Is it ACTUALLY more expensive to not do anything? Certainly, morally, but in terms of actual solutions and their efficacy and the knock-on effects and the cost of implementations - the data is actually thin on the ground.
The Paris agreement is an example. Even if we all stuck to it, these same research bodies are now saying it's not enough.
If the cost of not-drowing-in-Waterworld is to actually make many modern conveniences so expensive and unobtainable, have we "won"? Is that "better"? Is people aren't being flooded out of the coastal regions, but nobody can afford their electricity bill, or medicines and oils and products and shipping is suddenly twice as expensive?
Everyone's done the "cost analysis" of not doing something. Nobody has (realistically) done the cost analysis of actually doing something that might work - or even really suggested what that is.
It's a huge bugbear to me. The solutions are half-assed casual suggestions ("release less CO2", "stop burning oil"), etc. but the COST of doing so is not just a number on a balance sheet. More old people will die in winter, more things we take for granted won't be practical, and the associated error-bars are HUGE because we just don't know what's going to happen.
I'm perfectly happy to trust in science and saying yes, this is happening, it's bad, it's caused by us. Let's take that as an "assumption" to work from even if you don't personally believe it.
Now what? What do we do that fixes it? We stop burning coal. Okay, what would that affect? To my knowledge only one country in the world is coal-free on any regular basis (Germany?), and that's still one of the countries most reliant on coal overall. It's ALWAYS fossil fuels. Then nuclear. Then biomass (trees!). Then all the other "renewable" sources.
So just a simple statement as "don't burn coal" drastically affects the economy and energy production of every country on the planet. That's going to knock into heating, cooling and industry before anything else. Which is going to kill people (even if only the elderly) and make everything more expensive.
And that's just one item. Taken together, do the effects of "let's just burn everything, ramp up energy and use that resource to find a better solution" actually kill less or more people over the next 100 years? We don't know. Few ever study the "other side" of the coin.
The problem with this kind of thing, which I wholeheartedly believe is conveying a necessary message, is that the message boils down to "DO THIS OR DIE!" and then someone in the crowd says "But... if we do that... do we not die anyway? Just in a different way, while destroying industry and society and causing more damage long-term?" And nobody has even the decency to look sheepish or say "Well, no, actually we looked and it wouldn't hurt at all if we did X instead".
The research into that side might exist, but it's certainly not being advertised and not being made popular and almost certainly not being done as rigorously or as seriously as the scaremongering.
I'd honestly like to know - if we do EVERYTHING - if we all get unanimous worldwide co-operation and overnight we all become vegans who wash their clothes on rocks, solar-power the entire world, never burn so much as a match again, pump all our energy resources into reversing the CO2 increase, recycle every plastic bag in every landfill in the planet, etc. etc. etc. - whatever loony ideas we can come up with - will that *actually* make it better than the alternative? Because I see drastically little evidence that way. I know we all say "it's there, it's what the scientists say"... but as I consider myself a scientist, I can't honestly look and say "I must recommend this path, or indeed ANY path, out of this mess, because it will be better than the thing we think might happen if we don't".
Everyone acknowledges the problem. The solution eludes us. And the cost-benefit analysis of any dream we can imagine is really "Er... dunno... probably not" at best.
You don't "settle" unless you know that the consequences of not settling would be much worse.
It's a voluntary agreement to avoid - what must be almost inevitable - formal charges.
Not even an idiot like Musk "settles" for that kind of money / restriction without having considered the alternative.
If anything, I think that "settling" with a government entity should be what's illegal. Much like the UK tax authority (HMRC) "settling out of court" with people like Facebook and Apple on their unpaid tax.
Shouldn't be allowed... if you have evidence of a crime, convict them.
A drone that can lift anything sizeable for any decent distance (i.e. far enough to be away from any camera on the target etc.) is going to cost a damn sight more than a cab ride... and leave purchase records.
Really? 50 miles from the nearest town, for a fraction of a minute as a driverless car pulls up to pick you up, and then you're long gone? Otherwise just waiting in a car in a field somewhere?
It's not like you've been there all day - you're there precisely long enough to load up the "package" and make it go to its destination while staying away from any cameras it may have.
I haven't owned a console from-new since I was a child. The last one I actually ever had was the original Wii.
It's always been PC precisely because of the reasons you state AND that a PC can emulate all my old games perfectly well, thanks.
And not just that, but a PC can do everything else. One machine for entertainment, games, work, remote-working, travelling on a plane, etc.
Steam is the "console experience" of the modern age.
I'll give you some exceptions, though:
- XBox wireless controllers. Best thing for multiplayer on a PC. Because they present as standard PC hardware, basically. - Wii controllers can be joined via Bluetooth. - Things like RetroPie do a wonderful non-PC job of having a home "console" for retro games.
Everything else, I literally have never bothered with. Watched someone play the latest Assassin's Creed something-or-other recently on some XBox console and honestly got bored within minutes. That was after an hour of downloading updates from new, messing about with the disk to make it read, signing into this or that account, going through some rigmarole about the right account for doing things etc.
