that's their problem. They have NO right to make it my problem. I don't follow their religious law and I your argument is basically the same argument used to justify abominations like Jim Crow laws.
This is all just a distraction and pandering to a political base.
No it is not. It is an attempt to enshrine bigoted ideology into law against a group of people who have done them no harm. Just because it is pandering does not mean it will not do real harm.
No business that likes money and wants to continue making money will be discriminating against anyone.
BULLSHIT. Plenty of racist homophobes actually support this nonsense. This is legislation that specifically targets minority groups that by definition do not have the population to fight back directly. "Ohh, 1% of our customer base is angry with us, whatever will we do..."
Big corporations surely don't care who or what you sleep with in bed at night if you want to give them money.
Do you seriously think that the owners of Chick-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby wouldn't force their religion on others if given the chance? Companies are guided by people and people have biases. It's not even remotely difficult to find examples of companies discriminating against entire classes of people including women, blacks, hispanics, asians etc even when doing so is explicitly against the law. Ask women how that equal pay thing is going these day.
And if a small business decides to put their own religious beliefs in front of making money, then so be it if they go under.
If it were a fair world I would agree with you but reality frequently doesn't work that way.
Religious people have the right not to have their faith mocked...
Exactly where in US law does it say that one should be immune to mockery based on your religious choices? Rest assured that I fully plan to mock you and your invisible friend. I'll just won't deny your marriage license as well.
...by being forced to admit into their midst people that do not share their beliefs.
That is EXACTLY the excuse used by bigots to justify Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination. That's just a fancy way of saying "we don't want your kind here".
It's weird how some on the left are so eager to push "diversity" that they'll compromise our own liberal western values in the process of pandering to people who do not share these values.
Fair enough. Explain to us then the rational opposing position then. Explain to us the pro-discrimination position whereby we should be permitted to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation when none of those things should matter. Explain how these laws trying to push laws purporting to support "religious freedom" are actually anything other than an attempt by bigoted people to discriminate against others.
It sounds to me like you have an ideological issue with "some of the left" and are trying for some reason to justify what is plainly an attempt by right wing religious conservatives to codify bigotry into state law. 50 years ago those laws were called Jim Crow laws. This is just a later day version of separate but equal. Freedom of speech does not equal freedom to discriminate particularly on a religious basis.
Are you really going to argue that your average driver with electronic assist is quicker than a racing driver without?
Which "average" are you comparing against? If you are comparing me (an average non-racing driver) to an F-1 driver then no, the electronic assist won't matter. If you are comparing and average F1 driver to the best F1 drivers then chances are it will very much make a difference because the differences in their skill levels are quite small. Even an average F1 driver is astonishingly talented and the gap between middle of the pack and the front in driving skill is easily overwhelmed by technology.
It's just another technological advancement banished from racing for nothing more than "reasons".
I suspect they've put a tad more thought into it than that. The reasons may or may not be good ones but they didn't just do it for grins and giggles.
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Every form of energy has an environmental cost, the cost of making windmills and solar panels are mostly hidden in China, so Al Gore and his buddies can pretend that the cost doesn't exist.
That would be a great argument except the majority of wind turbines used in the US are also made in the the US these days and the plenty are exported as well.
I bet there are other toxic lakes just outside the processing plants that make solar panels too, since China currently doesn't care much about pollution.
I've been to China. They care about the pollution plenty. They also care about trying raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. You think doing that while protecting the environment is an easy thing to do? It's easy to sit in the cheap seats and decry what they are doing but claiming they don't care is simply not fair or true.
We're able to produce most of what we use, including rare earth minerals, without creating toxic sludge lakes. The only reason we send all of these industries to China is to because their lax environmental and labor laws allow cheaper production, and thus higher profit margins.
Not correct, or at least not completely true. The primary reason China has captured a lot of manufacturing business is because they have a large supply of cheap labor. And most of the reason it is cheap is precisely because the supply is so large - economics 101 stuff. Lots of laborers competing for jobs keeps wages suppressed. You are correct however that lax environmental policies do play a role in some industries as well. Stuff like glass, steel, etc can be pretty rough on the environment and not having to pay for these externalities can be a competitive advantage. China doesn't have a bad pollution problem just by coincidence. That is the result of decades of sacrificing the environment to boost wages and build industry. (It also has a lot to do with the number of dirty coal fired power plants they use)
Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all.
