Nope. If you RTFA you'd know that these things are autonomous.
If you'd read the discussion thread you'd know we weren't talking about the vehicle in TFA. We were talking about a more generic flying car.
Yes, unsurprisingly, they've planned an end-run around this most obvious show-stopper; no pilots' licences are required.
Fancy autonomous controls of flying vehicles is hardly news these days. Drones are not exactly a new thing including those of the self piloting variety. Modern aircraft essentially fly themselves and are controlled electronically. The pilot basically directs the computers which actually fly the plane. It's a comparatively short hop to making the computer make all the decisions. None of that is remotely in the category of making a flying car. Autonomous control of an airplane is not the same thing as an autonomous flying car.
It's not difficult to imagine personal multicopters being much safer than the average car is today.
Only to those who have no clue about real engineering, physics, and economics that goes into such devices and their reliability. Modern cars have had over a century of development to get to their somewhat pathetic safety record. Let's not pretend that a far more complicated flying version is going to be better without a lot of people dying in the process.
Personal flying cars are a stupid and unrealistic idea. Let it go. It isn't going to happen without some massive and unforeseen technological advance.
It will do all kinds of self-tests and if it detects a fault, it will refuse to fly.
If it were possible to do that sort of comprehensive self testing economically, commercial airlines would already be doing it but that's not how real world safety systems work. Back here on planet earth things are a little more complicated. There is a reason that pilots and ground maintenance to this day do walkarounds and have extensive checklists before flights. It's not because of a sense of nostalgia.
As for who's controlling the aircraft...
It doesn't matter. Physics and economics make flying cars impossible as a practical concern. Until you can present us some real world version of Tony Stark's arc reactor at a deeply unrealistic price point ALL your arguments about flying cars are moot. The closest thing you'll see are some planes and helicopters with automated piloting.
If you want to know just how ridiculous a flying car for the masses is, just go take an introductory flying lesson.
Quite so. Even fully automating a vehicle's navigation and controls doesn't solve the problem. For aircraft to safely fly they have to have a rather rigorous level of inspection and maintenance, well beyond what most people are capable of (including myself).
Then there is the ridiculous energy cost to flying. Trying to lift something the size of a car into the air will suck energy at a enormous rate.
I get that the idea of a flying car is appealing but if you give it a few moment's thought it's a really dumb concept. It doesn't solve any burning problems, it's hugely expensive, the technology doesn't exist and likely never will, it's terrible for the environment, our infrastructure isn't designed for it, and it's dangerous.
Implicit in the distinction of 'flying cars' is the idea that they have the ease of use, maintenance, and safety of cars with the added ability of not needing roads
None of which are realistic. People can barely handle cars safely and we're going to allow them to fly? No thanks. Plus an aircraft has to be MUCH safer than a car, otherwise it is a huge danger not just to the occupants but to whatever they hit when the inevitable crash happens. More safety = more maintenance and/or more expense.
And if you don't need roads then it isn't a car now is it? Then it's just an aircraft.
If it has all the qualities you mentioned: expensive, dangerous, high maintenance, loud, etc, then it's not a 'flying car.'
Well, cars are expensive, dangerous, high maintenance, and loud so it's puzzling to me why anyone would thing a flying car would somehow be less so.
Technology was never the issue with flying cars but safety always was
While I agree that safety was/is a huge issue with them, the technology is a show stopper issue too. Since we lack Tony Stark's arc reactor we really don't have a power source with a power to weight ratio adequate to make a flying car a practical reality. There is no technology that is not science fiction that is going to make flying cars a reality nor is there any reasonable prospect of such a technology any time soon. This issue alone makes flying cars literally an impossibility.
There also is the fact that our infrastructure is utterly unprepared for a flying car. Our parking lots and roads were not designed with 3 dimensions in mind. Even full autonomous control doesn't solve this problem. We'd have to completely rebuild our infrastructure to make flying cars practical even if it were technologically possible to make them. I think Elon Musk is correct that it's a LOT more practical to dig than to try to fly if we want to add a third dimension to our routine travel. We still have the technology to fly but trying to make a flying car is like putting a rocket motor on a cement block - even if you get it in the air it's still a dumb idea.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" is pretty god-damned mother-fucking clear-as-crystal. So pardon the shit out of my mother-fucking french for expecting the god-damned government to get a mother-fucking warrant first.
Here's the problem with your little rant. They know the weakness in your argument and in that particular amendment is in defining the word "unreasonable". If they convince a court that the search is a reasonable one then that whole pesky amendment problem goes away. They don't have to get a warrant if they can convince the courts that what they are doing is reasonable. The entire amendment hinges on what we define the word "unreasonable" to mean and that is the bit under attack.
I don't mean to sound critical, but have you ever ran a business? Income is more important than profit because it's harder to generate income than profit.
No it isn't and I can prove it. Start a business selling $2 bills for $1. I guarantee you that you will have a HUGE amount of revenue but you'll also be losing money faster than you can say "chapter 7 bankruptcy". It's easy to generate revenue when you are giving selling something that people want for less than it actually costs to provide. What is hard is generating profitable revenue. Growing the top line is difficult only when you have to generate sales that ALSO make a profit.
