I'd love to have a set of minis like this for my current D&D group. The thought of our dumpy asses going toe to toe against ogres and dragons is pretty amusing.
It's made for the Indian market, rather than the country with household debt of $11.65 Trillion.
That's why I'm glad the review honed in on the problems with keyboard/input. Waiting around for 10 seconds is fine if your only other option is not seeing content at all. But if typing isn't even remotely accurate, I can see the frustration setting in pretty quickly.
Shouldn't we instead at some point focus on the fact that streaming itself is a silly and wasteful thing? So much more efficient to download something once and watch it to your heart's content. But then how to keep it under control...
Remember, Ulbricht was living in a shared apartment and working out of a library. If his defense is that he's not the guy running Silk Road, it would be suspicious for a man in his situation to suddenly have an expensive defense team.
Maybe he could start a Kickstarter to fund... well, not his defense, because that's not a creative work, so to speak, but a DOCUMENTARY about his defense, including people who could just check by to see if he was dead yet.
What then becomes the problem (such as at my local ShopRite) is that when there are long lines and only a certain number of self-checks, there aren't any cashiers waiting for you. But you wait, because you need food. And the company has already stomped out competition in the local area, so you're still waiting through a line of 10 people who don't know how to scan their own groceries, because they've already fired half the cashiers who could have taken you. And if you bopped over to Pathmark, it'd be the same situation. Of course, then there are those markets far enough away from bus routes who know they can just cater to the non-peasants, and they charge higher prices for staples but lower prices for healthy items.
Though continuing to increase our prison population is one "safety net" we seem to be dealing with okay. Criminalize more and more things, increase enforcement constantly, you have an almost never-ending service industry of containing human beings. Unless you decide there's no reason to keep them around anymore, that is.
What is of more concern is that the proliferation of technical jobs is gradually excluding people of less than average intelligence - a nontrivial fraction of the population.
Exactly. Because nothing ever goes wrong with millions of stupid, angry people with lots of time on their hands.
That's one way of defining the average (mean) standard of living, yes. But that does not necessarily mean that the median standard of living also increases in the same scenario, without stronger assumptions on the distribution.
Grade-school level statistics actually showing themselves to be useful. My fifth-grade self's jaw just hit the floor.
I'm more inclined to believe in the second possibility. Social pressure would not permit the former IMO. But regardless, my post was just to criticize this idea that because Luddites were wrong once, during the industrial revolution, that their idea of jobs being lost to automation would be forever false. It is bound to happen sometime this century. We will eventually need to find an alternative to our current economic and monetary system based on a jobless (yet productive) society.
I think we share the same hope, though Bangladesh is a good case study of #1 being enacted as we speak.
Also, the reason we 'need' so many telemarketers is because we can't use autodialers for telemarketing. Government regulations stop robots from taking that field.
...which is obviously an unfair intrusion by government into a problem (i.e. spending all that money on employees) that could be solved by the market.
In my area, we now have garbage trucks that pick up (standardized) trash cans. Presumably, this leads to fewer "garbage men" - who used to be the archetypal unskilled laborers. But the few garbage men that remain now must be skilled as truck drivers.
I actually know a guy who worked as a garbageman who got replaced by automation. It paid good money, because he had qualifications that most people didn't. He had the strength and agility to lift 70 lb barrels into the truck, hang on for dear life at speed, tolerate a "variety" of weather conditions and a living situation that allowed him to go to work at 4 or 5 AM. Unfortunately, when the demand for those skills and qualifications evaporated overnight, there weren't that many package handling jobs to absorb the influx, and his earning ability dropped just as quickly. Kinda sucks to be forced into a 6-12 month unpaid vacation while trying to find money to get trained for something else at wages that will never match what he made before. No way around it, of course, those jobs are just gone and he understands that. He's got another job, so I guess you could say his job wasn't "killed," it just became something else that didn't pay as well even after becoming proficient.
And now we have a potentially very angry man who has the strength and agility to lift 70 lb barrels into the truck and hang on for dear life at speed. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
You're essentially increasing the productivity of mankind per capita. There's nothing wrong with *that* - the one thing wrong is that once we have that productivity, we randomly deny the output to others even though nothing prevents us. Well, I guess that societies can get outdated as much as business models and technologies do.
Of the 10 of you, we've replaced 9 of your jobs with a machine. Steve can keep his job, unless someone amongst you is willing to do it for less. Oh, and we're not gonna feed anyone who's not hauling his weight.
