Lots of things once were not "presently compelling economic options". Among them, computers that could be afforded by small businesses, digital television and offshoring information-handling jobs to foreign countries via high-speed data channels.
Things change. Sometimes they get kickstarted by government subsidies. Sometimes by a private concern with deep pockets and high expectations. Sometimes just by the onward march of technology.
"presently economically compelling" is about the WORST reason for not considering doing something I can think of.
My experience has been that people with strong people and technical skills are very difficult to replace with someone working in another country. It doesn't mean it is impossible, but it is very hard. If you want to find a job that cannot be outsourced, it probably means working with physical things that require hands on manipulation. On the other hand, if you consider why particular jobs are easy to outsource, you may find skills that you can develop in addition to technical skills that would make you very hard to replace with someone on the other side of the world.
If you have strong people skills, you'll be one of the last ones standing, But strong technical skills? One reason what there's so much total crap software is that the people who hire software people could care less about technical skills if they can save money.
Sure, they DEMAND heavy skillsets, but when it comes to hiring decisions...
I'll bet that garbage collection could eventually be done by a self driving truck with an automated garbage can lift.
A lot of cashier jobs are already getting replaced with self check-out systems as well.
I'm thinking that politics is a pretty safe field to get into, since those jobs are geofenced by law. I'll bet that Dentistry is a pretty safe field as well.
1. In our town, except for the self-driving part, it already has been. And at the rate things are going...
2. True. But anti-social as I am, that's one place I don't go. Not only will I not use the self-checkout, I'll avoid stores that even have self-checkouts.
3. Politicians have the ultimate union. Even the anti-union ones.
4. Actually, I'm not so sure. In fact, it's quite possible that a nimble enough robot might have better luck getting things done than people with relatively fat finders do.
Some time many years back, Sony (I think) advertised a TV with "works in a drawer". Basically, the electronics - excepting the actual high-voltage parts - were on phenolic circuit boards maybe something like 4x6 inches (give or take a meter). The idea was that a repairman could slot in a new one as easily as the older sets did with blown tubes.
I'm suspecting that in most actual cases, however, it was the high-voltage stuff that was most likely to fail once everything went solid-state.
In any event, higher-quality electronics are now so inexpensive that it's cheaper to wave-solder everything onto one motherboard and not even bother with motherboard replacements. Because even though the motherboard, fully ready-to-go might only cost $5, it's still cheaper to toss the entire set and replace it than to pay $65/hr or so to have someone do the replacing.
Automating surgery is actually harder. People are made up of squishy things that won't stay still or even have the decency to be the right size, shape, and location as in the textbooks.
Automating a datacenter is trivial. 19-inch standard racks made to hold boxes in multiples of "U" height. All you need is standard power and data bus points to avoid having to do custom wiring. Robots can easily slot in units or racks. Just back up an automated truck to the loading dock 2 or 3 times a week to deliver automatically-built new units and haul off the dead/obsolete ones to be disposed of.
It even scales to things like Wal-Mart. Just send the automated fleet in with pallets of merchandise and have robots tug them to the sales banks. All you'd need for employees is the obligatory 6 levels of security guards before and after the self-service checkout. Since Wal-Mart is one of those stores that assumes that the majority of their customers are thieves anyway.
I went to burger joints in the 70's where people shoved raw patties in one side of a machine and they came cooked out the other. These days we could easily even automate the process of pulling them from pallets and wrapping buns around them. Don't be surprised if in the not-too-distant future that the only employee in most burger joints is the manager. And even that only to pull the alarm if the machine goes down.
Certainly, given what we've got, if we even bother with humans taking orders, they'll probably be working out of a call center in Pune or Kolkata.
Automated construction has been an ongoing thing for decades. A lot of houses are extensively pre-fab even without robots to handle the final assembly and fill-in work.
If you are able to be replaced by someone who barely knows the language, doesn't know the country, has to live out of a suitcase, well, mate, it is your fault, not theirs.
Well, I see one little snowflake hasn't hit the griddle.
Computer education is pointless. Why be trained in any profession if that profession is going to end up extinct in the areas that need employed people to patronize the local businesses, pay the taxes, and so forth?
If they were serious about making a sustainable economy, they'd ditch the whole drone-level skill training program and focus on how to start your own business and thus avoid the layoff treadmill. After all, isn't that what we're told? The only job that's safe is the one you make yourself?