Depends strongly on what exactly you are producing. I run a manufacturing company. Whether something costs more to make in China versus the US depends primarily on the labor content of what is being produced. Labor intensive goods tend to get produced in low labor cost countries. Capital intensive goods tend to get produced in capital efficient (usually high labor cost) countries. It's obviously not quite that simple but it's a good first approximation. Stuff that can be automated or which has a lot of IP content tends to stay domestic. Stuff that requires the lowest possible labor costs tends to migrate elsewhere.
The outsourcing of manufacturing hasn't even significantly dropped retail prices much, though profit margins (and net profits) are at record highs across most industries.
Hasn't dropped retail prices much? A quick trip through Walmart should disabuse you of that notion. I've quoted jobs for stuff that is sold through Walmart. The target prices sometimes were below our cost of materials. Much of that cost savings is being passed on precisely because that is Walmart's business model - to be a price leader you have to pass on savings to customers or someone else will. If you think manufacturers are keeping all those profits from offshoring then you are very, very mistaken.
Profit margins are sometimes higher on domestically manufactured goods because of selection bias. The companies that are left are generally those which are not in labor intensive industries where offshoring makes sense due to intense price competition. The ones that are left are those that can for one reason or another protect their margins. Sometimes through IP, sometimes through capital efficiency, sometimes through automation, sometimes due to customer requirements, sometimes due to regulations. The US manufacturing sector is roughly the same size as China's when measured in dollars so plenty of stuff gets made here. Just not your McDonalds happy meal toys.
As wearable fitness devices become popular, we're seeing the beginning of a change in how untrained people can monitor their own health.
There has never been anything preventing this. You do not need a wearable fitness device to monitor your health. It might be helpful in some cases but the benefit is mostly marginal.
On top of that, we also have access now to powerful data-sharing tools — if a patient has the means and the interest to look at the data from a doctor's medical scans, she can.
There are very few people who have the training to really comprehend most medical scans. Even if they think they know what a particular piece means (which they usually do not) they likely will have no idea what the implications are regarding disease process or treatment. Even trained medical professionals like most nurses and EMTs aren't trained beyond the screamingly obvious stuff. Anything subtle is going to pass them by. So you'll have a bunch of untrained lay-people "reading" their medical scans and freaking out about a bunch of stuff they don't understand and/or misinterpret based on something they read on WebMD or Wikipedia.
I think a patient being involved in their medical care is a great thing but let's not pretend that a fitbit and an internet connection is comparable to 4 years of medical school.
There is still plenty of money when it comes to bombing brown people on the other side of the planet, but not enough for scientific research, infrastructure, or anything else that benefits the entire country.
Funding on a large scale generally only comes if either A) people are scared of something or B) people think they can make a buck. Option A is why we went to the moon. However right now the big scary thing is "terrorism" and a space program isn't vital to dealing with that. Option B applies to NASA but only indirectly to most firms outside of NASA. NASA is a research organization so they cannot predict what economic benefits will flow from their work because economic benefits from basic research are fundamentally unknowable in advance. Worse, the benefits from basic research generally take longer than the election cycle so politicians are unlikely to be interested. Most US research funding comes from fear of things that might kill us or hurt us. Defense, disease, energy, etc.
So if you want to increase NASA's budget you need to either A) scare congress about some threat or B) find some way to make economic benefits from research flow more quickly. In either case the benefits will need to flow in a time shorter than an election cycle most likely.
Is living without social media possible in 2015?
Stupid question. It's not only possible, it's easy. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account and frankly it hasn't mattered a bit. Those services offer me nothing I value. If someone thinks you are odd or "recoils in horror" that you don't bother with Facebook then that tells you everything you need to know about them right there. Someone who looks down on you for ignoring the latest fad is an idiot you probably don't need to associate with. You don't actually need to know the banal details of everyone's Facebook account to have an active social life.
