You don't believe the garbage about them always recording and sending everything to Google do you?
One should believe that no more than one should believe Google would scan your Gmail for information.
Nonsense. There are many reasons to believe Google will scan your e-mail but not record everything around you. To begin with, Google tells you they're doing the former and not the latter. For another, the former is technically feasible, while the latter is not.
Google Glass will enable them to get such incredible data that will just mint money for them
How? You don't believe the garbage about them always recording and sending everything to Google do you?
AND it's a way to put advertising in front of people's eyeballs when they are away from their computers or other devices.
Google is not doing advertising on Glass, nor even allowing other developers to display ads on Glass (though I'm sure people will find a way to work around that).
At today's minimum wage, astronauts, brain surgeons, and the President of the United States should be making about $60K a year, and it should only go down from there.
Heh. Make that the law and you'll see all highly skilled labor leaving the country. There's a LOT more than 4X difference between what a neurosurgeon and a fry cook contribute to society.
Because the tech sector hasn't crashed the world economy...yet?
In addition to that, I think there's a perception that bankers make their money by exploiting the people, by charging them more for mortgages, paying them less in interest, etc. Basically, by sucking money out of these common transactions that everyone has to make. The money paid to bankers could, the argument goes, have been left in the pockets of the average person.
In contrast, doing business with tech companies is more voluntary. No one has to buy an iPhone or an iPad, while buying a house or condo is more mandatory (even renters get hit, since their landlords have mortgages and pass the costs along). Using Google is perhaps harder to avoid, but the average person's perspective is that they don't pay Google anything, so the money paid to Eric Schmidt doesn't come out of their pocket. In fact, the advertisers who pay Google get their income from the people, so the average person actually does contribute to Schmidt's income, very indirectly (though there's a good argument that the advertisers would have needed to advertise regardless and since Google has made advertising more efficient the net effect of Google's work has been to reduce the amount consumers pay).
Anyway, without getting into the degree to which these perceptions are accurate (not very), banks are seen as parasites, while tech companies are seen as adding value, and that has a strong impact on whether people feel the companies have the right to pay their people exorbitant amounts of money.
Interesting idea. If you took it a little further, you could choose a large enough voter pool that the decision would be an accurate reflection of the electorate's will, with very high probability. The pool would still be small enough that we could arrange to pay them so they could really put in the time needed to evaluate the candidates and make a careful choice.
However, it would still leave the vast majority of people feeling like they had no say, and the feeling of disenfranchisement would, I think, do more damage than any improvement in the selection of leaders. As it is, we all feel like we have a tiny say, even if we recognize that it's almost indistinguishable from zero.
// personal opinion of mine, not from my employer.
The thief will steal your phone and you. Didn't you read the relevant xkcd strip?
If the thief is going to steal me, my phone and my accounts are the least of my worries.
The phone makes access to your account a lot faster and simpler. I don't use that for my bank for that specific reason.
I don't know what your bank does, but with most 2FA systems that's not the case. The thief needs your phone and also your password, so 2FA actually makes access to your account a little bit more tedious over a password alone... but nearly impossible for someone who doesn't have both.
As an aside, if my bank already provides that, how come Google bought a product which didn't launch yet? Probably for the patents, but even so...
Google already offers 2FA for its accounts, too. They bought this company presumably because the company's new approach is better in some way than what Google and many others are already doing.
The DMCA's counter-notice provisions clearly preserve free speech and journalism. All Myles has to do is file a counter notice and YouTube will put his video back up, available for all to see. Then he and the copyright owner can go to court and fight about it, and if the court determines that this really is a freedom of speech / journalism question, then the Fair Use provisions of copyright law will allow it to stay up. For that matter, if the Fair Use provisions didn't exist in the law, the courts would impose them. Indeed, the Fair Use provisions codified in Federal law were originally created by Judge Joseph Story's ruling in Folsom v Marsh, an 1841 case about infringing copies of 533 pages of George Washington's biography.
There are lots of things wrong with copyright law -- duration and scope, mostly -- but with respect to all of the issues here Congress (with help from the courts) has done a very good job of balancing First Amendment issues against Copyright Clause issues. The only rational way to disagree with this is to assert that the First Amendment overrides and invalidates the Copyright Clause, and I challenge you to find a single shred of evidence that that was the intent of the authors and ratifiers of the Bill of Rights.
