Look if frequent thefts of uninsured capital occur in a market, the attractiveness of that market is going to diminish.
Not until a lot of people endure a lot of unnecessary losses. Markets don't solve every problem and they especially don't solve unchecked greed. We have financial regulations for good reasons. Many of those reasons are to prevent people from being defrauded. It's cheaper to society to prevent a crime than to wait for a market to adapt which might take years if it happens at all.
The downfall of BTC is going to be that many people aren't sure if they can trust their wallets or the exchanges.
That's not the only problem with it though it is a big one. What's really going to kill it however is the high risk adjusted transaction costs. If bitcoin were actually cheaper than say the dollar on a risk adjusted basis, that fact alone would make it hard to stop. But in reality bitcoin is rather expensive and relatively complicated to use. (good luck explaining a bitcoin wallet to your grandmother) The biggest problem bitcoin has is that it is expensive compared to competing currencies for transactions.
will condescend to keeping their subjects from injuring themselves.
Actually yes you can turn off the sarcasm machine. We DO need regulation surrounding cryptocurrencies to protect people. We do have laws and police and regulations for very good reasons. Many of those reasons are to protect those who aren't able to protect themselves both from financial predators and sometimes from themselves. Why? Because A) it's the right thing to do morally and B) nobody exists in a financial vacuum so one person's bad decisions tends to affect others. Are you seriously arguing that we should have no regulations of financial systems? Or are you one of the more foolish varieties of libertarian who suffers from the delusion that unfettered capitalism with no rules is somehow a good thing?
The European Union has warned that it will regulate cryptocurrencies if the risks exposed by the meteoric rise of bitcoin and its ilk are not addressed.
Translation: We will regulated cryptocurrencies since there is no one else in a position to address the risks involved even if they wanted to.
Seriously folks, cryptocurrencies are a criminal's wet dream. Anyone expecting governments to sit on the sidelines and do nothing to regulate them is delusional.
No, because they were recognizably crap by the standards of the day. It was well known that handset makers regarded the carriers (AT&T, Verizon, etc) as their customers rather than the end users. As a result they made very little effort to make their devices especially useful post purchase. This strategy worked until the iPhone dropped and then the handset makers that relied on this distribution bottleneck (Nokia being foremost among them) found themselves in deep shit.
Did you ever try to get a Nokia phone to talk with a PC circa 2000-2005? I did with multiple devices. It SUCKED. Seriously, Nokia was absolutely terrible at consumer oriented software and interfaces. The "web browser" on my last Nokia phone was only a web browser in the sense that it technically could load a web page. But it was utterly useless for real world use. It simply allowed them to claim the phone had the capability. Same with the email on the phone. Blackberries did email ok at the time but every Nokia I ever held prior to the iPhone (and for a while after) was absolutely horrid at email. Even text messaging was a shit show unless you had a phone with a proper querty keyboard.
They are of course judged their competition of the time.
Most of the competition of the time sucked too but it had little to do with their technical capabilities. They simply designed bad devices because they thought their customer was a big corporation instead of the person actually using the device. Some of the devices like the Palm devices and Blackberries were ok for the era. They were actually usable for real work albeit with recognizable deficiencies. Nokia just never really figured smartphones out until way too late in the game to matter.
Anyone who pays $1000 for a phone, I don't care if they get a deal or ripped off. You're still blowing a grand on something that will become less useful than a toaster in 5 years.
Maybe but I'm going to use my smartphone 4-8 hours almost every day, every day for the next 1-3 years. I might use my toaster once or twice a month for about 2 minutes. I am quite confident I'm getting better value for money out of a $1000 smartphone than a $20 toaster.
A thousand bucks buys you an insanely good guitar, violin, or damn near anything else.
I don't play guitar, violin, or anything else and don't plan to start. So why do I care? None of those things have any value to me. A smartphone does.
You could buy a full VR setup.
And do what with it exactly? I have less use for a VR setup than the toaster.
Does no one have to make careful decisions about where to spend their money?
When you have sufficient amounts of it the answer is no. You seem awfully concerned about what I spend my money on. I recommend finding something more productive to get worked up over. Spend your money on what is valuable to you and I'll do the same. I promise I won't care what you buy.
I could buy a pretty damn good laptop for a grand and it would be USEFUL for at least ten years.
I already have several of those. Why do I need more?