I don't think ARM or AMD are going to be the next big threat to the Intel monopoly.
AMD isn't and likely won't be a threat. Intel makes more in profit than AMD does in revenue. AMD is unfortunately a rival in name only and they operate at a significant cost disadvantage to Intel because Intel is vertically integrated and AMD isn't. I'd like to see AMD doing better but if you look at the financial statements of both companies (and I have) you'll quickly conclude that AMD is trying to diversify away from competing with Intel because it's a game they cannot win. They've been trying and failing for 30+ years and the only reason they continue to exist is because Intel needs them around to keep the anti-trust authorities off their back. Intel could put AMD out of the CPU business in a blink if they had a free hand to do so. (They would simply drop the price of their CPUs to less than AMDs cost until AMD exits the market - Intel wouldn't even have to take a loss to do it)
ARM is a threat but an indirect one. ARM can't (and likely won't) compete with Intel in PCs but ARM is kicking Intel's ass in mobile. As mobile grows the traditional computer market shrinks to some degree which hurts Intel. The biggest threats are usually the indirect ones. Nobody is going to compete and win head on with Microsoft in desktop operating systems but linux is winning through the back door by eroding the market through mobile. Intel faces a similar threat. ARM's threat to Intel is by eroding their existing markets.
Even they will be supplanted. It's going to come from left field, specifically from a company that is researching the next generation of computing.
One can always imagine some advance in technology that can kill the incumbents but there are more immediate threats to Intel that don't require invoking some as yet undeveloped new technology. The biggest one I think is that the large companies that operate data centers (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) start to roll their own CPUs. They appear to be working on it. Power management is a serious issue with data centers and Intel has never been very good at that. (which is a big reason they struggle in mobile) Plus there is significant margin leakage when you buy as many computers as these companies do. Vertical integration can provide serious cost savings. And these big companies definitely can bankroll the move to a different CPU architecture if they are so inclined. Intel makes about 30-40% of their revenue from this sector so it's not trivial to them.
However, Intel can't maintain itself on its current markets, as they are all shrinking in favor of Mobile and, to a lesser extent, Cloud.
Well Intel supplies an awful lot of those CPUs for the cloud so I don't think that worries them so much. Mobile is an issue for them because that is definitely where the growth is. The biggest threat to Intel is that they have so much of their revenue and profit tied up in the X86 platform. If software and PC makers continue to migrate away from X86 it's going to hurt Intel badly sooner or later.
And wouldn't the always risky move of combining two cultures, employees, and physical plants introduce an even greater peril?
Depends on how they handle it. If they operate the acquired company as a stand alone entity (sort of like how Berkshire Hathaway operates) then the cultures don't really have to mix much at all and that can work fine. Mixing company cultures is a serious challenge but it's not always required.
I think Intel's biggest challenge is that they've been a de-facto monopoly for so long that they seem to have forgotten how to compete in areas where they don't dominate. It's always a risk for company that has one big cash cow that they just milk it to the exclusion of all else. The biggest risk to Intel is software makers leaving the X86 platform which is where the vast majority of their revenue comes from. They make some money from IoT and flash memory and security but these are about 12% of their revenue and 7% of their profit combined.
Well, by that logic, why even have time zones in the first place?
Because time zones do have utility and nobody is making stupid and irrelevant arguments that they don't. Plus good luck getting rid of time zones at this point. How about we stick to the reality we actually live in and do things that are actually possible and useful?
Because time is the measure of a day's progress -- faking it to appease stupid people who can't change their or their employees working/school hours is just lying to oneself.
Time progresses regardless. You didn't answer the question. Why does it matter what we define noon as? Why can't we define 1PM as the time when the sun is highest? It's an equally valid and equally arbitrary convention but one that carries greater utility for most people. Your argument is basically "that's the way we've always done it" which is almost always a stupid argument.
faking it to appease stupid people who can't change their or their employees working/school hours is just lying to oneself.
Ok smart guy. Explain how we get millions of schools and businesses to change their work hours simultaneously just so we can keep your pointless defintion of noon being the point in the day when the sun is highest. Oh that's right, the easiest way is to change the time zone convention.
Well, given that the state does not even want something closest to natural time, where the sun is at the highest point closest to noon, but instead wants the artificial DST in effect permanently, is weird.
There is no such thing as "natural time". The definition of noon as the point when the sun is highest in the sky is an arbitrary convention. Arbitrary conventions can and should be changed when no longer sensible. It is no longer particularly useful in today's world. Given that most people get up in the morning and head straight to work and spend essentially all their free time in the evening, it makes a huge amount of sense to adjust our clocks to deal with that reality. Maximize free time when the most people can get the most value from it.
It's Florida! People on the beach don't care what time it is, the retirees don't care what time it is, so why insist on DST?
Right because nobody in Florida actually goes to work. Everyone in the state is a beach bum or a retiree... You should be able to hear my eyes rolling about now.
If DST is a pain, why not get rid of it?
