I'm quite curious about driverless cars and how much work has been done between them and bicycles, both in terms of detection and logic. Bikes come from odd directions, pass on the wrong side (both particularly at intersections) and present a very small, erratic 'signal' to detect visually or radar cross-section.
Hey, I agree that the certification in SOME cases is bullshit, but (as in your welder example) I'd be willing to pay for the expertise confirmed by the certification.
Of course, in this case, the economically-intelligent action for the cabbies is to say "F the City" and all migrate to Uber. At least, until the population of uber-vs-cabs reflects the population's actual economic demand for the expertise they offer.
Essentially, (as you imply) it's just illustrating the farce that is government 'picking winners' and defending them with licensure when in fact the market isn't really willing to pay for the expertise.
Now..expect the whole economic landscape on this to shift after the first serial-killer-using-uber driver is identified. Then we might see a... re-evaluation on the value of certification. Of course, humans suck at assessing risk, in particular the young people that are typically the victims of serial murderers.
I agree with you, in principle. However, the value that they bring has to be WORTH IT. That's how capitalism works: if someone is willing to do the job cheaper than you and they do it "well enough", they will get business. My cab driver can also do surgery and quote Tennyson? Great - I'm not paying for it. It's not the purchaser's responsibility to offer a 'living' or 'fair' payment for what you're bringing. They are going to buy the cheapest service possible that does what they want.
Bjorn Lomborg tried to say exactly this, and was publicly academically crucified for it.
His point wasn't that 'global warming*,** is bunk', it was that 'global warming is pretty unclear as a science now, and in the meanwhile there are a BUNCH of other more pressing, clear environmental needs that we CAN be addressing". But then, apostasy is worse then heresy, eh?
Sorry, but if I 'rent' a 15' x 10' (or whatever) space to park my car for a 24 hour span, but I move my car away and some other car sits in that space for the duration - how the hell is the space-owner entitled to demand more $? That's as stupid as a sandwich-shop owner insisting that if I gave a chunk of my sandwich to a homeless dude, I should pay him for another sandwich (which, frankly, a restaurant in Luxembourg tried to assert to me was reasonable - I'd paid for a pizza, but because my g/f ate a piece, they wanted to charge me for another pizza). Which is equally as stupid as the idea that I can't resell a book, or dvd, or mp3 if I bought it. But I guess the lobbyists have arranged that privilege right? The question is, could they re-sell the congressmen they paid for?
Technical applications are essentially pulling the 'slack' out of the system, and allowing people to take advantage of things that they PAID FOR, but which in practical terms they couldn't really use and so ended up as profit in the seller's pocket.
...if they aggressively pursued all Bill of Rights violations by the government, not just those of the Constitutional Rights that they particularly happen to agree with.
Economists can generate numbers however they want, but the true 'value' of something is what someone would actually pay for it.
For example, if we 'value' someone's free time playing (ie the entertainment value) at $20/hour, then the purported 10,000 players in EVE are 'generating' at least $200,000 'value' per hour. To suggest that after 10 years of crafting, they've only created 90 'hours' worth of virtual durable goods (there's an oxymoron) would suggest that the EVE economy is staggeringly unproductive.
As a famous economist opined: "Put 10 economists in a room and you'll probably get 12 opinions".
The whole thing will stop smelling like a religion when they stop CONSTANTLY trying to stretch some tissue-paper-thin suppositions into policy prescriptions.
I stopped reading at "...frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean..."
Essentially, the link between global warming and hurricanes is hotly (get it?) debated, the data inconclusive and contradictory. My understanding is that reasonable scientists disagree on this one. To use this as wall paper in some recent 'boilerplate of doom' just proves that they lack any sense of their own incredibility.
Waconia Public High School - where my kids go - issued ipads to all the students starting with a certain grade.
Now, a year or so on, my student WANTED to take notes longhand, as they felt that they learned the material better in that way. The teacher actually PREVENTED this student from doing so, claiming that "all the notes needed were coming to her ipad" and that the school's recommended policy is for students to then take their ipads home, and manually copy the notes in longhand there to improve retention.
I wouldn't use a Symantec product if it was an extinguisher and I was on fire.
Nobody even vaguely familiar with PC support over the last 20 years can possibly fail to be acquainted with what was (is?) the most complicated, agonizing, and laborious process that was removing a Symantec/Norton antivirus "product" from a computer. Seriously, with a newer machine, just re-installing the OS was far quicker, easier, and less likely to leave you with later issues.
As an AV product, it was not terribly successful in most neutral tests I saw.
