So, start with eathing three good, full meals. That definitily helps to quench the snack attacks.
I'm guessing you've never really actually tried to lose weight. That is definitively NOT the advice you will receive from experts on the subject. The three squares a day idea does not derive from any actual evidence about its utility for weight maintenance or health. In fact if most people tried just eating three meals a day and not snacking with an eye towards weight control then they will very likely fail to maintain that regimen for any significant length of time. This has been demonstrated time and again in research on the topic.
You think "security" is something that can be "built in." Security in software development is a mindset.
A mindset in a software developers head is a useless thing to an end user. It might start there but it has to actually become something more than that. Ultimately security has to manifest itself in products (software and hardware) and processes to use those products. A developer's mindset will not keep a network or device or data safe any more than and engineer thinking about how to stop a car will actually cause one to halt. So yes, security ultimately has to be built into whatever device(s) and software you are using.
My idea is, everytime a vendor has a security issue on their device, I want a refund.
Then you would have no devices because it's impossible to prove that non trivial devices and software have no security issues. Nobody could ship a product and be sure there was no security issue they missed. It is arguably reasonable however to apply strict product liability laws to software and to hold companies financially accountable for damages. Current application of product liability laws routinely provide software makers too much wiggle room to avoid responsibility for their failures, particularly with regard to security.
Well shit, man, you should have said you meant "random consumer grade camera" when you wrote "real camera", and "random jerk off the street" when you meant "photographer".
Oh I get it, you are trolling. My bad for confusing you with someone with an actual interest in photography.
I strongly agree with your first point, but this point is absolute nonsense. I can't speak for your Sony a9, but I have owned 4 Canon bodies and the interface is far more functional than android or ios.
Sigh... No it is not. I'm not talking about the act of capturing the image. Dedicated cameras mostly handle the actual image capture just fine. I'm talking about everything before and after and particularly about the software. I've used Canon's too and their software UI is just as bad as anyone else. Setting up your camera to get a good work flow requires a lot of training and needless configuration of the software. Doesn't matter which camera maker you prefer, they are all pretty bad. Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fuji, doesn't matter - their UIs suck. Some are marginally better than others but none are good. But as bad as that is it is the post processing interface and functionality where they really shit the bed. Smartphones run rings around dedicated cameras for everything after the picture is taken and the sad thing is that the reason is just that they have better software for that which could be put into dedicated cameras too. There is no technical limitation on what "real" cameras can do but just failings of the engineering teams designing the things.
Real cameras take better pictures. If you think otherwise, you really need to learn how to use your camera. I've never met a knowledgeable professional who disagrees. We don't buy these expensive, bulky cameras for show. They really do take MUCH better pictures.
No, they CAN take better pictures in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing. For most people a smartphone camera is more than adequate and is far easier to use. And I know photographers that can reliably get better images from a shitty toy camera than most people can with the fanciest gear money can buy because skill matters.
What I have failed to communicate is that this advantage in image quality is really the ONLY thing they do better and that is NOT enough. Int a lot of cases it doesn't matter much at all. My Sony A9 should be able to do everything and more than my smartphone can do with an image IN CAMERA and it cannot. I should be able to out of the box share images to dropbox or instagram or facebook with minimal configuration. I should be able to crop, filter, adjust and process images in camera. I should be able to email, text or share images. And it needs to do these things as well as or better than my smartphone. The point and shoot camera market died because the improved image quality is only a piece of the puzzle and often not the most important piece.
If you are a pro shooting for the cover of Nat Geo then yeah, image quality trumps everything else. The overwhelming majority of photos and photographers do not fall into this category most of the time and camera makers forget that at their peril.
For truly "serious" photographers, none of those things matter nearly as much as being able to get as many photons to as many silicon photosites as quickly as possible.
If you think that then you don't know many serious photographers. Being a serious photographer is far more complicated than having the biggest possible glass and most pixels.
Which is why a Phase One IQ3 costs 50 grand without lens and can't do any of the the above except via expensive tethering software tied to a PC.
The Phase One products are aimed at a tiny fraction of a fraction of the market even among professional photographers. Most people that get paid for their photos do not use equipment like this and they certainly are not the demarcation line for what makes a "serious photographer".
1. A good digital camera these days will pair with your smartphone, such that every time you snap a picture, one or more versions of it appear on the phone, potentially also triggering any number of secondary actions like watermarking, cropping, and uploading to multiple services. My favorite app for this purpose is "shuttersnitch".
Good digital cameras (and I own several) do nothing of the sort out of the box and the software provided with them to share images is almost universally terrible. I shouldn't have to invest in third party applications to get a useful work flow. And you are missing the point. Aside from professional photographers, if you have to pair the camera to a smartphone or tablet to get useful workflows then for most people for most circumstance it's better for them to just carry the phone or tablet and drop the camera entirely. And that is EXACTLY what has happened to the point and shoot market. The camera needs to be BETTER as a standalone device for image manipulation, computational photography, post processing, and image sharing than smartphones but currently they are often way behind.
2. In much the same way you can pair the camera with a tablet, such as an iPad, and get a very large screen indeed for previews, and use it from several feet away. The UI argument is a moot point, given the diversity of options, except:
Bullshit the UI argument is moot. If I have to pair it with a phone or a tablet to get a useful preview screen and post processing tools then 99% of users will be better off dropping the dedicate camera entirely and just using the pretty darn good camera in the phone/tablet. It's only a tiny fraction of photographers that actually need the extra imaging capabilities of a dedicated camera. If the camera cannot do a better job with image quality AND post processing than a phone then the cameras are going to lose every time. This is what happened to point and shoot cameras. They have basically died as a market because smartphones have images that are almost as good, video that is often better, are easier to use, and can do other things as well.
Furthermore have you actually used the software interfaces on Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc ILCs? They are horrible. I primarily shoot Sony and their menu systems are an abomination. Their Playmemories software almost could not be more awkward to use. Canon and Nikon aren't meaningfully better either. All of them are trapped in the past and need some serious lessons in software UI design.
3. "Ease of use" may not be what you think it is, if you're coming from the smartphone camera world. A purpose-built digital camera can go from OFF, to zoomed, precisely focused, and taking the picture, in less than a second. That includes zooming to the edge of, say, a 400mm lens: You just turn a large, easily accessible physical ring. See how long it takes to do the finger-spread or slider-drag equivalent on a smartphone -- even just to adjust the zoom slightly.
You are only talking about the actual image capture which is maybe 20% of the work. Purpose built cameras generally do this just fine. It's the image sharing and post processing IN CAMERA where they shit the bed. Smartphones often do FAR better computational photography (particularly for video) than purpose built cameras and they are light years ahead in image sharing, software interface, and post processing tools. The only thing dedicated cameras reliably do better is get better image quality and only then in the hands of someone who actually knows what they are doing and has the right glass.
