What should the rest of us do in the meantime while we are waiting for the answers?
Seriously. I'm not anti-science, I'm just against the arrogant viewpoint of some scientists that science will give us the answers we need in a timely manner to create perfect public policy that brings us to utopia.
This is a really good point. Science depends on reconciling competing world views through peer-review. Eventually, one must withdraw their line of research for a variety of reasons. This is not as decisive as some would purport it to be. Statements like "the science is settled", are hardly ever true.
But both are examples of deliberately refusing to acknowledge what is obviously a significant cultural event (in the USA.) By definition, this is counter-culture and that alone is enough to offend many people.
I guess I'm pretty lucky then. Management where I work actively supports the concept of directing customers to the customer support department and to leave Engineering busy with their own work.
Yes exactly. We have this strange concept that anyone in the world can call me, send me a text, IM me or include me in a long email thread. Worse is when they expect an immediate response, or think I should stay at my desk to keep replying to their IM messages. Maybe I'm too busy and my primary job function is not to deal with instant communication.
Text is becoming more widespread and seems to be the _only_ way to reach some people. It does give me a lot of hesitation as well. Even if it is being used more commonly, I can't see it replacing voice conversation outright. I think when companies put up a 'voicewall' making it impossible to talk to a live human they may be making a mistake. I don't typically leave a message if I call a customer support line, but I'd be pissed if I couldn't talk to a human to explain verbally a situation.
Voicemail may be dying, and that doesn't bother me too much. I've never liked the overly pedantic voicemail greeting/outgoing messages that take 30 seconds to listen to all of the obsolete pointless options. I'm pretty sure everyone in this era knows to just start talking when you hear the beep. "Please leave a message for XXX. BEEEP." That would work for me. If I didn't get in touch with someone, all I want to do is to have them call me back or I will try again later. With caller ID, the voicemail is mostly pointless. The only useful information I need to convey is the urgency of the message, maybe a few words to frame the point of my calling.
Nothing is worse than a three minute voicemail monolog trying to have a one-sided conversation with me with specific numbers and descriptions of things. Email is much better for that.
I would say a very loose standard. There are a variety of pallet dimensions. Sometimes you get stuck moving a pallet that the hand jack can't fit into.
At least forklifts have more articulated and usually thinner tines that can be adjusted to fit pretty much everything.
Yeah exactly, which came first? The pallet is virtually useless without the fork. I wonder if the fork jack was invented first, but people got tired of the lower row of boxes in every stack being punctured.:p Some innovative person somewhere thought about it and realized the need for a frame to support the stack of boxes over the forks. But how did they decide to call it a pallet?
Everyone should have equal access to opportunity to earn that stuff. If you are disabled, ok - we will sort that out. If you don't want to get on the economic treadmill, - ok, you can opt out for the simpler life.
But you just want the same stuff to go to everyone just because?
If you think some people have more stuff than they deserve, then look carefully what society values. You are probably mistaken Look upon yourself what you are willing to pay other people for. It is possible some people are ripping off society, but the fix there is transparency and competition.
This is like a math problem involving discontinuity and infinities. I think we can all understand the hypothetical thought-experiment of no jobs resulting in people with no money, therefore how do we distribute the supposedly free goods and services?
Let's never mind the fact that land and materials won't be free. And that nobody will bother to build a factory to make free products even if it costs even nothing to build it.
This isn't the end of capitalism, and I really don't think we need to go all socialist to cope with increasing automation. Even though you could project this to a singularity where all jobs are eliminated (including creative work), I think the very arguments people are having demonstrate why that process will throttle itself before we get there. There will be a point where the cost of automating some jobs is well above the marginal benefits due to the diminishing prices that the capitalists can charge.
The more realistic questions are going to be about where this equilibrium will happen and what to do with the marginalized people? Do we consider them disabled if they cannot be retrained? How do people bootstrap themselves to that level of education if labor isn't worth enough to pay back tuition? What other sort of traps, inversions, quantized effects will occur that we haven't thought of yet?