Not at all. Up to the threshold of dangerous climate change, there is no blame. But, now, China is pushing us past that threshold. It is countries with growing emissions that must be forced to pay reparations for climate change induced damage.
And at the same time we can stunt their economic growth and the US and Europe can maintain their dominant economic positions! Win win! Well, except for the fact that the developed world likes the cheap goods from the developing world, and those would get more expensive as well.
It has the same problems that Google's current two factor has, namely that it is game over if someone steals your phone.
Not really, Google Authenticator allows you to switch to another phone or disable it so that codes from the old phone don't work. I assume the same would apply to SlickLogin.
In addition, if your phone is encrypted (and therefore password-protected), the thief is going to find it nearly impossible to get to the code even before you disable it.
Making it light enough to be easily lifted in and out of the vehicle would be problematic. Even just lifting it up to put it in the tow hitch could be difficult, though it would be reasonable to provide some kind of wheeled jack stand. Personally, I'd rather just have a small trailer.
it's invested in low-risk, high to moderate-liquidity investments.
So it's just like a bank account, except they get MORE money than what they put in?
I see. You don't know what an investment is. Reference back to the post you responded to and read what I wrote about how investments feed back into taxable businesses.
Stock dividends are capital gains, which are taxed
Capital gains taxes go down every year, and are now lower than the income tax rate
Umm, no, capital gains taxes do not go down every year. They've gone up and down over time. The most recent change was an increase. In any case, capital gains taxes can be changed at will by a simple act of Congress.
Even if it's shipped offshore, it can be taxed if there is political will to do so.
There doesn't seem to be "the will to do so" in Ireland, Bermuda, or the Cayman Islands, which is where most of these offshore account are.
Irrelevant. The money has to get to the offshore accounts from the countries where it's generated, and it has to come back in order to be used. The will that matters is in the countries where it's generated or spent.
You should seriously consider reading a book on basic economics. I highly recommend this one.
Only a little time ago, there was lots of "OMG Android is becoming fragmented" stories. Now the stories are essentially the opposite: that device makers are closely tied into what Google does.
Is there someone behind this? Or am I seeing consipiracies where there are none?
It really has changed, and the first thing caused the second.
Android fragmentation was becoming a real problem, so Google decided they had to do something about it. Since AOSP is truly open source, Google can't use it to control what device manufacturers do. Google's solution was to tighten up the licensing requirements on the Google Apps, requiring licensees to agree not to do things that tend to fragment the ecosystem. Similarly, many new APIs have been added to the Google Play services, rather than the core OS, because that way Google can push the new APIs out, rather than having to wait for carriers and device makers to upgrade the core OS.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but I don't work on Android and don't have any knowledge of Google Apps licensing beyond what I read in public articles. My information about the intent behind putting APIs into Google Play services came from a talk at Google I/O last year.)
It's not "going somewhere," unless that somewhere is an off-shore bank account.
The company isn't going to spend more than it absolutely has to on wages and overhead. The surplus money goes into stock dividends, executive bonuses, political contributions, and (anti-)competitive acquisitions.
Companies don't keep large piles of money in bank accounts. They invest it in other companies, where it goes to buy equipment, pay wages, etc. When you hear that, for example, Apple has $100B "in the bank", it's not actually in bank accounts, it's invested in low-risk, high to moderate-liquidity investments. For that matter, even the money that is in the bank doesn't just sit there; it gets invested or loaned out. There is no such thing as a big pile of cash just sitting there.
Stock dividends are capital gains, which are taxed, and the remainder generally goes back into investment accounts where they are reinvested in other companies (equipment, wages...).
Executive bonuses are income, taxed at high marginal rates.
The portion of acquisitions which is done with cash goes to investors in the acquired company, where it becomes income, gets reinvested, etc. and therefore gets taxed. Most of acquisition payouts are done in the form of stock swaps, which don't change the profit situation.
