We need a base load of power generation. Something cheap that will generate a continuous amount of power. Ignore (Shoot) all the Green Peace virtue signalers and nuclear would be perfect for this. We also need peak production, something that can be throttled up and down easily. Hydro is best for this but requires actual geography to have provided it. Coal and natural gas also work. Tide, wind and solar don't actually fit in this model. They don't make power when we need it and we still don't have a good way of storing it. Batteries aren't good enough yet and pump and storage maintenance costs are too high (even if your capital is free and the electricity cost goes negative).
Negative price - The UK government has guaranteed the operators they will pay a fixed price for the electricity produced by these windmills. That means that when the wind blows and no one wants the electricity the price of electricity will go negative. People will be paid to consume electricity. In Ontario, Ohio, Pennsylvanian and Michigan we did the same thing. Here the wind blows the most after everyone has gone to bed in January and February. This is also our lowest consumption time.
I've dealt with the bureaucracy in electrical grids in many countries. The stupidity is amazing but the UK is special, they have an extra layer of cronyism and arrogance that no other country has.
You are not Equifax's customer, you are their product. (Just like you are facebook and google's product). You are however your credit card companies customer. If there was pressure put on the credit companies not to share information with an insecure entity like Equifax then Equifax would either put some effort into security or go bankrupt. Equifax has to have a near complete picture of everyone's credit score to remain in business. If even a few creditors stopped sharing information with them they would be in big trouble.
The breaking is regenerative. If you want to stop fast you need motors that can absorb energy. Breaking at 100km/h (62 mph) will give you far more energy than accelerating from zero. So any electric car that can do decent regenerative breaking at speeds above 100km/h is going to be able to do the reverse and accelerate from 0 to 100 in 5~6 seconds. The 5~6 seconds is really the coefficient of friction of the tires with the road limiting the acceleration.
Step 1: If the URL is from one of the new domains just block it. They are all shit. If the URL is in PUNY code (non-ASCII display) and it isn't mostly characters that are not significantly different from the Roman letters block it, otherwise display the name of the language set and mark it with a warning. Sorry rest of the world but having a few thousand character sets that often overlap is a security nightmare.
Step 2: If the URL has multiple sub domains in it, list the top domain first. Make an exception for the UK and.co.uk.
Step 3: Hard part, make companies clean up their confusing query strings. I want to clearly see a ticket number, userId or a short id of what I'm looking at. When doing a search I want to see the query parameters so I can hand manipulate them or save the search. If the user can't edit it then it's not a query string its some websites stupid data passing mechanism and it should trigger a warning.
Step 4: Start banning more CAs for issuing certs to confusing URLs. Most CAs are crap. Do some PEN testing or even social engineering and see how many will issue you a cert for something they shouldn't. (hint - most)
You need to be able to review and understand the commands being sent on a network. Often just a one hour review will reveal that there is no real security. There are 3 levels of lack of security:
1)Static keys, no replay attack prevention, sending the session key with a static key are all things that happen all the time.
2)Authorization: The next level of security fuck-up for many small devices like these is a complete lack of authorization. Any device that is in radio range or has access to the LAN during the joining window can join the network. (think of WiFi or Blue Tooth as an example).
3)Identification: Most devices have no means to prove they really are who they say they are. Thus an attacker who takes one device apart and extracts its keys can impersonate almost any other device. Many networks don't even care what device joins, as long as it has a static piece of information and they have no defense against man-in-the-middle attacks. This is also the case where a single device connecting to a network can see everything. When you log into a website and pull up your information and then change the query string to another user's ID and see their information, that isn't a hack. The site is performing as designed.
I call these lack of security, they aren't bugs or vulnerabilities, the system was simply was never designed to be secure. You aren't hacking a system that didn't have security*.
*Disclaimer: If you live in a certain country where pointing out something has no security embarrasses people with money you are likely to get charged with unauthorized use of a computer, lose all financial resources, be threatened with 10^20 years in prison and have to take a plea deal. Don't ever do security research in that country.
I like your thoroughness in design but I'll accept a little bit of insecurity in my voting machines if I know I can audit them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This means I can check that my vote was cast and counted correctly. Assuming some people check their personal vote then the probability of multiple invalid votes being cast or votes being altered becomes vanishingly small.
I wrote the program to create pass codes for the Webkinz children's toys. I probably should have looked at the codes created more carefully. About 1 in a million codes began 'F' 'U' 'C' 'K'. We then created a list of bad words and ran it against the codes we had already shipped. Not my finest day when I saw the result. Sorry to anyone who was offended.