They are getting rid of it. It's the twice per year change that is the hassle. So they are getting rid of the pointless change and going with the time definition that makes the most sense. DST year round makes a ton of sense.
This needs to be done at the national level or you get a patchwork of states on or off DST . A true PITA for anyone needing to coordinate time across state lines.
We already have a patchwork of states doing their own thing with DST and you didn't really notice. Arizona doesn't do DST. Which states are in which time zones is moderately arbitrary. Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho and Oregon all have the time zone boundaries not tied to state boundaries. Having some places observe DST and not others is barely different than living near a time zone boundary. It's all slightly annoying but genuinely not the end of the world.
I think year round DST is a great idea. Maximize the daylight in the evening when it is of the most value to the most people.
but it seems that your reasons for disagreement support the contention that an increase in minimum wage is not causing producers to utilize automation where they otherwise would not.
A higher minimum wage does have SOME effect on whether automation is economical but it generally isn't as big an effect as many would have you believe. For businesses like a restaurant, it is generally extremely difficult to automate substantial portions of the business. You can raise the minimum wage and the net effect isn't going to be automation but rather more people eating at home more often. Some restaurants may go out of business but most of them will simply raise prices and people are still going to buy their pizza and burgers. Some workers will be displaced but not as many as many fear.
A lot depends on how easy it is to automate a given task and who the competition is. For my company we are competing against Chinese labor already so raising our minimum wage would have a modest effect on our business because we already have to go after certain types of jobs where we aren't trying to squeeze every penny out as it is. We need more talented labor already and that already costs much more than minimum wage. It might cost us some jobs but it isn't going to radically alter the calculus for us. We don't compete on the large volume jobs but instead smaller volume higher complexity jobs that are difficult to automate and that are difficult to send overseas.
whereas your argument is that humans are capable of doing low-skill tasks that machines are unable to do, so an increase in labor costs doesn't change the mechanics of human vs machine.
It's not just low skill tasks. High skill too. But changing the labor rate just changes where the tipping point is in the human vs robot decision. The lower labor costs are the higher the unit volumes have to be to justify the capital expense of automating. The equation is the same, just with slightly different inputs. As automation for a particular task becomes cheaper that also changes the equation but that tends to happen rather slowly or in step functions. Nobody is going to come out with a robot with human level intellect and flexibility for a long time if ever and even if they did it would cost a fortune. Specific tasks will be taken over by specialized automation but general purpose automation is a hugely difficult and expensive task. I have little worry that people aren't going to be able to find work within my lifetime.
machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing.
Speaking as someone who makes these sorts of cost calculations almost daily such a blanket statement is completely untrue. Professionally I am a certified accountant and also an industrial engineer. I manage a small manufacturing company and have to make decisions on automation all the time. Whether a machine is more economically efficient depends on the specific situation. In particular it depends on the volume and value of what is being produced. Many seemingly simple tasks are actually quite hard to automate economically unless you are producing large quantities of the product.
Hell, China is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages.
That depends on what those Chinese workers are making. I've been to China and I assure you that there is no lack of work for their labor force. Once the unit volume of a product gets high enough, it makes sense to automate almost any process. Having lower labor costs simply means the required unit volume is higher but the calculation is the same. Foxconn can consider automating the assembly of iPhones because they make MILLIONS of them. But there are VAST numbers of things we need to make for which the cost of automation is prohibitive and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Turns out that humans are very flexible, easy to train, readily available, and (comparatively) inexpensive for many tasks both simple and complex. Automation will replace a lot of assembly work (and that is a good thing) but it is not going to replace it all.
Let me give you an example. On my production floor today we are building a wiring harness for a customer. We have a machine that can automate production of the wire leads that go into it. But for this machine to be economical it really needs a production run of about 500 pieces because of the setup time and tooling costs. But we are only making 30 of these harnesses. So for this product (and many others we make) it is provably cheaper to use people to manually make the wire leads. But even if we were making 50000 of these harnesses we STILL would need the people because the only thing the machine can do is make leads. It cannot do any of the hundreds of other tasks that go into making the product whereas I can train almost any human to do most of them and not have to pay $100K up front for a new machine to do each task. To fully automate this job would require unit volumes in the hundreds of thousands to millions. Point is that there is a LOT of headroom between making one unit and the number where automation starts to make sense for people to work in. And this isn't going to change no matter how much people worry about it.
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless
Oh I wish that were actually true. My day job is running a company that does assembly work and we hire a fair amount of what could reasonably be called unskilled labor. For the unit volumes we produce (we make smaller quantities of a wide variety of products) there is no machine that could possibly economically replace these workers nor will there be one anytime soon.
There are several flaws in your argument. 1) Humans can be easily and quickly re-purposed to a different job. A burger flipping robot can just flip burgers and while it may be efficient at that task it is useless otherwise. To really replace a person you would need far more automation. 2) To replace a human who does more than one specialized task (and most do) you need a far more flexible set of automation which is not coincidentally FAR more expensive. Good luck asking the burger fli
True, but since it is only needed to cover that last 20%, when we are already have 80% wind and solar, it is not needed now.