That means teaching kids at an early age how to meet prospective clients (this does not come naturally or easily to us introverts), negotiate favorable contracts (ditto), manage the various legal and financial aspects of running a company, manage staff - for those who washed out on the whole run-your-own-company deal, and... if you're fortunate, learn a constructive skill to sell in whatever spare time remains.
That's basically what the local business dynasties do anyway. They're brought up learning how to lead, how to negotiate, how to deal with people, then sent to schools of like-minded people so that they'll have all the right connections.
CO2 emissions are proportional to fuel consumption, so I guess there's no point measuring that figure; the fuel efficiency of vehicles is a known quantity.
But are these vehicule really causing 90% of the pollution? Maybe it's only 35% when you count CO2 who knows?
Some of the listed pollutants are the results of incomplete combustion. It's worthwhile to include CO2, since there's a very good chance that the offending vehicles may therefore be releasing less waste in CO2 form.
1984 revolved around the surveillance of bureaucrats; those who knew the truth. The working class were distracted with government-approved music, television and pornography. The novel doesn't really address the middle class; like communist economies, only government employees had luxuries. But I assume the high-end middle-class will be monitored. As the story itself admits, any revolution must be supported by the middle-class to succeed. So a totalitarian state will search the middle class for dissenters. That's the real purpose of national security.
The novel differs from reality because real-life bureaucrats aren't being surveilled, just the voters: Because you are the problem. Yet the voters consistently forget this vilification and erosion of freedom at election time.
I think I'd have to classify Winston Smith as "middle class". And he certainly didn't have luxuries above and beyond basic things like the chocolate ration.
The Proles were supposed to be lower-class, I think. Strictly manual labour and cannon fodder. There were no corporations mentioned and the implication was that all office (white-collar) work was in some way or form done for the Party by Party members.
The Party being what it was, of course, the only way to actually have white collars was to be a member of the Inner Party. Winston's was probably more like a perpetual dingy grey, owing to being hand-washed in the lavatory sink in harsh Victory Detergent.
Personally I'd like to see the environmental nightmare of the Keurig and Tassimo curl up and die.
I own a keurig and a half dozen reusable pods that I throw in the dishwasher. I actually waste less coffee, coffee filters, etc.. now that I own a keurig and I like that I can make a single cup of coffee in the morning without any waste. I used the 20 pods that came free with my keurig but I haven't bought any since. I don't understand why people continue to buy those overpriced pieces of plastic when the same exact coffee is a fraction of the cost. Are people really that lazy that they can't spend 3 seconds dumping the old grounds in the trash?
I have a 2-cup espresso machine. No pods at all. Permanent stainless-steel filter. The only disposable thing that goes into it is ground coffee and it makes 1 or 2 cups in about 2 minutes. And the used grounds go around the plants and make them VERY happy!
When do we have an expectation of privacy anymore?
When we are not actively broadcasting our location to third parties as an inherent part of the service? Privacy isn't possible when your phone is broadcasting constantly where it is. Any more than privacy on the internet is possible, since everything you do, by the nature of the internet, passes through multiple parties' anonymous hands.
There is privacy, and then there is confidentiality.
No, there is no privacy. But there is a certain expectation that the various parties involved will keep information to themselves and not pass it back and forth freely when it is not necessary to do so.
If the cellphone company chooses to comply with the court order, no warrant is needed.
Which companies voluntarily turn over customer location data to the police? Please name names.
AT&T. Verizon. T-Mobile (sometimes, anyway).
Sprint allegedly isn't quite as accommodating, but you never know in an age where "they" know all and demand that you know nothing. But we do know that AT&T has provided the courtesy of a full-time locked room that's essentially US Government property right in the middle of their own premises.
In my current city there is a company that writes software for mortgage companies. Their back end systems were all written in COBOL.
Located in Northeast Florida, you say? Has an NFL team?
I liked Ada. But when I used it in school, it took a medium-sized IBM mainframe and chewed it down to the same sort of performance I could get doing Fortran on a Z-80.
Ada might have been a bigger hit had it been introduced more recently. I doubt it's much more of a burden than Java, and these days even cell-phones have the power of a medium-sized IBM mainframe from back then.
Speaking of what makes each language different, Ada's claim to fame was that your could define both range and domain on its functions and the type-defining capabilities were so rigorous that the infamous we-used-inches-instead-of-centimeters bugs were all but impossible.