But my Steam account has 1000 games, I just double-click on the name and it runs and we have multiplayer games parties. And, oh look... I could click buy and own Assassin's Creed now if I wanted to. If someone else is using it, I just sling it into Big Picture Mode and it becomes a console to them and they can go in and out of games to their heart's content.
I haven't "got" games consoles since they first started going online. At that point all the advantages they had dripped away to become inferior PCs. The XBox WAS a PC, quite literally.
All the people who complain about "driver issues" and things seem to be really echoing some circa-1997 things that people complain about. If you can get on Chrome, your computer works. If you have a graphics card suitable for gaming, and the game you want is compatible, it'll work. If you're playing Beta drivers on day one of a new game, yeah, you're gonna suffer for that. Otherwise, it doesn't affect 99.9% of people.
And the best bit - you don't have to upgrade much at all. I'll buy a "new laptop" when HL3 comes out and demands it. Until then, I am using an 8-year-old gaming laptop and it runs all my games and laughed at GTA V (though I had SSDd it by then).
The only thing I could kind of understand it for was gaming on the move - since the days of the Gameboy portable games consoles were great. Nowadays, I don't see much point as the smartphone I'm holding wipes the floor with anything Nintendo can make.
The questions are: If the job can be automated, why did nobody else know that, why do his managers not understand that, could *anyone* have done that (not everyone writes code), is that code part of the business or not (I know not all employers have IP-assignment, and usually not if you're not hired as a techy/coding/ideas person) - because otherwise you would have to compensate for that tool, no?
But my question as an employer would be: Fabulous! Thanks! How much can I pay you to licence that tool?
To be honest, debuggers also introduce just as many differences - I have crafted code (nothing special, fancy or playing tricks) that, when debugged, works entirely differently to non-debugged. Debugging inserts all kinds of stuff into the code that modifies the pointers of all kinds of data by vast amounts, and can made it "pass" whatever it is you wanted to do.
Also, if you program against many architectures, an architecture-specific bug might be something that you don't have the tools for, despite debugging the code on all your normal platforms. Yes, a debugger is the ultimate solution, but mostly you might just not have that stuff available and it could be days or weeks before you can get it going to the point that you can effectively debug code that you've been working on for 20 years and know inside out.
Plus many problems are not debuggable - maybe your users are having the issue but you're not, and you can't reproduce, but dozens of your users can, and yet they have almost identical environments to you - the only way to debug that is to set up a full programming, debugging and source environment on their machine - which may be something you don't want to do - or give them an instrumented version of the executable, which may not reproduce the problem.
I know for a fact that I have programs that work on Linux, Windows, even HTML5 (via emscripten), that also can work on Mac. But for sure I wouldn't be buying a Mac to diagnose problems on that platform until it was absolutely necessary. And I wouldn't be giving my code to users for them to diagnose it.
But through in a bunch of printf's and a log and - no matter the architecture or tools available - you can get down to a function, a line, a set of parameters enough to debug before you even need to think "How the fuck am I'm going to go about getting debug info out of that person/system/architecture?"
I know I have a C macro that I prefix all functions with. In "normal" mode, it just expands to a function definition. In "debug" mode, it expands to the function, and a bunch of debugging lines for when it enters/leaves each function and the parameters given to it. This means one switch change and the program runs basically identically to how it runs without debugging, churns out a huge log file, doesn't modify any structures, pointers, etc. and which I can skim the bottom of after a crash report to know where and why it crashed, on any architecture, with a compiled binary, without including the full -g debugging shit that basically gives away your source code (or a version of it).
The other is: Musk lied to the world about the potential of investment in his company.
You can't do that. It's illegal. You can hype, but you can't lie. That's why it's always "we believe...", "we forecast...", "we predict...", "we want to be..."
He's not being held to any rules different to everybody else. And it has little to do with gullibility of investors. Hell, people would have profited from jumping on the hype train and getting out before other people realised what they already knew.
He's being held to account for straight-out lying about what the company were doing, as the CEO of the company.
If you can't see the side of the vehicle, that means that you don't notice when it moves out of alignment creating anything more than the theoretically infinitely-fine angle that you left between the car being visible and not in the mirror.
Thus the blind-spot can build over time and you'll never notice unless you literally adjust every time to see the vehicle and check you can see everything.
You should be able to see your door handle. And not much more. That lets you see if the rear doors are open, that you can view anything behind you coming into the spot that would be the blind spot, and see if your mirrors are going out of alignment (which can happen within a journey, don't forget, you only need a strong wind or a loose bolt).
Everything else you "can't see" is outside an arc traced from the rear of the vehicle to somewhere alongside it - to get there someone needs to have passed through your visibility.
Looks at computer desktop - sees no security popups. Not because I've turned them off but because the things I need to use them for are rare and require specialist attention.
And, sorry, but if a little old granny or a mother in a hurry gets a constant beep in their car, they're going to ask someone about it. Because the vast majority of people's cars do not beep all day long every day.
And when you can't turn that beeping and the flashing seatbelt light off in any other sensible way besides... putting on your seatbelt, guess what people are going to do?
As per your virus question - yes it is. Because just one action will wipe out your PC. Strangely, I consider that a really odd analogy, because nobody I knows tolerates that shite either, and they bring their computers to me to check. And your computer isn't anywhere close to being a ton of metal moving at 70mph within inches of others, where the tiniest deviation can result in instantaneous death.