Not needed now? It certainly is needed right now but that's irrelevant because it's NOT POSSIBLE. If it were available it would be needed immediately but there is no such technology in existence nor any reasonable near term prospect of it being developed. Companies that produce carbon have no incentive to work on the problem and there is no profit in it for anyone else. Carbon capture/sequestration is a bogus marketing term used by the fossil fuel industry to try to prevent regulation and taxation of the pollution they cause.
It is normal for a technology that is not yet needed not to be already deployed.
There is NO SUCH THING as carbon capture to deploy. You cannot deploy something that does not exist.
Some of that is offset by huge gaming systems with enormous power supplies, and bitcoin mining rigs. They are probably a minority nowadays..
I think you hugely overestimate the number of people who have gaming rigs with their attendant out sized power requirements. Compared to the number of computers out there it is a fraction of a single percent. In other words a rounding error. Same with bitcoin mining. It's getting way more play in the media than it really justifies and really the number of people involved is a good approximation of insignificant.
Demand for electricity is stagnant. Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way.
Assuming that demand has been flat domestically, the outsourcing of certain energy intensive industries doesn't mean the demand has gone away. It just places it in a different geographic location. That's not the same thing as flat demand.
What makes renewables bad is that we don't have reliable storage.
We have reliable storage, or at least the technology to make it. Tesla and others have seen to that. What we don't have is cheap and plentiful storage. Part of that is because we haven't ramped up battery production to full scale and part of it is that we're still trying to reduce cost in the face of subsidized fossil fuels which makes clean options seem more expensive than they actually are.
Long term is every home can cover 75% of their bas usage with solar and batteries then the need for large grid scale systems shrinks.
Yes, exactly. Every rooftop that can have solar should have solar. It would make the grid more reliable, cleaner, and eventually cheaper. It would require the grid to be upgraded in certain ways but that's not a bad thing. What we have now is rather outdated anyway. Yes we need batteries to do this but again, that's not a bad thing in the long run.
I'm about as much of a greenie as you are likely to run across. I'm strongly of the opinion that we cannot get solar and wind power to be major parts of the grid fast enough. We also need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels (which we do globally to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually) and force them to cost the full economic value of the pollution they cause. That said, the notion that we can rely solely on wind and solar (and hydro where available) in the near future is preposterous. Doing that in a rational way would take a century just due to the cost alone. Fossil fuels simply aren't going away for many decades at minimum no matter what. Fortunately we don't need to get carbon emitting energy sources to zero. We need to get them to a level that the ecosystem can handle which is obviously much lower than it is today. Use nuclear to replace fossil fuels where possible and solar and wind for most of the rest. Yes we will need batteries too. The grid WILL need to be updated no matter what so I don't see that as a bad thing. But if we need to spend the money to keep the planet habitable then no real benefit to waiting.
One beef with the summary is that there currently is no such thing as fossil fuels with carbon capture technology. There is NO industrial scale carbon capture or carbon sequestration technology available nor any reasonable prospect of such technology in the near future. So take that off the table as an option until such time as it becomes a real thing.
But this hardware is being sold like an "appliance" and it isn't failing as an appliance - it's being effectively remotely disabled.
Lots of appliances have a lifespan of 10-15 years of effective use. My last hot water tank for example lasted 12 years before failing and that is typical for that and many other appliances. Not really so different in this case.
There are DVD players still going strong after 20 years of use.
The maker of that DVD player isn't being asked to support it after 20 years either. Apples to grapefruits my friend.
It really doesn't matter what those governments do because criminals will merely find another get rich quick scheme to use in order to separate fools from their money.
It very much does matter what governments do. The fact that dealing with criminals is an eternal game of whack-a-mole is irrelevant. Yes they will try something else but that does not excuse doing nothing about their scams when we know about them. Should we allow check kiting or pyramid schemes just because "criminals will merely find another get rich quick scheme"? Spare me.
I think that most of this is pointless saber rattling as no one in government has any better understanding of cryptocurrency than your average person on the street, but I expect we'll see plenty of comments from representatives with a "series of tubes" level of understanding.
They don't have to understand them better though. They just have to understand how they are used to defraud people and take actions against that. No different than for fiat currency. And frankly your notion that "nobody" in government has more of a clue about money than the "average" person is demonstrably untrue. There are some very talented people in government who understand how money works about as well as anyone out there. You are seeking confirmation of your biases.
They aren't in a position to address the risks either. They just think they are.
Actually they are very much in a position to address a great number of the risks. Among the options they have is to make dealing in cryptocurrencies illegal. While criminals will still be criminals, governments and law enforcement agencies are in a strong position to mitigate a lot of the damage that could be done just like they do for other types of financial crime and misbehavior.
So is Medicare/Medicaid. Government fosters that cesspit.
That "cesspit" as you call it is the only way our senior citizens would be able to get health care and insurance. No private insurance company could possibly provide insurance to the elderly and make a profit or even break even. Are you seriously arguing that the elderly should not have health care?
If you want to go to single payer like every other civilized country I'm all for it.
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Nope. If you RTFA you'd know that these things are autonomous.