When an app dives into one of the Windows-only assemblies, Mono's word is "broken"..Net and Java are a lot alike. Both are "universal" platforms (originally) sponsored by vendors of operating systems. But.Net is turned inwards whereas Java is turned outwards. Indeed, the only reason.Net exists is because Sun wouldn't let Microsoft weld Windows-only functionality into their version of Java.
There are probably less than half a dozen basic language syntaxes. COBOL/Fortran/Python, Algol/Pascal/Modula/Ada, C/C++/JavaScript/Perl/PHP, LISP/Scheme, RPN/Forth/Smalltalk. and so forth, not even touching other relatives of the forms I've just named.
What makes them different languages isn't the language, and it isn't really even the support llbraries (if any), It's the way of thinking that comes along with the language. Whether it's object-oriented, message-oriented, parallel-optimized, Functional, whatever, each language has its own characteristics.
As the old adage goes (something like) being able to write COBOL in 17 different languages. Yes, you can pick up the syntax in a few days and begin to get a feel in a few weeks, but most people won't think naturally in a language's mindset unless they've spent several months at a minimum at it.
Python excels at quick-and-dirty. Unlike many of the scripting languages, it's applicable to a wide range of environments and usages. It doesn't require the time devoted to rigor that Java does nor the time devoted to avoiding pitfalls that C/C++ does. It's not "write-only" and the syntax isn't littered with cryptic constructs. It doesn't induce writers cramp like COBOL and it handles strings more graciously than FORTRAN. If you have one-off tasks that don't need polishing, what you hacked out in a short period is probably going to make a reasonable amount of sense when you or someone else picks it up again a year or 3 later.
In the Windows world, this is a niche that VB occupies. In the wider world, where VB isn't available, it's Python.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of things once were not "presently compelling economic options". Among them, computers that could be afforded by small businesses, digital television and offshoring information-handling jobs to foreign countries via high-speed data channels.
Things change. Sometimes they get kickstarted by government subsidies. Sometimes by a private concern with deep pockets and high expectations. Sometimes just by the onward march of technology.
"presently economically compelling" is about the WORST reason for not considering doing something I can think of.
My experience has been that people with strong people and technical skills are very difficult to replace with someone working in another country. It doesn't mean it is impossible, but it is very hard. If you want to find a job that cannot be outsourced, it probably means working with physical things that require hands on manipulation. On the other hand, if you consider why particular jobs are easy to outsource, you may find skills that you can develop in addition to technical skills that would make you very hard to replace with someone on the other side of the world.
If you have strong people skills, you'll be one of the last ones standing, But strong technical skills? One reason what there's so much total crap software is that the people who hire software people could care less about technical skills if they can save money.
Sure, they DEMAND heavy skillsets, but when it comes to hiring decisions...
Automation isn't offshoring, but what's the point in getting an offshore-proof job if it gets automated out from under you?
I'll bet that garbage collection could eventually be done by a self driving truck with an automated garbage can lift.
A lot of cashier jobs are already getting replaced with self check-out systems as well.
I'm thinking that politics is a pretty safe field to get into, since those jobs are geofenced by law. I'll bet that Dentistry is a pretty safe field as well.
1. In our town, except for the self-driving part, it already has been. And at the rate things are going...
2. True. But anti-social as I am, that's one place I don't go. Not only will I not use the self-checkout, I'll avoid stores that even have self-checkouts.
3. Politicians have the ultimate union. Even the anti-union ones.
4. Actually, I'm not so sure. In fact, it's quite possible that a nimble enough robot might have better luck getting things done than people with relatively fat finders do.
Some time many years back, Sony (I think) advertised a TV with "works in a drawer". Basically, the electronics - excepting the actual high-voltage parts - were on phenolic circuit boards maybe something like 4x6 inches (give or take a meter). The idea was that a repairman could slot in a new one as easily as the older sets did with blown tubes.
I'm suspecting that in most actual cases, however, it was the high-voltage stuff that was most likely to fail once everything went solid-state.
In any event, higher-quality electronics are now so inexpensive that it's cheaper to wave-solder everything onto one motherboard and not even bother with motherboard replacements. Because even though the motherboard, fully ready-to-go might only cost $5, it's still cheaper to toss the entire set and replace it than to pay $65/hr or so to have someone do the replacing.
Be your own boss. Then nobody can fire you.
But if you're as bad a salesman as I am, you'll starve trying to get customers.