I've been noticing that lately smart phones such as android and iphones are terrible at their primary role which is to just make and receive calls.
That's because their primary role is not and never has been to make and receive calls. Smartphones are handheld computers that happen to be able to make calls too. Phone calls are CLEARLY not their primary role for the majority of people using them. They use them primarily for web browsing, email, texting, various apps, games, and the like. Phone calls are just a bonus feature that gets used now and then - some use it more than others. Personally I probably use 50-100 minutes for phone calls on my smartphone in a given month - sometimes less. But I use my smartphone for probably 4-8 hours every day.
Screw smart phones, they aren't good at their primary function and come with too much baggage from all the extra crap it is made to do. Happier with a flip phone, damned if I'll go back to one of those 'smart' monstrosities.
Again you seem really worked up about your incorrect notion about what smartphones are for. If you don't need/want a handheld computer then fine but I'm kind of puzzled why you are wasting your time here on slashdot if you don't give a shit about technology. You can hang out with my grandmother and the other technologically impaired folks who can't handle the modern world.
Animojis from the iPhone X or AR Emojis from the S9 may not be your thing, but they are absolutely driving interest in the flagship phones from both companies.
Really? Because I've seen precisely zero people actually using them. While I understand that my personal experiences do not imply anything more general, I'm definitely not seeing any evidence of sales because of this "feature".
the fact that a cell phone can even give something close to that in real time should be something you appreciate, not tell people to get off your lawn about.
I'll appreciate it when it does something actually useful to someone besides a bored 12 year old. Turning my face into an animated smiling pile of motion captured poo is not useful even as an insult.
I do remember using these phones for a while, and they were crap.
Every Nokia phone I owned was crap for one reason or another. I owned a steady stream of them from around 1997-2007. The hardware was reasonably durable and the battery life was ok but everything else about them was pretty crap. (unfortunately so was most of the competition at the time too) The software absolutely sucked, most features aside from making/receiving calls were borderline useless, heaven forbid you needed to have your phone communicate with a PC, address books sucked, etc. Their "smartphones" would have features like web browsing and email but if you actually tried to use them it usually was painful if it worked at all. I think people's nostalgia for Nokia products is largely misplaced.
Regardless of the crap quality, I do get nostalgic about the coolness factor. Taking it out and *snap*ping it open would never fail to turn a few heads.
I'm sure it would but is that really why you want a phone? I'll take something that actually is useful for more than showing off.
The economic engine of Silicon Valley seems to have driven right by the midwest
No it hasn't. It only seems so to clueless people on the coasts because the people who live in Silicon Valley live in a bubble. If you are looking for tech jobs, Southeast Michigan routinely outperforms Silicon Valley in R&D spending, revenue, and hiring. Why? The automotive industry uses a HUGE amount of tech. People tend to forget how much technology goes into designing and making cars. Oakland County just outside of Detroit City is one of the richest counties in the entire US. Michigan has a ridiculous amount of engineering talent - but it isn't centered around PCs and phones. It's in robots, automation, chemicals, controls, metalworking, etc.
Venture capital firms are setting up shop. Startups are clustering in old industrial strongholds. But the region's tech sectors look different than their coastal cousins. The midwest is seeing the rise of "mid-tech."
Venture capital firms have always been here in the midwest. So have startups. The culture is different and the economy doesn't look the same but none of that is anything new. It's kind of amazing how condescending folks from the coasts are about parts of the country they never bother to visit and know little about. They hear that the City of Detroit is having a hard time so they assume that the entire midwest is a desolate hell hole with no jobs and no technology.
Mid-tech jobs composed more than a quarter of all tech employment in major midwestern metropolitan areas, including Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota-Wisconsin. More than 100,000 people were employed in such jobs in these cities alone.
Detroit metro alone has a population of over 4 million. 100,000 people is kind of a rounding error. Plus those jobs have always been there. If you didn't know that you weren't paying attention. You don't need a four year degree to learn how to program a robot or a CNC mill but those definitely are technical jobs.
Scientists are worried that space aliens might send messages that worm their way into human society -- not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture.
Why is this written as if to imply that all scientists everywhere are worried about this? Just because a few people who are scientists have an idea doesn't make it wide spread or accepted. That's a really shady tactic used by journalists and politicians.