Ultimately you don't even have to tax corporations at all, because the money gets transferred to individuals in some way or another, even if only through a long chain of investments. But whether you tax corporations or only individuals, the point is that the money does not and cannot just disappear.
For that matter, "money" isn't even relevant. Money isn't real. It's just a fiction we use to facilitate the transfer of real goods and services; those are what matter and heavy automation will dramatically increase the quantity of real goods and services available. The only question at hand is whether there will be a mechanism to make those goods and services widely available. Further, even the most evil of corporations have a powerful vested interest in being able to distribute their products to many people... because if no one can buy their products, they can't generate profits.
(To avoid confusion, when I say money isn't real, I'm not speaking of the fiat nature of modern state-backed currencies. Money is equally unreal regardless of whether it's invented or dug out of the ground. The tokens we exchange may have different degrees of reality, whether they're mere numbers in electronic memories or paper ledgers; pieces of paper; or chunks of metal, but the money they represent is pure fiction anyway except to the degree the tokens have intrinsic value for what can be made of them or done with them.)
Trickle-down economics didn't work in the 80s
Total red herring. In fact, if you're not deliberately trying to distract from the question, if the above is a serious attempt at an argument, it makes me wonder if you have any idea at all what we're talking about. We're not talking about trickle-down, we're talking about taxation... and the point is that the money is there to be taxed. Even if it's shipped offshore, it can be taxed if there is political will to do so. Tax attorneys are good at finding loopholes, but that only works if the loopholes exist.
Don't bother blathering about corporations buying legislators to create the loopholes; that only works to a point. At the end of the day, money cannot buy laws. Only votes can buy laws, and the votes are owned by the people, not the corporations. Obviously, to some degree money can buy votes, but there are sharp limits to that, and when people are serious enough about the need for redistribution that there's a serious risk of widespread revolution, the votes for redistribution will be there.
By the way, I am not granting that redistributive taxation is actually necessary. In fact, in the long run I'm certain that it is not. In the short run, it may be. I would hope tha
I don't think you're overlooking an alternative "choice", but I think you are overlooking a critical element of the expected outcome of automation and a fundamental element of economics.
The outcome of automation you're overlooking is the dramatic decline in cost of production. When production costs decline, one of two things must happen, or a mixture of both: profits increase or prices decrease. What will happen in the short term is some of both. In the longer term, competition will drive out the crazy profit margins and goods will just be fantastically cheap, costing little more than the value of the raw materials that went into them. Though there will be a premium market for new products. This is exactly what has happened in the past, and it's going to be even bigger; nearly all of the value in a product will be the IP.
The element of economics you're overlooking is that, since we're assuming that government redistribution -- welfare -- is a given, those productivity increases that don't go to lower prices accrue to someone, and that someone is a target for government to extract the money needed to run the welfare state.
Fundamentally, automation increases the size of the pie to be divided among the people, at the same time it skews the concentration of value, placing a larger share of it in the hands of those with capital and those with technical skills. So as long as there is a working mechanism to reallocate this pie, there's no real problem.
In the long term, I don't think we even need government reallocation. I think that, just as has happened at every stage of industrialization and automation in the past, new kinds of industry will spring up that require labor. Actually, the availability of labor is a big part of what enables the new industries to start. What will those new industries look like? Beats me. I suspect they're going to be heavily service-oriented, primarily serving to feed the need/desire of people to be waited on by other people, but they may also be heavily design-oriented -- all about producing highly-customized, narrowly-tailored product designs. Two things I know: there will be a lot of variety and most of it will be stuff that's as unimaginable to us as what I do would have been to the average person 50 years ago.
In the short term, it's likely that the changes are going to come harder and faster than they have in past economic restructurings, and we probably will need some societal mechanism (government is the leading candidate, though not the only one) to ease the transition. But we'll have greater resources than ever before with which to do it.
Some day I expect it will be a tie, especially when they track which results get clicked to determine which results to show.
They've been tracking which results get clicked and using that to help evaluate result quality since the very beginning. The big indicator isn't what people click, it's what people click last, since presumably that click got them what they needed. Of course, it could also be that they gave up, or ran out of time, or something else so "last click" isn't a perfect indicator of success, but it's useful.