If you didn't uninstall it, it was a resource hog, bringing even powerful machines to their proverbial knees when scanning. If you were foolish enough to install the 'suite' of security applications, it would involve literally dozens of services installed obscurely across your system. Removing it was very much like (or worse than) trying to get rid of some of the most tenacious malware I've ever encountered.
Truly, the 'cure' in this case was nearly worse than the disease. They *owned* the PC security market in the early days...why do you think its competitors have been so widely successful?
Have you ever had to depower an electrical device - blu-ray player, computer, laptop, hell, even my Onkyo receiver - to force it to reboot?
If your answer is yes, you should absolutely reject this keyless idea for reasons that should be utterly self-evident.
And, while we're at it, let's remember that the alternatives here aren't the Hobson's choice of "mechanical key that failed" vs "much more reliable electronic system". The fact is that if they were motivated to do so, carmakers could very well design a much more failure-proof mechanical key. They just would have to actually invest in it, instead of driving every mechanical part to the minimum-functional substance to the point where it fails, and then backing off by 0.0001%.
....someone's going to figure out that the problem here is " It takes years of planning and overcoming red tape to launch a project. "
Seriously? Why? If the state simultaneously refuses to constrain growth within their water resources, and cannot GTFO of the way of communities *solving* the water resource limitations themselves, does anyone see there's a contradiction there?
1000% agree. Every time I see updates, it's invariably to increase an app's access in my phone.
I would pay money for an app that can 'firewall' other apps, and prevent them from accessing what I would consider to be irrelevant things. "Flashlight" app wants to access GPS? I don't think so. "Solitare card game" wants to access my systems' phone number? No.
I *do* try to always go into airplane mode when I run Kandy Krush Saga, but then I've gotten to a point where I think it's essentially impossible to win without paying $.. I honestly can't even comprehend someone paying ANYTHING for a 'few more turns' at a timewaster, meaningless game. Seriously.
...let's just agree that IF this is in fact a globally-critical issue, then we need to keep the patronizing post-colonial political correctness out of the room and just work to ACTUALLY fix the problem, eh?
To wit: we're not talking about yesterday, we're talking about today, and tomorrow.
That means we need to constrain the "Western Powers" significantly, but let's be honest - they're ALREADY doing the most to mitigate CO2 emissions (hell, even the US's emissions have gone down*). The 'problem children' now are India and China, and in the future the 3rd world developing states.
*if this statement bothers you, or if your first thought is to contradict it because "oh they just switched to Nat'l Gas" or to air some sort of fracking complaint, then you're already missing the entire point of the comment. FYI. If the goal is to critically reduce CO2 emissions, let's see the ecologists leading the charge for funding for fusion research and the development of pebble-bed reactors. If they feel that we need to "just stop using so much power" - they can start by shutting off their computers and quitting posting on the internet. Not reasonable or realistic? Then neither is the idea that we're going to suddenly use less power.
As long as the ecomarxists on the Left feel that this is the 'stick' with which they can enact their grievance-based, punitive anti-US, anti-North, anti-Western agenda, then they are going to (continue to) have problems being taken seriously.
If, OTOH, we actually consider this a serious threat, then we need to TREAT it like a serious threat and stop applying it with the intent of 'score settling' for whatever political hobby horse you're riding.
If your house is burning down, that's not the point at which Jimmy gets to complain that Janie got the better bedroom. Put out the fire. Period.
...insofar as their product is complete vaporware to date, Romero can clearly claim prior art (pretty much anything he's started where someone else wasnt clearly carrying him).
"Innocent is innocent is innocent. " Simply asserting it doesn't make it true.
Look, I'm being utilitarian here. Not every person is precious, simply because they're alive. Shit, we've got BILLIONS of people on this planet, it's inconceivable that they're all worth having around. Now, of course you're "shocked" at such an assertion - that life isn't inherently precious. It simply isn't; it's ubiquitous. People breed CONSTANTLY.
I'm willing to concede without argument that MOST people are in fact valuable in some possible way. But after hundreds, if not thousands of hours of legal argument in front of a Judge, Jury, and at least 2 lawyers, it's abundantly clear that the 'death process' is neither reflex nor arbitrary. To assert so is simply nonsensical. After such an investment, if it's abundantly clear that the person is a net deficit on the human balance sheet...well, just get rid of 'em. There's going to be more piling up faster than we can get rid of them, I'm almost certain.