You do not need Facebook to have friends.
Nobody really cares what you say on Twitter.
You can get a job without LinkedIn.
Plenty of ways to share photos without Instagram.
Have we forgotten how to function without Facebook?
No. Seriously Facebook is NOT and never has been a necessity for most people. If Facebook entertains you then by all means have at it but it is unequivocally not a necessity. Email might almost be a necessity though even that is debatable.
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density.
Why the assumption that rush hour will disappear? If everyone continues to go to work at roughly the same time then the roadways will be crowded. Automation *might* alleviate this somewhat but I really cannot envision it disappearing entirely. The cars still take up physical space and the safety margins required won't be drastically less then they are now. Plus populations continue to grow so any efficiency gains are going to mitigated by larger numbers of people on the road over time. The human population has nearly doubled in my lifetime with little indication it is slowing.
I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".
Do you think the laws of physics will be repealed as well? Traffic density will have a minimum largely dictated by the traction of tires to the road. Ice will still be slippery and stuff will unexpectedly cross the road and potholes will still pop tires, etc. Computers can have faster reaction times but that doesn't mean cars can stop or maneuver instantly. Several thousand kilograms isn't super maneuverable no matter who is driving. The tighter you pack traffic the more accidents *will* occur, with or without a driver.
I think driverless cars have huge potential benefits but I think touting them as the solution to traffic congestion is rather over-sold.
You seem obsessed with robots but also seem to have no actual experience with any of those industries. There is no such thing as a robotic hospital. Fully automated factories are science fiction. Just because some jobs in a particular industry can be automated/roboticized does not mean that most of the rest will be.
Do you think that warehouses suddenly will become fully automated just because there are some stocking robots available? Do you have even the vaguest concept of how much an ASRS (automated storage and retrieval system) costs and how inflexible they are? Every one of your examples is a tiny little niche within a much larger industry. There is a place for robotics and automation but it isn't going to suddenly allow everyone to start telecommuting to work.
Robots are NOT going to replace people in most jobs any time soon for both economic and technical reasons. For a robot to replace a human worker it has to be both A) less expensive and B) equally or more flexible. And in some jobs even if the robot were cheaper people would reject it anyway. I will happily invite you to my company. We manufacture wire harnesses. The most basic machine that can do the simplest products we make will cost $1 million each which makes zero economic sense given the volumes of products we make. Most of the products we make cannot be economically automated at all and probably won't be in my lifetime. And even if they could be automated I would still need people on site to tend to the machines.
I think of it as putting a value on my time.
There is a value on your time. But it is demonstrably not your hourly rate on your job unless you are actually taking time away from your job. The rate is something different.
On a salary, the money keeps rolling in on a regular basis. If I squander a bit of it, I'll get more with the next paycheck. If I squander my time, it's gone for ever.
You haven't thought through the full implications of that statement. Earning a paycheck is essentially trading time for money. If you squander the money you earned, the time you spent earning it is wasted at the same time. The only difference is that the waste is time shifted but it is still wasted time that you will never, ever recover.
People actually like to drive.
People like to ride horses too but you don't see many of those around these days do you? For most people cars are an expensive tool and little more.
There is also a tremendous social good to the population interacting with each other by driving.
Not really following the logic of this. Yeah people like cars but there are plenty of ways to be social that do not involve cars.
But they never will. It is once again naive science fiction-ism perpetrated by those who desire to make money off a forced change for no good reason.
No good reason? How about tens of thousands of auto fatalities per year? How about drunk driving or texting while driving or sleepy driving no longer being an issue? How about the lost opportunity cost of the billions of man-hours spent driving instead of doing something else even marginally more productive? How about the fact that a huge percentage of the driving public is demonstrably incompetent at driving?
There are TONS of good reasons to automate transportation. If you can't think of any then you really haven't given the matter any real thought.
Now, planes flying themselves, that would be good considering recent headlines.