Personally, I doubt that it will ever be a tie. Google has the bigger and better search engine development team, and they continue pushing the boundaries, with Bing always lagging. I think the only thing that could change this is if someone on the Bing team came up with a truly revolutionary advance in ranking, on the order of the level of improvement that PageRank provided over the approaches then in use by Lycos, Altavista, etc. (which, if you remember, were so poor that many people thought that Yahoo!'s giant hand-curated directory approach was always going to be better than searching). But there is so much research going on in that space, by so many smart people, that I don't think there are many such revolutions available... and as often happens in areas of focused research, when the big jumps come they tend to be discovered by many people simultaneously, because the foundations for noticing the next big idea are in place.
My prediction is that Google will continue being somewhat better than Bing, even as both of them continue improving over all. Occasionally the gap may widen or close a bit, but I doubt Bing will ever equal Google.
Of course, since I work for Google, I may be biased. But I think I'm objective, for whatever that's worth (note that I don't work on search).
Google doesn't give Youtube the money to upgrade their infrastructure? Verizon's fault!
If YouTube is slow for you, it's not because it's slow at Google's end. This is why Google is starting to rate carriers by video performance, because they're tired of being blamed for what carriers are doing (or not doing). The rating project is so far only rolled out in Canada: http://business.financialpost....
I'm perplexed by your line of reasoning. Apparently, having the Google account that purchased the app is insufficient credentials to post a rating/comment, yet if that very same account were to create an empty Google Plus account then it's somehow magically legitimized?
If only apps that have purchased the app could rate, that would be even more effective, at least for paid apps.
Slashdot Mirror
So... same as a phone.
You don't believe the garbage about them always recording and sending everything to Google do you?
One should believe that no more than one should believe Google would scan your Gmail for information.
Nonsense. There are many reasons to believe Google will scan your e-mail but not record everything around you. To begin with, Google tells you they're doing the former and not the latter. For another, the former is technically feasible, while the latter is not.
Google Glass will enable them to get such incredible data that will just mint money for them
How? You don't believe the garbage about them always recording and sending everything to Google do you?
AND it's a way to put advertising in front of people's eyeballs when they are away from their computers or other devices.
Google is not doing advertising on Glass, nor even allowing other developers to display ads on Glass (though I'm sure people will find a way to work around that).
At today's minimum wage, astronauts, brain surgeons, and the President of the United States should be making about $60K a year, and it should only go down from there.
Heh. Make that the law and you'll see all highly skilled labor leaving the country. There's a LOT more than 4X difference between what a neurosurgeon and a fry cook contribute to society.
Because the tech sector hasn't crashed the world economy...yet?
In addition to that, I think there's a perception that bankers make their money by exploiting the people, by charging them more for mortgages, paying them less in interest, etc. Basically, by sucking money out of these common transactions that everyone has to make. The money paid to bankers could, the argument goes, have been left in the pockets of the average person.
In contrast, doing business with tech companies is more voluntary. No one has to buy an iPhone or an iPad, while buying a house or condo is more mandatory (even renters get hit, since their landlords have mortgages and pass the costs along). Using Google is perhaps harder to avoid, but the average person's perspective is that they don't pay Google anything, so the money paid to Eric Schmidt doesn't come out of their pocket. In fact, the advertisers who pay Google get their income from the people, so the average person actually does contribute to Schmidt's income, very indirectly (though there's a good argument that the advertisers would have needed to advertise regardless and since Google has made advertising more efficient the net effect of Google's work has been to reduce the amount consumers pay).
Anyway, without getting into the degree to which these perceptions are accurate (not very), banks are seen as parasites, while tech companies are seen as adding value, and that has a strong impact on whether people feel the companies have the right to pay their people exorbitant amounts of money.
Interesting idea. If you took it a little further, you could choose a large enough voter pool that the decision would be an accurate reflection of the electorate's will, with very high probability. The pool would still be small enough that we could arrange to pay them so they could really put in the time needed to evaluate the candidates and make a careful choice.
However, it would still leave the vast majority of people feeling like they had no say, and the feeling of disenfranchisement would, I think, do more damage than any improvement in the selection of leaders. As it is, we all feel like we have a tiny say, even if we recognize that it's almost indistinguishable from zero.