It also fails to take into account that the skills required for the jobs that disappear are entirely different than the skills required for the new jobs that replace them. This means you lose everything you've worked for, career-wise. I might have 30 years in as a buggy whip craftsman, but that doesn't mean I have the skill set required to assemble an automobile. It also means that the salary I've been building up disappears. Even if the jobs are equivalent pay ranges, a senior buggy whip architect probably makes a lot more than a junior steering column technician.
If I started at $40,000/yr 30 years ago and make $75,000/yr today and suddenly lose that because my entire industry has been obsoleted -- including my retirement possibly -- and can now only take a new job at $50,000/yr... I'm still screwed.
I'm not arguing we should stop inventing, but its hugely callous to ignore the difficulties inflicted on people when this kind of thing happens.
"Callous" is really the only possible word I think we can use here. Look, I respect people's understanding of the benefits of capitalism. There are some brilliant capitalists around here. But when the problem is "solved" by market forces, there's another problem left over-- lots and lots of now-unqualified, unemployed people. Just using their children's hunger as a whip to scramble for a new job may again be a market force in action, but it's certainly not kind.
And then you run into the problem of... if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
Very simply our standard of living = (production - consumption)/(numbers of citizens)
Robots increase production, which is good.
It is good. But the fruits of that production aren't distributed to the entire population, but rather to the owners of those robots to distribute as they see fit.
Man, I could see the above sentence turning redder and redder even as I was typing it. Just gonna call myself out on that one.:)
Slashdot Mirror
...shoving your penis into a container of glop and trying to hold perfectly still while maintaining a constant erection for 2-3 minutes...
^____^ That's my fetish!
I'd love to have a set of minis like this for my current D&D group. The thought of our dumpy asses going toe to toe against ogres and dragons is pretty amusing.
Today I learned that cancer antibodies are often made in hamster ovaries. This may be, to date, the most I have ever thought about hamster ovaries.
Give it a couple more years and you'll be buying smart phones out of vending machines.
Man, drug dealers are gonna loooooove that. :)
It's 35 bucks. Or 1/20th of an iPhone.
It's made for the Indian market, rather than the country with household debt of $11.65 Trillion.
That's why I'm glad the review honed in on the problems with keyboard/input. Waiting around for 10 seconds is fine if your only other option is not seeing content at all. But if typing isn't even remotely accurate, I can see the frustration setting in pretty quickly.
Apparently some people actually have more intelligent commentary to share than I do. lol
HOW DO THEY WORK??!!
Shouldn't we instead at some point focus on the fact that streaming itself is a silly and wasteful thing? So much more efficient to download something once and watch it to your heart's content. But then how to keep it under control...
Make it rain, baby.
According to Wired he's using a public defender.
Remember, Ulbricht was living in a shared apartment and working out of a library. If his defense is that he's not the guy running Silk Road, it would be suspicious for a man in his situation to suddenly have an expensive defense team.
Maybe he could start a Kickstarter to fund... well, not his defense, because that's not a creative work, so to speak, but a DOCUMENTARY about his defense, including people who could just check by to see if he was dead yet.
What then becomes the problem (such as at my local ShopRite) is that when there are long lines and only a certain number of self-checks, there aren't any cashiers waiting for you. But you wait, because you need food. And the company has already stomped out competition in the local area, so you're still waiting through a line of 10 people who don't know how to scan their own groceries, because they've already fired half the cashiers who could have taken you. And if you bopped over to Pathmark, it'd be the same situation. Of course, then there are those markets far enough away from bus routes who know they can just cater to the non-peasants, and they charge higher prices for staples but lower prices for healthy items.
Though continuing to increase our prison population is one "safety net" we seem to be dealing with okay. Criminalize more and more things, increase enforcement constantly, you have an almost never-ending service industry of containing human beings. Unless you decide there's no reason to keep them around anymore, that is.
Enh, wait until after. Or for even more fun you could work in university admin.
What is of more concern is that the proliferation of technical jobs is gradually excluding people of less than average intelligence - a nontrivial fraction of the population.
Exactly. Because nothing ever goes wrong with millions of stupid, angry people with lots of time on their hands.
You'll be able to leave your job at McDonald's and get a job cleaning the offices at the robot manufacturing plant!
Are you kidding? They have an industrial-sized Roomba.
