If cashiering is one of the most automatable jobs in the economy, that raises the question of "why haven't they all been automated?" One reason is that self-checkout lines cause theft to increase substantially, even with overseers watching the self-checkout lanes. Waiting in line also causes people to buy more of the impulse-aisle stuff (like candy) by the registers. Low-volume shops like antique stores (that might have one or two employees on duty at any given time) have the cashier do other tasks when there are no customers ready to check out, so a self-service checkout doesn't fully replace even one employee.
Google recently announced a tech called VPS, which I've been waiting for someone to invent. Soon, instead of attempting to find someone on the floor of a large store, and asking them where X is, you'll whip out your smartphone, start the VPS app, and ask it Siri-style what you want, and it'll navigate you exactly to that item/aisle/department/location/bathroom. And not much afterward, it'll be able to tell you what the price of something is. About half the time someone asks me how much an item costs, there's a price sticker on the item that says how much it is; a further 25% of the time, there's a price on the shelf where they picked it up. The app could probably just look at the UPC and do a database lookup on the store's website, though. The related question "do you have more in stock/where's another store that has more?" could also be answered by a database lookup. The last major customer service function of people on the floor is getting an item down... but robots could do this, trivially if the store were designed to be stocked by robots in the first place (and a stocking robot already existed).
Stocking is a drag for retail. At high-volume stores, it's a difficult job, so turnover is high. Lots of money is wasted on training, and retaining skilled workers is difficult since minimum wage is typical; since worker quality varies so much, and there are usually several who don't show up for work, time taken to stock varies significantly, putting a damper on the effectiveness of JIT warehousing. Stockers at my local Walmart are almost all immigrants who don't speak English, so I don't even bother asking them questions; VPS will make this moot soon, but point is, they don't serve much secondary function and could be safely automated.
And the next obvious step is giant Bangalore ATC outsourcing company...
Outsourcing it to Bangalore would probably be better than outsourcing to Saudi Arabia. Hope the latency isn't a problem, or accents, or crackling of the crappy microphone and VOIP setup from the lowest-bidder call-center-style operation. Seriously though, I wonder why this wasn't fully-automated decades ago. Air-traffic controllers have to deal with massive amounts of information, notice if things look wrong, or if anything suddenly appears/disappears. Strikes can ground an entire airport (or collection of airports, even), not just one airline. Airports regularly get grounded due to the 50-year-old ATC computers malfunctioning. ATC is basically strict adherence to a textbook of rules and procedures, applied to data they look at on a computer monitor, which is ripe for automation.
Once Threadripper is out, AMD will have a consumer chip with more cores than Intel's top enthusiast chip. Intel's enthusiast chip with the most cores was the ($1600) 6950X with 10 cores, and a 12-core Skylake-X upgrade is expected to release in a few weeks. The big question is pricing on these chips. Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these? Professionals who REALLY need to quickly reencode lots of video at maximum quality, or run lots of Photoshop filters, can afford a $1600 chip. That $300 Ryzen with 8 cores will be 'good enough' for nearly everyone who can't afford to spend top dollar, otherwise you should use the EPYC, or the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.
I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.
How exactly was the gelatin engineered to respond to estrogen and release an egg only upon estrus? I'm guessing it wasn't, and this printed ovary just periodically released eggs. The article also contains this gem: "an ovary implant could also help cancer survivors whose eggs are so damaged that they need hormone replacement therapy to trigger puberty". My understanding is that eggs don't cause puberty; and this 'ovarian prosthetic' does nothing to grow new follicles, so if your eggs are damaged, you're still sterile.
USA culture is obsessed with the 'new'. In fact, 'new' and 'free' are the two most-liked words in the English language (in the USA.) It should be no surprise that consumer spending behavior would gravitate towards what's novel, which necessarily (eventually) requires new technology. An increasing proportion of our entire economy is being automated, with widespread predictions that eventually, our ENTIRE supply-side economy will be automated. This automation requires, again, new technology. Therefore, tech companies are displacing older companies; you thought you wanted X good or service, but it turns out that new tech makes X irrelevant (cars vs. buggy whips), or Y alternative (electric cars vs. ICE) so cheap it's preferable to what you were planning on using.