Very impressive. It's not often you get modded +5 insightful for setting up a series of strawmen and knocking them down.
// personal opinion of mine, not from my employer.
The thief will steal your phone and you. Didn't you read the relevant xkcd strip?
If the thief is going to steal me, my phone and my accounts are the least of my worries.
The phone makes access to your account a lot faster and simpler. I don't use that for my bank for that specific reason.
I don't know what your bank does, but with most 2FA systems that's not the case. The thief needs your phone and also your password, so 2FA actually makes access to your account a little bit more tedious over a password alone... but nearly impossible for someone who doesn't have both.
As an aside, if my bank already provides that, how come Google bought a product which didn't launch yet? Probably for the patents, but even so...
Google already offers 2FA for its accounts, too. They bought this company presumably because the company's new approach is better in some way than what Google and many others are already doing.
Bah.
The DMCA's counter-notice provisions clearly preserve free speech and journalism. All Myles has to do is file a counter notice and YouTube will put his video back up, available for all to see. Then he and the copyright owner can go to court and fight about it, and if the court determines that this really is a freedom of speech / journalism question, then the Fair Use provisions of copyright law will allow it to stay up. For that matter, if the Fair Use provisions didn't exist in the law, the courts would impose them. Indeed, the Fair Use provisions codified in Federal law were originally created by Judge Joseph Story's ruling in Folsom v Marsh, an 1841 case about infringing copies of 533 pages of George Washington's biography.
There are lots of things wrong with copyright law -- duration and scope, mostly -- but with respect to all of the issues here Congress (with help from the courts) has done a very good job of balancing First Amendment issues against Copyright Clause issues. The only rational way to disagree with this is to assert that the First Amendment overrides and invalidates the Copyright Clause, and I challenge you to find a single shred of evidence that that was the intent of the authors and ratifiers of the Bill of Rights.
Not at all. Up to the threshold of dangerous climate change, there is no blame. But, now, China is pushing us past that threshold. It is countries with growing emissions that must be forced to pay reparations for climate change induced damage.
And at the same time we can stunt their economic growth and the US and Europe can maintain their dominant economic positions! Win win! Well, except for the fact that the developed world likes the cheap goods from the developing world, and those would get more expensive as well.
It has the same problems that Google's current two factor has, namely that it is game over if someone steals your phone.
Not really, Google Authenticator allows you to switch to another phone or disable it so that codes from the old phone don't work. I assume the same would apply to SlickLogin.
In addition, if your phone is encrypted (and therefore password-protected), the thief is going to find it nearly impossible to get to the code even before you disable it.
Making it light enough to be easily lifted in and out of the vehicle would be problematic. Even just lifting it up to put it in the tow hitch could be difficult, though it would be reasonable to provide some kind of wheeled jack stand. Personally, I'd rather just have a small trailer.
Use this and Google will be able to identify and tie your id with both your computer and your smartphone .
Yeah, well, Two Factor Authentication already used by Google already KNOWS the computer you are using, and the PHONE you are using.
This adds no more information than you've already given them for Two Factor Authentication.
Or, for that matter, by just logging into Google on both your phone and your computer.
Why towable?
So you don't have to haul it around the 99% of the time you don't need it.
Whoosh!
it's invested in low-risk, high to moderate-liquidity investments.
So it's just like a bank account, except they get MORE money than what they put in?
I see. You don't know what an investment is. Reference back to the post you responded to and read what I wrote about how investments feed back into taxable businesses.
Stock dividends are capital gains, which are taxed
Capital gains taxes go down every year, and are now lower than the income tax rate
Umm, no, capital gains taxes do not go down every year. They've gone up and down over time. The most recent change was an increase. In any case, capital gains taxes can be changed at will by a simple act of Congress.
Since you don't seem to be willing to do your own basic research: http://www.data360.org/temp/ds...
Even if it's shipped offshore, it can be taxed if there is political will to do so.
There doesn't seem to be "the will to do so" in Ireland, Bermuda, or the Cayman Islands, which is where most of these offshore account are.