"Astrophysicists Michael Hippke and John Learned argue in a recent paper that our telescopes might pick up hazardous messages sent our way
So these two specific scientists have a theory. Why lead off with the idiotic implication that this idea is more widespread than it really is. It's the same tactic Trump uses when he says "people are saying..." when it's really one guy's drunken twitter post.
No, in your example, Coca Cola is big enough to crush any copier to dust by simply having their lawyers march in the immediate vicinity of the offender.
Tell that to Pepsi. Coca-Cola didn't get magically huge by having flesh eating lawyers. They got huge because they did a really good job making their product available, consistent, and relevant to their customers. It's not hard to copy the taste of Coke or any of their other drinks and there are countless other brands of cola available some of which arguably taste better. Coke succeeded because they executed the best. Also they aren't as big or as dominant as you seem to believe.
As a matter of fact, there are zounds of similar beverages out there, all over the world, but CC is so entrenched that all copiers combined have maybe 1% marked share compared to CC.
You might want to actually look up some facts before sounding stupid publicly. Coke has about 42% market share in soft drinks. Pepsi has about 30%. ARC Refreshments (the maker of RC Cola) has about 15% of the soft drink market. And the other players split the remaining 8%.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, when you think about it, ideas are an expense. It is the execution that matters.
This is very true. I had a mentor of mine once point out that if you think you have an idea that nobody else has thought of then you should put down whatever you are smoking. Protecting an idea is very expensive so it had better be a really good one to be worth the bother. Coca-Cola is a multi-billion dollar company and they have a product that is ridiculously easy to knock off. But their business execution is second to none and for most products that is what really matters. This remains true even if you have a product that justifies patents and other idea protection. You still have to execute or someone else will figure out a way to make a buck in your place.
Also, business plans are designed to eliminate workers from the beginning.
Ha! Good luck running a business with no people. That is one of the most self defeating arguments I've read in a while. Every business plan requires people. There are precisely zero businesses that exist with no people.
Second, exactly what "private" (in your view) industry did he "socialize?"
All airport security was private contractors prior to 9/11. Then it became a part of DHS. More generally public sector payroll expanded greatly during their administration - more than most recent presidents except perhaps Clinton. Based on their actions it's not entirely irrational to say they are closeted socialists.
Third, are you seriously claiming that Bush (41 or 43) is a socialist?
Oh they try to pretend they aren't but it's actually pretty easy to argue that a lot of republicans are really socialists in denial about it. They want big government and if you mute their rhetoric their actions prove it. They never actually cut military spending, medicare spending, or social security which are the three biggest line items in the federal budget. In fact Bush 43 expanded medicare and every republican administration tries to make the military larger to pander to their base. So yeah, they kind of are a weird sort of socialist.
What folks are saying is that it will cause some serious social upheaval as people adjust and some folks won't be to adjust - they'll be permanently booted out of the workforce; like what happened with the weavers during the English Industrial Revolution*.
Nobody is "permanently booted out of the workforce". Some categories of jobs disappear but that's not a bad thing. Those displaced have to go find something else economically valuable to do. We know this happened. It wasn't comfortable in the short term for some but there was no class of people unable to find work for the rest of their lives.
*When the weavers were displaced, they did not become machine operators they were left out to starve or demoted to unskilled labor. One machine replaced about 27 weavers and one person operated at least 3 machines. Automation has always been a net job destroyer.
If automation was a net job destroyer then society would immediately collapse. Your argument makes no sense. Automation is a net job creator. Automation and it's positive benefits are all around you. The house you live in, the car you drive, the roads you travel on, the food you eat. All results of automation being a net job creator. The internet is a perfect example. The internet is a form of automation and it has created FAR more jobs than it has eliminated.
And folks make the mistake of looking at TOTAL employment and jump to the erroneous conclusion that the displaced workers got retrained and just moved to another job of equal pay.
What happened is that overall people got retrained and eventually ended up in BETTER paying jobs. Standards of living have increased more or less steadily (even with some down times) for centuries now globally. Your argument that we aren't better off than we were 50 years ago is belied by the flat screen tv on your wall and the car you drive and they computer you are staring at now. People are better fed, living longer, have more income, travel more, and are more comfortable than they have been in the entirety of human history. Your argument is quite simply not supported by actual fact.
I'd love to work on my little projects all day long, but nobody's going to pay me for that - at least not enough and not long enough to earn a living from it.