You can buy a Gear VR for $120, or a Daydream headset for $70, assuming you have a compatible phone. Daydream-compatible phones will be ubiquitous once Samsung no longer has a lock on the Snapdragon 835. The PSVR can be bought for $400, all you need is a PS4 and 60 million of those have been sold so far; about 1 million PSVR headsets have been sold so far.
My counterpoint was that representative democracy in no way prevents tyranny of the majority, and direct democracy can theoretically be better at preventing it in some situations.
In response to your sig: "Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue" If the two wolves eat the sheep, what are they going to eat next? They're going to starve because all they know is how to take from others, and the others no longer have anything to give. This is why it takes a large population of prey to support a small number of apex predators, or else the predators starve to death. Note that the prey outnumber the predators by a large number, the 'two wolves and a sheep' is the endgame. The sheep would've had plenty of time to vote the wolves off the island.
Ok, time for less metaphor. The majority hate the minority, and want them to be miserable to their own benefit. Easy solution: slavery. In practice this usually just meant 'less-favorable terms for cost of labor, goods etc.' and law enforcement looks the other way to this. A better option than systematically taking people's stuff and killing them turns out to be to get them to make stuff for you. However, what'd be ideal is if you (as part of the elite) don't have to work at all, just have a stable of untouchables doing the drudgery. That means you need a large number of the minority (sheep) relative to the elite (wolves). In a representative democracy, they can vote you out of power, and vote themselves into power. But of course, they don't want the wrong lizard (wolf (elite)) to win, so they keep voting in lizards (wolves (elites)). In contrast, in a direct democracy, the minority can present a bill that prevents discrimination and requires equal pay for their minority, fines for businesses that exploit them etc. and the (power) majority can't outvote them because the (power) minority has a numerical majority. Assuming the voting isn't rigged.
However, there's a wrinkle: propaganda. The elite will spend LOTS of money to maintain their position, and aren't above using propaganda to control the sheeple. TV advertisements are the most obvious modern incarnation, as well as paying news media to run articles/columns that parrot your talking points or happen to only consult with sources friendly to your position. Factionalization, turning the masses against one another, agents provocateur, organization infiltrators, Uncle Toms, and straight-up soapboxing are less-obvious examples. Think about how many people are against minimum wage increases, saying it'll harm the people it's intended to help, if you want an example of all this (whether or not you think it's true). It's easy to invoke learned helplessness on people raised on the idea that they're inferior and can't do anything except keep their heads down.
Direct democracy is theoretically more liberating to the masses, but undermined by the vastly increased ability of the elites to push propaganda upon them. Wage slavery is pretty much guaranteed in all scenarios, at least for the underclass. Direct democracy has a similar problem with poor laws as representative democracy. Alice: "You voted AGAINST the Terrorist Disemboweling Act 2018? You disgust me!" Bob: "It had all the same language and provisions as the Terrorist Disemboweling Act 2017 so I saw no need for it." Alice: "It's a matter of principle! Have to show we're still tough on terrorism!" And of course the 2018 version had a rider snuck into the 900-page bill requiring disemboweling of those who hang toilet paper towards the wall, but almost noone noticed until the Great TP Pogrom started.
Almost forgot to address the 'armed sheep will contest the vote' idea. The general sentiment would be 'crazy loose cannons terrorizing normal folks' rather than 'freedom fighters'. Propaganda wins this fight, hands down. Now, a potential alternative way that can go is Hutu vs. Tutsis, and there's no telling which side of the genocide you'd be on.
Only Shia Muslims (a minority of Muslims worldwide; most are Sunni, although a few countries like Iraq are mostly Shia) care what Imams have to say. They're like Catholic Bishops in that few non-Catholics give much weight to what they say, but are different in that anyone can declare themselves an Imam with no centralized authority/hierarchy. The ISIS (supposed) caliphate probably could effectively be that central authority... but its leader is Sunni so they wouldn't endorse Imams anyhow. Given ISIS' wholesale excommunication and slaughter of Muslims who don't follow their rules, they'd probably put the Imams' heads on pikes instead.
This type of policy won't do anything to impede terrorists. At best you'll get the low-hanging fruit of a few guilty-minded people looking for an excuse to be stopped, but I have a feeling that rarely happens. The dumbest terrorists will simply wipe anything incriminating off their phone before traveling (or not keep anything incriminating on their phone in the first place), or keep everything locked behind an app that customs is unlikely to ask for the password to. Smarter terrorists will stash a SIM on them, or carry no phone and buy a burner when they reach their destination, or have a phone shipped to them. The smartest terrorists will use no phones at all, and then SIGINT is of no help; you need old-fashioned boots on the ground to catch those.