Yes, anything related to labor will be very low cost (but not free.) There will still be rent-seekers in the economic sense. Not to mention that people want to make their own choices where to live, what to eat, how many kids to have, etc. People will still pay something for the land they live on (we can't all crowd into paradise for free), people will still buy gold jewelry. Likewise, factories will still be owned by someone, built on land that needs to be amortized in the product, and require non-free raw materials. Raw materials, like rare earths, are finite even if the labor for mineral extraction is free.
Do you think the state can decide these things in a way that makes people better off? To even go down that path, how do you 'buy out' the current private stakeholders if money is to become obsolete?
So yes there is always rationing. Economics is simply the question of how you allow this to happen and how much personal choice individuals have.
Exactly. If nobody had to do any work (including 'creative' work like entertainment), what would you want to do with your time? I'd probably value some interaction with friends and family. But I think I'd generally avoid other people and I wouldn't give a care what 'competency' they had. I would either be entertained by robots or explore and visit places. But I don't personally find other people very compelling, since any tangible knowledge or skill they have is better done by a robot.
The only competency that I would still see as being relevant would be the fact that somebody owns the robots, somebody owns the places I want to visit. So I would still need some currency; and I don't think they would find my 'competency' very compelling since they are also too busy avoiding people like me.
To put it more crudely, I think the currency would be the fully 'animated' Realdolls.
I think generalizations and prejudice (i.e. pre-conceived notions about what we think is true) are a common trap that everyone has to stop and think about.
I'm all for being self-aware and checking my assumptions in any situation. For example, in science and technology it makes you a good problem solver to not jump to conclusions based on assumptions.
So why would you even keep the 'white privilege' narrative going? It deliberately generalizes all white people until proven innocent. You say if I'm doing what I can to avoid the sins of stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination, then I am 'safe' from this blame. But that to me sounds too much like 'original sin', guilty until proven innocent, etc.
This is exactly the problem with the 'white privilege' narrative. You don't realize it is the definition of stereotyping.
You only live in your viewpoint. I happen to be white, but you have no right to suppose anything about me, what challenges I've faced, what unfair advantage I may or may not have had. Maybe you carry some guilt. That is fine and I honestly respect the self-reflection.
My parents valued education also, and I feel no guilt about that. They would gladly spend money on tuition over just about anything else. My parents only had some college. My sister and I were pushed to complete at least a Bachelor's degree. Every generation must have expectations.
Furthermore, the narrative of 'privilege' is damaging in the following ways: - We are distracted from productive ways of promoting unity and advancement for all. Basically it is offensive and people stop listening. - Economic success is demonized and torn down. Success comes from one generation passing values to the next. Let's promote this more in a way that helps people of all colors and classes. - It becomes an excuse to just assume whites will always succeed based on color alone, rather than simply realize that education, demeanor, and manner of dress are far more important. - Initiatives such as EEO are downplayed by this narrative if we start believing that whiteness is the only factor. The reality is that most companies _do_ gladly hire minorities because there is no incentive to be racist. Do you really want to take focus away from programs that actually work?
Fox news is pretty quick to break into commentary. But I will say they run stories you wouldn't hear otherwise. Don't waste your time with CNN, ABC, etc. if you want to actually know what is going on in the world. Stick with BBC, NPR, and FOX.
I learned wire-wrapping about 12 years ago in university courses. Prior to that, I would have assumed it was obsolete tech, but there were some very wise and experienced professors. It is much faster and cleaner than soldering. I still use it when debugging boards and I need a quick test lead attached to a pin header. Solder would ruin the connector, but wire-wrap is removable.
I would recommend having all the supplies you can anticipate ahead of time. Food, water, and keep your car fueled up as much as reasonable. Have a generator if you ever anticipate the need. The things that are in demand at those times become very short in supply and will be unavailable at any price. But money should still be kept just in case it becomes needed.
Maybe yes, but probably no. Just getting the Bluetooth chipset to work is probably not that hard. RF testing is expensive and complicated. So it is unlikely that testing went beyond a basic functionality test. It is unlikely that any testing is done by rogue vendors to measure radiated power, frequency spectrum. Furthermore, certified designs take into account failure modes from contamination, vibration, production variation, etc. In the case of intentional transmitters like this, a failure mode could exist that would grossly emit interference.