Then perhaps you are doing it wrong. Lots of people figure out how to make a living from what they otherwise consider hobbies or projects. But it requires a lot of work and you have to figure out the business model to go with it. If you aren't willing to take the risk I understand but let's not pretend it is impossible. People do it all the time.
Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
Automation is NOT going to result in the Apocalypse. It is NOT going to take everyone's job away. It is NOT going to result in a global financial meltdown. There is NOT going to be a singularity.
Yes, some people will be displaced out of some jobs and have to find something else to do. No this will not be easy for some of them but it will be good for society overall. This is nothing new and has been happening continually for the entirety of the industrial revolution. The more things get automated the more we can accomplish. A lot of progress is held back simply because humans are stuck doing work that we don't yet have a machine for. A lot of dangerous, tedious, wasteful jobs will disappear. A lot of extra capability will be available for jobs that don't. New jobs will emerge that nobody even considered before. (How many web developers did you know circa 1985?) If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down or in extreme circumstances revolt (possibly violently).
All this sturm und drang about robots taking all the jobs and killing us all is mostly about as realistic as the latest zombie movie. It makes for good entertainment but it doesn't have much to do with reality.
Between the two parties the democrats take the cake on uninformed
Maybe but I'll take honestly uninformed over the disingenuously lying and/or crazy any day of the week. And the gun lobby is both disingenuous and crazy.
Laws that wouldn't have stopped the last shooting
So what? That's like arguing that we shouldn't have traffic laws because people still commit traffic violations. That's a straw man argument.
Trying to ban a gun that isn't responsible for 99% of gun deaths.
So we shouldn't ban guns that no civilian needs any legitimate purpose? Claiming you need an AR15 for "self defense" is ridiculous. Pretending you are going to use it to "protect your rights" even more so. Just because controlling hand guns is tougher politically doesn't mean we shouldn't control weapons with no purpose other than to facilitate mass murder.
Conflating gun laws with lower crime
You say this and are calling democrats uninformed? There is VAST evidence that reducing numbers of guns available results in reduced gun crime. Pretending that more guns available doesn't result in more guns used for crimes is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard in my life. When you can show me rates of gun violence in the US that are lower than countries that have stricter gun control then we can have this debate. Until then spare me this absurdity.
Here's a thought, how about push for the government to enforce the existing laws before you start pushing new ones.
Because the existing laws aren't enough. And even if "fully enforced" the existing laws will never solve the problems of violence in this country. We have far too many people (mostly on the political right) who have completely lost any sense of rationality when it comes to guns or regulations surrounding them.
It has to be light, designed to take quite a lot of pressure, shock, and vibration, and deal with temperatures, and it has to separate reliably. These are hard to make and expensive. In some cases the mission requires a custom fairing.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Define "injure" and "harm". Remember that this is a computer so it will do EXACTLY what it is instructed to do. This is the problem with the three laws is that it relies on ill defined concepts that we sort of grasp but rarely are explicit about. If a child falls down and skins a knee that is clearly harm which might be prevented but is it worthwhile doing so? If so how do you prevent such "harm" and is the prevention of harm causing other harms in the process? Humans actually need some amount of harm (not too much) to come to them to develop properly and learn to deal with problems.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Utterly meaningless unless you adequately define the first law. You also have to define what constitutes and order given by a human. And are we talking about ANY human under any circumstance? If a robot has to obey any human under any circumstance then that makes them extremely dangerous in circumstances where the robot is unable to comprehend the harm it might cause. It would be trivial to a human to order a robot to engage in a task that harms another human without the robot realizing it is causing harm unless the robot is smarter and more aware than the human ordering it about. And if the robot is smarter than the human then we have a whole different set of problems to deal with.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law./quote.
So a four year can order a robot to self destruct despite not really comprehending why that is bad. What could possibly go wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Look if frequent thefts of uninsured capital occur in a market, the attractiveness of that market is going to diminish.
Not until a lot of people endure a lot of unnecessary losses. Markets don't solve every problem and they especially don't solve unchecked greed. We have financial regulations for good reasons. Many of those reasons are to prevent people from being defrauded. It's cheaper to society to prevent a crime than to wait for a market to adapt which might take years if it happens at all.
The downfall of BTC is going to be that many people aren't sure if they can trust their wallets or the exchanges.