Whether or not it's the rule, you're a fecking idiot not to.
For a start, airbags are about one tenth as effective without them.
And the reason that countries have it against the law for even your passengers to not wear seatbelts is: that them being fired into you at 130+mph when you have a head-on crash kills them, you and people around you. You survive the impact because of your own belt and airbag and crumple zones and then the fucking 60kg lump behind you hits you at 130mph and shoves you into the remains of your dash and wheel and airbag. You can literally launch people through the windscreen at that speed.
This guy sounds like EVERY point he brings up is to demonstrate exactly how he's the PRECISE category of person the article is aimed at. All kinds of warnings and he wants to turn them all off and ignore them, rather than drive such they aren't activated, and without even the basics of a seat-belt.
I honestly, genuinely hope the guy hits a static lamp-post or something - anything that'll show him he isn't the better judge of speed and distance, and why you want to wear a seatbelt whether it's law or not, and without hurting anyone else but himself. But, no, he's the type who'll take out a family coming the other way because he drifted out of lane, spent 20 seconds shutting off the warning, then it was too late to brake because he wasn't paying attention.
P.S. you get in my car, you put the belt on. It's not optional. I don't care if you're 8 or 80. Even though adult passengers have their own responsibility in my country (myself and any children are my responsibility as the driver). Literally, you take it off, I'm stopping the car. You refuse, you're walking. You "unclip" later in the journey, I'm stopping again.
Not because I'm a 20mph-everywhere kind of guy - because I ain't gonna visit you in hospital, or pay my insurance excess for you to try to claim your injuries against me, or deal with the paperwork of you being dead and proving that I advised you otherwise. I also ain't going to let your kids see you do that if you're with me.
No belt, no drive. It was the first English that my Italian relatives/friends (including kids) learned from me, because they're quite lax over there and when I was driving, even if it was "nono"'s car, they were having their belts on. There was no negotiation possible.
P.S. the fucking beeping warnings are there for a reason.
Because I was a paying customer back before... was it 3.5?
They have literally changed the Vivaldi icon THREE times in the last two years. They have put in all kind of nonsense theming. But still, it's "just a browser".
Despite a preview version being released with an email client in it "by mistake".
Opera was also a torrent downloader, an RSS feed reader, IMAP/POP mail client, and a bunch of other things. Also not present in Vivaldi. Hell, if you do a laundry list of "what Opera had" it puts every modern browser to shame. Vivaldi "letting you customise keyboard shortcuts" is a LONG way from that. And they had 90% of those in the very first version of Vivaldi.
What I want is what Opera was, which is what Vivaldi was promised to be, which is a long way from what it currently is, which is nothing more than a Chrome clone like many others, with barely a single feature that isn't available as a million-and-one Chrome Extensions already.
"Atiyah was made a Knight Bachelor in 1983 and made a member of the Order of Merit in 1992."
Didn't take much to Wiki that.
He's certainly got a very impressive track record. However, there is a certain amount of doubt because the proof incorporates knowledge of his "particular" way of doing things, that's almost impenetrable to most mathematicians. To verify this is going to take a LONG time.
As someone linked above, the second paper is the basis of the mathematics and joining the two together to any semblance of a proof is non-trivial.
Buy a cheap $30 thing off Amazon. Stick a pay-as-you-go SIM in it, with data.
The last one I bought (TK103 - cheap chinese stuff) has GPS and GSM, an internal battery, is just a black-box you fit anywhere in your car, and comes with a bunch of relays for cutting off fuel pumps etc. (if you're into that), a mic for recording the in-car conversation, a button to press to send an emergency text (with location) to a pre-set number, etc.
You just send it text commands from your phone and you can track it (live is tricky without some software knowledge), ask for a one-off location (it sends you a google maps link), ring it to hear the in-car chatter, or send it a text command to cut off the relays, etc..
Literally cheap electronic store junk nowadays. I've had one on my car for about 10 years now.
We no longer need to make cars that go at ludicrous speeds. My cheap run-of-the-mill car will easily do 130mph if I ask it to.
That's unnecessary.
All the safety features on modern cars are there for a reason. Your bumpers disintegrate because they will save your life much better than any older car. Airbags are everywhere, even the roof supports. Because it saves your life. None of those are repairable, you don't want them to be, because people will sell you a car with a second-hand replacement airbag that they bolted in after they rear-ended someone and you'll die.
The entertainment costs an absolute pittance of space and money. Usually the same wires as an ISO radio, maybe
a mic or two, and a couple of data cables. And yet they add satnav, in-car voice activation, bluetooth dialling etc. It's literally such a cheap bolt-on they give it away to you because people go "ooh" or consider it a necessity.
In terms of the *car*, the main engine and everything else, the repairability may have gone down but - you know what, few people care. The vast majority of people do not service their own car. It's just that simple.
My father's a mechanic, worked on fleets for decades. He is perfectly capable of building his own kit cars, making anything out of a pile of scrap, removing every single component of a car and engine, cleaning and servicing, and then refitting it all.