Quite a few planes are already highly automated. Big airliners aren't far from being able to handle the entire flight without a pilot actually being technically necessary for routine flights. Autopilot and navigation has been routine for a long time now and a lot of the technology for drones is easily transferable to manned flight. Heck the space shuttle and most space flight is essentially fully automated - the "pilot" is mostly just a backup system.
Mostly because of idiot bosses that think they need to be able to walk up to you and poke you with a stick to make sure you are working.
Frequently true. If you have every managed people you'll quickly find that many of them are very interested in a paycheck but not very interested in actually working for said paycheck. A bit of figurative poking is frequently necessary.
A large number of jobs can be done at home over the network.
And far more cannot be done at home over a network. Retail, medicine, manufacturing, freight, mining, farming, restaurants, refining, and many more are not widely compatible with telecommuting. Programmers and tech workers too often have this ridiculous notion that because it can work well for software development that it makes sense for every other job which is easily and demonstrably not true.
Why do we *need* to travel at all?
Because lots of things have to be done in person. I run a manufacturing plant. I can assure you that you cannot run a manufacturing plant from your bedroom at home. It's a little hard to run a restaurant while telecommuting. Good luck operating a retail store while telecommuting. Farming? Mining? Medicine? Freight delivery? Most jobs aren't really compatible with telecommuting if you actually give it a moment's thought.
Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
I assure you that that is quite false in the majority of cases. Autonomous transportation is basically like a very small flexible train system that does not require tracks. It's like riding the bus - someone else is doing the driving but you still have to get there for a reason.
No. It's not more efficient. Picking, boxing, and shipping a single bottle of detergent hundreds of miles to your house because you are too lazy to walk two aisles over to the detergent aisle on your regular trip to the grocery store is a waste of the world's resources and generates extra CO2.
So instead the bottle gets picked, palletized and shipped to a resource intensive grocery store near me where I have to drive a several thousand pound vehicle and waste an hour of my time to go get it. There is nothing eco-friendly about me driving to the grocery store. Not that having it delivered is eco-friendly either but the marginal difference in resources between the two is fairly minimal. Not zero but not huge.
Stop assuming everyone goes to the grocery store on a regular basis. Your lifestyle is not the same as everyone else's. No, this button thing doesn't make much sense for most of us (myself included) but there are people who it could make a lot of sense for. Someone who is housebound. Someone who lives in a dense urban area without a car. Someone who prefers a brand not carried by their local stores. Etc. It will make sense for some folks without the word lazy being involved at all. If you were handicapped you might find this sort of service to be a godsend.
I don't like Amazon as a company. I don't like the way they deal with vendors. I really don't like the way they deal with their own employees, down to the recent non-complete agreements for warehouse laborers! As a consumer, I love Amazon, though I do try to not support them.
You sound a little conflicted. If you don't like them then don't do business with them. Nobody will be offended I promise.
Why do I want this button?
Odds are you don't. I can see use cases where this sort of thing might make sense but for most people I don't really see it being practical. I already go to the grocery store about once a week so the convenience value of this button is pretty minimal for me. However I could see it making sense for a busy person who lives somewhere like NYC where getting to the local Costco isn't exactly a sensible use of their time. If you live someplace you don't have a car, or if you aren't mobile, having stuff delivered to you starts to make a lot of sense.
Amazon's deliveries need to be a lot more expensive to justify my spending over an hour of the precious personal time on errands per week.
I shop a ton at Amazon but are you seriously going to claim that your week is SO packed that you don't even have 1 hour to spend grocery shopping? Really? You'd have to be unbelievably busy or ill for me to believe that.
BTW, I'm a cost accountant professionally. Using your hourly billing rate as an opportunity cost only works if you would actually forgo that income if you spent that time doing something other than earning wages. Since most people shop outside of work hours there is no lost wages and so the opportunity cost is much smaller.
I for one was lazy decades before I got my first cellular (and not so smart) phone.
So you admit your are lazy rather than otherwise occupied. Got it.
The only problem is, most of this stuff is cheaper at Costco — when they are having a sale, one can load-up until next year's sale of the same commodity.
