Any time you spend doing something you enjoy is not wasted. Playing cell phone games is a better use of your time than spending it with your friends and family if you enjoy it more. But if you enjoy your friends and family more, spend those 6 hours talking to them. If the thing you enjoy most is upgrading gas pump software then do that. By making your process more efficient, you can do the thing you love 4 times as much in the time you have.
No, it'll be around forever like the lever, button or trigger.
You can make a better crossbow and call it a gun, but the hardware we interact with (e.g., the trigger) will stay the same as long as the hardware we're made of stays the same.
Phones used to have buttons. Now they are touchscreens with virtual buttons. We still have the same fingers. How is it possible that something usurped buttons given that they were clearly the ideal method for humans to input information to a computer?
And no, we won't see neural interfaces providing faster input than keyboards in the near future because our brains can't think creatively and focus hard enough to constrain our output to some neural HMI at the same time because 98% of People Can't Multitask
By this logic we shouldn't be able to type either.
The path: "brain -> fingers -> keyboard -> machine" can certainly be improved
"brain -> brain reader -> machine" eliminates one hop.
Your contention that the problem is peoples' brains is ridiculous considering that the brains are the things ultimately controlling the keyboards as well. Your typing speed can not exceed the speed of thought, but the reverse is certainly possible.
Energy and transportation are run at the state level, so I would expect that it would take some governors with courage and integrity (and lack of strong opposition).
It might be nice to have this stuff controlled at the federal level when we have Mr. hope and change running things, but that's a bit scary since I don't have much hope for 2016. I think I have more faith in California's Governor Moonbeam, than Hillary or whoever wins the Republican primary.
I do not see how totally arbitrary insurance levels (decided on by you and the insurance company both of which do not need to tell the truth about their risks) would make it easier then a requirement for a minimum level of cover for specific usage.
We already have laws that enforce contracts. And I already said I am not opposed to laws which guarantee minimum coverage provided by auto insurance. I would just have this be for everybody rather than only certain categories of licenses.
Why do taxis pay more for insurance? The above is one of the reasons. Why should you be required to pay for this when you only behave like a cab hundreds of times a week?
I agree that taxis and uber drivers should pay more for insurance. I don't see the point of a law mandating the solution that the market will naturally arrive at anyway.
This is like making a law that fast computers need to cost more than slow computers. We don't need a law like that. People selling fast computers can decide what to charge people, and people selling slow computers can decide what to charge people.
Why on earth would you want to do a solution that uses 16 laptops? In addition to being expensive, and inconvenient, it requires keeping 16 laptops maintained.
Using advanced routing techniques isn't trickery. It's how networks are supposed to be used to solve problems. This is the benefit of a network interface over something like a PPP serial connection. It sucks that all the pumps have the same IP address, but due to the versatility of network technology, that's not an insurmountable problem.
Buying a single 24 port smart switch will be much cheaper than buying 16 laptops.
Maybe they do, I don't know. I am just ranting on what I think is the right solution regardless of what anyone is actually doing.
It was my understanding that heavier vehicles do more damage to the roads, but maybe that's not true.
My general solution is this. Figure out where the costs of road infrastructure come from (is it 99% repair done by big rigs? Is it 99% making new roads that everyone uses equally?, etc). Come up with a scheme that charges people based on how much cost they incur to the state.
For example, if the only cost was damage by big rigs, then have a big rig tax. If roads only get damaged by the weather (i.e. not by use), then have a per mile tax. I suspect the actual breakdown is more complicated and nuanced.
But my basic message is that it should be evidence based, and it should put the incentives in the right places to minimize costs. (e.g. disincentivize driving vehicles which damage roads, or incentivizing conservation of resources, etc)
Basically, get economists (rather than politicians) to come up with the policy
The most elegant way to do it, is to buy a potentially expensive smart switch that can do all this for you in a compact and efficient. You may have to do some research on how to configure it properly.
The next best way would be to build a PC with a bunch of NICs and basically build the switch from my first suggestion. It's probably even more effort to configure it. It may be even more expensive if you need to buy all the parts new, but you are more likely to have these common parts or know someone who does, and they can be old.