I'm sorry if that offends your sensibilities, but as much as eating every gram of sugar and fat is an evolutionary legacy of our 'humans desperately on the edge of survival' phase, so too (I believe) is our unexamined premise that every human life is incredibly sacred. It was obviously important when we were barely able to survive on the leavings of alpha predators, and our brains offered this clawless, armorless, weak, naked primate only the faintest of evolutionary advantage in a collective sense - but not nearly enough to make much of an individual difference against better-equipped, better-evolved predators above us. That's almost demonstrably NOT true now.
"I still dislike the school-college-job career path we've created" Well sure, but it does provide a handy way for clever congressmen to hand giant piles of money to teachers and their unions on an ongoing business, while SIMULTANEOUSLY looking great to voters because they're handing out "college money" to voters like candy.
It has NOTHING to do with education, or improving the workforce, or (laughably) the students.
Happy to. First, we could start with the absurdities in every Farm Bill, ever - in which $billion$ to giant agro industries are sustained for no good reason, barriers to imports of sugar, etc are lifted/strengthened to defend US agro firms, etc.
Second, we could look at the US Schools Lunch Programs which are largely mandated by the USDA...hence the furious lobbying going on there. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_...
Heck, even the "Food Pyramid" we all learned about in school was the product of lobbyists and special interests, not nutritionists: http://healthwyze.org/index.ph... (I have no idea if this site is a tinfoil hat one, etc - but the comments there from nutritionists about the gov't handling of the issue are instructive.)
Finally, the failure of our government to understand that one cannot spend more than one makes on an extended basis, means that "marginal" entities are defunded, despite widespread agreement that it's one of the core functions of the Federal government: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
Who says Americans will be using the majority of the oil? I'm not sure you have been paying attention, the US is net EXPORTER of oil now. Sure, we still import some, but we are largely now oil independent.
By that same logic, if the factory making iphones burns down, hipsters need to rebuild it?
But you're saying the EXACT opposite. You're saying "we all live on the same planet, it's all our responsibility...unless there's an accident. In THAT case, it's America's responsibility."
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...who consistently vote and donate to the Democrats, despite the Left's clear opposition to everything Israel.
Then again, Jews are famous for being self-loathing, so perhaps that's all just being consistent on another level.
I'm quite curious about driverless cars and how much work has been done between them and bicycles, both in terms of detection and logic. Bikes come from odd directions, pass on the wrong side (both particularly at intersections) and present a very small, erratic 'signal' to detect visually or radar cross-section.
Hey, I agree that the certification in SOME cases is bullshit, but (as in your welder example) I'd be willing to pay for the expertise confirmed by the certification.
Of course, in this case, the economically-intelligent action for the cabbies is to say "F the City" and all migrate to Uber. At least, until the population of uber-vs-cabs reflects the population's actual economic demand for the expertise they offer.
Essentially, (as you imply) it's just illustrating the farce that is government 'picking winners' and defending them with licensure when in fact the market isn't really willing to pay for the expertise.
Now..expect the whole economic landscape on this to shift after the first serial-killer-using-uber driver is identified. Then we might see a ... re-evaluation on the value of certification. Of course, humans suck at assessing risk, in particular the young people that are typically the victims of serial murderers.
I agree with you, in principle.
However, the value that they bring has to be WORTH IT. That's how capitalism works: if someone is willing to do the job cheaper than you and they do it "well enough", they will get business. My cab driver can also do surgery and quote Tennyson? Great - I'm not paying for it.
It's not the purchaser's responsibility to offer a 'living' or 'fair' payment for what you're bringing. They are going to buy the cheapest service possible that does what they want.
Bjorn Lomborg tried to say exactly this, and was publicly academically crucified for it.
His point wasn't that 'global warming*,** is bunk', it was that 'global warming is pretty unclear as a science now, and in the meanwhile there are a BUNCH of other more pressing, clear environmental needs that we CAN be addressing". But then, apostasy is worse then heresy, eh?
*climate change
** climate disruption
Sorry, but if I 'rent' a 15' x 10' (or whatever) space to park my car for a 24 hour span, but I move my car away and some other car sits in that space for the duration - how the hell is the space-owner entitled to demand more $?
That's as stupid as a sandwich-shop owner insisting that if I gave a chunk of my sandwich to a homeless dude, I should pay him for another sandwich (which, frankly, a restaurant in Luxembourg tried to assert to me was reasonable - I'd paid for a pizza, but because my g/f ate a piece, they wanted to charge me for another pizza).
Which is equally as stupid as the idea that I can't resell a book, or dvd, or mp3 if I bought it. But I guess the lobbyists have arranged that privilege right? The question is, could they re-sell the congressmen they paid for?
Technical applications are essentially pulling the 'slack' out of the system, and allowing people to take advantage of things that they PAID FOR, but which in practical terms they couldn't really use and so ended up as profit in the seller's pocket.