I'm skeptical that searching these people's phones (who already seem to be on some kind of list) is an attempt to create a 'huge data bank on thousands of UK citizens.' First, a database with info on thousands of people isn't 'huge', this isn't 1980 anymore. Second, the UK govt. presumably ALREADY has data on these thousands of people... leading to them being put on the 'search their phone' list. I find it more likely that one of the main purposes is 'intimidation', sending a message of 'we have our all-seeing eye on you', along with a not-so-subtle message of "you're not welcome here." It seems the UK is giving in to Islamophobia recently, I hear.
I agree this is Exhibit A of why there shouldn't be built-in govt. backdoors in computers. However, the powers that be will simply weigh a) likelihood * damage if knowledge of the backdoor were to leak vs b) all those Bad Guys they'll be able to catch because of this omniscient surveillance. if knowledge is power then a God am I! bwahahaha! sorry, i mean, catch terr'ists and stuff. think of the children and whatnot.
most of the 'damage' in A will be borne by people/organizations outside of the nation that mandated the backdoor. the damage to the govt. will be paid for by taxpayer money, and fixing it requires temporary contract workers, overtime pay, et cetera. instant jobs program, yeah! those that make the decision to vote yay to a backdoor won't see any hardship. until these attacks using leaked exploits start infecting politicians' personal/work computers, making their lives more difficult, they will vote for "keep it secret, keep it safe" every time, confident the Nazgul won't come for them.
Wait until one of these leaked/lost TLA tools becomes used by a 3rd party in such a way that it looks like a state-sponsored attack on one of their enemies. Or, equally likely, a 'leaked/lost' tool used by a 1st party, with a '3rd party did it' plausible deniability argument. It's like separating a 'rogue terrorist group' from a 'state-sponsored terrorist group'.
I imagine soon, a major power will say "all attacks by tools that could only have been created by a state actor, will be responded to as if actually used by that actor" and then the "oops, my WMD fell off the back of a truck, my bad" excuse will no longer work. It may soon be considered too dangerous to hoard these exploits, as their inevitable leak will harm their creator more than if they had never been created in the first place. Taking bets on if that happens before or after the IT world figures out how to secure their shit.
The computer running the simulation we live in will one day soon be infected by ransomware. Will our creators pay the ransom, or just wipe the system and start over? We have to provide enough value to our creators to justify them paying up.
Human noses tend to be several feet off the ground, while dog noses are much closer (and often go to the ground to sniff stuff.) Even if a human puts their head to the ground the nostril points the wrong way to hoover up scents on the ground.
I imagine a small proportion of black slaves in America were arrested and incarcerated, as well. That's hardly the only measure of freedom, however. "So long as you freely allow authoritarians to dictate what you can and can't do, without resisting or protesting" is a pretty big exception to freedom.
7" touch screen? Camera and better speaker than an Echo? Runs Fire OS? Likely $199+? Almost certainly runs ARM. Tell me again how this is different from a Fire tablet.
a ) Emergence of New Tech(tm) to solve the problem! b) The managing director expects to tire of playing golf in the desert within 25 years, and will reluctantly relinquish the water. c) After 20 years of delays in the construction of desalination plants due to graft, the corrupt ministers will retire, thus leaving only a new generation of completely honest ministers, and the plants will be finished up within 5 years. d) Everyone will have left the UAE due to other countries moving away from ICEs, regional strife, etc. e) Mandatory 25-year water shortage. Sorry, they'd LOVE to fit it into their schedule next century, but darn, it's just too FULL. f) Aliens. Somehow. g) The Rapture will happen in 25 years so it'll be moot.
Slashdot Mirror
If cashiering is one of the most automatable jobs in the economy, that raises the question of "why haven't they all been automated?" One reason is that self-checkout lines cause theft to increase substantially, even with overseers watching the self-checkout lanes. Waiting in line also causes people to buy more of the impulse-aisle stuff (like candy) by the registers. Low-volume shops like antique stores (that might have one or two employees on duty at any given time) have the cashier do other tasks when there are no customers ready to check out, so a self-service checkout doesn't fully replace even one employee.