The way that requires the least technical know-how but might be the most MacGyvery, ugly, and fun, id to get a bunch of old routers (one for each pump). Set the DMZ address of each NAT router to be the fixed IP of the pumps. Configure the wan addresses to something like 192.168.0.1 (for pump 1), 0.2 (for pump 2), etc. Then hook all the wan ports on the routers to a big switch along with your laptop. And hook up each pump to one of the lan ports of it's corresposnding NAT router. And bingo, you are on a network where each pump has a different IP address.
The downside with this last one, is that you have a lot of points of failure. Old routers are not known for being very reliable. The good news is that they are cheap, and you don't need the wifi to work. You don't even need them all to be the same make/model.
Are you paid by the hour? If yes, what the actual fuck are you thinking?
Because who wouldn't want to keep doing a tedious job over and over as long as the income is steady?/s
Even if this person is a lazy fuck (which I suspect he isn't), he still has an incentive to solve this problem. He could automate the software load for all the gas pumps (minimizing the amount of work he needs to do), and sit in his car playing cell phone games for the amount of time it normally takes to do it the tedious way.
It pays to be efficient whether you are a lazy fuck or someone who wants to get a lot of work done. Only dumb people waste their time.
I think that makes a lot of sense. I think insurance laws, if designed correctly, shouldn't need to be changed with the arrival of ridesharing, because ridesharing is still just cars driving on the road that need to be insured.
Every state is different, but what irks me, is the claim that uber and lyft are violating existing regulations, while at the same time there are all these new regulations being passed specifically targeted at ridesharing. It would seem that the necessity of creating a new law implies that thy were not violating existing laws. Furthermore, well crafted laws shouldn't need to be amended by such a trivial change in society.
I would like to see laws designed more like software. Is there a reason to specifically single out taxis? If not then find a way not to do it. In this example it forces one to define what a taxi service is and creates loopholes for companies that can avoid this definition.
That's even assuming that the lawmakers are trying to do their job well. Many lawmakers are self serving and simply enact laws to benefit a particular lobby that supports them.
I actually think we do need to address the issue of electric cars skirting the gas tax. Hybrids still use gas.
The nice thing about the gas tax, is that in addition to taxing cars more for how much they drive, it also taxes heavier cars more (because they use more gas per mile), this meant that an 18 wheeler driving a mile pays more tax than a carolla driving a mile. This makes a lot of sense since the big rig does a lot more damage to the road in that mile.
I think a better solution would be a gas tax and an electricity tax (i.e. an energy tax). That way an electric 18 wheeler still pays higher tax than a carolla, and we also incentivize making more efficient cars (both electric and gas powered).
It's not more profit for companies. Even in the scenario you outlined, it would just be a wash for companies. They would potentially gross more revenue which would be cancelled by the costs of more expensive labor.
Even the employee customers aren't really benefiting, because the potentially higher wages are offset by a higher costs of living in the city (assuming they don't lose their job).
If I give you $1000, and you give it right back to me, we didn't both earn $1000 more this year.
Minimum wage is a terrible tool to helping the poor for several reasons. It doesn't just help the poor. It also helps people who are rather wealthy but do not earn more than minimum wage (i.e. teenagers, spouses, etc). It also artificially manipulates the cost of labor with causes our economy to be less efficient. And as the article suggests, in many circumstances, minimum wage actually causes loss of jobs, and higher cost of living.
If we really want to help the poor, we should provide a good enough social safety net that the poor are not reliant on their paycheck to survive.
If the minimum cost of living is $50,000, then we should make sure people have that much money, and if they have a $3/hour job on top of that, then that's a bonus. We don't need to pervert the market by artificially manipulating the prices of labor and goods to have a social safety net.
The government makes this simpler by requiring you to have a certain kind of insurance depending on how you use your vehicle.
I don't see how this is simpler.
I think the simplest solution would be that the government's only job is making sure insurance companies honor the contracts they sign (e.g. pay for damage to cars, etc), via the justice system, ensuring that insurance companies are solvent and can cover their claims, and setting basic guidelines for what kind of damage must be covered (i.e. to prevent fraudulent insurance companies that have exploitive gaps in coverage).