The cost of the foundaries has been rising exponentially. While circuit density has been doubling every 18 months, foundary cost has been doubling every 36 months. When Moore's law was proposed the engineering was the main limiting factor in increasing density, it has been shifting though to a financing problem. The result has been few and few foundaries on the bleeding edge. I can't imagine things continuing for another 9 years (3 more doublings). Even if there was only one foundary left at that point it probably wouldn't be economical. There just wouldn't be enough of a market. The other problem is R&D as a percentage of revenue.
Basically to stay on top a foundary is now spending 20% of revenue on R&D. Margins aren't going up only volume
This brings up another dilemma about the last 20 years of economic growth. Much of the recent economic growth has been driven by increases in market size. Companies make more and more specialized widgets for lower and lower costs but are only able to do this because the market size has increased. I can sell to all of North America, then Europe, China and now India. The environment can't even support the 3.5 billion people in the world economy today. Even if we do double that number we can only double one more time.
Seriously half the commenters are so wrapped up in virtue signalling that they didn't even bother to try and understand what has been said. Two points were made:
1)The marginal cost to software (and books, and movies and some financial services) is almost zero. Yes, there is some small cost to produce a physical copy and licensing might cost pennies. Patches are not a marginal cost, you create the patch whether you sell one or one million copies. Customer support is customer support it is separate and most software I use, I've never used any support for.
2) And this is the big point. The part of the economy that works on this new model of low or almost zero marginal cost is now significant.
2 is new and it has significant impact on how the economy will function and we need to change regulations and other behaviours because of this.
Really? I didn't see that line. Even more I'm pretty sure the first amendments to the constitution actually were restrictions on what the US government could do to any person. Think about it. If you start saying your limits of what the government can aren't universal then the government can slowly chip away at them and pretty soon you might find the US constitution only applying to some special group like land owning white men. I'm sure no one intended that.
If I'm testing productivity, trustworthiness or date-ability, I don't want to give away my method of measurement otherwise it will be gamed. Sure I could spend a large amount of time and accurately measure something but for something like productivity it might mean giving 3 people the exact same thing to do. The cost is too high, so I will used a proxy that mostly works. Women use confidence as a proxy for dating all the time and some men knowing that and are successful at faking it. If you boss uses lines of code as a proxy for productivity and you know it, then you comment the hell out of the code. Governments use proxies all the time, like wait times for specific procedures, except they tell everyone what the proxy is and it gets gamed.
Coal would have died without Greenpeace and others like them driving up the cost of nuclear. Coal mines were going bankrupt in the late 60s and early 70s but then nuclear costs went up 10x and suddenly coal was viable again. Greenpeace is responsible for a good portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere as well as lead, arsenic and radioactive dust released from coal burning (yes, coal has radio active material in it, usually in the form of daughter particles of radon decay). Plus all the deaths from the mining of coal.
Screw them and their virtue signalling about being good for the environment.
The credit bureaus sell credit scores by zip code. Other companies sell subscription information. In the days of spam snail mail advertising companies did this kind of thing all the time. Want a new credit card or a loan, well unless you lived in the right place you wouldn't know about the best deals.
The cost of electricity in most places people live in the USA will vary between -$0.02 and $7.00 per KWh. Some places even more. The utility really hates it when they have to pay $7/KWh and you should too because the price will be passed on to you eventually. So it would be nice if you shut off your electric water heater or your pool pump or turned up your thermostat when this happens. Most of your meters run a protocol called ZigBee Smart Energy. It's a low power, low bandwidth protocol. It contains commands to ask devices to cut back on power consumption (Demand Response Load Control (DRLC)) and it also has commands to tell devices the price of electricity. DRLC commands should always have a randomization factor so that even if every device received the command at the same time they would all react to it slowly over a period of time. Similarly, if the price jumps, smart devices should randomly adjust their behaviour to reduce their demand sometime before or after the price change.
Disclosure: I'm a contributor to the Smart Energy standard.
This is what a UBI should be eliminating. The program we had in Ontario was stupid unfortunately as moronic as it was it was better than what we have now. Currently once you are on welfare in Ontario you get all kinds of benefits. The only catch is that if you dare to try and get off welfare and even temporarily get a job you lose all of them. Oh, and while you are on welfare you can't save anything or have any substantial assets. So if you get a low paying job, not only could you be worse off, if you then lose the job you could be homeless and starving.