Is it truly cheaper at Costco once you factor in all the costs? Are you accounting for your time, gasoline, wear on your car, opportunity cost, membership fees, etc. Are you accounting for the fact that many people don't live conveniently close to a Costco (I'm one of them)? Are you accounting for the fact that many people don't have the storage space or vehicle capacity to transport a pallet of toilet paper to their house? What about those people who don't own a car like many in NYC?
My point is that there is no one size fits all economic answer. Costco is a great solution for many people. I could see these button things working well for a different group of people, particularly urbanites where the "local" Costco might be 30 miles away. If I lived in Manhattan and didn't have a car like a lot of people there Costco is a pretty terrible solution.
First of all, Germany is not replacing nuclear power with coal but with wind and solar.
Germany has targeted closing all their nuclear plants by 2022, a mere 7 years from now. Nuclear accounts for something like 17-19% of power in Germany. Do you honestly think they are going to install that much renewable capacity AND solve the baseload problem in 7 years without fossil fuels playing a role to get them there? They aren't going to use coal but they are going to use more natural gas" which isn't exactly something to be thrilled about. It's cleaner but not by much.
Secondly, german coal plants filter exhaust.
So do plants in most developed countries.
They basically exhaust cleaner air than they 'breath in', besides CO2.
Complete bullshit. There isn't an operational coal plant in the world that is that clean even if you stupidly ignore the CO2 problem.
Thirdly, the 'idea' that coal emits noticeable radioactivity is a myth from the 1960s/1970s.
A myth you say? Yeah, the facts are not backing you up on that one.
This is why I think it's important for STEM majors to go to a liberal arts school. A school that forces you to do a number of credits from different faculties and will force you to take courses in the social 'sciences,' arts, literature, history philosophy, religion, anthropology, etc.
I have an engineering degree and the college I went to had a general philosophy of trying to make "well rounded" engineers by forcing us to take various liberal arts courses. I don't have an issue with the general idea but I can tell you from first hand experience that colleges that try this almost invariably fail miserably at it. Mine certainly did. I got a great engineering education but humanities? Not so much.
I can assure you that the random smattering of non-STEM courses I took as college grad did not meaningfully expand my mind. I'm kind of a naturally curious person and I learned far more about humanities outside of classes than I ever did in a formal classroom. Forcing engineers to take a few randomly-chosen-whatever-fits-my-schedule courses really doesn't accomplish much. The problem isn't with the concept of learning about disparate subjects, the problem is with the execution of that plan. Learning about engineering by necessity takes up a HUGE amount of the credit hour budget for a degree. There simply isn't a lot of left over curriculum space for a meaningful humanities education to fit in. I do not really see how a school could deliver both a quality engineering AND humanities education in the same four years.
And that method is starting to fall apart as high efficiency and alternative fuel vehicles become more common.
I didn't choose the word fuel by accident. You will note I did not say gasoline or diesel. Fuel can come in the form of stored electrons. You can tax electricity just as easily as gasoline. You can also adjust the tax rate to adjust for improving fuel economy.
How do you expect people to measure their consumption of goods such as public roadways?
Traditionally that is done via a fuel tax. Usage of the roads correlates strongly with the amount of fuel consumed. Lots of public goods can be tracked with a good that correlates strongly with the use of the public good.
Everyone discriminates. You choose physical / personality traits that you require in someone to date / marry / have sex with. You choose your hobbies, bands, etc. You say "I love McDonald's" or "I hate White Castle". EVERYONE DISCRIMINATES.
Not one of those forms of discrimination causes societal harm. Whom you chose to date does NOT cause the same problems as denying someone basic civil rights because they are a woman or a minority. There are some forms of discrimination that are plainly harmful to society so we protect classes of people against discrimination. No it is NOT ok to pass over someone for a job or pay them less because they have a vagina. No it is NOT ok to refuse service to a well behaved patron in a restaurant because of their skin color. Do not confuse basic consumer choices with civil rights.
Then with the Civil Rights movement, they decided that for blacks to have equal rights, business owners had to lose their rights (yeah, I don't get the logic either).
Say what now? You think it is ok for a business owner to refuse service on the basis of skin color? Business owners merely were required to actually follow the constitution (not to mention basic decency) which they could have been doing all along but didn't. "Don't get the logic"? Are you seriously that daft?