I really don't see the point in mandating different classes of licenses, and different classes of insurance.
I really don't see the problem in simply letting insurance companies decide to charge more to who they feel is a greater risk for damages.
So, you're saying kids should know how to use twitter in order to design the next ultimate time waster in the future?
yes
So far, it seems like kids are able to adequately use twitter without the schools helping out.
I also said
However, teaching anything in schools seems unnecessary if they [kids] already have a borderline unhealthy interest in it.
and
People seem to figure it out on their own just by living their normal lives, and therefore doesn't need to be taught in school.
I still say stick to the basics. If the kids don't know basic math and science then they're not going to be able to engineer anything new, and if they don't know basic art concepts they won't be able to adequately design a new look either.
Obviously the basics should not be excluded, but should K-12 exclusively be about the learning basics?
In the next 30 years, arithmetic is not going to change.
And at some point well before High school, we stop teaching kids arithmetic, and move on to more advanced topics.
You can't learn how a smartphone works if you don't know how the stuff before smartphones work.
It depends on your definition of "how something works". You can certainly know how to operate a smartphone without knowing how to design one. The OP was talking about skills that involved using (not designing) technology. It was this use of "knowing how something works" that I started with (e.g. knowing how a hammer works (how to use a hammer) is different from knowing how to make a hammer)
But yes, I think students need to have mastery of lower level topics before they can progress to advanced topics.
I was merely pointing out that the analogy of "the people who built the first smartphone had never seen a smartphone" was a bit misleading.
The task of having an idea to make a multipurpose computer that replaces a dumb single purpose cell phone does not require knowledge of how cell phones work (how to design a cell phone). But it probably does require knowledge of how dumb cell phones "work" (familiarity with dumb cell phones, how to operate them, etc).
The task of actually making (designing) a smartphone (once the idea has been formulated), requires lots of school as well as familiarity with how the previous technology worked and was used.
.
Who built the first smartphone? Was it Steve jobs with the vision? Or the engineers who actually designed and built it? You don't need to be an engineer to be a Steve Jobs and "build" the first smartphone. But you do have to be familiar with how regular dumb phones are used.
And schools don't (and maybe can't and shouldn't try to) teach people how to be Steve Jobs. Maybe business school does something like this... I wouldn't know.
I would add basic arithmetic, and the ability to do sums in your head.
Where do you use it? In real life, when dealing with money. You go to the grocery store, you pick up stuff, you check out. How about knowing if your basket of food is in your budget? Or if buying that extra treat will break the budget?
Being able to estimate your basket with tax is handy, and doing so without dragging out a calculator doubly so.
This is one of the few things in the area of mathematics, that I think we really don't need people to be good at.
Using a calculator is really easy. Calculators are really cheap. They are solar powered and don't even need batteries. And they are incalculably more accurate than a human being at crunching numbers.
Should kids be able to do arithmetic? Yes. But I don't think they need to approach the accuracy of a calculator (which is nearly impossible). I think they should be able to know how to do it, as this knowledge is fundamental to mathematics, but being able to do it quickly and error free in your mind is a waste of time considering nearly every person has a calculator in their pocket at all times.
There was a time when mathematicians all had volumes of books of logarithms. They could tediously calculate the logarithms tediously by hand (and make lots of mistakes). Or they could much more quickly and accurately look up the value in a book. Then "cheap" calculators came along (e.g. like $1000), and all the mathematicians threw away their logarithm books.
Mathematics is for humans. Arithmetic is for calculators.
Yes, the register does it all, but how do you know the price got scanned correctly? Many times you can save a few bucks through scanning errors by realizing what was $3 scanned for $4. And sometimes, if you read those little posted notices, you can get $10 off a scanned error (or for stuff under $10, free!).
All that effort to save a couple bucks here and there? Not only that, but rather than checking the register in your head, you could have checked the register on your own calculator and caught even more mistakes and saved even more money.
Even after all the governments fall in the zombie apocalypse, and we lose all our technology as our power plants shut down, we will still have millions of solar powered calculators.
IDE's don't do any of the work- they take care of the things aren't actually programming.