Irrelevant. The money has to get to the offshore accounts from the countries where it's generated, and it has to come back in order to be used. The will that matters is in the countries where it's generated or spent.
You should seriously consider reading a book on basic economics. I highly recommend this one.
Only a little time ago, there was lots of "OMG Android is becoming fragmented" stories. Now the stories are essentially the opposite: that device makers are closely tied into what Google does.
Is there someone behind this? Or am I seeing consipiracies where there are none?
It really has changed, and the first thing caused the second.
Android fragmentation was becoming a real problem, so Google decided they had to do something about it. Since AOSP is truly open source, Google can't use it to control what device manufacturers do. Google's solution was to tighten up the licensing requirements on the Google Apps, requiring licensees to agree not to do things that tend to fragment the ecosystem. Similarly, many new APIs have been added to the Google Play services, rather than the core OS, because that way Google can push the new APIs out, rather than having to wait for carriers and device makers to upgrade the core OS.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but I don't work on Android and don't have any knowledge of Google Apps licensing beyond what I read in public articles. My information about the intent behind putting APIs into Google Play services came from a talk at Google I/O last year.)
It's not "going somewhere," unless that somewhere is an off-shore bank account.
The company isn't going to spend more than it absolutely has to on wages and overhead. The surplus money goes into stock dividends, executive bonuses, political contributions, and (anti-)competitive acquisitions.
Companies don't keep large piles of money in bank accounts. They invest it in other companies, where it goes to buy equipment, pay wages, etc. When you hear that, for example, Apple has $100B "in the bank", it's not actually in bank accounts, it's invested in low-risk, high to moderate-liquidity investments. For that matter, even the money that is in the bank doesn't just sit there; it gets invested or loaned out. There is no such thing as a big pile of cash just sitting there.
Stock dividends are capital gains, which are taxed, and the remainder generally goes back into investment accounts where they are reinvested in other companies (equipment, wages...).
Executive bonuses are income, taxed at high marginal rates.
The portion of acquisitions which is done with cash goes to investors in the acquired company, where it becomes income, gets reinvested, etc. and therefore gets taxed. Most of acquisition payouts are done in the form of stock swaps, which don't change the profit situation.
Ultimately you don't even have to tax corporations at all, because the money gets transferred to individuals in some way or another, even if only through a long chain of investments. But whether you tax corporations or only individuals, the point is that the money does not and cannot just disappear.
For that matter, "money" isn't even relevant. Money isn't real. It's just a fiction we use to facilitate the transfer of real goods and services; those are what matter and heavy automation will dramatically increase the quantity of real goods and services available. The only question at hand is whether there will be a mechanism to make those goods and services widely available. Further, even the most evil of corporations have a powerful vested interest in being able to distribute their products to many people... because if no one can buy their products, they can't generate profits.
(To avoid confusion, when I say money isn't real, I'm not speaking of the fiat nature of modern state-backed currencies. Money is equally unreal regardless of whether it's invented or dug out of the ground. The tokens we exchange may have different degrees of reality, whether they're mere numbers in electronic memories or paper ledgers; pieces of paper; or chunks of metal, but the money they represent is pure fiction anyway except to the degree the tokens have intrinsic value for what can be made of them or done with them.)
Trickle-down economics didn't work in the 80s
Total red herring. In fact, if you're not deliberately trying to distract from the question, if the above is a serious attempt at an argument, it makes me wonder if you have any idea at all what we're talking about. We're not talking about trickle-down, we're talking about taxation... and the point is that the money is there to be taxed. Even if it's shipped offshore, it can be taxed if there is political will to do so. Tax attorneys are good at finding loopholes, but that only works if the loopholes exist.
Don't bother blathering about corporations buying legislators to create the loopholes; that only works to a point. At the end of the day, money cannot buy laws. Only votes can buy laws, and the votes are owned by the people, not the corporations. Obviously, to some degree money can buy votes, but there are sharp limits to that, and when people are serious enough about the need for redistribution that there's a serious risk of widespread revolution, the votes for redistribution will be there.
By the way, I am not granting that redistributive taxation is actually necessary. In fact, in the long run I'm certain that it is not. In the short run, it may be. I would hope tha
None of which changes the fact that the money from the improved productivity is still going somewhere, and is available for redistribution.