4. If you think a real camera only produces "marginally better" photos in most situations, try using a real camera with an f1.4 full-frame lens in a dimly lit room. Or try catching the action at a soccer game with even a reasonably priced 70-200mm lens like the Canon f/4.
That isn't what I said. I do all of these things and have even gotten
The thing that tends to limit point-and-shoot cameras is the crappy software. Software is also what makes phone cameras great.
Exactly. This is exactly right. The hardware in the dedicated camera (point and shoot as well as pro cameras) is more than good enough but the software for interfacing and post processing is absolutely horrible. Doesn't matter which camera vendor you are talking about either - they are all terrible.
If you could get a point-and-shoot that had, say, the computational photography stuff in a Google Pixel phone it would be awesome. But you can't, so there is a very good chance that despite the smaller sensor and technically worse optics the Pixel will give you a better photo.
I don't think I could have said it better. Why bother carrying a dedicated camera if my phone takes good enough image quality and has vastly better post processing?
Wouldn't all these workflow problems if the cameras just transferred the image instantly to your smartphone (will you will be carrying anyways)?
Yes and no. It would be a quick fix and it's shocking that they cannot already do it efficiently. Even my Sony A9 which gets awesome images makes it a huge pain in the ass to get the pictures where I need them after taking them. It has wifi but the software to connect to it SUCKS. It has an ethernet RJ45 port built in that I cannot do anything but connect to an FTP server with!?! WTF? This isn't the 1990s... But even if they could transfer quickly the problem for dedicated cameras remains. Why would I carry a camera that in most cases takes at best marginally better images than my smartphone if it has no other advantages? Most people want a "good enough" image most of the time and it's the post processing efficiency that actually matters most.
I don't know jack about regular cameras but someone has to have done something like this. Transferring the photos via bluetooth or something.
Here's the funny thing. The cameras routinely already have wifi, bluetooth, gps, usb, (sometimes) ethernet, etc. My Sony mirrorless already has all that and more. It's really just a question of software. But the engineers making these cameras are utter fuckwits about this topic. I should be able to have my images back up to the cloud in real time as I'm taking them. The hardware is already in my camera to do it. I should be able to crop, filter, and share *in camera*. It's just software that is required. They need to make it as easy as humanly possible to take amazing images and then to do something but they are still stuck with thinking we are back in the days of film. If I'm going to lug around a purpose built camera it has to be a category killer in every way, including post processing to make it worth the bother. It has to be BETTER than a smartphone for image taking AND processing. But somehow smartphones are kicking the ass of cameras in post processing in almost every imaginable way.
It's obviously not apple, because apple barely makes anything.
Apple makes software. They are a software company. People seem to have a hard time with this concept but it's true. Companies are what they make and what Apple makes and sets their products apart is software. The hardware in an iPhone is really barely different than any similar Android phone. A Mac's hardware is nearly identical to any Windows PC. What Apple sells people is the software in a pretty box. People who think Apple is a hardware company don't understand their business model.
Compact point and shoots still have _crappy_ glass. Better than a cell phone, but still crap.
That's not true at all. There are some point and shoots with very good quality glass. Far better than smartphones in the right hands. The problem point and shoots have is that their workflow after the picture is taken SUCKS and they are one trick ponies. They take good pictures just fine but then what? They offer nothing after that. With a smartphone I can edit the photo, add filters, back it up to the cloud, share it with my friends, post to social media, all within seconds. And I have a device that does other things. The makers of point and shoot cameras have completely shit the bed in realizing that for these cameras it's the workflow that matters more than the image. They never bothered to make them web connected, give them editing and social media tools, etc which would actually make the possibly worth bothering with. They still live in the SD card to a PC world which smartphones made obsolete years ago.
If they wanted to make a point and shoot relevant again it should have LTE and wifi. It should back up to dropbox and the cloud. It should have a big and good touch screen. High quality glass. GPS and location tagging. Seamless transfer to tablets. It should have image processing better than that on a smartphone. Image cataloging. Flip screens for vlogging. It should have 4K video at high frame rates and tools to actually do something useful with it IN CAMERA. All this should be automated to a high degree in a compact size and the cost cannot be more than a smartphone. Better images only matter when you can actually use them to do what you want and taking the picture is just the start. Nobody wants a point and shoot camera that can only take pictures and can't do anything in post. Smartphone makers understand this and camera makers remain utterly clueless about it.
Oh and a LOT of these complaints apply to high end pro cameras too. They also have shit interfaces and terrible connectivity and work flow. Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc all persist with the delusion that only image quality and physical ergonomics matter. And this myopia will cost them dearly.
If there is an innovative disruptive Silicon Valley genius out there who wants to do something, how about a really cheap, reliable cell phone that JUST makes calls and texts?
No money in it. Seriously the number of people who would actually buy this is so small that it is not really worth addressing. It's cheaper to just include the camera and if the user doesn't want it they don't have to use it.
The iPhone camera has never been a superior camera to real full fledged digital cameras (of their time).
Smartphone cameras don't (usually) make superior images to "real" cameras. But smartphone cameras do several things FAR better than "real" cameras, most related to work flow for certain types of tasks.
1) Far better ability to share and back up images via the internet. Any picture I snap with my smartphone is automatically backed up to the cloud and can be shared immediately via email, text message, or social media. Not so much for "real" cameras which still require plugging in a cable or pulling out an SD card and finding a PC somewhere. They are seriously terrible at this and it's costing them dearly in sales against smartphones. 2) Bigger and more useful screens to view and edit images. Better touch screens too. 3) Fit in my pocket. I can carry my smartphone almost everywhere. Not so much for my bulky "real" camera. The best camera is the one you have with you. I'm not lugging a Sony A9 with a 70-200F2.8 around very often - the thing weighs the better part of 2kg and is bulky as heck. Awesome under the right circumstances and yes it makes better images but that comes at a cost both financial and in work flow. Hard to justify if you aren't getting paid to take pictures. Even compact point and shoot cameras like the RX100 which make great images are still bulkier than my smartphone and can't do anything else besides take images. 4) Has a FAR more elegant interface for basic shooting. Seriously the interfaces on interchangeable lens cameras are universally awful and almost useless for anything more than basic chimping. 5) Unless you get into some pretty pricey gear smartphones often actually do as good or better on video than a shocking number of "real" cameras for certain applications.
So called "real" cameras get better images (if you know what you are doing) but there is a LOT of overhead in achieving that. The work flow for basic point and shoot picture taking and image sharing is vastly superior on smartphones than any "real" camera. No they can't get the best possible image in most cases but most of the time that's not important to most people. There is a reason why the point and shoot camera market has basically died despite the fact that they can produce measurably better images. Image quality is NOT the only thing that matters for most people most of the time. The overhead, shitty work flow, and bulky equipment required to achieve these (usually marginally) better images with "real" cameras is simply not worth the hassle. And I say this as someone who is a photography enthusiast with a lot of very expensive camera bodies and lenses.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will not remain dangerous for 10 thousand years, only a few hundred.