If we can't even agree that infants should be fed, I sadly don't see the guaranteed minimum income coming about any time soon.
That's one way of defining the average (mean) standard of living, yes. But that does not necessarily mean that the median standard of living also increases in the same scenario, without stronger assumptions on the distribution.
Grade-school level statistics actually showing themselves to be useful. My fifth-grade self's jaw just hit the floor.
I'm more inclined to believe in the second possibility. Social pressure would not permit the former IMO. But regardless, my post was just to criticize this idea that because Luddites were wrong once, during the industrial revolution, that their idea of jobs being lost to automation would be forever false. It is bound to happen sometime this century. We will eventually need to find an alternative to our current economic and monetary system based on a jobless (yet productive) society.
I think we share the same hope, though Bangladesh is a good case study of #1 being enacted as we speak.
Also, the reason we 'need' so many telemarketers is because we can't use autodialers for telemarketing. Government regulations stop robots from taking that field.
...which is obviously an unfair intrusion by government into a problem (i.e. spending all that money on employees) that could be solved by the market.
In my area, we now have garbage trucks that pick up (standardized) trash cans. Presumably, this leads to fewer "garbage men" - who used to be the archetypal unskilled laborers. But the few garbage men that remain now must be skilled as truck drivers.
I actually know a guy who worked as a garbageman who got replaced by automation. It paid good money, because he had qualifications that most people didn't. He had the strength and agility to lift 70 lb barrels into the truck, hang on for dear life at speed, tolerate a "variety" of weather conditions and a living situation that allowed him to go to work at 4 or 5 AM. Unfortunately, when the demand for those skills and qualifications evaporated overnight, there weren't that many package handling jobs to absorb the influx, and his earning ability dropped just as quickly. Kinda sucks to be forced into a 6-12 month unpaid vacation while trying to find money to get trained for something else at wages that will never match what he made before. No way around it, of course, those jobs are just gone and he understands that. He's got another job, so I guess you could say his job wasn't "killed," it just became something else that didn't pay as well even after becoming proficient.
And now we have a potentially very angry man who has the strength and agility to lift 70 lb barrels into the truck and hang on for dear life at speed. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
You're essentially increasing the productivity of mankind per capita. There's nothing wrong with *that* - the one thing wrong is that once we have that productivity, we randomly deny the output to others even though nothing prevents us. Well, I guess that societies can get outdated as much as business models and technologies do.
Of the 10 of you, we've replaced 9 of your jobs with a machine. Steve can keep his job, unless someone amongst you is willing to do it for less. Oh, and we're not gonna feed anyone who's not hauling his weight.
It also fails to take into account that the skills required for the jobs that disappear are entirely different than the skills required for the new jobs that replace them. This means you lose everything you've worked for, career-wise. I might have 30 years in as a buggy whip craftsman, but that doesn't mean I have the skill set required to assemble an automobile. It also means that the salary I've been building up disappears. Even if the jobs are equivalent pay ranges, a senior buggy whip architect probably makes a lot more than a junior steering column technician.
If I started at $40,000/yr 30 years ago and make $75,000/yr today and suddenly lose that because my entire industry has been obsoleted -- including my retirement possibly -- and can now only take a new job at $50,000/yr... I'm still screwed.
I'm not arguing we should stop inventing, but its hugely callous to ignore the difficulties inflicted on people when this kind of thing happens.
"Callous" is really the only possible word I think we can use here. Look, I respect people's understanding of the benefits of capitalism. There are some brilliant capitalists around here. But when the problem is "solved" by market forces, there's another problem left over-- lots and lots of now-unqualified, unemployed people. Just using their children's hunger as a whip to scramble for a new job may again be a market force in action, but it's certainly not kind.
And then you run into the problem of... if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
Telemarketers are the scum of the earth. If you meet one kick them in the head.
Enh, usually they're already regretting every life-decision they've ever made that landed them in that job in the first place.
Who are we kidding? Developers don't start at grade B, they clearly start at grade F.
And if you're like me, you basically remain at Grade F and then go become an English major.
Very simply our standard of living = (production - consumption)/(numbers of citizens) Robots increase production, which is good.
It is good. But the fruits of that production aren't distributed to the entire population, but rather to the owners of those robots to distribute as they see fit.
Man, I could see the above sentence turning redder and redder even as I was typing it. Just gonna call myself out on that one. :)