I don't think you're overlooking an alternative "choice", but I think you are overlooking a critical element of the expected outcome of automation and a fundamental element of economics.
The outcome of automation you're overlooking is the dramatic decline in cost of production. When production costs decline, one of two things must happen, or a mixture of both: profits increase or prices decrease. What will happen in the short term is some of both. In the longer term, competition will drive out the crazy profit margins and goods will just be fantastically cheap, costing little more than the value of the raw materials that went into them. Though there will be a premium market for new products. This is exactly what has happened in the past, and it's going to be even bigger; nearly all of the value in a product will be the IP.
The element of economics you're overlooking is that, since we're assuming that government redistribution -- welfare -- is a given, those productivity increases that don't go to lower prices accrue to someone, and that someone is a target for government to extract the money needed to run the welfare state.
Fundamentally, automation increases the size of the pie to be divided among the people, at the same time it skews the concentration of value, placing a larger share of it in the hands of those with capital and those with technical skills. So as long as there is a working mechanism to reallocate this pie, there's no real problem.
In the long term, I don't think we even need government reallocation. I think that, just as has happened at every stage of industrialization and automation in the past, new kinds of industry will spring up that require labor. Actually, the availability of labor is a big part of what enables the new industries to start. What will those new industries look like? Beats me. I suspect they're going to be heavily service-oriented, primarily serving to feed the need/desire of people to be waited on by other people, but they may also be heavily design-oriented -- all about producing highly-customized, narrowly-tailored product designs. Two things I know: there will be a lot of variety and most of it will be stuff that's as unimaginable to us as what I do would have been to the average person 50 years ago.
In the short term, it's likely that the changes are going to come harder and faster than they have in past economic restructurings, and we probably will need some societal mechanism (government is the leading candidate, though not the only one) to ease the transition. But we'll have greater resources than ever before with which to do it.
Yep, until my next rates notice says I owe $10 more due to rising government costs.
You have $8M!
Sinkholes are common in that area, but it really doesn't matter if you have a 12' thick concrete slab foundation if the sinkhole drops 100' or more.
I don't see how the depth of the hole matters at all. The width, however, matters a great deal.
Some day I expect it will be a tie, especially when they track which results get clicked to determine which results to show.
They've been tracking which results get clicked and using that to help evaluate result quality since the very beginning. The big indicator isn't what people click, it's what people click last, since presumably that click got them what they needed. Of course, it could also be that they gave up, or ran out of time, or something else so "last click" isn't a perfect indicator of success, but it's useful.
Personally, I doubt that it will ever be a tie. Google has the bigger and better search engine development team, and they continue pushing the boundaries, with Bing always lagging. I think the only thing that could change this is if someone on the Bing team came up with a truly revolutionary advance in ranking, on the order of the level of improvement that PageRank provided over the approaches then in use by Lycos, Altavista, etc. (which, if you remember, were so poor that many people thought that Yahoo!'s giant hand-curated directory approach was always going to be better than searching). But there is so much research going on in that space, by so many smart people, that I don't think there are many such revolutions available... and as often happens in areas of focused research, when the big jumps come they tend to be discovered by many people simultaneously, because the foundations for noticing the next big idea are in place.
My prediction is that Google will continue being somewhat better than Bing, even as both of them continue improving over all. Occasionally the gap may widen or close a bit, but I doubt Bing will ever equal Google.
Of course, since I work for Google, I may be biased. But I think I'm objective, for whatever that's worth (note that I don't work on search).
Google doesn't give Youtube the money to upgrade their infrastructure? Verizon's fault!
If YouTube is slow for you, it's not because it's slow at Google's end. This is why Google is starting to rate carriers by video performance, because they're tired of being blamed for what carriers are doing (or not doing). The rating project is so far only rolled out in Canada: http://business.financialpost....
I'm perplexed by your line of reasoning. Apparently, having the Google account that purchased the app is insufficient credentials to post a rating/comment, yet if that very same account were to create an empty Google Plus account then it's somehow magically legitimized?
If only apps that have purchased the app could rate, that would be even more effective, at least for paid apps.