That's not the only problem with it though it is a big one. What's really going to kill it however is the high risk adjusted transaction costs. If bitcoin were actually cheaper than say the dollar on a risk adjusted basis, that fact alone would make it hard to stop. But in reality bitcoin is rather expensive and relatively complicated to use. (good luck explaining a bitcoin wallet to your grandmother) The biggest problem bitcoin has is that it is expensive compared to competing currencies for transactions.
will condescend to keeping their subjects from injuring themselves.
Actually yes you can turn off the sarcasm machine. We DO need regulation surrounding cryptocurrencies to protect people. We do have laws and police and regulations for very good reasons. Many of those reasons are to protect those who aren't able to protect themselves both from financial predators and sometimes from themselves. Why? Because A) it's the right thing to do morally and B) nobody exists in a financial vacuum so one person's bad decisions tends to affect others. Are you seriously arguing that we should have no regulations of financial systems? Or are you one of the more foolish varieties of libertarian who suffers from the delusion that unfettered capitalism with no rules is somehow a good thing?
The European Union has warned that it will regulate cryptocurrencies if the risks exposed by the meteoric rise of bitcoin and its ilk are not addressed.
Translation: We will regulated cryptocurrencies since there is no one else in a position to address the risks involved even if they wanted to.
Seriously folks, cryptocurrencies are a criminal's wet dream. Anyone expecting governments to sit on the sidelines and do nothing to regulate them is delusional.
Because they weren't the smartphone of today?
No, because they were recognizably crap by the standards of the day. It was well known that handset makers regarded the carriers (AT&T, Verizon, etc) as their customers rather than the end users. As a result they made very little effort to make their devices especially useful post purchase. This strategy worked until the iPhone dropped and then the handset makers that relied on this distribution bottleneck (Nokia being foremost among them) found themselves in deep shit.
Did you ever try to get a Nokia phone to talk with a PC circa 2000-2005? I did with multiple devices. It SUCKED. Seriously, Nokia was absolutely terrible at consumer oriented software and interfaces. The "web browser" on my last Nokia phone was only a web browser in the sense that it technically could load a web page. But it was utterly useless for real world use. It simply allowed them to claim the phone had the capability. Same with the email on the phone. Blackberries did email ok at the time but every Nokia I ever held prior to the iPhone (and for a while after) was absolutely horrid at email. Even text messaging was a shit show unless you had a phone with a proper querty keyboard.
They are of course judged their competition of the time.
Most of the competition of the time sucked too but it had little to do with their technical capabilities. They simply designed bad devices because they thought their customer was a big corporation instead of the person actually using the device. Some of the devices like the Palm devices and Blackberries were ok for the era. They were actually usable for real work albeit with recognizable deficiencies. Nokia just never really figured smartphones out until way too late in the game to matter.
Anyone who pays $1000 for a phone, I don't care if they get a deal or ripped off. You're still blowing a grand on something that will become less useful than a toaster in 5 years.
Maybe but I'm going to use my smartphone 4-8 hours almost every day, every day for the next 1-3 years. I might use my toaster once or twice a month for about 2 minutes. I am quite confident I'm getting better value for money out of a $1000 smartphone than a $20 toaster.
A thousand bucks buys you an insanely good guitar, violin, or damn near anything else.
I don't play guitar, violin, or anything else and don't plan to start. So why do I care? None of those things have any value to me. A smartphone does.
You could buy a full VR setup.
And do what with it exactly? I have less use for a VR setup than the toaster.
Does no one have to make careful decisions about where to spend their money?
When you have sufficient amounts of it the answer is no. You seem awfully concerned about what I spend my money on. I recommend finding something more productive to get worked up over. Spend your money on what is valuable to you and I'll do the same. I promise I won't care what you buy.
I could buy a pretty damn good laptop for a grand and it would be USEFUL for at least ten years.
I already have several of those. Why do I need more?
I've been noticing that lately smart phones such as android and iphones are terrible at their primary role which is to just make and receive calls.
That's because their primary role is not and never has been to make and receive calls. Smartphones are handheld computers that happen to be able to make calls too. Phone calls are CLEARLY not their primary role for the majority of people using them. They use them primarily for web browsing, email, texting, various apps, games, and the like. Phone calls are just a bonus feature that gets used now and then - some use it more than others. Personally I probably use 50-100 minutes for phone calls on my smartphone in a given month - sometimes less. But I use my smartphone for probably 4-8 hours every day.