Google recently announced a tech called VPS, which I've been waiting for someone to invent. Soon, instead of attempting to find someone on the floor of a large store, and asking them where X is, you'll whip out your smartphone, start the VPS app, and ask it Siri-style what you want, and it'll navigate you exactly to that item/aisle/department/location/bathroom. And not much afterward, it'll be able to tell you what the price of something is. About half the time someone asks me how much an item costs, there's a price sticker on the item that says how much it is; a further 25% of the time, there's a price on the shelf where they picked it up. The app could probably just look at the UPC and do a database lookup on the store's website, though. The related question "do you have more in stock/where's another store that has more?" could also be answered by a database lookup. The last major customer service function of people on the floor is getting an item down... but robots could do this, trivially if the store were designed to be stocked by robots in the first place (and a stocking robot already existed).
Stocking is a drag for retail. At high-volume stores, it's a difficult job, so turnover is high. Lots of money is wasted on training, and retaining skilled workers is difficult since minimum wage is typical; since worker quality varies so much, and there are usually several who don't show up for work, time taken to stock varies significantly, putting a damper on the effectiveness of JIT warehousing. Stockers at my local Walmart are almost all immigrants who don't speak English, so I don't even bother asking them questions; VPS will make this moot soon, but point is, they don't serve much secondary function and could be safely automated.
And the next obvious step is giant Bangalore ATC outsourcing company...
Outsourcing it to Bangalore would probably be better than outsourcing to Saudi Arabia. Hope the latency isn't a problem, or accents, or crackling of the crappy microphone and VOIP setup from the lowest-bidder call-center-style operation.
Seriously though, I wonder why this wasn't fully-automated decades ago. Air-traffic controllers have to deal with massive amounts of information, notice if things look wrong, or if anything suddenly appears/disappears. Strikes can ground an entire airport (or collection of airports, even), not just one airline. Airports regularly get grounded due to the 50-year-old ATC computers malfunctioning. ATC is basically strict adherence to a textbook of rules and procedures, applied to data they look at on a computer monitor, which is ripe for automation.
Once Threadripper is out, AMD will have a consumer chip with more cores than Intel's top enthusiast chip. Intel's enthusiast chip with the most cores was the ($1600) 6950X with 10 cores, and a 12-core Skylake-X upgrade is expected to release in a few weeks. The big question is pricing on these chips. Once the hype dies down, the question is who really needs these? Professionals who REALLY need to quickly reencode lots of video at maximum quality, or run lots of Photoshop filters, can afford a $1600 chip. That $300 Ryzen with 8 cores will be 'good enough' for nearly everyone who can't afford to spend top dollar, otherwise you should use the EPYC, or the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.
I hear that most servers only user 4-core CPUs and don't need more than that, so I guess EPYC will be a niche use-case.
How exactly was the gelatin engineered to respond to estrogen and release an egg only upon estrus? I'm guessing it wasn't, and this printed ovary just periodically released eggs. The article also contains this gem: "an ovary implant could also help cancer survivors whose eggs are so damaged that they need hormone replacement therapy to trigger puberty". My understanding is that eggs don't cause puberty; and this 'ovarian prosthetic' does nothing to grow new follicles, so if your eggs are damaged, you're still sterile.
USA culture is obsessed with the 'new'. In fact, 'new' and 'free' are the two most-liked words in the English language (in the USA.) It should be no surprise that consumer spending behavior would gravitate towards what's novel, which necessarily (eventually) requires new technology. An increasing proportion of our entire economy is being automated, with widespread predictions that eventually, our ENTIRE supply-side economy will be automated. This automation requires, again, new technology. Therefore, tech companies are displacing older companies; you thought you wanted X good or service, but it turns out that new tech makes X irrelevant (cars vs. buggy whips), or Y alternative (electric cars vs. ICE) so cheap it's preferable to what you were planning on using.
Finally, MP3 Pro will have its day!
You can buy a Gear VR for $120, or a Daydream headset for $70, assuming you have a compatible phone. Daydream-compatible phones will be ubiquitous once Samsung no longer has a lock on the Snapdragon 835. The PSVR can be bought for $400, all you need is a PS4 and 60 million of those have been sold so far; about 1 million PSVR headsets have been sold so far.