He hasn't for years because... he's not being paid to do it. He did it for me a couple of times for accident repair and literal engine failure, etc. but he wouldn't just do it.
The costs involved are all in the parts. He got trade prices. The rest is labour, which is enormous. The complications of all the modern tech is ridiculous, granted. Yet the computer tells him exactly what's wrong when it would take him hours to find out himself.
So even he would go out of his way to avoid promising anything more than an oil change, a brake-pad change or simple repairs / replacements (e.g. lambda sensors).
Not because he couldn't, but it's just not worth the hassle. And when you buy the kit - even a certified compatible, at trade prices, from a guy you've known 20+ years - it takes longer to fit and piss about than just taking it to a garage. It's not something he can afford to do any more as a favour to people.
ABS is mandated in Europe. No ABS on your car, it doesn't get off the forecourt for the model design. Entertainment and luxury stuff is literally just trim. My dad couldn't do anything about most of it or even approach anything techy, but it's all throwaway computer modules and switches in the seats, nothing complex or expensive. But the actual engine-running and safety features - nobody sits and pisses about with those any more, you can't afford to. Just replacing like-for-like costs a fortune because of the legislation on car design.
For example, seat-belt pre-tensioners. Literal explosives in the seatbelt. You can't mess with that stuff. Airbags in every corner and bracket and door and support. You can't mess with that stuff and even running cables around / near them can be a chore.
It's not that there's nothing to play with. It's not that you have to be an expert to do so. It's not that these features are "unnecessary". It's that there's so much in a modern car that you can't get cheaper parts to replace them and it's just not worth the effort to try.
My dad's already written off changing brakes on my car if they run low because it has an electronic handbrake. I didn't get the option on an entire raft of vehicle models. You get an electronic handbrake. And to safely adjust that means a piece of software from the manufacturer, a lesson in IT, and hours of pissing about.
But the consumer just sees "hill start assist" and doesn't think twice, because they don't care about the repairability. It will hardly ever be them repairing it.
Cars are more-so consumer items now than even computers and tablets and smartphones are. I sympathis
Though that might hold for most things based on the fact that there'll simply be more people as time goes by for quite a while yet, it won't hold generally.
For a start, depending on how broadly you define your industries, you can always cheat.
The people who made cars are... well... gone. The people who ran music shops... gone. The people who took orders at McDonald's... gone. The people behind my bank counter... gone.
Now that doesn't mean that they can't have hired more bank tellers internally to the bank in other roles, it means that there aren't many bank tellers left. All those people who sat behind a bank branch handling cheques? Gone.
Replaced by a handful of computer technicians and people making machines to accept cheques, and people servicing that infrastructure, sure. But the role has gone. And I very, very much doubt that banks are hiring more people to fulfill that role even if they are hiring more people overall.
If you account for "natural inflation", in that there are just that many more customers, branches and people around, then some industries are indeed dying off. Say, staff-per-customer. That's plummeting in some industries. And there's a reason for that.
Whether the *number* of jobs grows isn't the bet here. It's the proportion (i.e. less humans, more machines, proportionally).
Even IT... I can manage a thousand machines from one desktop. I couldn't do that 20 years before. It simply wasn't possible. But I might have the same team-size as I did back then. The problem is, the other guy is nothing but a keyboard jockey, and proportionally I'm servicing twice as many users as I was back then too.
Thus, though the number may not have changed, the proportion and skills has drastically shifted to the machines instead of the people.
Travel agencies died with the advent of online travel price comparison sites (flights, hotels, etc.). Their replacements may have generated more IT jobs, maybe even more sales jobs, but it didn't make more jobs in the actual travel industry, just the opposite.
Whatever way you look at it, that's a hit. And it's predicated on one problem... that as things get more automated, more of those industry jobs go to IT (whether coding, server support, datacentre rookie, or just plain tech support). And more and more of IT is getting automated. You don't even speak to advisers on websites any more, little AI chatbots cut the simple questions out.
Before long there will be a significant hit to other areas. Big supermarkets and shops probably spend more on their online services now than they do on ground staff... it's ground rent that's killing them and pushing them out of the high-street. Do you know how many big-name high-street retailers have gone out of business in the UK in the last 10 years alone? To be replaced with websites.
And last time I changed car insurer, it was all done online (there's an industry that's almost dead offline), and LITERALLY the backend/company/underwriters that actually insured me for my old and new policies from two different brand names were the same place. Same web interface. Same underwriting clauses. Same technical data access. But two different "brands" offering the same insurance policy at completely different prices.
If anything, that's a perfect example that shows you what will happen - an enormous shift to IT-running of these places, everything operated on the basis of algorithms, no human-face at all (even the customer support lines are way understaffed and refer you to the website more than anything) and then an enormous consolidation of those services from all kinds of places into one place that they all outsource to.
It's slow. There are ALWAYS jobs if you want to go looking for them. But it's inevitable, measurable and inexorable.
I'd go for Insurance as the industry. And I'd say that once things like PPI claims etc. are past their expiry dates, those numbers will plummet. Because, as an industry, they just don't nee
I think it's not about "who you are" but "who you decide to be".
Everyone has a natural base, which includes all kinds of unwanted behaviour.