Screw smart phones, they aren't good at their primary function and come with too much baggage from all the extra crap it is made to do. Happier with a flip phone, damned if I'll go back to one of those 'smart' monstrosities.
Again you seem really worked up about your incorrect notion about what smartphones are for. If you don't need/want a handheld computer then fine but I'm kind of puzzled why you are wasting your time here on slashdot if you don't give a shit about technology. You can hang out with my grandmother and the other technologically impaired folks who can't handle the modern world.
Animojis from the iPhone X or AR Emojis from the S9 may not be your thing, but they are absolutely driving interest in the flagship phones from both companies.
Really? Because I've seen precisely zero people actually using them. While I understand that my personal experiences do not imply anything more general, I'm definitely not seeing any evidence of sales because of this "feature".
the fact that a cell phone can even give something close to that in real time should be something you appreciate, not tell people to get off your lawn about.
I'll appreciate it when it does something actually useful to someone besides a bored 12 year old. Turning my face into an animated smiling pile of motion captured poo is not useful even as an insult.
Doesn't matter if you need 6 hands to actually use it. Size is king.
That's what she said.
I do remember using these phones for a while, and they were crap.
Every Nokia phone I owned was crap for one reason or another. I owned a steady stream of them from around 1997-2007. The hardware was reasonably durable and the battery life was ok but everything else about them was pretty crap. (unfortunately so was most of the competition at the time too) The software absolutely sucked, most features aside from making/receiving calls were borderline useless, heaven forbid you needed to have your phone communicate with a PC, address books sucked, etc. Their "smartphones" would have features like web browsing and email but if you actually tried to use them it usually was painful if it worked at all. I think people's nostalgia for Nokia products is largely misplaced.
Regardless of the crap quality, I do get nostalgic about the coolness factor. Taking it out and *snap*ping it open would never fail to turn a few heads.
I'm sure it would but is that really why you want a phone? I'll take something that actually is useful for more than showing off.
The economic engine of Silicon Valley seems to have driven right by the midwest
No it hasn't. It only seems so to clueless people on the coasts because the people who live in Silicon Valley live in a bubble. If you are looking for tech jobs, Southeast Michigan routinely outperforms Silicon Valley in R&D spending, revenue, and hiring. Why? The automotive industry uses a HUGE amount of tech. People tend to forget how much technology goes into designing and making cars. Oakland County just outside of Detroit City is one of the richest counties in the entire US. Michigan has a ridiculous amount of engineering talent - but it isn't centered around PCs and phones. It's in robots, automation, chemicals, controls, metalworking, etc.
Venture capital firms are setting up shop. Startups are clustering in old industrial strongholds. But the region's tech sectors look different than their coastal cousins. The midwest is seeing the rise of "mid-tech."
Venture capital firms have always been here in the midwest. So have startups. The culture is different and the economy doesn't look the same but none of that is anything new. It's kind of amazing how condescending folks from the coasts are about parts of the country they never bother to visit and know little about. They hear that the City of Detroit is having a hard time so they assume that the entire midwest is a desolate hell hole with no jobs and no technology.
Mid-tech jobs composed more than a quarter of all tech employment in major midwestern metropolitan areas, including Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota-Wisconsin. More than 100,000 people were employed in such jobs in these cities alone.
Detroit metro alone has a population of over 4 million. 100,000 people is kind of a rounding error. Plus those jobs have always been there. If you didn't know that you weren't paying attention. You don't need a four year degree to learn how to program a robot or a CNC mill but those definitely are technical jobs.
Scientists are worried that space aliens might send messages that worm their way into human society -- not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture.
Why is this written as if to imply that all scientists everywhere are worried about this? Just because a few people who are scientists have an idea doesn't make it wide spread or accepted. That's a really shady tactic used by journalists and politicians.
"Astrophysicists Michael Hippke and John Learned argue in a recent paper that our telescopes might pick up hazardous messages sent our way
So these two specific scientists have a theory. Why lead off with the idiotic implication that this idea is more widespread than it really is. It's the same tactic Trump uses when he says "people are saying..." when it's really one guy's drunken twitter post.
Roger Stone, Trumpy advisor, already warned that getting rid of The Donald would result in Civil War.
I'm happy to call his bluff and take the chance.
No, in your example, Coca Cola is big enough to crush any copier to dust by simply having their lawyers march in the immediate vicinity of the offender.