It's expected to remain unlivable for longer than the USA has been in existence. When we are talking about time scales longer than anyone reading this will be alive it's a distinction without much of a difference.
But do get my point about that accident. It was the WORST conceivable scenario.
No it was not the worst conceivable scenario. Very bad yes but it's trivial to conceive of a worse one. Imagine an accident similar to Chernobyl had happened at Indian Point just 25 miles from New York City. If the wind happened to be blowing the right way it could render the city uninhabitable under the right conditions. Unlikely I'll grant but the probability is not zero.
In fact, BOTH cities where atomic bombs where used are inhabited and it's been less than 100 years since the end of WW2.
Chernobyl put 400X more radioactive material into the atmosphere than Hiroshima. Furthermore the types of radiation released from Chernobyl were much longer lasting than those from the two bombs dropped on Japan. You are comparing apples to oranges.
So, you are scare mongering with the "Laying waste to a state for 10,000 years" thing.
Read what I wrote. Did you see me write anything about 10,000 years? No you did not. You are responding to your own strawman. I said it "Nobody is going to be living in that 'state sized portion of real estate' for a very long time to come." which is 100% true. Stop trying to put words in my mouth that I did not say.
Yes there are risks, but nothing as dire as you claim.
The risks are absolutely that serious and we ignore them at our peril. The probability of catastrophic failure of a fission plant regardless of design is low but is not zero. Denial of that fact is dangerous. I think nuclear power is important and should be used but I'm not about to pretend it doesn't carry some serious dangers.
No they are not. You referenced a cost estimate of gross margin on their cars which is a bunch of educated guesses by outside cost accountants without access to actual cost data. These sorts of reports are useful but you should be careful reading too much into them. What is undeniably useful is the public financial statements each company has to put out which gives a good basis for comparison.
Gross margin for a company like Toyota (one of the more profitable big auto companies) hovers around 18-20% which is pretty good for what they do. Tesla's gross margin is similar but more volatile but low by the standards of luxury car makers. Bear in mind that Tesla sells no cars in the lower end of the market where margins are tighter while Toyota sells quite a few. Compare with a high margin manufacturer like Ferrari which has gross margins around 50% and Tesla doesn't look so special. Tesla might have a lot of room to improve gross margins but they aren't getting gross margins wildly better than many of their competitors.
The thing with Tesla is that.. they don't really have any special technology.
Neither does Coca Cola - nothing special about carbonated sugar water - but that doesn't mean they cannot succeed. It's all about execution. And when it comes to electric vehicles to date Tesla has been out executing pretty much everyone. That's not to say they have any sort of insurmountable advantage - they don't. But the incumbent auto makers sleep on Tesla at their own peril. Tesla is vertically integrated, has a fantastically popular brand, products people are willing to wait literally years for, the best electric vehicle technology on the market, patents (even if they don't use them aggressively), and a visionary leader. Yes they still might shit the bed but I'm not about to bet against them at this point.
They just sold it at a price that didn't make any fucking sense for them to be doing, since they were selling all production(supposedly) and still losing money(even after one time book shenigans).
Yeah, yeah... People made the same short sighted argument about Amazon back in the day. While I wouldn't buy Tesla's stock at the current price and they definitely aren't on solid financial ground yet, they also have a long term strategy that if it works will pay off very handsomely. They didn't make money because they were aggressively investing in future products to grow bigger instead of remaining a boutique maker of high end cars - ala Ferrari. This was a calculated gamble by Tesla but there is a good chance it will actually work. They probably could have made money on the Model S but they had larger ambitions. Nothing wrong with that.
Why do american car companies insist on building stuff people can't afford anyways en masse? don't they realize that 80 000 dollar + cars are an extreme luxury, just because they live rich themselves?
What are you talking about? Tesla sells a tiny of the cars sold every year in the US and almost everyone who buys one can definitely afford it. They sell in numbers comparable to other luxury car maker for similar products. Tesla has less than 1.5% market share in the US.
The absolute worst accident we've had, where a stupidly designed reactor was literally blown apart and burned for days didn't produce such a unlivable place for 10 thousand years, and certainly not a state sized portion of real estate.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is roughly the size of the State of Rhode Island (both are just over 1000 square miles). Nobody is going to be living in that "state sized portion of real estate" for a very long time to come.
I'm not going to tell you there are not risks, but I am going to insist on being reasonable about assessing those risks.
Agreed but please start by not spouting false data about actual catastrophes. I think there is a level of risk for nuclear fission that is acceptable but we have a lot of hard work ahead of us to get to that level of safety and we certainly aren't there today.
What State, or even large-scale area, has been rendered as you claim?
Forgetting about Chernobyl? The Chernobyl exclusion zone is roughly 1000mi^2. For comparison the state of Rhode Island in the US is about 1200mi^2. So there you go - an area the size of an entire state rendered uninhabitable by nuclear power. But I guess since it happened somewhere else you think it could not ever happen here?
Fear-mongering is so much easier than reasoned debate, isn't it?
It's not FUD when it actually has happened. The failure modes of nuclear fission are not hypothetical and it is dangerous to not honestly acknowledge them.
Hmm, as of 2008, rooftop solar has caused 0.44 deaths per TWh produced. Nuclear is at 0.04 deaths per TWh.
Solar power has caused ZERO deaths per Wh. Industrial accidents relating to solar installations have happened but the actual act of making solar power has literally zero deaths unless you can find some random guy that somehow got electrocuted. Nuclear energy undeniably has a body count attached to it. A low body count to be sure but the number is not zero. Construction accidents have happened with every form of power generation. Furthermore solar has not rendered any location permanently uninhabitable by humans unlike nuclear. This argument that there are more deaths from solar is some of the most contrived and cynical fanboy-ism I've every heard.
Well, we all know that nuclear is by far the most deadly form of power ever invented, so obviously, these numbers are fabrications....
Yes it is. Ask Japan especially in the neighborhoods of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are not separable issues.
it should be noted that the short half-life stuff that makes nuclear waste, well, seriously radioactive is pretty much gone a week after shutdown of the plant.
Again this is complete bullshit according to no less an authority than the Department of Energy.
And the long half-life stuff? Not nearly so dangerous as airplane flight.
So what you are looking for is a Small Modular Reactor. These are relatively small reactors that can be produced on an assembly line and shipped to the installation site, so they are cheaper than conventional nuclear designs.
Being cheaper than current reactor designs is kind of damning with faint praise. And these are proposed reactor designs, not actual products that can be bought today. The DOE is claiming that we might see them in 10-15 years which is how researches talk when they mean probably never.
Most don't require active cooling, which means you don't get meltdowns.