If you'd read the discussion thread you'd know we weren't talking about the vehicle in TFA. We were talking about a more generic flying car.
Yes, unsurprisingly, they've planned an end-run around this most obvious show-stopper; no pilots' licences are required.
Fancy autonomous controls of flying vehicles is hardly news these days. Drones are not exactly a new thing including those of the self piloting variety. Modern aircraft essentially fly themselves and are controlled electronically. The pilot basically directs the computers which actually fly the plane. It's a comparatively short hop to making the computer make all the decisions. None of that is remotely in the category of making a flying car. Autonomous control of an airplane is not the same thing as an autonomous flying car.
It's not difficult to imagine personal multicopters being much safer than the average car is today.
Only to those who have no clue about real engineering, physics, and economics that goes into such devices and their reliability. Modern cars have had over a century of development to get to their somewhat pathetic safety record. Let's not pretend that a far more complicated flying version is going to be better without a lot of people dying in the process.
Personal flying cars are a stupid and unrealistic idea. Let it go. It isn't going to happen without some massive and unforeseen technological advance.
It will do all kinds of self-tests and if it detects a fault, it will refuse to fly.
If it were possible to do that sort of comprehensive self testing economically, commercial airlines would already be doing it but that's not how real world safety systems work. Back here on planet earth things are a little more complicated. There is a reason that pilots and ground maintenance to this day do walkarounds and have extensive checklists before flights. It's not because of a sense of nostalgia.
As for who's controlling the aircraft...
It doesn't matter. Physics and economics make flying cars impossible as a practical concern. Until you can present us some real world version of Tony Stark's arc reactor at a deeply unrealistic price point ALL your arguments about flying cars are moot. The closest thing you'll see are some planes and helicopters with automated piloting.
If you want to know just how ridiculous a flying car for the masses is, just go take an introductory flying lesson.
Quite so. Even fully automating a vehicle's navigation and controls doesn't solve the problem. For aircraft to safely fly they have to have a rather rigorous level of inspection and maintenance, well beyond what most people are capable of (including myself).
Then there is the ridiculous energy cost to flying. Trying to lift something the size of a car into the air will suck energy at a enormous rate.
I get that the idea of a flying car is appealing but if you give it a few moment's thought it's a really dumb concept. It doesn't solve any burning problems, it's hugely expensive, the technology doesn't exist and likely never will, it's terrible for the environment, our infrastructure isn't designed for it, and it's dangerous.
Implicit in the distinction of 'flying cars' is the idea that they have the ease of use, maintenance, and safety of cars with the added ability of not needing roads
None of which are realistic. People can barely handle cars safely and we're going to allow them to fly? No thanks. Plus an aircraft has to be MUCH safer than a car, otherwise it is a huge danger not just to the occupants but to whatever they hit when the inevitable crash happens. More safety = more maintenance and/or more expense.
And if you don't need roads then it isn't a car now is it? Then it's just an aircraft.
If it has all the qualities you mentioned: expensive, dangerous, high maintenance, loud, etc, then it's not a 'flying car.'
Well, cars are expensive, dangerous, high maintenance, and loud so it's puzzling to me why anyone would thing a flying car would somehow be less so.
Technology was never the issue with flying cars but safety always was
While I agree that safety was/is a huge issue with them, the technology is a show stopper issue too. Since we lack Tony Stark's arc reactor we really don't have a power source with a power to weight ratio adequate to make a flying car a practical reality. There is no technology that is not science fiction that is going to make flying cars a reality nor is there any reasonable prospect of such a technology any time soon. This issue alone makes flying cars literally an impossibility.
There also is the fact that our infrastructure is utterly unprepared for a flying car. Our parking lots and roads were not designed with 3 dimensions in mind. Even full autonomous control doesn't solve this problem. We'd have to completely rebuild our infrastructure to make flying cars practical even if it were technologically possible to make them. I think Elon Musk is correct that it's a LOT more practical to dig than to try to fly if we want to add a third dimension to our routine travel. We still have the technology to fly but trying to make a flying car is like putting a rocket motor on a cement block - even if you get it in the air it's still a dumb idea.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" is pretty god-damned mother-fucking clear-as-crystal. So pardon the shit out of my mother-fucking french for expecting the god-damned government to get a mother-fucking warrant first.
Here's the problem with your little rant. They know the weakness in your argument and in that particular amendment is in defining the word "unreasonable". If they convince a court that the search is a reasonable one then that whole pesky amendment problem goes away. They don't have to get a warrant if they can convince the courts that what they are doing is reasonable. The entire amendment hinges on what we define the word "unreasonable" to mean and that is the bit under attack.
I don't mean to sound critical, but have you ever ran a business? Income is more important than profit because it's harder to generate income than profit.
No it isn't and I can prove it. Start a business selling $2 bills for $1. I guarantee you that you will have a HUGE amount of revenue but you'll also be losing money faster than you can say "chapter 7 bankruptcy". It's easy to generate revenue when you are giving selling something that people want for less than it actually costs to provide. What is hard is generating profitable revenue. Growing the top line is difficult only when you have to generate sales that ALSO make a profit.