My counterpoint was that representative democracy in no way prevents tyranny of the majority, and direct democracy can theoretically be better at preventing it in some situations.
I wasn't targeting you specifically, that saying just always rubbed me the wrong way and I wanted to put down my thoughts about it.
Whoops, mea culpa. Guess I got mixed up somewhere.
In response to your sig: "Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue"
If the two wolves eat the sheep, what are they going to eat next? They're going to starve because all they know is how to take from others, and the others no longer have anything to give. This is why it takes a large population of prey to support a small number of apex predators, or else the predators starve to death. Note that the prey outnumber the predators by a large number, the 'two wolves and a sheep' is the endgame. The sheep would've had plenty of time to vote the wolves off the island.
Ok, time for less metaphor. The majority hate the minority, and want them to be miserable to their own benefit. Easy solution: slavery. In practice this usually just meant 'less-favorable terms for cost of labor, goods etc.' and law enforcement looks the other way to this. A better option than systematically taking people's stuff and killing them turns out to be to get them to make stuff for you. However, what'd be ideal is if you (as part of the elite) don't have to work at all, just have a stable of untouchables doing the drudgery. That means you need a large number of the minority (sheep) relative to the elite (wolves). In a representative democracy, they can vote you out of power, and vote themselves into power. But of course, they don't want the wrong lizard (wolf (elite)) to win, so they keep voting in lizards (wolves (elites)). In contrast, in a direct democracy, the minority can present a bill that prevents discrimination and requires equal pay for their minority, fines for businesses that exploit them etc. and the (power) majority can't outvote them because the (power) minority has a numerical majority. Assuming the voting isn't rigged.
However, there's a wrinkle: propaganda. The elite will spend LOTS of money to maintain their position, and aren't above using propaganda to control the sheeple. TV advertisements are the most obvious modern incarnation, as well as paying news media to run articles/columns that parrot your talking points or happen to only consult with sources friendly to your position. Factionalization, turning the masses against one another, agents provocateur, organization infiltrators, Uncle Toms, and straight-up soapboxing are less-obvious examples. Think about how many people are against minimum wage increases, saying it'll harm the people it's intended to help, if you want an example of all this (whether or not you think it's true). It's easy to invoke learned helplessness on people raised on the idea that they're inferior and can't do anything except keep their heads down.
Direct democracy is theoretically more liberating to the masses, but undermined by the vastly increased ability of the elites to push propaganda upon them. Wage slavery is pretty much guaranteed in all scenarios, at least for the underclass. Direct democracy has a similar problem with poor laws as representative democracy.
Alice: "You voted AGAINST the Terrorist Disemboweling Act 2018? You disgust me!"
Bob: "It had all the same language and provisions as the Terrorist Disemboweling Act 2017 so I saw no need for it."
Alice: "It's a matter of principle! Have to show we're still tough on terrorism!"
And of course the 2018 version had a rider snuck into the 900-page bill requiring disemboweling of those who hang toilet paper towards the wall, but almost noone noticed until the Great TP Pogrom started.
Almost forgot to address the 'armed sheep will contest the vote' idea. The general sentiment would be 'crazy loose cannons terrorizing normal folks' rather than 'freedom fighters'. Propaganda wins this fight, hands down. Now, a potential alternative way that can go is Hutu vs. Tutsis, and there's no telling which side of the genocide you'd be on.
Only Shia Muslims (a minority of Muslims worldwide; most are Sunni, although a few countries like Iraq are mostly Shia) care what Imams have to say. They're like Catholic Bishops in that few non-Catholics give much weight to what they say, but are different in that anyone can declare themselves an Imam with no centralized authority/hierarchy. The ISIS (supposed) caliphate probably could effectively be that central authority... but its leader is Sunni so they wouldn't endorse Imams anyhow. Given ISIS' wholesale excommunication and slaughter of Muslims who don't follow their rules, they'd probably put the Imams' heads on pikes instead.
This type of policy won't do anything to impede terrorists. At best you'll get the low-hanging fruit of a few guilty-minded people looking for an excuse to be stopped, but I have a feeling that rarely happens. The dumbest terrorists will simply wipe anything incriminating off their phone before traveling (or not keep anything incriminating on their phone in the first place), or keep everything locked behind an app that customs is unlikely to ask for the password to. Smarter terrorists will stash a SIM on them, or carry no phone and buy a burner when they reach their destination, or have a phone shipped to them. The smartest terrorists will use no phones at all, and then SIGINT is of no help; you need old-fashioned boots on the ground to catch those.