You can either be an adult and compensate for it, literally biting your tongue as necessary or just realising "What does it matter? I'll come back in ten minutes and write a better response." Or you can just live off instinct forever.
Note that I am hypocrite #1 in one sense... because I rarely bite my tongue and when I do so, I do it in a way that people know I'm doing it, which is a message within itself.
However, I also work with a huge bunch of very demanding customers. Which means that I have also learned the proper "Oh, you're an idiot, but I'll deal with you as if you weren't and you'll never tell that I think that" response too.
No, you can't *stop* your brain reacting the way you do. But you can stop your body/mouth reacting that way. Same way that we don't all go out and just force sex on people because we are attracted to them. Brain says one thing, subconsciously, and consciously we know that, know it's not appropriate and moderate any response we may want to give.
That said, I don't think Torvalds is at all bad in this regard. For sure, I'd be a lot worse. He's pretty focused on results, and he gets them, so I think his rants are valuable. There's a big difference between his "No, look, you're just not doing it the wrong way, but I get what you're aiming for" and his "What the hell is this shit?" that tell you everything you need to know.
How long before the FBI are insisting that you silently include a way for them to do the same and bring any Tesla they want to a halt or track it's location? They're doing it for everything from ISPs to encryption, you think they never would want to stop a car? Or that they wouldn't insist you do it under a serious NDA?
I have a 2016 model Ford. I know that the car can't talk home because it just doesn't have that capability. Without the capability, it can't be made to do anything, by anyone. Nobody can remotely apply its brakes or disable its engine. It just doesn't have that level of technology.
Hell, there's an option. I could buy a 3G dongle and connect it to the net and that might well let it talk home and thus be able to do those things. But why would I? And why would I have that dongle all ALL THE TIME?
Like with government controls, ID cards, etc. etc. it's not what you ARE doing, it's what you COULD do if you so desired, and hence what - say - a dictator, rogue intern or enemy state could do if they wanted. Your girlfriend works for the FBI or Tesla? Better hope they don't allow her to see the map data that rats you out, or cut your braking power remotely.
If you don't have the CAPABILITY to do things like that, they can't be misused.
Caffeine addiction is nowhere near as severe as nicotine addiction.
Literally, grown adults will be reduced to neurotic, screaming, shaking wrecks because they don't get their fix of nicotine. I've never ONCE met a smoker who "could give it up any time" who then actually does. Even ones where they were told it was killing them, where they had bits of their body REMOVED because it had killed them (lung cancer, etc.) and still they kept smoking.
Caffeine? You get a headache and a bit cranky. You know how I know? I'm addicted to caffeine. I drink 2 litres of caffeinated drink almost every day and have done for... almost 20 years? Caffeine literally has no effect on me any more - I can drink litres of Coke and then just nod off to sleep no problem. It doesn't ever make me alert or hyper, and lack of it even for extended periods (months) doesn't make me grumpy or tired.
Guess what the first thing to go is when I am low on cash? The caffeine. Guess what the LAST thing a smoker will give up when they're low on cash? Nicotine. Difference being I literally would not notice if I went without caffeine for a month, or stop drinking it. (I drink it because I don't like water, don't enjoy tea/coffee, etc. and Coke/Pepsi is good enough throughout the world to be fairly consistent and always be available).
I speak as someone who lived with a smoker for my entire childhood, who has lived with smokers as young as 18 (just last year in fact), who has worked closely with smokers in their early twenties, etc. They all say "I could give it up". And then I say "You can't." And then they say "Give up your caffeine then". And I guarantee you that every time they challenge me to give up caffeine for as long as they give up nicotine, I win. Every time. Hands down. Sometimes I double, triple, quadruple the time they gave up just to prove the point.
The 18-year-old and my work-colleague were POTLESS, they had no money at all. Totally skint. One was on minimum wage, the other was trying to fund his first ever rented apartment with his also-20, also-smoker girlfriend. They endlessly complained about money, they did tricks on the McDonald's kiosks that gave them a full adult meal (in about 10 parts from children's meals!) for ridiculously low prices just so they could eat.
And yet when I added up their smoking habits it was their largest expenditure of all, with the only exception being rent. More than they spend on food, clothes, their car, or anything else.
The reason for that is addiction. They can't do without it. Both "tried" in a challenge with me. One lasted literally one day (but then pretended to last two weeks because she was so ashamed, but I'd already seen her smoking and confronted her with it when she tried to collect on the bet!), the other a few weeks on a nicotine patch - literally ripping it off his arm in front of me and throwing a strop in work (a school!) to storm off and have a cigarette.
Nicotine addiction is powerful, more powerful than anything else normal people do in daily life. It's not on the same scale. And it makes teenagers with no money go without food or clothes or a house so they can burn it into their lungs.
Cigarettes are not legal for kids. Not anywhere civilised.
Nor should e-cigarettes with addictive components be but the law was slow to catch up.
Nicotine dependence isn't something to encourage in children especially if they are being given the message "this stuff doesn't harm you" which is what e-cigarettes are claiming (though give it 30 years and that might turn out to be a mistake).