I don't think ARM or AMD are going to be the next big threat to the Intel monopoly.
AMD isn't and likely won't be a threat. Intel makes more in profit than AMD does in revenue. AMD is unfortunately a rival in name only and they operate at a significant cost disadvantage to Intel because Intel is vertically integrated and AMD isn't. I'd like to see AMD doing better but if you look at the financial statements of both companies (and I have) you'll quickly conclude that AMD is trying to diversify away from competing with Intel because it's a game they cannot win. They've been trying and failing for 30+ years and the only reason they continue to exist is because Intel needs them around to keep the anti-trust authorities off their back. Intel could put AMD out of the CPU business in a blink if they had a free hand to do so. (They would simply drop the price of their CPUs to less than AMDs cost until AMD exits the market - Intel wouldn't even have to take a loss to do it)
ARM is a threat but an indirect one. ARM can't (and likely won't) compete with Intel in PCs but ARM is kicking Intel's ass in mobile. As mobile grows the traditional computer market shrinks to some degree which hurts Intel. The biggest threats are usually the indirect ones. Nobody is going to compete and win head on with Microsoft in desktop operating systems but linux is winning through the back door by eroding the market through mobile. Intel faces a similar threat. ARM's threat to Intel is by eroding their existing markets.
Even they will be supplanted. It's going to come from left field, specifically from a company that is researching the next generation of computing.
One can always imagine some advance in technology that can kill the incumbents but there are more immediate threats to Intel that don't require invoking some as yet undeveloped new technology. The biggest one I think is that the large companies that operate data centers (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) start to roll their own CPUs. They appear to be working on it. Power management is a serious issue with data centers and Intel has never been very good at that. (which is a big reason they struggle in mobile) Plus there is significant margin leakage when you buy as many computers as these companies do. Vertical integration can provide serious cost savings. And these big companies definitely can bankroll the move to a different CPU architecture if they are so inclined. Intel makes about 30-40% of their revenue from this sector so it's not trivial to them.
However, Intel can't maintain itself on its current markets, as they are all shrinking in favor of Mobile and, to a lesser extent, Cloud.
Well Intel supplies an awful lot of those CPUs for the cloud so I don't think that worries them so much. Mobile is an issue for them because that is definitely where the growth is. The biggest threat to Intel is that they have so much of their revenue and profit tied up in the X86 platform. If software and PC makers continue to migrate away from X86 it's going to hurt Intel badly sooner or later.
And wouldn't the always risky move of combining two cultures, employees, and physical plants introduce an even greater peril?
Depends on how they handle it. If they operate the acquired company as a stand alone entity (sort of like how Berkshire Hathaway operates) then the cultures don't really have to mix much at all and that can work fine. Mixing company cultures is a serious challenge but it's not always required.
I think Intel's biggest challenge is that they've been a de-facto monopoly for so long that they seem to have forgotten how to compete in areas where they don't dominate. It's always a risk for company that has one big cash cow that they just milk it to the exclusion of all else. The biggest risk to Intel is software makers leaving the X86 platform which is where the vast majority of their revenue comes from. They make some money from IoT and flash memory and security but these are about 12% of their revenue and 7% of their profit combined.
Well, by that logic, why even have time zones in the first place?
Because time zones do have utility and nobody is making stupid and irrelevant arguments that they don't. Plus good luck getting rid of time zones at this point. How about we stick to the reality we actually live in and do things that are actually possible and useful?
Because time is the measure of a day's progress -- faking it to appease stupid people who can't change their or their employees working/school hours is just lying to oneself.
Time progresses regardless. You didn't answer the question. Why does it matter what we define noon as? Why can't we define 1PM as the time when the sun is highest? It's an equally valid and equally arbitrary convention but one that carries greater utility for most people. Your argument is basically "that's the way we've always done it" which is almost always a stupid argument.
faking it to appease stupid people who can't change their or their employees working/school hours is just lying to oneself.
Ok smart guy. Explain how we get millions of schools and businesses to change their work hours simultaneously just so we can keep your pointless defintion of noon being the point in the day when the sun is highest. Oh that's right, the easiest way is to change the time zone convention.
Well, given that the state does not even want something closest to natural time, where the sun is at the highest point closest to noon, but instead wants the artificial DST in effect permanently, is weird.
There is no such thing as "natural time". The definition of noon as the point when the sun is highest in the sky is an arbitrary convention. Arbitrary conventions can and should be changed when no longer sensible. It is no longer particularly useful in today's world. Given that most people get up in the morning and head straight to work and spend essentially all their free time in the evening, it makes a huge amount of sense to adjust our clocks to deal with that reality. Maximize free time when the most people can get the most value from it.
It's Florida! People on the beach don't care what time it is, the retirees don't care what time it is, so why insist on DST?
Right because nobody in Florida actually goes to work. Everyone in the state is a beach bum or a retiree... You should be able to hear my eyes rolling about now.
If DST is a pain, why not get rid of it?
They are getting rid of it. It's the twice per year change that is the hassle. So they are getting rid of the pointless change and going with the time definition that makes the most sense. DST year round makes a ton of sense.