Fortunately, most academic projects don't need to be maintained beyond the semester, much less from one week to the next. It might be a good topic for freshman to learn to use version control, but that would be a relatively small part of what someone goes to school to learn.
Really good advise about adding overhead. Trying to choose the perfect coding standard, tools, language, etc. should not be the thing to spend time on at this point. If that is the thing that interests you most, then just keep this as a hobby/self-guided project experience for future job interviews.
But for a commercial product - just choose tools/languages that you already know that are reasonably applicable to the task at hand. However it should be something mainstream that will be supportable: new hires will need to adapt to it, and you want to make sure it will be maintained in the future. You have to put your time into developing and selling the core product.
For choosing a coding standard, that will be a headache as you hire more people. It can be a potential ideological battle among your employees, and you have to really evaluate how much a particular standard will specifically improve productivity or quality in the long run vs. hinder or irritate your developers. Some industries already mandate specific coding standards such as MISRA or DoD specs, but for most companies that isn't a factor. My personal feeling is that if you are going to enforce coding standards, you could better spend that time and political capital with your employees by instead reviewing code for mistakes in general perhaps? When you find a particular bug, make sure you have drilled down and found similar cases, etc. Document so that you remember to look for this in the next code review. You will end up with a more robust process rather than imagined cases where code style is an issue.
Paid job experience can be very narrow and misleading as an indicator of future success in another technical job role. You can spend decades coding the same paradigms that happen to fit your employer's specific industry. Worse, you may fall into specific patterns and jargon specific to one particular employer. Formal education is specifically designed to handle a broader range of problem solving and knowledge; and it proves a candidate's basic work ethic.
Job experience helps to temper idealistic expectations to better understand what customers will pay for and how to deliver that effectively.
So I guess it depends what the job role is specifically.
Slashdot Mirror
What should the rest of us do in the meantime while we are waiting for the answers?
Seriously. I'm not anti-science, I'm just against the arrogant viewpoint of some scientists that science will give us the answers we need in a timely manner to create perfect public policy that brings us to utopia.
This is a really good point. Science depends on reconciling competing world views through peer-review. Eventually, one must withdraw their line of research for a variety of reasons. This is not as decisive as some would purport it to be. Statements like "the science is settled", are hardly ever true.
But both are examples of deliberately refusing to acknowledge what is obviously a significant cultural event (in the USA.) By definition, this is counter-culture and that alone is enough to offend many people.
An exercise left to the student?
200 Gigatons *2000 pounds/ton / 2 lbs per board foot / 16000 board feet in average house: 12.5 billion houses?
http://www.idahoforests.org/wo...
http://www.osbornelumber.net/w...
I guess I'm pretty lucky then. Management where I work actively supports the concept of directing customers to the customer support department and to leave Engineering busy with their own work.
Yes exactly. We have this strange concept that anyone in the world can call me, send me a text, IM me or include me in a long email thread. Worse is when they expect an immediate response, or think I should stay at my desk to keep replying to their IM messages. Maybe I'm too busy and my primary job function is not to deal with instant communication.
Text is becoming more widespread and seems to be the _only_ way to reach some people. It does give me a lot of hesitation as well. Even if it is being used more commonly, I can't see it replacing voice conversation outright. I think when companies put up a 'voicewall' making it impossible to talk to a live human they may be making a mistake. I don't typically leave a message if I call a customer support line, but I'd be pissed if I couldn't talk to a human to explain verbally a situation.
Voicemail may be dying, and that doesn't bother me too much. I've never liked the overly pedantic voicemail greeting/outgoing messages that take 30 seconds to listen to all of the obsolete pointless options. I'm pretty sure everyone in this era knows to just start talking when you hear the beep. "Please leave a message for XXX. BEEEP." That would work for me. If I didn't get in touch with someone, all I want to do is to have them call me back or I will try again later. With caller ID, the voicemail is mostly pointless. The only useful information I need to convey is the urgency of the message, maybe a few words to frame the point of my calling.
Nothing is worse than a three minute voicemail monolog trying to have a one-sided conversation with me with specific numbers and descriptions of things. Email is much better for that.