I don't think you can argue that children shouldn't be consuming something known to be highly addictive, which shouldn't be available to them, even if the end-result isn't directly damaging to their lungs.
And, no, sugar etc. isn't addictive, and even alcohol isn't nearly as addictive and is regulated for minors just as tough.
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But... is it?
Is it ACTUALLY more expensive to not do anything? Certainly, morally, but in terms of actual solutions and their efficacy and the knock-on effects and the cost of implementations - the data is actually thin on the ground.
The Paris agreement is an example. Even if we all stuck to it, these same research bodies are now saying it's not enough.
If the cost of not-drowing-in-Waterworld is to actually make many modern conveniences so expensive and unobtainable, have we "won"? Is that "better"? Is people aren't being flooded out of the coastal regions, but nobody can afford their electricity bill, or medicines and oils and products and shipping is suddenly twice as expensive?
Everyone's done the "cost analysis" of not doing something. Nobody has (realistically) done the cost analysis of actually doing something that might work - or even really suggested what that is.
It's a huge bugbear to me. The solutions are half-assed casual suggestions ("release less CO2", "stop burning oil"), etc. but the COST of doing so is not just a number on a balance sheet. More old people will die in winter, more things we take for granted won't be practical, and the associated error-bars are HUGE because we just don't know what's going to happen.
I'm perfectly happy to trust in science and saying yes, this is happening, it's bad, it's caused by us. Let's take that as an "assumption" to work from even if you don't personally believe it.
Now what? What do we do that fixes it? We stop burning coal. Okay, what would that affect? To my knowledge only one country in the world is coal-free on any regular basis (Germany?), and that's still one of the countries most reliant on coal overall. It's ALWAYS fossil fuels. Then nuclear. Then biomass (trees!). Then all the other "renewable" sources.
So just a simple statement as "don't burn coal" drastically affects the economy and energy production of every country on the planet. That's going to knock into heating, cooling and industry before anything else. Which is going to kill people (even if only the elderly) and make everything more expensive.
And that's just one item. Taken together, do the effects of "let's just burn everything, ramp up energy and use that resource to find a better solution" actually kill less or more people over the next 100 years? We don't know. Few ever study the "other side" of the coin.
The problem with this kind of thing, which I wholeheartedly believe is conveying a necessary message, is that the message boils down to "DO THIS OR DIE!" and then someone in the crowd says "But... if we do that... do we not die anyway? Just in a different way, while destroying industry and society and causing more damage long-term?" And nobody has even the decency to look sheepish or say "Well, no, actually we looked and it wouldn't hurt at all if we did X instead".
The research into that side might exist, but it's certainly not being advertised and not being made popular and almost certainly not being done as rigorously or as seriously as the scaremongering.
I'd honestly like to know - if we do EVERYTHING - if we all get unanimous worldwide co-operation and overnight we all become vegans who wash their clothes on rocks, solar-power the entire world, never burn so much as a match again, pump all our energy resources into reversing the CO2 increase, recycle every plastic bag in every landfill in the planet, etc. etc. etc. - whatever loony ideas we can come up with - will that *actually* make it better than the alternative? Because I see drastically little evidence that way. I know we all say "it's there, it's what the scientists say"... but as I consider myself a scientist, I can't honestly look and say "I must recommend this path, or indeed ANY path, out of this mess, because it will be better than the thing we think might happen if we don't".
Everyone acknowledges the problem. The solution eludes us. And the cost-benefit analysis of any dream we can imagine is really "Er... dunno... probably not" at best.
You don't "settle" unless you know that the consequences of not settling would be much worse.
It's a voluntary agreement to avoid - what must be almost inevitable - formal charges.
Not even an idiot like Musk "settles" for that kind of money / restriction without having considered the alternative.
If anything, I think that "settling" with a government entity should be what's illegal. Much like the UK tax authority (HMRC) "settling out of court" with people like Facebook and Apple on their unpaid tax.
Shouldn't be allowed... if you have evidence of a crime, convict them.
A drone that can lift anything sizeable for any decent distance (i.e. far enough to be away from any camera on the target etc.) is going to cost a damn sight more than a cab ride... and leave purchase records.
Really? 50 miles from the nearest town, for a fraction of a minute as a driverless car pulls up to pick you up, and then you're long gone? Otherwise just waiting in a car in a field somewhere?
It's not like you've been there all day - you're there precisely long enough to load up the "package" and make it go to its destination while staying away from any cameras it may have.
I haven't owned a console from-new since I was a child. The last one I actually ever had was the original Wii.
It's always been PC precisely because of the reasons you state AND that a PC can emulate all my old games perfectly well, thanks.
And not just that, but a PC can do everything else. One machine for entertainment, games, work, remote-working, travelling on a plane, etc.
Steam is the "console experience" of the modern age.
I'll give you some exceptions, though:
- XBox wireless controllers. Best thing for multiplayer on a PC. Because they present as standard PC hardware, basically.
- Wii controllers can be joined via Bluetooth.
- Things like RetroPie do a wonderful non-PC job of having a home "console" for retro games.
Everything else, I literally have never bothered with. Watched someone play the latest Assassin's Creed something-or-other recently on some XBox console and honestly got bored within minutes. That was after an hour of downloading updates from new, messing about with the disk to make it read, signing into this or that account, going through some rigmarole about the right account for doing things etc.