$17000 is a pretty good amount to live on. You can get a room to yourself for $250 in a student ghetto in Toronto. If you like rice and potatoes you can live on $200 a month for food. Another $50 worth of shopping at the Good Will a month and you can survive. I'm not saying it's great but lots of students manage on $6000 a year. My ex and myself when we had our first child survived on $1500 a month and I didn't even feel that poor. (fuck, even counting inflation, I make that in a day now). I don't think it would break the provinces finances if everyone got a flat check of $500 a month and we killed every other social program.
The total mass of the ort cloud is maybe 5 times that of earth. Now that might sound like a lot but it is spread out over such an insane volume that it is completely useless. Even with some sort of fusion drive, I'm not sure you could actually gather it efficiently enough that you would have a net gain in material.
At the correct altitude in the Venusian atmosphere you can have earth like temperature and pressure. You don't need 5m of concrete to protect you from the solar winds and you have all the ingredients to build everything you want there. You just can't stand on the surface today. If your colony is willing to float in huge balloons though then things are much much easier than Mars.
I was terrible at the job. It was a total mismatch in skills and aptitude. I hated every second at the job and couldn't be motivated to do it. I should have quit but I think I just got depressed an unmotivated. Got divorced while at the job. I had a few amazing co-workers and a good boss so I really can't blame anyone but me. I'm working for myself now, a million times happier and no regrets about the divorce.
Not in Canada. You can't legally photograph me for commercial purposes in a public place (there are exceptions for public figures). Also some pictures even in a public place would be considered an invasion of privacy. Examples would be: Using a telephoto lens or taking a picture in wavelengths that make clothing see through or taking a picture under a woman's skirt. Even using a drone with a go-pro in a public place could get you in trouble. I have an expectation that people will see me and look at me in a public place with their eyes. I can expect, as long as they aren't being creepy and invading my space, them to record what they see for their personal use. Beyond that, I expect that I will not be recorded.
In Canada, I have an expectation that the video surveillance will only be viewed if a crime has been committed and that if no crime has been committed it will be deleted in a short period of time. If I'm in an intimate place like a taxi, I have an expectation that only law enforcement will view it in the event of a crime. These malls haven't broken the law but they are close.
My city, Ottawa, experimented with putting up cameras in the parks. The cameras had software in them so that only the park was actually recorded. They masked out any buildings or private property before the data was saved. In the end they determined that the amount of crime prevention didn't justify the surveillance and dropped the project.
He might not be the brightest politician in Canada but he is under adult supervision. The Conservative party limited his tweeting before the election and I'm sure they will take it away soon. He can blow a lot of hot air but he won't actually do much. His powers are limited and he has few allies in his party. The cabinet seems to have been chosen from the most competent elected members of the Conservative party. (disclaimer - for the first time ever I spoiled my ballot in the provincial election. I didn't like any of my options. I thought Wynne was by far the smartest leader but her party became to socialist even for me. I would have voted Conservative if the party had chosen either Christine Elliott or Caroline Mulroney)
Most people have no idea what is in their computer. They also seem to accept that when their computer/phone/tablet dies that they will lose everything they have on it, pictures, paid songs and ebook, purchased apps. It actually isn't worth your time explaining to people that they can upgrade many of these devices or that the music, books and apps could be moved to a new machine owned by them. Half the people on this site are the alpha geeks for their friends. We only help our friends because it pains us when they lose things. We care but we are a minority.
Future shop, even if they paid minimum wage, probably couldn't turn a profit helping your grandmother recover her stuff. It's not the technical part that kills you, its the hours of hand holding. You really can't sell something to someone if they don't even know they want it.
I've actually hired a babysitter for myself just to keep me focused and to not get distracted. $14/hr sucks but it currently is the only way I can do work most days. I've tried quite a few ADHD drugs and they either have no effect or they make me drowsy. By drowsy I mean do not operate any motor vehicle drowsy. My doctor failed to mention that part.
It's different. Someone in control of the area laid the mine. You can mostly figure out who laid the mines and I can't easily surprise you with a mine field and let someone else take the blame. A very small autonomous drone equipped with a nerve agent could easily assassinate any world leader and tracing the attack back with 100% certainty to a state actor would be almost impossible.
Early in my career I had a few QA and grunt jobs. Those who worked with me had similar or worse jobs that usually involved getting data in one format and converting it to another format. These jobs were trivial to automate and yet some poor souls had been doing these things for years. In all but one case the people doing the eliminated jobs were given more meaningful work to do. The one exception was at a company that went bankrupt a month later and this lucky guy was the only one to get severance.