I would say a very loose standard. There are a variety of pallet dimensions. Sometimes you get stuck moving a pallet that the hand jack can't fit into.
At least forklifts have more articulated and usually thinner tines that can be adjusted to fit pretty much everything.
Yeah exactly, which came first? The pallet is virtually useless without the fork. I wonder if the fork jack was invented first, but people got tired of the lower row of boxes in every stack being punctured. :p Some innovative person somewhere thought about it and realized the need for a frame to support the stack of boxes over the forks. But how did they decide to call it a pallet?
Everyone should have equal access to opportunity to earn that stuff.
If you are disabled, ok - we will sort that out.
If you don't want to get on the economic treadmill, - ok, you can opt out for the simpler life.
But you just want the same stuff to go to everyone just because?
If you think some people have more stuff than they deserve, then look carefully what society values. You are probably mistaken Look upon yourself what you are willing to pay other people for. It is possible some people are ripping off society, but the fix there is transparency and competition.
This is like a math problem involving discontinuity and infinities. I think we can all understand the hypothetical thought-experiment of no jobs resulting in people with no money, therefore how do we distribute the supposedly free goods and services?
Let's never mind the fact that land and materials won't be free. And that nobody will bother to build a factory to make free products even if it costs even nothing to build it.
This isn't the end of capitalism, and I really don't think we need to go all socialist to cope with increasing automation. Even though you could project this to a singularity where all jobs are eliminated (including creative work), I think the very arguments people are having demonstrate why that process will throttle itself before we get there. There will be a point where the cost of automating some jobs is well above the marginal benefits due to the diminishing prices that the capitalists can charge.
The more realistic questions are going to be about where this equilibrium will happen and what to do with the marginalized people? Do we consider them disabled if they cannot be retrained? How do people bootstrap themselves to that level of education if labor isn't worth enough to pay back tuition? What other sort of traps, inversions, quantized effects will occur that we haven't thought of yet?
Yes, anything related to labor will be very low cost (but not free.) There will still be rent-seekers in the economic sense. Not to mention that people want to make their own choices where to live, what to eat, how many kids to have, etc. People will still pay something for the land they live on (we can't all crowd into paradise for free), people will still buy gold jewelry. Likewise, factories will still be owned by someone, built on land that needs to be amortized in the product, and require non-free raw materials. Raw materials, like rare earths, are finite even if the labor for mineral extraction is free.
Do you think the state can decide these things in a way that makes people better off? To even go down that path, how do you 'buy out' the current private stakeholders if money is to become obsolete?
So yes there is always rationing. Economics is simply the question of how you allow this to happen and how much personal choice individuals have.
Exactly. If nobody had to do any work (including 'creative' work like entertainment), what would you want to do with your time? I'd probably value some interaction with friends and family. But I think I'd generally avoid other people and I wouldn't give a care what 'competency' they had. I would either be entertained by robots or explore and visit places. But I don't personally find other people very compelling, since any tangible knowledge or skill they have is better done by a robot.
The only competency that I would still see as being relevant would be the fact that somebody owns the robots, somebody owns the places I want to visit. So I would still need some currency; and I don't think they would find my 'competency' very compelling since they are also too busy avoiding people like me.
To put it more crudely, I think the currency would be the fully 'animated' Realdolls.
What would you propose doing to promote a more ideal free market that hasn't yet been tried after 5000 years of human civilization?
I think generalizations and prejudice (i.e. pre-conceived notions about what we think is true) are a common trap that everyone has to stop and think about.
I'm all for being self-aware and checking my assumptions in any situation. For example, in science and technology it makes you a good problem solver to not jump to conclusions based on assumptions.
So why would you even keep the 'white privilege' narrative going? It deliberately generalizes all white people until proven innocent. You say if I'm doing what I can to avoid the sins of stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination, then I am 'safe' from this blame. But that to me sounds too much like 'original sin', guilty until proven innocent, etc.
This is exactly the problem with the 'white privilege' narrative. You don't realize it is the definition of stereotyping.
You only live in your viewpoint. I happen to be white, but you have no right to suppose anything about me, what challenges I've faced, what unfair advantage I may or may not have had. Maybe you carry some guilt. That is fine and I honestly respect the self-reflection.