The only reason that people currently are opposed to the "religious freedom" law is because they don't like THAT religious view.
100% wrong. These "religious freedom" laws are simply sneaky attempts to enshrine and protect bigotry. Someone's religion should NEVER form a basis to refuse economic transactions because economic transactions are the domain of the state. That is a plain violation of the separation of church and state.
But they see no harm in forcing a religious person to choose between being faithful to God and making their living.
Exactly how is a religious person being harmed here? Harmed in a tangible way that we both can agree is real. A religious person claiming it is a "sin" for them to make a wedding cake for a gay couple is a mental block in their own head. This is nothing more than an attempt to justify a bigoted fear response. This sort of bogus argument is why we have separation of church and state in the first place. Economic transactions are the domain of the state and personal religious preferences should have NO bearing on them at all. Ever.
As far as I can tell, that prioritization is itself a religious judgment. It's saying that it's more wrong to refuse to blaspheme, than to blaspheme.
A religious person's imaginary rules for themselves are not and never should become my problem. If they want to live their life putting crazy imaginary restrictions on what they are ok with doing, that's their problem. They have NO right to make it my problem. I don't follow their religious law and I your argument is basically the same argument used to justify abominations like Jim Crow laws.
This is all just a distraction and pandering to a political base.
No it is not. It is an attempt to enshrine bigoted ideology into law against a group of people who have done them no harm. Just because it is pandering does not mean it will not do real harm.
No business that likes money and wants to continue making money will be discriminating against anyone.
BULLSHIT. Plenty of racist homophobes actually support this nonsense. This is legislation that specifically targets minority groups that by definition do not have the population to fight back directly. "Ohh, 1% of our customer base is angry with us, whatever will we do..."
Big corporations surely don't care who or what you sleep with in bed at night if you want to give them money.
Do you seriously think that the owners of Chick-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby wouldn't force their religion on others if given the chance? Companies are guided by people and people have biases. It's not even remotely difficult to find examples of companies discriminating against entire classes of people including women, blacks, hispanics, asians etc even when doing so is explicitly against the law. Ask women how that equal pay thing is going these day.
And if a small business decides to put their own religious beliefs in front of making money, then so be it if they go under.
If it were a fair world I would agree with you but reality frequently doesn't work that way.
Religious people have the right not to have their faith mocked...
Exactly where in US law does it say that one should be immune to mockery based on your religious choices? Rest assured that I fully plan to mock you and your invisible friend. I'll just won't deny your marriage license as well.
...by being forced to admit into their midst people that do not share their beliefs.
That is EXACTLY the excuse used by bigots to justify Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination. That's just a fancy way of saying "we don't want your kind here".
It's weird how some on the left are so eager to push "diversity" that they'll compromise our own liberal western values in the process of pandering to people who do not share these values.
Fair enough. Explain to us then the rational opposing position then. Explain to us the pro-discrimination position whereby we should be permitted to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation when none of those things should matter. Explain how these laws trying to push laws purporting to support "religious freedom" are actually anything other than an attempt by bigoted people to discriminate against others.
It sounds to me like you have an ideological issue with "some of the left" and are trying for some reason to justify what is plainly an attempt by right wing religious conservatives to codify bigotry into state law. 50 years ago those laws were called Jim Crow laws. This is just a later day version of separate but equal. Freedom of speech does not equal freedom to discriminate particularly on a religious basis.
Are you really going to argue that your average driver with electronic assist is quicker than a racing driver without?
Which "average" are you comparing against? If you are comparing me (an average non-racing driver) to an F-1 driver then no, the electronic assist won't matter. If you are comparing and average F1 driver to the best F1 drivers then chances are it will very much make a difference because the differences in their skill levels are quite small. Even an average F1 driver is astonishingly talented and the gap between middle of the pack and the front in driving skill is easily overwhelmed by technology.
It's just another technological advancement banished from racing for nothing more than "reasons".
I suspect they've put a tad more thought into it than that. The reasons may or may not be good ones but they didn't just do it for grins and giggles.