If an IDE takes care of things that I would otherwise have to do (programming or not), then it is doing work. It is freeing me to do other things. It is increasing my productivity.
The nice part about tools, is that despite the work they do, you don't have to pay them, so you should be using every tool that increases productivity.
It's an example of another technology that makes the job of programming much easier, but doesn't literally write your code for you. I don't think we should consider tools that don't do any "programming work" as not doing any work. I think we should value any and all tools which significantly increase productivity.
I didn't include anything in the term programming. I think it is ridiculous to label anything that isn't "programming" as "doing none of the work". Either programming is narrow, and the job of a programmer includes lots of things that are not programming, and anything that helps with those no programming tasks is doing work (even if it is not programming), and is therefore useful. Or programming is broad and an IDE is clearly helping to do the work of programming.
My post was meant to illustrate that there are many things that do a lot of the work (i.e. freeing humans to be more productive), that are what I would consider equally as "non-programming" as what an IDE does. Compilers don't actually generate any source code either. They however do an immense amount of work. We didn't always have compilers. There was a time when programmers tediously wrote low level assembly code, and were relatively much less productive than programmers with access to compilers.
I agree that the people who built the first skyscraper probably didn't know how to design a contemporary building while in high school, but they almost certainly knew how to "use" such a building (i.e. they were familiar with it's proper functionality).
But as I said, the proper operation of a building is something that does not need to be taught in school. People seem to figure it out on their own just by living their normal lives, and therefore doesn't need to be taught in school.
However, I think Amish kids (e.g. kids that are denied the opportunity to use technology) might be at a disadvantage in creating new technology. I think understanding how to use existing technology is a prerequisite (albeit a trivial one) to being able to create future technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Any time you spend doing something you enjoy is not wasted. Playing cell phone games is a better use of your time than spending it with your friends and family if you enjoy it more. But if you enjoy your friends and family more, spend those 6 hours talking to them. If the thing you enjoy most is upgrading gas pump software then do that. By making your process more efficient, you can do the thing you love 4 times as much in the time you have.
No, it'll be around forever like the lever, button or trigger. You can make a better crossbow and call it a gun, but the hardware we interact with (e.g., the trigger) will stay the same as long as the hardware we're made of stays the same.
Phones used to have buttons. Now they are touchscreens with virtual buttons. We still have the same fingers. How is it possible that something usurped buttons given that they were clearly the ideal method for humans to input information to a computer?
And no, we won't see neural interfaces providing faster input than keyboards in the near future because our brains can't think creatively and focus hard enough to constrain our output to some neural HMI at the same time because 98% of People Can't Multitask
By this logic we shouldn't be able to type either.
The path: "brain -> fingers -> keyboard -> machine" can certainly be improved
"brain -> brain reader -> machine" eliminates one hop.
Your contention that the problem is peoples' brains is ridiculous considering that the brains are the things ultimately controlling the keyboards as well. Your typing speed can not exceed the speed of thought, but the reverse is certainly possible.
Energy and transportation are run at the state level, so I would expect that it would take some governors with courage and integrity (and lack of strong opposition).
It might be nice to have this stuff controlled at the federal level when we have Mr. hope and change running things, but that's a bit scary since I don't have much hope for 2016. I think I have more faith in California's Governor Moonbeam, than Hillary or whoever wins the Republican primary.
I hope Elizabeth Warren decides to run.
I do not see how totally arbitrary insurance levels (decided on by you and the insurance company both of which do not need to tell the truth about their risks) would make it easier then a requirement for a minimum level of cover for specific usage.
We already have laws that enforce contracts. And I already said I am not opposed to laws which guarantee minimum coverage provided by auto insurance. I would just have this be for everybody rather than only certain categories of licenses.
Why do taxis pay more for insurance? The above is one of the reasons. Why should you be required to pay for this when you only behave like a cab hundreds of times a week?
I agree that taxis and uber drivers should pay more for insurance. I don't see the point of a law mandating the solution that the market will naturally arrive at anyway.
This is like making a law that fast computers need to cost more than slow computers. We don't need a law like that. People selling fast computers can decide what to charge people, and people selling slow computers can decide what to charge people.