Tell that to Pepsi. Coca-Cola didn't get magically huge by having flesh eating lawyers. They got huge because they did a really good job making their product available, consistent, and relevant to their customers. It's not hard to copy the taste of Coke or any of their other drinks and there are countless other brands of cola available some of which arguably taste better. Coke succeeded because they executed the best. Also they aren't as big or as dominant as you seem to believe.
As a matter of fact, there are zounds of similar beverages out there, all over the world, but CC is so entrenched that all copiers combined have maybe 1% marked share compared to CC.
You might want to actually look up some facts before sounding stupid publicly. Coke has about 42% market share in soft drinks. Pepsi has about 30%. ARC Refreshments (the maker of RC Cola) has about 15% of the soft drink market. And the other players split the remaining 8%.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, when you think about it, ideas are an expense. It is the execution that matters.
This is very true. I had a mentor of mine once point out that if you think you have an idea that nobody else has thought of then you should put down whatever you are smoking. Protecting an idea is very expensive so it had better be a really good one to be worth the bother. Coca-Cola is a multi-billion dollar company and they have a product that is ridiculously easy to knock off. But their business execution is second to none and for most products that is what really matters. This remains true even if you have a product that justifies patents and other idea protection. You still have to execute or someone else will figure out a way to make a buck in your place.
Also, business plans are designed to eliminate workers from the beginning.
Ha! Good luck running a business with no people. That is one of the most self defeating arguments I've read in a while. Every business plan requires people. There are precisely zero businesses that exist with no people.
Only Apple FanBoys will defend Apple. That's all.
Ahh the old "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" strategy. Well played.
First of all, which Bush?
It doesn't matter. Both of them substantially expanded the number of government jobs during their administrations.
Second, exactly what "private" (in your view) industry did he "socialize?"
All airport security was private contractors prior to 9/11. Then it became a part of DHS. More generally public sector payroll expanded greatly during their administration - more than most recent presidents except perhaps Clinton. Based on their actions it's not entirely irrational to say they are closeted socialists.
Third, are you seriously claiming that Bush (41 or 43) is a socialist?
Oh they try to pretend they aren't but it's actually pretty easy to argue that a lot of republicans are really socialists in denial about it. They want big government and if you mute their rhetoric their actions prove it. They never actually cut military spending, medicare spending, or social security which are the three biggest line items in the federal budget. In fact Bush 43 expanded medicare and every republican administration tries to make the military larger to pander to their base. So yeah, they kind of are a weird sort of socialist.
What folks are saying is that it will cause some serious social upheaval as people adjust and some folks won't be to adjust - they'll be permanently booted out of the workforce; like what happened with the weavers during the English Industrial Revolution*.
Nobody is "permanently booted out of the workforce". Some categories of jobs disappear but that's not a bad thing. Those displaced have to go find something else economically valuable to do. We know this happened. It wasn't comfortable in the short term for some but there was no class of people unable to find work for the rest of their lives.
*When the weavers were displaced, they did not become machine operators they were left out to starve or demoted to unskilled labor. One machine replaced about 27 weavers and one person operated at least 3 machines. Automation has always been a net job destroyer.
If automation was a net job destroyer then society would immediately collapse. Your argument makes no sense. Automation is a net job creator. Automation and it's positive benefits are all around you. The house you live in, the car you drive, the roads you travel on, the food you eat. All results of automation being a net job creator. The internet is a perfect example. The internet is a form of automation and it has created FAR more jobs than it has eliminated.
And folks make the mistake of looking at TOTAL employment and jump to the erroneous conclusion that the displaced workers got retrained and just moved to another job of equal pay.
What happened is that overall people got retrained and eventually ended up in BETTER paying jobs. Standards of living have increased more or less steadily (even with some down times) for centuries now globally. Your argument that we aren't better off than we were 50 years ago is belied by the flat screen tv on your wall and the car you drive and they computer you are staring at now. People are better fed, living longer, have more income, travel more, and are more comfortable than they have been in the entirety of human history. Your argument is quite simply not supported by actual fact.
I'd love to work on my little projects all day long, but nobody's going to pay me for that - at least not enough and not long enough to earn a living from it.
Then perhaps you are doing it wrong. Lots of people figure out how to make a living from what they otherwise consider hobbies or projects. But it requires a lot of work and you have to figure out the business model to go with it. If you aren't willing to take the risk I understand but let's not pretend it is impossible. People do it all the time.
Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
Automation is NOT going to result in the Apocalypse. It is NOT going to take everyone's job away. It is NOT going to result in a global financial meltdown. There is NOT going to be a singularity.
Yes, some people will be displaced out of some jobs and have to find something else to do. No this will not be easy for some of them but it will be good for society overall. This is nothing new and has been happening continually for the entirety of the industrial revolution. The more things get automated the more we can accomplish. A lot of progress is held back simply because humans are stuck doing work that we don't yet have a machine for. A lot of dangerous, tedious, wasteful jobs will disappear. A lot of extra capability will be available for jobs that don't. New jobs will emerge that nobody even considered before. (How many web developers did you know circa 1985?) If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down or in extreme circumstances revolt (possibly violently).
All this sturm und drang about robots taking all the jobs and killing us all is mostly about as realistic as the latest zombie movie. It makes for good entertainment but it doesn't have much to do with reality.
All Estes rockets are orbital class. Where do you think all the lost rockets end up?
I think they go where my socks go so they really are Behind The Dryer class rockets.
Piffle, just carve it out of balsa wood. Learn from those who came before you... Estes.
Please direct me to where I can purchase an orbital class Estes rocket.
Between the two parties the democrats take the cake on uninformed
Maybe but I'll take honestly uninformed over the disingenuously lying and/or crazy any day of the week. And the gun lobby is both disingenuous and crazy.
Laws that wouldn't have stopped the last shooting
So what? That's like arguing that we shouldn't have traffic laws because people still commit traffic violations. That's a straw man argument.
Trying to ban a gun that isn't responsible for 99% of gun deaths.
So we shouldn't ban guns that no civilian needs any legitimate purpose? Claiming you need an AR15 for "self defense" is ridiculous. Pretending you are going to use it to "protect your rights" even more so. Just because controlling hand guns is tougher politically doesn't mean we shouldn't control weapons with no purpose other than to facilitate mass murder.
Conflating gun laws with lower crime
You say this and are calling democrats uninformed? There is VAST evidence that reducing numbers of guns available results in reduced gun crime. Pretending that more guns available doesn't result in more guns used for crimes is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard in my life. When you can show me rates of gun violence in the US that are lower than countries that have stricter gun control then we can have this debate. Until then spare me this absurdity.
Here's a thought, how about push for the government to enforce the existing laws before you start pushing new ones.
Because the existing laws aren't enough. And even if "fully enforced" the existing laws will never solve the problems of violence in this country. We have far too many people (mostly on the political right) who have completely lost any sense of rationality when it comes to guns or regulations surrounding them.
From the article you linked: the fairing costs $6m? Really?
You are aware that economies of scale are rather limited here right? It's not at all shocking that something like that would cost $6m in the sort of volume SpaceX deals in. Plus they aren't an "inert chuck of metal". Per SpaceX it is composite structure consisting of a 2.5 cm (1 in.) thick aluminum honeycomb core surrounded by carbon fiber face sheet plies (see section 4.3.7). It will require a huge oven for the carbon fiber which you can be sure is expensive and a lot of fancy tooling.
It has to be light, designed to take quite a lot of pressure, shock, and vibration, and deal with temperatures, and it has to separate reliably. These are hard to make and expensive. In some cases the mission requires a custom fairing.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Define "injure" and "harm". Remember that this is a computer so it will do EXACTLY what it is instructed to do. This is the problem with the three laws is that it relies on ill defined concepts that we sort of grasp but rarely are explicit about. If a child falls down and skins a knee that is clearly harm which might be prevented but is it worthwhile doing so? If so how do you prevent such "harm" and is the prevention of harm causing other harms in the process? Humans actually need some amount of harm (not too much) to come to them to develop properly and learn to deal with problems.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Utterly meaningless unless you adequately define the first law. You also have to define what constitutes and order given by a human. And are we talking about ANY human under any circumstance? If a robot has to obey any human under any circumstance then that makes them extremely dangerous in circumstances where the robot is unable to comprehend the harm it might cause. It would be trivial to a human to order a robot to engage in a task that harms another human without the robot realizing it is causing harm unless the robot is smarter and more aware than the human ordering it about. And if the robot is smarter than the human then we have a whole different set of problems to deal with.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law./quote.
So a four year can order a robot to self destruct despite not really comprehending why that is bad. What could possibly go wrong.