Meltdowns are just one of many failure modes for fission reactors to worry about and not anywhere near the most likely. And your use of the word "most" is not comforting since it means the number is not zero.
Also, you can bury them in a vault for protection from attack or sabotage.
The very fact that this would be a serious concern is rather worrisome don't you think? Nobody is going to be attacking wind turbines or solar panels or fossil fuel plants and even if they did and succeeded it wouldn't be a major catastrophe.
They require no maintenance. You run them until their fuel is spent, then you pull one out of service and recycle it.
There is no such thing as a man made device that never needs maintenance or that never fails. Reliable and easy to replace I could believe. As soon as someone says "no maintenance" what it actually means is easily replaced, disposable, or they are lying. The DOE does not claim they do not require maintenance. Any engineer that makes such a claim is either clueless or lying.
You end up with a few pounds of waste material per unit over the course of it's lifespan, which is a couple of decades.
That's the theory which has yet to be demonstrated in practice. If they can do it in practice then I'm all about it but right now you are talking about proposed designs and prototypes as if they are working products which they are not. And I think you are grossly overstating the likely actual outcome.
As the earlier post pointed out that one of the biggest problems with nuclear fission plants is that every design proposed is cheaper to operate if corners are cut which would reduce safety. When profit motive is at odds with safety you should always assume that profit motive will eventually win in some cases. This would be acceptable except that the failure modes for fission reactors are FAR more immediately and acutely catastrophic than any other power source we have access to. Fossil fuels may kill the whole planet eventually but a fission plant failure can render a large area uninhabitable by people for centuries in an instant.
My paternal grandmother purposely left out ingredients in recipes that she gave my mom, but purely out of spite. She didn't want anyone cooking for my dad better than she cooked for him herself.
I've seen people do stuff like that before. I'm amazed how petty people can be sometimes.
Of course that's why if you learn to really cook you become harder to fool when people pull shenanigans like that. You might have to do some detective work but it will be obvious that something is wrong if you know enough cooking or baking. Kind of like if someone hands you incomplete source code. Might take a minute to figure out the problem but you'll get the right result in the end. Sometimes even better since a lot of recipes are not actually all that good.
AI and robots will take a lot of jobs. But there will be more jobs created as a result.
Agreed. The whole fear of AI and robots seems to have little basis in evidence and seems more like linear extrapolation run amok.
Consider farming. Today, very few people are actual farmers.
Quite a lot of people are actual farmers. About 31% globally or around a billion people globally. Where your statement is correct is in rich industrialized countries which are comparatively automated but even then it is only a relative statement. In the US there are currently several million farm workers which isn't a trivial number even today. The most labor intensive farming has (like other industries) moved to locations with cheap labor when possible while industrialized economies utilize quite a lot of automation very much like manufacturing. The industry is growing even while it's share of total employment falls. The automation is exactly what enables these economies to do something other than mostly just farming.
You probably don't actually know a person who has ever plowed or harvested a field.
Not only do I know people who have done those things I have both friends and family that own farms and I live in an area where farms are common.
Pick any industry sector you like. Any industry at all. I'll bet a $100 to anyone that there will be more people working in that industry in 10 years than are working in that industry today.
You'd win that bet in a lot of industries but not all of them because it depends heavily on what definition of the word "industry" you use to define a particular industry. Industry can be a rather vague and subjective term so you have to be clear about what your definition is. It's part of what makes anti-trust regulation difficult because to determine if a company is a monopoly you first have to define what industry you think they monopolize. Sometimes this is easy but sometimes it's incredibly hard to pin down.
For example is PC operating systems an industry or should we use a definition of industry that applies to all general purpose computing devices? In the former definition Microsoft is arguably a monopoly but in the later it clearly is not. The consequences of these sorts of (sometimes subjective) choices are not trivial.
In less than a decade, most workplace tasks will be done by machines rather than humans
That was true a long time ago depending on how you parse the word "tasks". If a calculation is a task then computers do untold trillions of tasks every second - far more than what people do. We're a species of tool makers. It's hardly a surprise that our tools make us more productive.
Sometimes it absolutely is a time saver. Sometimes it is a money saver too. This isn't even up for debate. Whether it is a time or money saver depends on what food is being made, how much of it is being made, what recipe is being used, what pre-made or restaurant options are available as alternatives and what the price of all of the above happens to be. If the food you want can only be obtained by making it yourself that's fine but it's a choice you make. The rest of us may have different priorities and food requirements. Sometimes making food at home is the most economical choice but not every time. Pretending otherwise is to be willfully blind to the evidence.
Do a study.
Don't have to. There are literally thousands of scientific studies on the topic. Go look them up. Not to mention I'm nearly 5 decades old so I have a lifetime of first hand data on the subject.
I can prepare several meals in the time it takes to order and wait on pizza or some other oil ladden sugary trash.
You think when I order a pizza I just sit around doing nothing until it is delivered? I'm ordering a pizza precisely because I'm BUSY doing other things and I'm paying someone else to take the time and trouble. Ordering a pizza takes me all of 2 minutes of my time. Hell I can drive to my local pizza joint and be home with a ready made pizza in less than 10 minutes. You are not going to "prepare several meals" in less time than that. You aren't even going to prepare one meal in less time than that unless it is something stupid simple.
As soon as the population was tricked into needing males and females both working full-time, Amercian life went to shit.
Wow, where to start. "Tricked"? Women were prohibited from even entering much of the work force until not all that long ago. It wasn't even a choice. Believe it or not, not all women want to be stay at home mothers and spit out youngins'. That should be a choice, not a duty based on which genitalia you happen to have. In the US couples where both parents work are to a large degree because they want to and because they want a certain lifestyle regardless of gender. My wife and I both have careers because we WANT them. She's a doctor because she's smart and likes being a doctor. I'm an engineer for similar reasons. We don't need to both work but we choose to both work. We want our daughter to have the same choices and options and we're trying to set a good example for her. I don't want her to have to depend on someone else to fulfill some obsolete notion of gender roles like what you seem to prefer.
As for "american life went to shit"... I have no idea what you are talking about. American life in general is great and I wouldn't trade it. And I've spent lots of time overseas so I'm not just imagining what life is like elsewhere.
Now both parents are required to work if you have kids in a normal household, and there is little to no time to cook right.
There is no such thing as a "normal" household and a family doesn't need to look like a Norman Rockwell painting to be a great family. As for "cooking right" there is likewise no such thing. There is healthy eating but this can be achieved many ways including eating out. Not everyone gives a shit about home cooked meals. I'm pretty sure most captains of industry are not spending a lot of time in front of a stove. People have lots of priorities and eating a traditional sit down meal every day at home is not always among them. Nothing wrong with that. You be you and let them be them.
Slashdot Mirror
So, start with eathing three good, full meals. That definitily helps to quench the snack attacks.