...if they aggressively pursued all Bill of Rights violations by the government, not just those of the Constitutional Rights that they particularly happen to agree with.
Probably a better one is "Simulation from the Big Bang results in output that looks like our universe at the galactic scale"
To suggest that this equals "Astrophysicists Build Realistic Virtual Universe" more than a touch hyperbolic.
Economists can generate numbers however they want, but the true 'value' of something is what someone would actually pay for it.
For example, if we 'value' someone's free time playing (ie the entertainment value) at $20/hour, then the purported 10,000 players in EVE are 'generating' at least $200,000 'value' per hour. To suggest that after 10 years of crafting, they've only created 90 'hours' worth of virtual durable goods (there's an oxymoron) would suggest that the EVE economy is staggeringly unproductive.
As a famous economist opined: "Put 10 economists in a room and you'll probably get 12 opinions".
The whole thing will stop smelling like a religion when they stop CONSTANTLY trying to stretch some tissue-paper-thin suppositions into policy prescriptions.
I stopped reading at "...frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean..."
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
Essentially, the link between global warming and hurricanes is hotly (get it?) debated, the data inconclusive and contradictory. My understanding is that reasonable scientists disagree on this one. To use this as wall paper in some recent 'boilerplate of doom' just proves that they lack any sense of their own incredibility.
Waconia Public High School - where my kids go - issued ipads to all the students starting with a certain grade.
Now, a year or so on, my student WANTED to take notes longhand, as they felt that they learned the material better in that way. The teacher actually PREVENTED this student from doing so, claiming that "all the notes needed were coming to her ipad" and that the school's recommended policy is for students to then take their ipads home, and manually copy the notes in longhand there to improve retention.
Seriously.
I wouldn't use a Symantec product if it was an extinguisher and I was on fire.
Nobody even vaguely familiar with PC support over the last 20 years can possibly fail to be acquainted with what was (is?) the most complicated, agonizing, and laborious process that was removing a Symantec/Norton antivirus "product" from a computer.
Seriously, with a newer machine, just re-installing the OS was far quicker, easier, and less likely to leave you with later issues.
As an AV product, it was not terribly successful in most neutral tests I saw.
If you didn't uninstall it, it was a resource hog, bringing even powerful machines to their proverbial knees when scanning. If you were foolish enough to install the 'suite' of security applications, it would involve literally dozens of services installed obscurely across your system. Removing it was very much like (or worse than) trying to get rid of some of the most tenacious malware I've ever encountered.
Truly, the 'cure' in this case was nearly worse than the disease. They *owned* the PC security market in the early days...why do you think its competitors have been so widely successful?
Have you ever had to depower an electrical device - blu-ray player, computer, laptop, hell, even my Onkyo receiver - to force it to reboot?
If your answer is yes, you should absolutely reject this keyless idea for reasons that should be utterly self-evident.
And, while we're at it, let's remember that the alternatives here aren't the Hobson's choice of "mechanical key that failed" vs "much more reliable electronic system".
The fact is that if they were motivated to do so, carmakers could very well design a much more failure-proof mechanical key. They just would have to actually invest in it, instead of driving every mechanical part to the minimum-functional substance to the point where it fails, and then backing off by 0.0001%.
....someone's going to figure out that the problem here is " It takes years of planning and overcoming red tape to launch a project. "
Seriously?
Why?
If the state simultaneously refuses to constrain growth within their water resources, and cannot GTFO of the way of communities *solving* the water resource limitations themselves, does anyone see there's a contradiction there?
1000% agree.
Every time I see updates, it's invariably to increase an app's access in my phone.
I would pay money for an app that can 'firewall' other apps, and prevent them from accessing what I would consider to be irrelevant things.
"Flashlight" app wants to access GPS? I don't think so.
"Solitare card game" wants to access my systems' phone number? No.
I *do* try to always go into airplane mode when I run Kandy Krush Saga, but then I've gotten to a point where I think it's essentially impossible to win without paying $.. I honestly can't even comprehend someone paying ANYTHING for a 'few more turns' at a timewaster, meaningless game. Seriously.
...let's just agree that IF this is in fact a globally-critical issue, then we need to keep the patronizing post-colonial political correctness out of the room and just work to ACTUALLY fix the problem, eh?
To wit: we're not talking about yesterday, we're talking about today, and tomorrow.
That means we need to constrain the "Western Powers" significantly, but let's be honest - they're ALREADY doing the most to mitigate CO2 emissions (hell, even the US's emissions have gone down*). The 'problem children' now are India and China, and in the future the 3rd world developing states.