I'm skeptical that searching these people's phones (who already seem to be on some kind of list) is an attempt to create a 'huge data bank on thousands of UK citizens.' First, a database with info on thousands of people isn't 'huge', this isn't 1980 anymore. Second, the UK govt. presumably ALREADY has data on these thousands of people... leading to them being put on the 'search their phone' list. I find it more likely that one of the main purposes is 'intimidation', sending a message of 'we have our all-seeing eye on you', along with a not-so-subtle message of "you're not welcome here." It seems the UK is giving in to Islamophobia recently, I hear.
I agree this is Exhibit A of why there shouldn't be built-in govt. backdoors in computers. However, the powers that be will simply weigh
a) likelihood * damage if knowledge of the backdoor were to leak
vs b) all those Bad Guys they'll be able to catch because of this omniscient surveillance. if knowledge is power then a God am I! bwahahaha! sorry, i mean, catch terr'ists and stuff. think of the children and whatnot.
most of the 'damage' in A will be borne by people/organizations outside of the nation that mandated the backdoor. the damage to the govt. will be paid for by taxpayer money, and fixing it requires temporary contract workers, overtime pay, et cetera. instant jobs program, yeah! those that make the decision to vote yay to a backdoor won't see any hardship. until these attacks using leaked exploits start infecting politicians' personal/work computers, making their lives more difficult, they will vote for "keep it secret, keep it safe" every time, confident the Nazgul won't come for them.
Wait until one of these leaked/lost TLA tools becomes used by a 3rd party in such a way that it looks like a state-sponsored attack on one of their enemies. Or, equally likely, a 'leaked/lost' tool used by a 1st party, with a '3rd party did it' plausible deniability argument. It's like separating a 'rogue terrorist group' from a 'state-sponsored terrorist group'.
I imagine soon, a major power will say "all attacks by tools that could only have been created by a state actor, will be responded to as if actually used by that actor" and then the "oops, my WMD fell off the back of a truck, my bad" excuse will no longer work. It may soon be considered too dangerous to hoard these exploits, as their inevitable leak will harm their creator more than if they had never been created in the first place. Taking bets on if that happens before or after the IT world figures out how to secure their shit.
It's both hardcore AND softcore, until you measure it.
The computer running the simulation we live in will one day soon be infected by ransomware. Will our creators pay the ransom, or just wipe the system and start over? We have to provide enough value to our creators to justify them paying up.
Them writing about working is like an eunuch talking about fucking. Yeah, [they've] seen it done, but there's not really much first hand experience.
Worse, a eunuch that was castrated as punishment for rape.
I, for one, welcome our new Cylon overlords.
Human noses tend to be several feet off the ground, while dog noses are much closer (and often go to the ground to sniff stuff.) Even if a human puts their head to the ground the nostril points the wrong way to hoover up scents on the ground.
This may be the Internet, but I CAN tell you're a dog.
Bitcoin would like to have a word with you.
I imagine a small proportion of black slaves in America were arrested and incarcerated, as well. That's hardly the only measure of freedom, however.
"So long as you freely allow authoritarians to dictate what you can and can't do, without resisting or protesting" is a pretty big exception to freedom.
7" touch screen? Camera and better speaker than an Echo? Runs Fire OS? Likely $199+? Almost certainly runs ARM. Tell me again how this is different from a Fire tablet.
a ) Emergence of New Tech(tm) to solve the problem!
b) The managing director expects to tire of playing golf in the desert within 25 years, and will reluctantly relinquish the water.
c) After 20 years of delays in the construction of desalination plants due to graft, the corrupt ministers will retire, thus leaving only a new generation of completely honest ministers, and the plants will be finished up within 5 years.
d) Everyone will have left the UAE due to other countries moving away from ICEs, regional strife, etc.
e) Mandatory 25-year water shortage. Sorry, they'd LOVE to fit it into their schedule next century, but darn, it's just too FULL.
f) Aliens. Somehow.
g) The Rapture will happen in 25 years so it'll be moot.