Slashdot Mirror
We need a base load of power generation. Something cheap that will generate a continuous amount of power. Ignore (Shoot) all the Green Peace virtue signalers and nuclear would be perfect for this. We also need peak production, something that can be throttled up and down easily. Hydro is best for this but requires actual geography to have provided it. Coal and natural gas also work. Tide, wind and solar don't actually fit in this model. They don't make power when we need it and we still don't have a good way of storing it. Batteries aren't good enough yet and pump and storage maintenance costs are too high (even if your capital is free and the electricity cost goes negative).
Negative price - The UK government has guaranteed the operators they will pay a fixed price for the electricity produced by these windmills. That means that when the wind blows and no one wants the electricity the price of electricity will go negative. People will be paid to consume electricity. In Ontario, Ohio, Pennsylvanian and Michigan we did the same thing. Here the wind blows the most after everyone has gone to bed in January and February. This is also our lowest consumption time.
I've dealt with the bureaucracy in electrical grids in many countries. The stupidity is amazing but the UK is special, they have an extra layer of cronyism and arrogance that no other country has.
You are not Equifax's customer, you are their product. (Just like you are facebook and google's product). You are however your credit card companies customer. If there was pressure put on the credit companies not to share information with an insecure entity like Equifax then Equifax would either put some effort into security or go bankrupt. Equifax has to have a near complete picture of everyone's credit score to remain in business. If even a few creditors stopped sharing information with them they would be in big trouble.
The breaking is regenerative. If you want to stop fast you need motors that can absorb energy. Breaking at 100km/h (62 mph) will give you far more energy than accelerating from zero. So any electric car that can do decent regenerative breaking at speeds above 100km/h is going to be able to do the reverse and accelerate from 0 to 100 in 5~6 seconds. The 5~6 seconds is really the coefficient of friction of the tires with the road limiting the acceleration.
Step 1: If the URL is from one of the new domains just block it. They are all shit. If the URL is in PUNY code (non-ASCII display) and it isn't mostly characters that are not significantly different from the Roman letters block it, otherwise display the name of the language set and mark it with a warning. Sorry rest of the world but having a few thousand character sets that often overlap is a security nightmare.
.co.uk.
Step 2: If the URL has multiple sub domains in it, list the top domain first. Make an exception for the UK and
Step 3: Hard part, make companies clean up their confusing query strings. I want to clearly see a ticket number, userId or a short id of what I'm looking at. When doing a search I want to see the query parameters so I can hand manipulate them or save the search. If the user can't edit it then it's not a query string its some websites stupid data passing mechanism and it should trigger a warning.
Step 4: Start banning more CAs for issuing certs to confusing URLs. Most CAs are crap. Do some PEN testing or even social engineering and see how many will issue you a cert for something they shouldn't. (hint - most)
You need to be able to review and understand the commands being sent on a network. Often just a one hour review will reveal that there is no real security. There are 3 levels of lack of security:
1)Static keys, no replay attack prevention, sending the session key with a static key are all things that happen all the time.
2)Authorization: The next level of security fuck-up for many small devices like these is a complete lack of authorization. Any device that is in radio range or has access to the LAN during the joining window can join the network. (think of WiFi or Blue Tooth as an example).
3)Identification: Most devices have no means to prove they really are who they say they are. Thus an attacker who takes one device apart and extracts its keys can impersonate almost any other device. Many networks don't even care what device joins, as long as it has a static piece of information and they have no defense against man-in-the-middle attacks. This is also the case where a single device connecting to a network can see everything. When you log into a website and pull up your information and then change the query string to another user's ID and see their information, that isn't a hack. The site is performing as designed.
I call these lack of security, they aren't bugs or vulnerabilities, the system was simply was never designed to be secure. You aren't hacking a system that didn't have security*.
*Disclaimer: If you live in a certain country where pointing out something has no security embarrasses people with money you are likely to get charged with unauthorized use of a computer, lose all financial resources, be threatened with 10^20 years in prison and have to take a plea deal. Don't ever do security research in that country.
I like your thoroughness in design but I'll accept a little bit of insecurity in my voting machines if I know I can audit them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This means I can check that my vote was cast and counted correctly. Assuming some people check their personal vote then the probability of multiple invalid votes being cast or votes being altered becomes vanishingly small.
I wrote the program to create pass codes for the Webkinz children's toys. I probably should have looked at the codes created more carefully. About 1 in a million codes began 'F' 'U' 'C' 'K'. We then created a list of bad words and ran it against the codes we had already shipped. Not my finest day when I saw the result. Sorry to anyone who was offended.