I'm guessing you've never really actually tried to lose weight. That is definitively NOT the advice you will receive from experts on the subject. The three squares a day idea does not derive from any actual evidence about its utility for weight maintenance or health. In fact if most people tried just eating three meals a day and not snacking with an eye towards weight control then they will very likely fail to maintain that regimen for any significant length of time. This has been demonstrated time and again in research on the topic.
You think "security" is something that can be "built in." Security in software development is a mindset.
A mindset in a software developers head is a useless thing to an end user. It might start there but it has to actually become something more than that. Ultimately security has to manifest itself in products (software and hardware) and processes to use those products. A developer's mindset will not keep a network or device or data safe any more than and engineer thinking about how to stop a car will actually cause one to halt. So yes, security ultimately has to be built into whatever device(s) and software you are using.
My idea is, everytime a vendor has a security issue on their device, I want a refund.
Then you would have no devices because it's impossible to prove that non trivial devices and software have no security issues. Nobody could ship a product and be sure there was no security issue they missed. It is arguably reasonable however to apply strict product liability laws to software and to hold companies financially accountable for damages. Current application of product liability laws routinely provide software makers too much wiggle room to avoid responsibility for their failures, particularly with regard to security.
Well shit, man, you should have said you meant "random consumer grade camera" when you wrote "real camera", and "random jerk off the street" when you meant "photographer".
Oh I get it, you are trolling. My bad for confusing you with someone with an actual interest in photography.
I strongly agree with your first point, but this point is absolute nonsense. I can't speak for your Sony a9, but I have owned 4 Canon bodies and the interface is far more functional than android or ios.
Sigh... No it is not. I'm not talking about the act of capturing the image. Dedicated cameras mostly handle the actual image capture just fine. I'm talking about everything before and after and particularly about the software. I've used Canon's too and their software UI is just as bad as anyone else. Setting up your camera to get a good work flow requires a lot of training and needless configuration of the software. Doesn't matter which camera maker you prefer, they are all pretty bad. Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fuji, doesn't matter - their UIs suck. Some are marginally better than others but none are good. But as bad as that is it is the post processing interface and functionality where they really shit the bed. Smartphones run rings around dedicated cameras for everything after the picture is taken and the sad thing is that the reason is just that they have better software for that which could be put into dedicated cameras too. There is no technical limitation on what "real" cameras can do but just failings of the engineering teams designing the things.
Real cameras take better pictures. If you think otherwise, you really need to learn how to use your camera. I've never met a knowledgeable professional who disagrees. We don't buy these expensive, bulky cameras for show. They really do take MUCH better pictures.
No, they CAN take better pictures in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing. For most people a smartphone camera is more than adequate and is far easier to use. And I know photographers that can reliably get better images from a shitty toy camera than most people can with the fanciest gear money can buy because skill matters.
What I have failed to communicate is that this advantage in image quality is really the ONLY thing they do better and that is NOT enough. Int a lot of cases it doesn't matter much at all. My Sony A9 should be able to do everything and more than my smartphone can do with an image IN CAMERA and it cannot. I should be able to out of the box share images to dropbox or instagram or facebook with minimal configuration. I should be able to crop, filter, adjust and process images in camera. I should be able to email, text or share images. And it needs to do these things as well as or better than my smartphone. The point and shoot camera market died because the improved image quality is only a piece of the puzzle and often not the most important piece.
If you are a pro shooting for the cover of Nat Geo then yeah, image quality trumps everything else. The overwhelming majority of photos and photographers do not fall into this category most of the time and camera makers forget that at their peril.
For truly "serious" photographers, none of those things matter nearly as much as being able to get as many photons to as many silicon photosites as quickly as possible.
If you think that then you don't know many serious photographers. Being a serious photographer is far more complicated than having the biggest possible glass and most pixels.
Which is why a Phase One IQ3 costs 50 grand without lens and can't do any of the the above except via expensive tethering software tied to a PC.
The Phase One products are aimed at a tiny fraction of a fraction of the market even among professional photographers. Most people that get paid for their photos do not use equipment like this and they certainly are not the demarcation line for what makes a "serious photographer".
1. A good digital camera these days will pair with your smartphone, such that every time you snap a picture, one or more versions of it appear on the phone, potentially also triggering any number of secondary actions like watermarking, cropping, and uploading to multiple services. My favorite app for this purpose is "shuttersnitch".
Good digital cameras (and I own several) do nothing of the sort out of the box and the software provided with them to share images is almost universally terrible. I shouldn't have to invest in third party applications to get a useful work flow. And you are missing the point. Aside from professional photographers, if you have to pair the camera to a smartphone or tablet to get useful workflows then for most people for most circumstance it's better for them to just carry the phone or tablet and drop the camera entirely. And that is EXACTLY what has happened to the point and shoot market. The camera needs to be BETTER as a standalone device for image manipulation, computational photography, post processing, and image sharing than smartphones but currently they are often way behind.
2. In much the same way you can pair the camera with a tablet, such as an iPad, and get a very large screen indeed for previews, and use it from several feet away. The UI argument is a moot point, given the diversity of options, except:
Bullshit the UI argument is moot. If I have to pair it with a phone or a tablet to get a useful preview screen and post processing tools then 99% of users will be better off dropping the dedicate camera entirely and just using the pretty darn good camera in the phone/tablet. It's only a tiny fraction of photographers that actually need the extra imaging capabilities of a dedicated camera. If the camera cannot do a better job with image quality AND post processing than a phone then the cameras are going to lose every time. This is what happened to point and shoot cameras. They have basically died as a market because smartphones have images that are almost as good, video that is often better, are easier to use, and can do other things as well.
Furthermore have you actually used the software interfaces on Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc ILCs? They are horrible. I primarily shoot Sony and their menu systems are an abomination. Their Playmemories software almost could not be more awkward to use. Canon and Nikon aren't meaningfully better either. All of them are trapped in the past and need some serious lessons in software UI design.
3. "Ease of use" may not be what you think it is, if you're coming from the smartphone camera world. A purpose-built digital camera can go from OFF, to zoomed, precisely focused, and taking the picture, in less than a second. That includes zooming to the edge of, say, a 400mm lens: You just turn a large, easily accessible physical ring. See how long it takes to do the finger-spread or slider-drag equivalent on a smartphone -- even just to adjust the zoom slightly.
You are only talking about the actual image capture which is maybe 20% of the work. Purpose built cameras generally do this just fine. It's the image sharing and post processing IN CAMERA where they shit the bed. Smartphones often do FAR better computational photography (particularly for video) than purpose built cameras and they are light years ahead in image sharing, software interface, and post processing tools. The only thing dedicated cameras reliably do better is get better image quality and only then in the hands of someone who actually knows what they are doing and has the right glass.