*if this statement bothers you, or if your first thought is to contradict it because "oh they just switched to Nat'l Gas" or to air some sort of fracking complaint, then you're already missing the entire point of the comment. FYI. If the goal is to critically reduce CO2 emissions, let's see the ecologists leading the charge for funding for fusion research and the development of pebble-bed reactors. If they feel that we need to "just stop using so much power" - they can start by shutting off their computers and quitting posting on the internet. Not reasonable or realistic? Then neither is the idea that we're going to suddenly use less power.
As long as the ecomarxists on the Left feel that this is the 'stick' with which they can enact their grievance-based, punitive anti-US, anti-North, anti-Western agenda, then they are going to (continue to) have problems being taken seriously.
If, OTOH, we actually consider this a serious threat, then we need to TREAT it like a serious threat and stop applying it with the intent of 'score settling' for whatever political hobby horse you're riding.
If your house is burning down, that's not the point at which Jimmy gets to complain that Janie got the better bedroom. Put out the fire. Period.
...insofar as their product is complete vaporware to date, Romero can clearly claim prior art (pretty much anything he's started where someone else wasnt clearly carrying him).
Just sayin'.
"Bennett doesn't understand the concept of up front cost vs financing and why one may be more attractive than the other"
Or, you could just read 1200 words of stupid instead.
"Innocent is innocent is innocent. "
Simply asserting it doesn't make it true.
Look, I'm being utilitarian here.
Not every person is precious, simply because they're alive. Shit, we've got BILLIONS of people on this planet, it's inconceivable that they're all worth having around.
Now, of course you're "shocked" at such an assertion - that life isn't inherently precious. It simply isn't; it's ubiquitous. People breed CONSTANTLY.
I'm willing to concede without argument that MOST people are in fact valuable in some possible way.
But after hundreds, if not thousands of hours of legal argument in front of a Judge, Jury, and at least 2 lawyers, it's abundantly clear that the 'death process' is neither reflex nor arbitrary. To assert so is simply nonsensical.
After such an investment, if it's abundantly clear that the person is a net deficit on the human balance sheet...well, just get rid of 'em. There's going to be more piling up faster than we can get rid of them, I'm almost certain.
I'm sorry if that offends your sensibilities, but as much as eating every gram of sugar and fat is an evolutionary legacy of our 'humans desperately on the edge of survival' phase, so too (I believe) is our unexamined premise that every human life is incredibly sacred. It was obviously important when we were barely able to survive on the leavings of alpha predators, and our brains offered this clawless, armorless, weak, naked primate only the faintest of evolutionary advantage in a collective sense - but not nearly enough to make much of an individual difference against better-equipped, better-evolved predators above us. That's almost demonstrably NOT true now.
That's the part where I'd rely on Crows.
I mean, talk about significantly greener solution, as well!
"My GPA was damn near 16, while regular kids couldn't get above a 4.0"
And people wonder why nobody takes the grade-point metric seriously.
"I still dislike the school-college-job career path we've created"
Well sure, but it does provide a handy way for clever congressmen to hand giant piles of money to teachers and their unions on an ongoing business, while SIMULTANEOUSLY looking great to voters because they're handing out "college money" to voters like candy.
It has NOTHING to do with education, or improving the workforce, or (laughably) the students.
Happy to.
First, we could start with the absurdities in every Farm Bill, ever - in which $billion$ to giant agro industries are sustained for no good reason, barriers to imports of sugar, etc are lifted/strengthened to defend US agro firms, etc.
Second, we could look at the US Schools Lunch Programs which are largely mandated by the USDA...hence the furious lobbying going on there. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_...
Heck, even the "Food Pyramid" we all learned about in school was the product of lobbyists and special interests, not nutritionists:
http://healthwyze.org/index.ph...
(I have no idea if this site is a tinfoil hat one, etc - but the comments there from nutritionists about the gov't handling of the issue are instructive.)
Finally, the failure of our government to understand that one cannot spend more than one makes on an extended basis, means that "marginal" entities are defunded, despite widespread agreement that it's one of the core functions of the Federal government: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
Who says Americans will be using the majority of the oil?
I'm not sure you have been paying attention, the US is net EXPORTER of oil now. Sure, we still import some, but we are largely now oil independent.
By that same logic, if the factory making iphones burns down, hipsters need to rebuild it?
But you're saying the EXACT opposite.
You're saying "we all live on the same planet, it's all our responsibility...unless there's an accident. In THAT case, it's America's responsibility."
Which is hypocrisy, I believe.