Why on earth would you want to do a solution that uses 16 laptops? In addition to being expensive, and inconvenient, it requires keeping 16 laptops maintained.
Using advanced routing techniques isn't trickery. It's how networks are supposed to be used to solve problems. This is the benefit of a network interface over something like a PPP serial connection. It sucks that all the pumps have the same IP address, but due to the versatility of network technology, that's not an insurmountable problem.
Buying a single 24 port smart switch will be much cheaper than buying 16 laptops.
Introduce a high school boy to machines that type what he thinks
Like a keyboard?
Maybe they do, I don't know. I am just ranting on what I think is the right solution regardless of what anyone is actually doing.
It was my understanding that heavier vehicles do more damage to the roads, but maybe that's not true.
My general solution is this. Figure out where the costs of road infrastructure come from (is it 99% repair done by big rigs? Is it 99% making new roads that everyone uses equally?, etc). Come up with a scheme that charges people based on how much cost they incur to the state.
For example, if the only cost was damage by big rigs, then have a big rig tax. If roads only get damaged by the weather (i.e. not by use), then have a per mile tax. I suspect the actual breakdown is more complicated and nuanced.
But my basic message is that it should be evidence based, and it should put the incentives in the right places to minimize costs. (e.g. disincentivize driving vehicles which damage roads, or incentivizing conservation of resources, etc)
Basically, get economists (rather than politicians) to come up with the policy
Network address translation.
The most elegant way to do it, is to buy a potentially expensive smart switch that can do all this for you in a compact and efficient. You may have to do some research on how to configure it properly.
The next best way would be to build a PC with a bunch of NICs and basically build the switch from my first suggestion. It's probably even more effort to configure it. It may be even more expensive if you need to buy all the parts new, but you are more likely to have these common parts or know someone who does, and they can be old.
The way that requires the least technical know-how but might be the most MacGyvery, ugly, and fun, id to get a bunch of old routers (one for each pump). Set the DMZ address of each NAT router to be the fixed IP of the pumps. Configure the wan addresses to something like 192.168.0.1 (for pump 1), 0.2 (for pump 2), etc. Then hook all the wan ports on the routers to a big switch along with your laptop. And hook up each pump to one of the lan ports of it's corresposnding NAT router. And bingo, you are on a network where each pump has a different IP address.
The downside with this last one, is that you have a lot of points of failure. Old routers are not known for being very reliable. The good news is that they are cheap, and you don't need the wifi to work. You don't even need them all to be the same make/model.
I've seen plenty of people bork things 16 times in a row manually. I would rather have the potential to fix 16 borked pumps in parallel.
How is improving a task "one-upping" your manager?
Are you assuming the manager assured his boss that none of his workers have any initiative, and now he looks foolish?
Are you paid by the hour? If yes, what the actual fuck are you thinking?
Because who wouldn't want to keep doing a tedious job over and over as long as the income is steady? /s
Even if this person is a lazy fuck (which I suspect he isn't), he still has an incentive to solve this problem. He could automate the software load for all the gas pumps (minimizing the amount of work he needs to do), and sit in his car playing cell phone games for the amount of time it normally takes to do it the tedious way.
It pays to be efficient whether you are a lazy fuck or someone who wants to get a lot of work done. Only dumb people waste their time.
I think that makes a lot of sense. I think insurance laws, if designed correctly, shouldn't need to be changed with the arrival of ridesharing, because ridesharing is still just cars driving on the road that need to be insured.
Every state is different, but what irks me, is the claim that uber and lyft are violating existing regulations, while at the same time there are all these new regulations being passed specifically targeted at ridesharing. It would seem that the necessity of creating a new law implies that thy were not violating existing laws. Furthermore, well crafted laws shouldn't need to be amended by such a trivial change in society.
I would like to see laws designed more like software. Is there a reason to specifically single out taxis? If not then find a way not to do it. In this example it forces one to define what a taxi service is and creates loopholes for companies that can avoid this definition.
That's even assuming that the lawmakers are trying to do their job well. Many lawmakers are self serving and simply enact laws to benefit a particular lobby that supports them.