My parents valued education also, and I feel no guilt about that. They would gladly spend money on tuition over just about anything else. My parents only had some college. My sister and I were pushed to complete at least a Bachelor's degree. Every generation must have expectations.
Furthermore, the narrative of 'privilege' is damaging in the following ways:
- We are distracted from productive ways of promoting unity and advancement for all. Basically it is offensive and people stop listening.
- Economic success is demonized and torn down. Success comes from one generation passing values to the next. Let's promote this more in a way that helps people of all colors and classes.
- It becomes an excuse to just assume whites will always succeed based on color alone, rather than simply realize that education, demeanor, and manner of dress are far more important.
- Initiatives such as EEO are downplayed by this narrative if we start believing that whiteness is the only factor. The reality is that most companies _do_ gladly hire minorities because there is no incentive to be racist. Do you really want to take focus away from programs that actually work?
Fox news is pretty quick to break into commentary. But I will say they run stories you wouldn't hear otherwise. Don't waste your time with CNN, ABC, etc. if you want to actually know what is going on in the world. Stick with BBC, NPR, and FOX.
I learned wire-wrapping about 12 years ago in university courses. Prior to that, I would have assumed it was obsolete tech, but there were some very wise and experienced professors. It is much faster and cleaner than soldering. I still use it when debugging boards and I need a quick test lead attached to a pin header. Solder would ruin the connector, but wire-wrap is removable.
I would recommend having all the supplies you can anticipate ahead of time. Food, water, and keep your car fueled up as much as reasonable. Have a generator if you ever anticipate the need. The things that are in demand at those times become very short in supply and will be unavailable at any price. But money should still be kept just in case it becomes needed.
Maybe yes, but probably no. Just getting the Bluetooth chipset to work is probably not that hard. RF testing is expensive and complicated. So it is unlikely that testing went beyond a basic functionality test. It is unlikely that any testing is done by rogue vendors to measure radiated power, frequency spectrum. Furthermore, certified designs take into account failure modes from contamination, vibration, production variation, etc. In the case of intentional transmitters like this, a failure mode could exist that would grossly emit interference.
Exactly. "Diminishing marginal utility" - Economics 101.
So true. It takes a lot of patience because it will be like that at a lot of jobs and you don't want to piss off the wrong people.
Fortunately, most academic projects don't need to be maintained beyond the semester, much less from one week to the next. It might be a good topic for freshman to learn to use version control, but that would be a relatively small part of what someone goes to school to learn.
Really good advise about adding overhead. Trying to choose the perfect coding standard, tools, language, etc. should not be the thing to spend time on at this point. If that is the thing that interests you most, then just keep this as a hobby/self-guided project experience for future job interviews.
But for a commercial product - just choose tools/languages that you already know that are reasonably applicable to the task at hand. However it should be something mainstream that will be supportable: new hires will need to adapt to it, and you want to make sure it will be maintained in the future. You have to put your time into developing and selling the core product.
For choosing a coding standard, that will be a headache as you hire more people. It can be a potential ideological battle among your employees, and you have to really evaluate how much a particular standard will specifically improve productivity or quality in the long run vs. hinder or irritate your developers. Some industries already mandate specific coding standards such as MISRA or DoD specs, but for most companies that isn't a factor. My personal feeling is that if you are going to enforce coding standards, you could better spend that time and political capital with your employees by instead reviewing code for mistakes in general perhaps? When you find a particular bug, make sure you have drilled down and found similar cases, etc. Document so that you remember to look for this in the next code review. You will end up with a more robust process rather than imagined cases where code style is an issue.
Paid job experience can be very narrow and misleading as an indicator of future success in another technical job role. You can spend decades coding the same paradigms that happen to fit your employer's specific industry. Worse, you may fall into specific patterns and jargon specific to one particular employer. Formal education is specifically designed to handle a broader range of problem solving and knowledge; and it proves a candidate's basic work ethic.
Job experience helps to temper idealistic expectations to better understand what customers will pay for and how to deliver that effectively.
So I guess it depends what the job role is specifically.