Automating surgery is actually harder. People are made up of squishy things that won't stay still or even have the decency to be the right size, shape, and location as in the textbooks.
Automating a datacenter is trivial. 19-inch standard racks made to hold boxes in multiples of "U" height. All you need is standard power and data bus points to avoid having to do custom wiring. Robots can easily slot in units or racks. Just back up an automated truck to the loading dock 2 or 3 times a week to deliver automatically-built new units and haul off the dead/obsolete ones to be disposed of.
It even scales to things like Wal-Mart. Just send the automated fleet in with pallets of merchandise and have robots tug them to the sales banks. All you'd need for employees is the obligatory 6 levels of security guards before and after the self-service checkout. Since Wal-Mart is one of those stores that assumes that the majority of their customers are thieves anyway.
I went to burger joints in the 70's where people shoved raw patties in one side of a machine and they came cooked out the other. These days we could easily even automate the process of pulling them from pallets and wrapping buns around them. Don't be surprised if in the not-too-distant future that the only employee in most burger joints is the manager. And even that only to pull the alarm if the machine goes down.
Certainly, given what we've got, if we even bother with humans taking orders, they'll probably be working out of a call center in Pune or Kolkata.
Automated construction has been an ongoing thing for decades. A lot of houses are extensively pre-fab even without robots to handle the final assembly and fill-in work.
If you are able to be replaced by someone who barely knows the language, doesn't know the country, has to live out of a suitcase, well, mate, it is your fault, not theirs.
Well, I see one little snowflake hasn't hit the griddle.
Yet.
Computer education is pointless. Why be trained in any profession if that profession is going to end up extinct in the areas that need employed people to patronize the local businesses, pay the taxes, and so forth?
If they were serious about making a sustainable economy, they'd ditch the whole drone-level skill training program and focus on how to start your own business and thus avoid the layoff treadmill. After all, isn't that what we're told? The only job that's safe is the one you make yourself?
That means teaching kids at an early age how to meet prospective clients (this does not come naturally or easily to us introverts), negotiate favorable contracts (ditto), manage the various legal and financial aspects of running a company, manage staff - for those who washed out on the whole run-your-own-company deal, and ... if you're fortunate, learn a constructive skill to sell in whatever spare time remains.
That's basically what the local business dynasties do anyway. They're brought up learning how to lead, how to negotiate, how to deal with people, then sent to schools of like-minded people so that they'll have all the right connections.
CO2 emissions are proportional to fuel consumption, so I guess there's no point measuring that figure; the fuel efficiency of vehicles is a known quantity.
But are these vehicule really causing 90% of the pollution? Maybe it's only 35% when you count CO2 who knows?
Some of the listed pollutants are the results of incomplete combustion. It's worthwhile to include CO2, since there's a very good chance that the offending vehicles may therefore be releasing less waste in CO2 form.
1984 revolved around the surveillance of bureaucrats; those who knew the truth. The working class were distracted with government-approved music, television and pornography. The novel doesn't really address the middle class; like communist economies, only government employees had luxuries. But I assume the high-end middle-class will be monitored. As the story itself admits, any revolution must be supported by the middle-class to succeed. So a totalitarian state will search the middle class for dissenters. That's the real purpose of national security.
The novel differs from reality because real-life bureaucrats aren't being surveilled, just the voters: Because you are the problem. Yet the voters consistently forget this vilification and erosion of freedom at election time.
I think I'd have to classify Winston Smith as "middle class". And he certainly didn't have luxuries above and beyond basic things like the chocolate ration.
The Proles were supposed to be lower-class, I think. Strictly manual labour and cannon fodder. There were no corporations mentioned and the implication was that all office (white-collar) work was in some way or form done for the Party by Party members.
The Party being what it was, of course, the only way to actually have white collars was to be a member of the Inner Party. Winston's was probably more like a perpetual dingy grey, owing to being hand-washed in the lavatory sink in harsh Victory Detergent.
That "chemist" is a red flag for sure. Making IEDs in his basement, no doubt.
From what I've seen, every time you reboot Windows, a "large update" seems to be applied.
Updating 5 of 27. Please do not turn off your computer.
Personally I'd like to see the environmental nightmare of the Keurig and Tassimo curl up and die.