This needs to be done at the national level or you get a patchwork of states on or off DST . A true PITA for anyone needing to coordinate time across state lines.
We already have a patchwork of states doing their own thing with DST and you didn't really notice. Arizona doesn't do DST. Which states are in which time zones is moderately arbitrary. Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho and Oregon all have the time zone boundaries not tied to state boundaries. Having some places observe DST and not others is barely different than living near a time zone boundary. It's all slightly annoying but genuinely not the end of the world.
I think year round DST is a great idea. Maximize the daylight in the evening when it is of the most value to the most people.
but it seems that your reasons for disagreement support the contention that an increase in minimum wage is not causing producers to utilize automation where they otherwise would not.
A higher minimum wage does have SOME effect on whether automation is economical but it generally isn't as big an effect as many would have you believe. For businesses like a restaurant, it is generally extremely difficult to automate substantial portions of the business. You can raise the minimum wage and the net effect isn't going to be automation but rather more people eating at home more often. Some restaurants may go out of business but most of them will simply raise prices and people are still going to buy their pizza and burgers. Some workers will be displaced but not as many as many fear.
A lot depends on how easy it is to automate a given task and who the competition is. For my company we are competing against Chinese labor already so raising our minimum wage would have a modest effect on our business because we already have to go after certain types of jobs where we aren't trying to squeeze every penny out as it is. We need more talented labor already and that already costs much more than minimum wage. It might cost us some jobs but it isn't going to radically alter the calculus for us. We don't compete on the large volume jobs but instead smaller volume higher complexity jobs that are difficult to automate and that are difficult to send overseas.
whereas your argument is that humans are capable of doing low-skill tasks that machines are unable to do, so an increase in labor costs doesn't change the mechanics of human vs machine.
It's not just low skill tasks. High skill too. But changing the labor rate just changes where the tipping point is in the human vs robot decision. The lower labor costs are the higher the unit volumes have to be to justify the capital expense of automating. The equation is the same, just with slightly different inputs. As automation for a particular task becomes cheaper that also changes the equation but that tends to happen rather slowly or in step functions. Nobody is going to come out with a robot with human level intellect and flexibility for a long time if ever and even if they did it would cost a fortune. Specific tasks will be taken over by specialized automation but general purpose automation is a hugely difficult and expensive task. I have little worry that people aren't going to be able to find work within my lifetime.
machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing.
Speaking as someone who makes these sorts of cost calculations almost daily such a blanket statement is completely untrue. Professionally I am a certified accountant and also an industrial engineer. I manage a small manufacturing company and have to make decisions on automation all the time. Whether a machine is more economically efficient depends on the specific situation. In particular it depends on the volume and value of what is being produced. Many seemingly simple tasks are actually quite hard to automate economically unless you are producing large quantities of the product.
Hell, China is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages.
That depends on what those Chinese workers are making. I've been to China and I assure you that there is no lack of work for their labor force. Once the unit volume of a product gets high enough, it makes sense to automate almost any process. Having lower labor costs simply means the required unit volume is higher but the calculation is the same. Foxconn can consider automating the assembly of iPhones because they make MILLIONS of them. But there are VAST numbers of things we need to make for which the cost of automation is prohibitive and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Turns out that humans are very flexible, easy to train, readily available, and (comparatively) inexpensive for many tasks both simple and complex. Automation will replace a lot of assembly work (and that is a good thing) but it is not going to replace it all.
Let me give you an example. On my production floor today we are building a wiring harness for a customer. We have a machine that can automate production of the wire leads that go into it. But for this machine to be economical it really needs a production run of about 500 pieces because of the setup time and tooling costs. But we are only making 30 of these harnesses. So for this product (and many others we make) it is provably cheaper to use people to manually make the wire leads. But even if we were making 50000 of these harnesses we STILL would need the people because the only thing the machine can do is make leads. It cannot do any of the hundreds of other tasks that go into making the product whereas I can train almost any human to do most of them and not have to pay $100K up front for a new machine to do each task. To fully automate this job would require unit volumes in the hundreds of thousands to millions. Point is that there is a LOT of headroom between making one unit and the number where automation starts to make sense for people to work in. And this isn't going to change no matter how much people worry about it.
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless
Oh I wish that were actually true. My day job is running a company that does assembly work and we hire a fair amount of what could reasonably be called unskilled labor. For the unit volumes we produce (we make smaller quantities of a wide variety of products) there is no machine that could possibly economically replace these workers nor will there be one anytime soon.
There are several flaws in your argument.
1) Humans can be easily and quickly re-purposed to a different job. A burger flipping robot can just flip burgers and while it may be efficient at that task it is useless otherwise. To really replace a person you would need far more automation.
2) To replace a human who does more than one specialized task (and most do) you need a far more flexible set of automation which is not coincidentally FAR more expensive. Good luck asking the burger fli
True, but since it is only needed to cover that last 20%, when we are already have 80% wind and solar, it is not needed now.