But my Steam account has 1000 games, I just double-click on the name and it runs and we have multiplayer games parties. And, oh look... I could click buy and own Assassin's Creed now if I wanted to. If someone else is using it, I just sling it into Big Picture Mode and it becomes a console to them and they can go in and out of games to their heart's content.
I haven't "got" games consoles since they first started going online. At that point all the advantages they had dripped away to become inferior PCs. The XBox WAS a PC, quite literally.
All the people who complain about "driver issues" and things seem to be really echoing some circa-1997 things that people complain about. If you can get on Chrome, your computer works. If you have a graphics card suitable for gaming, and the game you want is compatible, it'll work. If you're playing Beta drivers on day one of a new game, yeah, you're gonna suffer for that. Otherwise, it doesn't affect 99.9% of people.
And the best bit - you don't have to upgrade much at all. I'll buy a "new laptop" when HL3 comes out and demands it. Until then, I am using an 8-year-old gaming laptop and it runs all my games and laughed at GTA V (though I had SSDd it by then).
The only thing I could kind of understand it for was gaming on the move - since the days of the Gameboy portable games consoles were great. Nowadays, I don't see much point as the smartphone I'm holding wipes the floor with anything Nintendo can make.
Book taxi to drive somewhere quiet for a pickup.
Put bomb in dummy on back seat while dressed head-to-toe in black.
Set taxi destination to some sensitive location, or as near as damn it.
Boom.
Wait for the fallout as they realise the only thing they have is a rural location and a pre-pay credit card to link it all back to.
The questions are: If the job can be automated, why did nobody else know that, why do his managers not understand that, could *anyone* have done that (not everyone writes code), is that code part of the business or not (I know not all employers have IP-assignment, and usually not if you're not hired as a techy/coding/ideas person) - because otherwise you would have to compensate for that tool, no?
But my question as an employer would be: Fabulous! Thanks! How much can I pay you to licence that tool?
Ever tried debugging deep-level OS kernel code?
To be honest, debuggers also introduce just as many differences - I have crafted code (nothing special, fancy or playing tricks) that, when debugged, works entirely differently to non-debugged. Debugging inserts all kinds of stuff into the code that modifies the pointers of all kinds of data by vast amounts, and can made it "pass" whatever it is you wanted to do.
Also, if you program against many architectures, an architecture-specific bug might be something that you don't have the tools for, despite debugging the code on all your normal platforms. Yes, a debugger is the ultimate solution, but mostly you might just not have that stuff available and it could be days or weeks before you can get it going to the point that you can effectively debug code that you've been working on for 20 years and know inside out.
Plus many problems are not debuggable - maybe your users are having the issue but you're not, and you can't reproduce, but dozens of your users can, and yet they have almost identical environments to you - the only way to debug that is to set up a full programming, debugging and source environment on their machine - which may be something you don't want to do - or give them an instrumented version of the executable, which may not reproduce the problem.
I know for a fact that I have programs that work on Linux, Windows, even HTML5 (via emscripten), that also can work on Mac. But for sure I wouldn't be buying a Mac to diagnose problems on that platform until it was absolutely necessary. And I wouldn't be giving my code to users for them to diagnose it.
But through in a bunch of printf's and a log and - no matter the architecture or tools available - you can get down to a function, a line, a set of parameters enough to debug before you even need to think "How the fuck am I'm going to go about getting debug info out of that person/system/architecture?"
I know I have a C macro that I prefix all functions with. In "normal" mode, it just expands to a function definition. In "debug" mode, it expands to the function, and a bunch of debugging lines for when it enters/leaves each function and the parameters given to it. This means one switch change and the program runs basically identically to how it runs without debugging, churns out a huge log file, doesn't modify any structures, pointers, etc. and which I can skim the bottom of after a crash report to know where and why it crashed, on any architecture, with a compiled binary, without including the full -g debugging shit that basically gives away your source code (or a version of it).
That's one interpretation.
The other is: Musk lied to the world about the potential of investment in his company.
You can't do that. It's illegal. You can hype, but you can't lie. That's why it's always "we believe...", "we forecast...", "we predict...", "we want to be..."
He's not being held to any rules different to everybody else. And it has little to do with gullibility of investors. Hell, people would have profited from jumping on the hype train and getting out before other people realised what they already knew.
He's being held to account for straight-out lying about what the company were doing, as the CEO of the company.
If you can't see the side of the vehicle, that means that you don't notice when it moves out of alignment creating anything more than the theoretically infinitely-fine angle that you left between the car being visible and not in the mirror.
Thus the blind-spot can build over time and you'll never notice unless you literally adjust every time to see the vehicle and check you can see everything.
You should be able to see your door handle. And not much more. That lets you see if the rear doors are open, that you can view anything behind you coming into the spot that would be the blind spot, and see if your mirrors are going out of alignment (which can happen within a journey, don't forget, you only need a strong wind or a loose bolt).
Everything else you "can't see" is outside an arc traced from the rear of the vehicle to somewhere alongside it - to get there someone needs to have passed through your visibility.