I own a keurig and a half dozen reusable pods that I throw in the dishwasher. I actually waste less coffee, coffee filters, etc.. now that I own a keurig and I like that I can make a single cup of coffee in the morning without any waste. I used the 20 pods that came free with my keurig but I haven't bought any since. I don't understand why people continue to buy those overpriced pieces of plastic when the same exact coffee is a fraction of the cost. Are people really that lazy that they can't spend 3 seconds dumping the old grounds in the trash?
I have a 2-cup espresso machine. No pods at all. Permanent stainless-steel filter. The only disposable thing that goes into it is ground coffee and it makes 1 or 2 cups in about 2 minutes. And the used grounds go around the plants and make them VERY happy!
I thought the Teamsters were more into the loading and unloading, and the drivers were often owner/operators.
Never heard of more than one person operating a truck at a time.
That's so racist! Not all undocumented extraterrestrial immigrants are Martians, neither are all Martian immigrants undocumented.
Do they have Green Cards?
When do we have an expectation of privacy anymore?
When we are not actively broadcasting our location to third parties as an inherent part of the service? Privacy isn't possible when your phone is broadcasting constantly where it is. Any more than privacy on the internet is possible, since everything you do, by the nature of the internet, passes through multiple parties' anonymous hands.
There is privacy, and then there is confidentiality.
No, there is no privacy. But there is a certain expectation that the various parties involved will keep information to themselves and not pass it back and forth freely when it is not necessary to do so.
Stop laughing!
If the cellphone company chooses to comply with the court order, no warrant is needed.
Which companies voluntarily turn over customer location data to the police? Please name names.
AT&T. Verizon. T-Mobile (sometimes, anyway).
Sprint allegedly isn't quite as accommodating, but you never know in an age where "they" know all and demand that you know nothing. But we do know that AT&T has provided the courtesy of a full-time locked room that's essentially US Government property right in the middle of their own premises.
In my current city there is a company that writes software for mortgage companies. Their back end systems were all written in COBOL.
Located in Northeast Florida, you say? Has an NFL team?
I liked Ada. But when I used it in school, it took a medium-sized IBM mainframe and chewed it down to the same sort of performance I could get doing Fortran on a Z-80.
Ada might have been a bigger hit had it been introduced more recently. I doubt it's much more of a burden than Java, and these days even cell-phones have the power of a medium-sized IBM mainframe from back then.
Speaking of what makes each language different, Ada's claim to fame was that your could define both range and domain on its functions and the type-defining capabilities were so rigorous that the infamous we-used-inches-instead-of-centimeters bugs were all but impossible.
I think you meant "now Forth Learn".
Precisely!
When an app dives into one of the Windows-only assemblies, Mono's word is "broken". .Net and Java are a lot alike. Both are "universal" platforms (originally) sponsored by vendors of operating systems. But .Net is turned inwards whereas Java is turned outwards. Indeed, the only reason .Net exists is because Sun wouldn't let Microsoft weld Windows-only functionality into their version of Java.
There are probably less than half a dozen basic language syntaxes. COBOL/Fortran/Python, Algol/Pascal/Modula/Ada, C/C++/JavaScript/Perl/PHP, LISP/Scheme, RPN/Forth/Smalltalk. and so forth, not even touching other relatives of the forms I've just named.
What makes them different languages isn't the language, and it isn't really even the support llbraries (if any), It's the way of thinking that comes along with the language. Whether it's object-oriented, message-oriented, parallel-optimized, Functional, whatever, each language has its own characteristics.
As the old adage goes (something like) being able to write COBOL in 17 different languages. Yes, you can pick up the syntax in a few days and begin to get a feel in a few weeks, but most people won't think naturally in a language's mindset unless they've spent several months at a minimum at it.
Python excels at quick-and-dirty. Unlike many of the scripting languages, it's applicable to a wide range of environments and usages. It doesn't require the time devoted to rigor that Java does nor the time devoted to avoiding pitfalls that C/C++ does. It's not "write-only" and the syntax isn't littered with cryptic constructs. It doesn't induce writers cramp like COBOL and it handles strings more graciously than FORTRAN. If you have one-off tasks that don't need polishing, what you hacked out in a short period is probably going to make a reasonable amount of sense when you or someone else picks it up again a year or 3 later.
In the Windows world, this is a niche that VB occupies. In the wider world, where VB isn't available, it's Python.
There is plenty of room for people who suck at programming.
Otherwise the country wouldn't be overrun with low-budget H1-Bs.