4. If you think a real camera only produces "marginally better" photos in most situations, try using a real camera with an f1.4 full-frame lens in a dimly lit room. Or try catching the action at a soccer game with even a reasonably priced 70-200mm lens like the Canon f/4.
That isn't what I said. I do all of these things and have even gotten
The thing that tends to limit point-and-shoot cameras is the crappy software. Software is also what makes phone cameras great.
Exactly. This is exactly right. The hardware in the dedicated camera (point and shoot as well as pro cameras) is more than good enough but the software for interfacing and post processing is absolutely horrible. Doesn't matter which camera vendor you are talking about either - they are all terrible.
If you could get a point-and-shoot that had, say, the computational photography stuff in a Google Pixel phone it would be awesome. But you can't, so there is a very good chance that despite the smaller sensor and technically worse optics the Pixel will give you a better photo.
I don't think I could have said it better. Why bother carrying a dedicated camera if my phone takes good enough image quality and has vastly better post processing?
Wouldn't all these workflow problems if the cameras just transferred the image instantly to your smartphone (will you will be carrying anyways)?
Yes and no. It would be a quick fix and it's shocking that they cannot already do it efficiently. Even my Sony A9 which gets awesome images makes it a huge pain in the ass to get the pictures where I need them after taking them. It has wifi but the software to connect to it SUCKS. It has an ethernet RJ45 port built in that I cannot do anything but connect to an FTP server with!?! WTF? This isn't the 1990s... But even if they could transfer quickly the problem for dedicated cameras remains. Why would I carry a camera that in most cases takes at best marginally better images than my smartphone if it has no other advantages? Most people want a "good enough" image most of the time and it's the post processing efficiency that actually matters most.
I don't know jack about regular cameras but someone has to have done something like this. Transferring the photos via bluetooth or something.
Here's the funny thing. The cameras routinely already have wifi, bluetooth, gps, usb, (sometimes) ethernet, etc. My Sony mirrorless already has all that and more. It's really just a question of software. But the engineers making these cameras are utter fuckwits about this topic. I should be able to have my images back up to the cloud in real time as I'm taking them. The hardware is already in my camera to do it. I should be able to crop, filter, and share *in camera*. It's just software that is required. They need to make it as easy as humanly possible to take amazing images and then to do something but they are still stuck with thinking we are back in the days of film. If I'm going to lug around a purpose built camera it has to be a category killer in every way, including post processing to make it worth the bother. It has to be BETTER than a smartphone for image taking AND processing. But somehow smartphones are kicking the ass of cameras in post processing in almost every imaginable way.
It's obviously not apple, because apple barely makes anything.
Apple makes software. They are a software company. People seem to have a hard time with this concept but it's true. Companies are what they make and what Apple makes and sets their products apart is software. The hardware in an iPhone is really barely different than any similar Android phone. A Mac's hardware is nearly identical to any Windows PC. What Apple sells people is the software in a pretty box. People who think Apple is a hardware company don't understand their business model.
Compact point and shoots still have _crappy_ glass. Better than a cell phone, but still crap.
That's not true at all. There are some point and shoots with very good quality glass. Far better than smartphones in the right hands. The problem point and shoots have is that their workflow after the picture is taken SUCKS and they are one trick ponies. They take good pictures just fine but then what? They offer nothing after that. With a smartphone I can edit the photo, add filters, back it up to the cloud, share it with my friends, post to social media, all within seconds. And I have a device that does other things. The makers of point and shoot cameras have completely shit the bed in realizing that for these cameras it's the workflow that matters more than the image. They never bothered to make them web connected, give them editing and social media tools, etc which would actually make the possibly worth bothering with. They still live in the SD card to a PC world which smartphones made obsolete years ago.
If they wanted to make a point and shoot relevant again it should have LTE and wifi. It should back up to dropbox and the cloud. It should have a big and good touch screen. High quality glass. GPS and location tagging. Seamless transfer to tablets. It should have image processing better than that on a smartphone. Image cataloging. Flip screens for vlogging. It should have 4K video at high frame rates and tools to actually do something useful with it IN CAMERA. All this should be automated to a high degree in a compact size and the cost cannot be more than a smartphone. Better images only matter when you can actually use them to do what you want and taking the picture is just the start. Nobody wants a point and shoot camera that can only take pictures and can't do anything in post. Smartphone makers understand this and camera makers remain utterly clueless about it.
Oh and a LOT of these complaints apply to high end pro cameras too. They also have shit interfaces and terrible connectivity and work flow. Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc all persist with the delusion that only image quality and physical ergonomics matter. And this myopia will cost them dearly.
If there is an innovative disruptive Silicon Valley genius out there who wants to do something, how about a really cheap, reliable cell phone that JUST makes calls and texts?
No money in it. Seriously the number of people who would actually buy this is so small that it is not really worth addressing. It's cheaper to just include the camera and if the user doesn't want it they don't have to use it.
The iPhone camera has never been a superior camera to real full fledged digital cameras (of their time).
Smartphone cameras don't (usually) make superior images to "real" cameras. But smartphone cameras do several things FAR better than "real" cameras, most related to work flow for certain types of tasks.
1) Far better ability to share and back up images via the internet. Any picture I snap with my smartphone is automatically backed up to the cloud and can be shared immediately via email, text message, or social media. Not so much for "real" cameras which still require plugging in a cable or pulling out an SD card and finding a PC somewhere. They are seriously terrible at this and it's costing them dearly in sales against smartphones.
2) Bigger and more useful screens to view and edit images. Better touch screens too.
3) Fit in my pocket. I can carry my smartphone almost everywhere. Not so much for my bulky "real" camera. The best camera is the one you have with you. I'm not lugging a Sony A9 with a 70-200F2.8 around very often - the thing weighs the better part of 2kg and is bulky as heck. Awesome under the right circumstances and yes it makes better images but that comes at a cost both financial and in work flow. Hard to justify if you aren't getting paid to take pictures. Even compact point and shoot cameras like the RX100 which make great images are still bulkier than my smartphone and can't do anything else besides take images.
4) Has a FAR more elegant interface for basic shooting. Seriously the interfaces on interchangeable lens cameras are universally awful and almost useless for anything more than basic chimping.
5) Unless you get into some pretty pricey gear smartphones often actually do as good or better on video than a shocking number of "real" cameras for certain applications.
So called "real" cameras get better images (if you know what you are doing) but there is a LOT of overhead in achieving that. The work flow for basic point and shoot picture taking and image sharing is vastly superior on smartphones than any "real" camera. No they can't get the best possible image in most cases but most of the time that's not important to most people. There is a reason why the point and shoot camera market has basically died despite the fact that they can produce measurably better images. Image quality is NOT the only thing that matters for most people most of the time. The overhead, shitty work flow, and bulky equipment required to achieve these (usually marginally) better images with "real" cameras is simply not worth the hassle. And I say this as someone who is a photography enthusiast with a lot of very expensive camera bodies and lenses.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will not remain dangerous for 10 thousand years, only a few hundred.