I actually think we do need to address the issue of electric cars skirting the gas tax. Hybrids still use gas.
The nice thing about the gas tax, is that in addition to taxing cars more for how much they drive, it also taxes heavier cars more (because they use more gas per mile), this meant that an 18 wheeler driving a mile pays more tax than a carolla driving a mile. This makes a lot of sense since the big rig does a lot more damage to the road in that mile.
I think a better solution would be a gas tax and an electricity tax (i.e. an energy tax). That way an electric 18 wheeler still pays higher tax than a carolla, and we also incentivize making more efficient cars (both electric and gas powered).
It's not more profit for companies. Even in the scenario you outlined, it would just be a wash for companies. They would potentially gross more revenue which would be cancelled by the costs of more expensive labor.
Even the employee customers aren't really benefiting, because the potentially higher wages are offset by a higher costs of living in the city (assuming they don't lose their job).
If I give you $1000, and you give it right back to me, we didn't both earn $1000 more this year.
Minimum wage is a terrible tool to helping the poor for several reasons. It doesn't just help the poor. It also helps people who are rather wealthy but do not earn more than minimum wage (i.e. teenagers, spouses, etc). It also artificially manipulates the cost of labor with causes our economy to be less efficient. And as the article suggests, in many circumstances, minimum wage actually causes loss of jobs, and higher cost of living.
If we really want to help the poor, we should provide a good enough social safety net that the poor are not reliant on their paycheck to survive.
If the minimum cost of living is $50,000, then we should make sure people have that much money, and if they have a $3/hour job on top of that, then that's a bonus. We don't need to pervert the market by artificially manipulating the prices of labor and goods to have a social safety net.
Corporations run the government... This shouldn't surprise you, as it also happened in Atlas Shrugged.
...and hope that no one else offers to do the same job for much less money.
The government makes this simpler by requiring you to have a certain kind of insurance depending on how you use your vehicle.
I don't see how this is simpler.
I think the simplest solution would be that the government's only job is making sure insurance companies honor the contracts they sign (e.g. pay for damage to cars, etc), via the justice system, ensuring that insurance companies are solvent and can cover their claims, and setting basic guidelines for what kind of damage must be covered (i.e. to prevent fraudulent insurance companies that have exploitive gaps in coverage).
I really don't see the point in mandating different classes of licenses, and different classes of insurance.
I really don't see the problem in simply letting insurance companies decide to charge more to who they feel is a greater risk for damages.
So, you're saying kids should know how to use twitter in order to design the next ultimate time waster in the future?
yes
So far, it seems like kids are able to adequately use twitter without the schools helping out.
I also said
However, teaching anything in schools seems unnecessary if they [kids] already have a borderline unhealthy interest in it.
and
People seem to figure it out on their own just by living their normal lives, and therefore doesn't need to be taught in school.
I still say stick to the basics. If the kids don't know basic math and science then they're not going to be able to engineer anything new, and if they don't know basic art concepts they won't be able to adequately design a new look either.
Obviously the basics should not be excluded, but should K-12 exclusively be about the learning basics?
In the next 30 years, arithmetic is not going to change.
And at some point well before High school, we stop teaching kids arithmetic, and move on to more advanced topics.
You can't learn how a smartphone works if you don't know how the stuff before smartphones work.
It depends on your definition of "how something works". You can certainly know how to operate a smartphone without knowing how to design one. The OP was talking about skills that involved using (not designing) technology. It was this use of "knowing how something works" that I started with (e.g. knowing how a hammer works (how to use a hammer) is different from knowing how to make a hammer)
But yes, I think students need to have mastery of lower level topics before they can progress to advanced topics.
I was merely pointing out that the analogy of "the people who built the first smartphone had never seen a smartphone" was a bit misleading.
The task of having an idea to make a multipurpose computer that replaces a dumb single purpose cell phone does not require knowledge of how cell phones work (how to design a cell phone). But it probably does require knowledge of how dumb cell phones "work" (familiarity with dumb cell phones, how to operate them, etc).