The cost of the foundaries has been rising exponentially. While circuit density has been doubling every 18 months, foundary cost has been doubling every 36 months. When Moore's law was proposed the engineering was the main limiting factor in increasing density, it has been shifting though to a financing problem. The result has been few and few foundaries on the bleeding edge. I can't imagine things continuing for another 9 years (3 more doublings). Even if there was only one foundary left at that point it probably wouldn't be economical. There just wouldn't be enough of a market. The other problem is R&D as a percentage of revenue. Basically to stay on top a foundary is now spending 20% of revenue on R&D. Margins aren't going up only volume
This brings up another dilemma about the last 20 years of economic growth. Much of the recent economic growth has been driven by increases in market size. Companies make more and more specialized widgets for lower and lower costs but are only able to do this because the market size has increased. I can sell to all of North America, then Europe, China and now India. The environment can't even support the 3.5 billion people in the world economy today. Even if we do double that number we can only double one more time.
Seriously half the commenters are so wrapped up in virtue signalling that they didn't even bother to try and understand what has been said. Two points were made:
1)The marginal cost to software (and books, and movies and some financial services) is almost zero. Yes, there is some small cost to produce a physical copy and licensing might cost pennies. Patches are not a marginal cost, you create the patch whether you sell one or one million copies. Customer support is customer support it is separate and most software I use, I've never used any support for.
2) And this is the big point. The part of the economy that works on this new model of low or almost zero marginal cost is now significant.
2 is new and it has significant impact on how the economy will function and we need to change regulations and other behaviours because of this.
Really? I didn't see that line. Even more I'm pretty sure the first amendments to the constitution actually were restrictions on what the US government could do to any person. Think about it. If you start saying your limits of what the government can aren't universal then the government can slowly chip away at them and pretty soon you might find the US constitution only applying to some special group like land owning white men. I'm sure no one intended that.
If I'm testing productivity, trustworthiness or date-ability, I don't want to give away my method of measurement otherwise it will be gamed. Sure I could spend a large amount of time and accurately measure something but for something like productivity it might mean giving 3 people the exact same thing to do. The cost is too high, so I will used a proxy that mostly works. Women use confidence as a proxy for dating all the time and some men knowing that and are successful at faking it. If you boss uses lines of code as a proxy for productivity and you know it, then you comment the hell out of the code. Governments use proxies all the time, like wait times for specific procedures, except they tell everyone what the proxy is and it gets gamed.
Coal would have died without Greenpeace and others like them driving up the cost of nuclear. Coal mines were going bankrupt in the late 60s and early 70s but then nuclear costs went up 10x and suddenly coal was viable again. Greenpeace is responsible for a good portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere as well as lead, arsenic and radioactive dust released from coal burning (yes, coal has radio active material in it, usually in the form of daughter particles of radon decay). Plus all the deaths from the mining of coal. Screw them and their virtue signalling about being good for the environment.
The credit bureaus sell credit scores by zip code. Other companies sell subscription information. In the days of spam snail mail advertising companies did this kind of thing all the time. Want a new credit card or a loan, well unless you lived in the right place you wouldn't know about the best deals.
The cost of electricity in most places people live in the USA will vary between -$0.02 and $7.00 per KWh. Some places even more. The utility really hates it when they have to pay $7/KWh and you should too because the price will be passed on to you eventually. So it would be nice if you shut off your electric water heater or your pool pump or turned up your thermostat when this happens. Most of your meters run a protocol called ZigBee Smart Energy. It's a low power, low bandwidth protocol. It contains commands to ask devices to cut back on power consumption (Demand Response Load Control (DRLC)) and it also has commands to tell devices the price of electricity. DRLC commands should always have a randomization factor so that even if every device received the command at the same time they would all react to it slowly over a period of time. Similarly, if the price jumps, smart devices should randomly adjust their behaviour to reduce their demand sometime before or after the price change.
Disclosure: I'm a contributor to the Smart Energy standard.
This is what a UBI should be eliminating. The program we had in Ontario was stupid unfortunately as moronic as it was it was better than what we have now. Currently once you are on welfare in Ontario you get all kinds of benefits. The only catch is that if you dare to try and get off welfare and even temporarily get a job you lose all of them. Oh, and while you are on welfare you can't save anything or have any substantial assets. So if you get a low paying job, not only could you be worse off, if you then lose the job you could be homeless and starving.