Not needed now? It certainly is needed right now but that's irrelevant because it's NOT POSSIBLE. If it were available it would be needed immediately but there is no such technology in existence nor any reasonable near term prospect of it being developed. Companies that produce carbon have no incentive to work on the problem and there is no profit in it for anyone else. Carbon capture/sequestration is a bogus marketing term used by the fossil fuel industry to try to prevent regulation and taxation of the pollution they cause.
It is normal for a technology that is not yet needed not to be already deployed.
There is NO SUCH THING as carbon capture to deploy. You cannot deploy something that does not exist.
Some of that is offset by huge gaming systems with enormous power supplies, and bitcoin mining rigs. They are probably a minority nowadays..
I think you hugely overestimate the number of people who have gaming rigs with their attendant out sized power requirements. Compared to the number of computers out there it is a fraction of a single percent. In other words a rounding error. Same with bitcoin mining. It's getting way more play in the media than it really justifies and really the number of people involved is a good approximation of insignificant.
Demand for electricity is stagnant. Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way.
Assuming that demand has been flat domestically, the outsourcing of certain energy intensive industries doesn't mean the demand has gone away. It just places it in a different geographic location. That's not the same thing as flat demand.
What makes renewables bad is that we don't have reliable storage.
We have reliable storage, or at least the technology to make it. Tesla and others have seen to that. What we don't have is cheap and plentiful storage. Part of that is because we haven't ramped up battery production to full scale and part of it is that we're still trying to reduce cost in the face of subsidized fossil fuels which makes clean options seem more expensive than they actually are.
Long term is every home can cover 75% of their bas usage with solar and batteries then the need for large grid scale systems shrinks.
Yes, exactly. Every rooftop that can have solar should have solar. It would make the grid more reliable, cleaner, and eventually cheaper. It would require the grid to be upgraded in certain ways but that's not a bad thing. What we have now is rather outdated anyway. Yes we need batteries to do this but again, that's not a bad thing in the long run.
I'm about as much of a greenie as you are likely to run across. I'm strongly of the opinion that we cannot get solar and wind power to be major parts of the grid fast enough. We also need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels (which we do globally to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually) and force them to cost the full economic value of the pollution they cause. That said, the notion that we can rely solely on wind and solar (and hydro where available) in the near future is preposterous. Doing that in a rational way would take a century just due to the cost alone. Fossil fuels simply aren't going away for many decades at minimum no matter what. Fortunately we don't need to get carbon emitting energy sources to zero. We need to get them to a level that the ecosystem can handle which is obviously much lower than it is today. Use nuclear to replace fossil fuels where possible and solar and wind for most of the rest. Yes we will need batteries too. The grid WILL need to be updated no matter what so I don't see that as a bad thing. But if we need to spend the money to keep the planet habitable then no real benefit to waiting.
One beef with the summary is that there currently is no such thing as fossil fuels with carbon capture technology. There is NO industrial scale carbon capture or carbon sequestration technology available nor any reasonable prospect of such technology in the near future. So take that off the table as an option until such time as it becomes a real thing.
And TVs that are still going strong after 40 years!
Are those TVs being actively supported by the manufacturer? No they are not.
But this hardware is being sold like an "appliance" and it isn't failing as an appliance - it's being effectively remotely disabled.
Lots of appliances have a lifespan of 10-15 years of effective use. My last hot water tank for example lasted 12 years before failing and that is typical for that and many other appliances. Not really so different in this case.
There are DVD players still going strong after 20 years of use.
The maker of that DVD player isn't being asked to support it after 20 years either. Apples to grapefruits my friend.
It really doesn't matter what those governments do because criminals will merely find another get rich quick scheme to use in order to separate fools from their money.
It very much does matter what governments do. The fact that dealing with criminals is an eternal game of whack-a-mole is irrelevant. Yes they will try something else but that does not excuse doing nothing about their scams when we know about them. Should we allow check kiting or pyramid schemes just because "criminals will merely find another get rich quick scheme"? Spare me.
I think that most of this is pointless saber rattling as no one in government has any better understanding of cryptocurrency than your average person on the street, but I expect we'll see plenty of comments from representatives with a "series of tubes" level of understanding.
They don't have to understand them better though. They just have to understand how they are used to defraud people and take actions against that. No different than for fiat currency. And frankly your notion that "nobody" in government has more of a clue about money than the "average" person is demonstrably untrue. There are some very talented people in government who understand how money works about as well as anyone out there. You are seeking confirmation of your biases.
They aren't in a position to address the risks either. They just think they are.
Actually they are very much in a position to address a great number of the risks. Among the options they have is to make dealing in cryptocurrencies illegal. While criminals will still be criminals, governments and law enforcement agencies are in a strong position to mitigate a lot of the damage that could be done just like they do for other types of financial crime and misbehavior.
So is Medicare/Medicaid. Government fosters that cesspit.
That "cesspit" as you call it is the only way our senior citizens would be able to get health care and insurance. No private insurance company could possibly provide insurance to the elderly and make a profit or even break even. Are you seriously arguing that the elderly should not have health care?
If you want to go to single payer like every other civilized country I'm all for it.