The task of actually making (designing) a smartphone (once the idea has been formulated), requires lots of school as well as familiarity with how the previous technology worked and was used.
.
Who built the first smartphone? Was it Steve jobs with the vision? Or the engineers who actually designed and built it? You don't need to be an engineer to be a Steve Jobs and "build" the first smartphone. But you do have to be familiar with how regular dumb phones are used.
And schools don't (and maybe can't and shouldn't try to) teach people how to be Steve Jobs. Maybe business school does something like this... I wouldn't know.
I can cut my lawn with toenail clippers and it would be a lot of work/effort. Is this the definition of work you are using?
I would add basic arithmetic, and the ability to do sums in your head. Where do you use it? In real life, when dealing with money. You go to the grocery store, you pick up stuff, you check out. How about knowing if your basket of food is in your budget? Or if buying that extra treat will break the budget? Being able to estimate your basket with tax is handy, and doing so without dragging out a calculator doubly so.
This is one of the few things in the area of mathematics, that I think we really don't need people to be good at.
Using a calculator is really easy. Calculators are really cheap. They are solar powered and don't even need batteries. And they are incalculably more accurate than a human being at crunching numbers.
Should kids be able to do arithmetic? Yes. But I don't think they need to approach the accuracy of a calculator (which is nearly impossible). I think they should be able to know how to do it, as this knowledge is fundamental to mathematics, but being able to do it quickly and error free in your mind is a waste of time considering nearly every person has a calculator in their pocket at all times.
There was a time when mathematicians all had volumes of books of logarithms. They could tediously calculate the logarithms tediously by hand (and make lots of mistakes). Or they could much more quickly and accurately look up the value in a book. Then "cheap" calculators came along (e.g. like $1000), and all the mathematicians threw away their logarithm books.
Mathematics is for humans. Arithmetic is for calculators.
Yes, the register does it all, but how do you know the price got scanned correctly? Many times you can save a few bucks through scanning errors by realizing what was $3 scanned for $4. And sometimes, if you read those little posted notices, you can get $10 off a scanned error (or for stuff under $10, free!).
All that effort to save a couple bucks here and there? Not only that, but rather than checking the register in your head, you could have checked the register on your own calculator and caught even more mistakes and saved even more money.
Even after all the governments fall in the zombie apocalypse, and we lose all our technology as our power plants shut down, we will still have millions of solar powered calculators.
IDE's don't do any of the work- they take care of the things aren't actually programming.
If an IDE takes care of things that I would otherwise have to do (programming or not), then it is doing work. It is freeing me to do other things. It is increasing my productivity.
The nice part about tools, is that despite the work they do, you don't have to pay them, so you should be using every tool that increases productivity.
It's an example of another technology that makes the job of programming much easier, but doesn't literally write your code for you. I don't think we should consider tools that don't do any "programming work" as not doing any work. I think we should value any and all tools which significantly increase productivity.
I didn't include anything in the term programming. I think it is ridiculous to label anything that isn't "programming" as "doing none of the work". Either programming is narrow, and the job of a programmer includes lots of things that are not programming, and anything that helps with those no programming tasks is doing work (even if it is not programming), and is therefore useful. Or programming is broad and an IDE is clearly helping to do the work of programming.
My post was meant to illustrate that there are many things that do a lot of the work (i.e. freeing humans to be more productive), that are what I would consider equally as "non-programming" as what an IDE does. Compilers don't actually generate any source code either. They however do an immense amount of work. We didn't always have compilers. There was a time when programmers tediously wrote low level assembly code, and were relatively much less productive than programmers with access to compilers.
I agree that the people who built the first skyscraper probably didn't know how to design a contemporary building while in high school, but they almost certainly knew how to "use" such a building (i.e. they were familiar with it's proper functionality).
But as I said, the proper operation of a building is something that does not need to be taught in school. People seem to figure it out on their own just by living their normal lives, and therefore doesn't need to be taught in school.
However, I think Amish kids (e.g. kids that are denied the opportunity to use technology) might be at a disadvantage in creating new technology. I think understanding how to use existing technology is a prerequisite (albeit a trivial one) to being able to create future technology.
I think you are confusing effort with productivity.