It's expected to remain unlivable for longer than the USA has been in existence. When we are talking about time scales longer than anyone reading this will be alive it's a distinction without much of a difference.
But do get my point about that accident. It was the WORST conceivable scenario.
No it was not the worst conceivable scenario. Very bad yes but it's trivial to conceive of a worse one. Imagine an accident similar to Chernobyl had happened at Indian Point just 25 miles from New York City. If the wind happened to be blowing the right way it could render the city uninhabitable under the right conditions. Unlikely I'll grant but the probability is not zero.
In fact, BOTH cities where atomic bombs where used are inhabited and it's been less than 100 years since the end of WW2.
Chernobyl put 400X more radioactive material into the atmosphere than Hiroshima. Furthermore the types of radiation released from Chernobyl were much longer lasting than those from the two bombs dropped on Japan. You are comparing apples to oranges.
So, you are scare mongering with the "Laying waste to a state for 10,000 years" thing.
Read what I wrote. Did you see me write anything about 10,000 years? No you did not. You are responding to your own strawman. I said it "Nobody is going to be living in that 'state sized portion of real estate' for a very long time to come." which is 100% true. Stop trying to put words in my mouth that I did not say.
Yes there are risks, but nothing as dire as you claim.
The risks are absolutely that serious and we ignore them at our peril. The probability of catastrophic failure of a fission plant regardless of design is low but is not zero. Denial of that fact is dangerous. I think nuclear power is important and should be used but I'm not about to pretend it doesn't carry some serious dangers.
Tesla are making about 30% on their cars
No they are not. You referenced a cost estimate of gross margin on their cars which is a bunch of educated guesses by outside cost accountants without access to actual cost data. These sorts of reports are useful but you should be careful reading too much into them. What is undeniably useful is the public financial statements each company has to put out which gives a good basis for comparison.
Gross margin for a company like Toyota (one of the more profitable big auto companies) hovers around 18-20% which is pretty good for what they do. Tesla's gross margin is similar but more volatile but low by the standards of luxury car makers. Bear in mind that Tesla sells no cars in the lower end of the market where margins are tighter while Toyota sells quite a few. Compare with a high margin manufacturer like Ferrari which has gross margins around 50% and Tesla doesn't look so special. Tesla might have a lot of room to improve gross margins but they aren't getting gross margins wildly better than many of their competitors.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant.
The thing with Tesla is that.. they don't really have any special technology.
Neither does Coca Cola - nothing special about carbonated sugar water - but that doesn't mean they cannot succeed. It's all about execution. And when it comes to electric vehicles to date Tesla has been out executing pretty much everyone. That's not to say they have any sort of insurmountable advantage - they don't. But the incumbent auto makers sleep on Tesla at their own peril. Tesla is vertically integrated, has a fantastically popular brand, products people are willing to wait literally years for, the best electric vehicle technology on the market, patents (even if they don't use them aggressively), and a visionary leader. Yes they still might shit the bed but I'm not about to bet against them at this point.
They just sold it at a price that didn't make any fucking sense for them to be doing, since they were selling all production(supposedly) and still losing money(even after one time book shenigans).
Yeah, yeah... People made the same short sighted argument about Amazon back in the day. While I wouldn't buy Tesla's stock at the current price and they definitely aren't on solid financial ground yet, they also have a long term strategy that if it works will pay off very handsomely. They didn't make money because they were aggressively investing in future products to grow bigger instead of remaining a boutique maker of high end cars - ala Ferrari. This was a calculated gamble by Tesla but there is a good chance it will actually work. They probably could have made money on the Model S but they had larger ambitions. Nothing wrong with that.
Why do american car companies insist on building stuff people can't afford anyways en masse? don't they realize that 80 000 dollar + cars are an extreme luxury, just because they live rich themselves?
What are you talking about? Tesla sells a tiny of the cars sold every year in the US and almost everyone who buys one can definitely afford it. They sell in numbers comparable to other luxury car maker for similar products. Tesla has less than 1.5% market share in the US.
The absolute worst accident we've had, where a stupidly designed reactor was literally blown apart and burned for days didn't produce such a unlivable place for 10 thousand years, and certainly not a state sized portion of real estate.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is roughly the size of the State of Rhode Island (both are just over 1000 square miles). Nobody is going to be living in that "state sized portion of real estate" for a very long time to come.
I'm not going to tell you there are not risks, but I am going to insist on being reasonable about assessing those risks.
Agreed but please start by not spouting false data about actual catastrophes. I think there is a level of risk for nuclear fission that is acceptable but we have a lot of hard work ahead of us to get to that level of safety and we certainly aren't there today.
What State, or even large-scale area, has been rendered as you claim?
Forgetting about Chernobyl? The Chernobyl exclusion zone is roughly 1000mi^2. For comparison the state of Rhode Island in the US is about 1200mi^2. So there you go - an area the size of an entire state rendered uninhabitable by nuclear power. But I guess since it happened somewhere else you think it could not ever happen here?
Fear-mongering is so much easier than reasoned debate, isn't it?
It's not FUD when it actually has happened. The failure modes of nuclear fission are not hypothetical and it is dangerous to not honestly acknowledge them.
Hmm, as of 2008, rooftop solar has caused 0.44 deaths per TWh produced. Nuclear is at 0.04 deaths per TWh.
Solar power has caused ZERO deaths per Wh. Industrial accidents relating to solar installations have happened but the actual act of making solar power has literally zero deaths unless you can find some random guy that somehow got electrocuted. Nuclear energy undeniably has a body count attached to it. A low body count to be sure but the number is not zero. Construction accidents have happened with every form of power generation. Furthermore solar has not rendered any location permanently uninhabitable by humans unlike nuclear. This argument that there are more deaths from solar is some of the most contrived and cynical fanboy-ism I've every heard.
Well, we all know that nuclear is by far the most deadly form of power ever invented, so obviously, these numbers are fabrications....
Yes it is. Ask Japan especially in the neighborhoods of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are not separable issues.
it should be noted that the short half-life stuff that makes nuclear waste, well, seriously radioactive is pretty much gone a week after shutdown of the plant.
Again this is complete bullshit according to no less an authority than the Department of Energy.
And the long half-life stuff? Not nearly so dangerous as airplane flight.
Completely wrong. See the link above.
So what you are looking for is a Small Modular Reactor. These are relatively small reactors that can be produced on an assembly line and shipped to the installation site, so they are cheaper than conventional nuclear designs.
Being cheaper than current reactor designs is kind of damning with faint praise. And these are proposed reactor designs, not actual products that can be bought today. The DOE is claiming that we might see them in 10-15 years which is how researches talk when they mean probably never.