$17000 is a pretty good amount to live on. You can get a room to yourself for $250 in a student ghetto in Toronto. If you like rice and potatoes you can live on $200 a month for food. Another $50 worth of shopping at the Good Will a month and you can survive. I'm not saying it's great but lots of students manage on $6000 a year. My ex and myself when we had our first child survived on $1500 a month and I didn't even feel that poor. (fuck, even counting inflation, I make that in a day now). I don't think it would break the provinces finances if everyone got a flat check of $500 a month and we killed every other social program.
The total mass of the ort cloud is maybe 5 times that of earth. Now that might sound like a lot but it is spread out over such an insane volume that it is completely useless. Even with some sort of fusion drive, I'm not sure you could actually gather it efficiently enough that you would have a net gain in material.
At the correct altitude in the Venusian atmosphere you can have earth like temperature and pressure. You don't need 5m of concrete to protect you from the solar winds and you have all the ingredients to build everything you want there. You just can't stand on the surface today. If your colony is willing to float in huge balloons though then things are much much easier than Mars.
I was terrible at the job. It was a total mismatch in skills and aptitude. I hated every second at the job and couldn't be motivated to do it. I should have quit but I think I just got depressed an unmotivated. Got divorced while at the job. I had a few amazing co-workers and a good boss so I really can't blame anyone but me. I'm working for myself now, a million times happier and no regrets about the divorce.
Not in Canada. You can't legally photograph me for commercial purposes in a public place (there are exceptions for public figures). Also some pictures even in a public place would be considered an invasion of privacy. Examples would be: Using a telephoto lens or taking a picture in wavelengths that make clothing see through or taking a picture under a woman's skirt. Even using a drone with a go-pro in a public place could get you in trouble. I have an expectation that people will see me and look at me in a public place with their eyes. I can expect, as long as they aren't being creepy and invading my space, them to record what they see for their personal use. Beyond that, I expect that I will not be recorded.
In Canada, I have an expectation that the video surveillance will only be viewed if a crime has been committed and that if no crime has been committed it will be deleted in a short period of time. If I'm in an intimate place like a taxi, I have an expectation that only law enforcement will view it in the event of a crime. These malls haven't broken the law but they are close.
My city, Ottawa, experimented with putting up cameras in the parks. The cameras had software in them so that only the park was actually recorded. They masked out any buildings or private property before the data was saved. In the end they determined that the amount of crime prevention didn't justify the surveillance and dropped the project.
He might not be the brightest politician in Canada but he is under adult supervision. The Conservative party limited his tweeting before the election and I'm sure they will take it away soon. He can blow a lot of hot air but he won't actually do much. His powers are limited and he has few allies in his party. The cabinet seems to have been chosen from the most competent elected members of the Conservative party. (disclaimer - for the first time ever I spoiled my ballot in the provincial election. I didn't like any of my options. I thought Wynne was by far the smartest leader but her party became to socialist even for me. I would have voted Conservative if the party had chosen either Christine Elliott or Caroline Mulroney)
Most people have no idea what is in their computer. They also seem to accept that when their computer/phone/tablet dies that they will lose everything they have on it, pictures, paid songs and ebook, purchased apps. It actually isn't worth your time explaining to people that they can upgrade many of these devices or that the music, books and apps could be moved to a new machine owned by them. Half the people on this site are the alpha geeks for their friends. We only help our friends because it pains us when they lose things. We care but we are a minority. Future shop, even if they paid minimum wage, probably couldn't turn a profit helping your grandmother recover her stuff. It's not the technical part that kills you, its the hours of hand holding. You really can't sell something to someone if they don't even know they want it.
I've actually hired a babysitter for myself just to keep me focused and to not get distracted. $14/hr sucks but it currently is the only way I can do work most days. I've tried quite a few ADHD drugs and they either have no effect or they make me drowsy. By drowsy I mean do not operate any motor vehicle drowsy. My doctor failed to mention that part.
It's different. Someone in control of the area laid the mine. You can mostly figure out who laid the mines and I can't easily surprise you with a mine field and let someone else take the blame. A very small autonomous drone equipped with a nerve agent could easily assassinate any world leader and tracing the attack back with 100% certainty to a state actor would be almost impossible.
Early in my career I had a few QA and grunt jobs. Those who worked with me had similar or worse jobs that usually involved getting data in one format and converting it to another format. These jobs were trivial to automate and yet some poor souls had been doing these things for years. In all but one case the people doing the eliminated jobs were given more meaningful work to do. The one exception was at a company that went bankrupt a month later and this lucky guy was the only one to get severance.