Most don't require active cooling, which means you don't get meltdowns.
Meltdowns are just one of many failure modes for fission reactors to worry about and not anywhere near the most likely. And your use of the word "most" is not comforting since it means the number is not zero.
Also, you can bury them in a vault for protection from attack or sabotage.
The very fact that this would be a serious concern is rather worrisome don't you think? Nobody is going to be attacking wind turbines or solar panels or fossil fuel plants and even if they did and succeeded it wouldn't be a major catastrophe.
They require no maintenance. You run them until their fuel is spent, then you pull one out of service and recycle it.
There is no such thing as a man made device that never needs maintenance or that never fails. Reliable and easy to replace I could believe. As soon as someone says "no maintenance" what it actually means is easily replaced, disposable, or they are lying. The DOE does not claim they do not require maintenance. Any engineer that makes such a claim is either clueless or lying.
You end up with a few pounds of waste material per unit over the course of it's lifespan, which is a couple of decades.
That's the theory which has yet to be demonstrated in practice. If they can do it in practice then I'm all about it but right now you are talking about proposed designs and prototypes as if they are working products which they are not. And I think you are grossly overstating the likely actual outcome.
As the earlier post pointed out that one of the biggest problems with nuclear fission plants is that every design proposed is cheaper to operate if corners are cut which would reduce safety. When profit motive is at odds with safety you should always assume that profit motive will eventually win in some cases. This would be acceptable except that the failure modes for fission reactors are FAR more immediately and acutely catastrophic than any other power source we have access to. Fossil fuels may kill the whole planet eventually but a fission plant failure can render a large area uninhabitable by people for centuries in an instant.
My paternal grandmother purposely left out ingredients in recipes that she gave my mom, but purely out of spite. She didn't want anyone cooking for my dad better than she cooked for him herself.
I've seen people do stuff like that before. I'm amazed how petty people can be sometimes.
Of course that's why if you learn to really cook you become harder to fool when people pull shenanigans like that. You might have to do some detective work but it will be obvious that something is wrong if you know enough cooking or baking. Kind of like if someone hands you incomplete source code. Might take a minute to figure out the problem but you'll get the right result in the end. Sometimes even better since a lot of recipes are not actually all that good.
AI and robots will take a lot of jobs. But there will be more jobs created as a result.
Agreed. The whole fear of AI and robots seems to have little basis in evidence and seems more like linear extrapolation run amok.
Consider farming. Today, very few people are actual farmers.
Quite a lot of people are actual farmers. About 31% globally or around a billion people globally. Where your statement is correct is in rich industrialized countries which are comparatively automated but even then it is only a relative statement. In the US there are currently several million farm workers which isn't a trivial number even today. The most labor intensive farming has (like other industries) moved to locations with cheap labor when possible while industrialized economies utilize quite a lot of automation very much like manufacturing. The industry is growing even while it's share of total employment falls. The automation is exactly what enables these economies to do something other than mostly just farming.
You probably don't actually know a person who has ever plowed or harvested a field.
Not only do I know people who have done those things I have both friends and family that own farms and I live in an area where farms are common.
Pick any industry sector you like. Any industry at all. I'll bet a $100 to anyone that there will be more people working in that industry in 10 years than are working in that industry today.
You'd win that bet in a lot of industries but not all of them because it depends heavily on what definition of the word "industry" you use to define a particular industry. Industry can be a rather vague and subjective term so you have to be clear about what your definition is. It's part of what makes anti-trust regulation difficult because to determine if a company is a monopoly you first have to define what industry you think they monopolize. Sometimes this is easy but sometimes it's incredibly hard to pin down.
For example is PC operating systems an industry or should we use a definition of industry that applies to all general purpose computing devices? In the former definition Microsoft is arguably a monopoly but in the later it clearly is not. The consequences of these sorts of (sometimes subjective) choices are not trivial.
In less than a decade, most workplace tasks will be done by machines rather than humans
That was true a long time ago depending on how you parse the word "tasks". If a calculation is a task then computers do untold trillions of tasks every second - far more than what people do. We're a species of tool makers. It's hardly a surprise that our tools make us more productive.
Eating out is not a time saver.
Sometimes it absolutely is a time saver. Sometimes it is a money saver too. This isn't even up for debate. Whether it is a time or money saver depends on what food is being made, how much of it is being made, what recipe is being used, what pre-made or restaurant options are available as alternatives and what the price of all of the above happens to be. If the food you want can only be obtained by making it yourself that's fine but it's a choice you make. The rest of us may have different priorities and food requirements. Sometimes making food at home is the most economical choice but not every time. Pretending otherwise is to be willfully blind to the evidence.
Do a study.
Don't have to. There are literally thousands of scientific studies on the topic. Go look them up. Not to mention I'm nearly 5 decades old so I have a lifetime of first hand data on the subject.
I can prepare several meals in the time it takes to order and wait on pizza or some other oil ladden sugary trash.
You think when I order a pizza I just sit around doing nothing until it is delivered? I'm ordering a pizza precisely because I'm BUSY doing other things and I'm paying someone else to take the time and trouble. Ordering a pizza takes me all of 2 minutes of my time. Hell I can drive to my local pizza joint and be home with a ready made pizza in less than 10 minutes. You are not going to "prepare several meals" in less time than that. You aren't even going to prepare one meal in less time than that unless it is something stupid simple.
As soon as the population was tricked into needing males and females both working full-time, Amercian life went to shit.
Wow, where to start. "Tricked"? Women were prohibited from even entering much of the work force until not all that long ago. It wasn't even a choice. Believe it or not, not all women want to be stay at home mothers and spit out youngins'. That should be a choice, not a duty based on which genitalia you happen to have. In the US couples where both parents work are to a large degree because they want to and because they want a certain lifestyle regardless of gender. My wife and I both have careers because we WANT them. She's a doctor because she's smart and likes being a doctor. I'm an engineer for similar reasons. We don't need to both work but we choose to both work. We want our daughter to have the same choices and options and we're trying to set a good example for her. I don't want her to have to depend on someone else to fulfill some obsolete notion of gender roles like what you seem to prefer.
As for "american life went to shit"... I have no idea what you are talking about. American life in general is great and I wouldn't trade it. And I've spent lots of time overseas so I'm not just imagining what life is like elsewhere.
Now both parents are required to work if you have kids in a normal household, and there is little to no time to cook right.
There is no such thing as a "normal" household and a family doesn't need to look like a Norman Rockwell painting to be a great family. As for "cooking right" there is likewise no such thing. There is healthy eating but this can be achieved many ways including eating out. Not everyone gives a shit about home cooked meals. I'm pretty sure most captains of industry are not spending a lot of time in front of a stove. People have lots of priorities and eating a traditional sit down meal every day at home is not always among them. Nothing wrong with that. You be you and let them be them.