Looks at computer desktop - sees no security popups. Not because I've turned them off but because the things I need to use them for are rare and require specialist attention.
And, sorry, but if a little old granny or a mother in a hurry gets a constant beep in their car, they're going to ask someone about it. Because the vast majority of people's cars do not beep all day long every day.
And when you can't turn that beeping and the flashing seatbelt light off in any other sensible way besides... putting on your seatbelt, guess what people are going to do?
As per your virus question - yes it is. Because just one action will wipe out your PC. Strangely, I consider that a really odd analogy, because nobody I knows tolerates that shite either, and they bring their computers to me to check. And your computer isn't anywhere close to being a ton of metal moving at 70mph within inches of others, where the tiniest deviation can result in instantaneous death.
Whether or not it's the rule, you're a fecking idiot not to.
For a start, airbags are about one tenth as effective without them.
And the reason that countries have it against the law for even your passengers to not wear seatbelts is: that them being fired into you at 130+mph when you have a head-on crash kills them, you and people around you. You survive the impact because of your own belt and airbag and crumple zones and then the fucking 60kg lump behind you hits you at 130mph and shoves you into the remains of your dash and wheel and airbag. You can literally launch people through the windscreen at that speed.
This guy sounds like EVERY point he brings up is to demonstrate exactly how he's the PRECISE category of person the article is aimed at. All kinds of warnings and he wants to turn them all off and ignore them, rather than drive such they aren't activated, and without even the basics of a seat-belt.
I honestly, genuinely hope the guy hits a static lamp-post or something - anything that'll show him he isn't the better judge of speed and distance, and why you want to wear a seatbelt whether it's law or not, and without hurting anyone else but himself. But, no, he's the type who'll take out a family coming the other way because he drifted out of lane, spent 20 seconds shutting off the warning, then it was too late to brake because he wasn't paying attention.
P.S. you get in my car, you put the belt on. It's not optional. I don't care if you're 8 or 80. Even though adult passengers have their own responsibility in my country (myself and any children are my responsibility as the driver). Literally, you take it off, I'm stopping the car. You refuse, you're walking. You "unclip" later in the journey, I'm stopping again.
Not because I'm a 20mph-everywhere kind of guy - because I ain't gonna visit you in hospital, or pay my insurance excess for you to try to claim your injuries against me, or deal with the paperwork of you being dead and proving that I advised you otherwise. I also ain't going to let your kids see you do that if you're with me.
No belt, no drive. It was the first English that my Italian relatives/friends (including kids) learned from me, because they're quite lax over there and when I was driving, even if it was "nono"'s car, they were having their belts on. There was no negotiation possible.
P.S. the fucking beeping warnings are there for a reason.
Did you ever use Opera? I mean really?
Because I was a paying customer back before... was it 3.5?
They have literally changed the Vivaldi icon THREE times in the last two years. They have put in all kind of nonsense theming. But still, it's "just a browser".
Despite a preview version being released with an email client in it "by mistake".
Opera was also a torrent downloader, an RSS feed reader, IMAP/POP mail client, and a bunch of other things. Also not present in Vivaldi. Hell, if you do a laundry list of "what Opera had" it puts every modern browser to shame. Vivaldi "letting you customise keyboard shortcuts" is a LONG way from that. And they had 90% of those in the very first version of Vivaldi.
What I want is what Opera was, which is what Vivaldi was promised to be, which is a long way from what it currently is, which is nothing more than a Chrome clone like many others, with barely a single feature that isn't available as a million-and-one Chrome Extensions already.
Great.
What about all those other features promised years ago where it was going to be "more than just a browser".
It's literally a Chrome clone. It was supposed to be an Opera clone, because you used to make Opera.
If you don't get the difference, and see that you've just made a Chrome clone, I don't see how you can even bring yourself to announce anything.
Nope.
https://math.stackexchange.com...
And elliptic curve cryptography has even less to with primes. Nor most of the "post-quantum" cryptography already available.
"Atiyah was made a Knight Bachelor in 1983 and made a member of the Order of Merit in 1992."
Didn't take much to Wiki that.
He's certainly got a very impressive track record. However, there is a certain amount of doubt because the proof incorporates knowledge of his "particular" way of doing things, that's almost impenetrable to most mathematicians. To verify this is going to take a LONG time.
As someone linked above, the second paper is the basis of the mathematics and joining the two together to any semblance of a proof is non-trivial.
Look at the number of digits in the UID.
Ironic that Slashdot are now quoting stories from SoylentNews, because they get there first and have better coverage.
Buy a cheap $30 thing off Amazon. Stick a pay-as-you-go SIM in it, with data.
The last one I bought (TK103 - cheap chinese stuff) has GPS and GSM, an internal battery, is just a black-box you fit anywhere in your car, and comes with a bunch of relays for cutting off fuel pumps etc. (if you're into that), a mic for recording the in-car conversation, a button to press to send an emergency text (with location) to a pre-set number, etc.
You just send it text commands from your phone and you can track it (live is tricky without some software knowledge), ask for a one-off location (it sends you a google maps link), ring it to hear the in-car chatter, or send it a text command to cut off the relays, etc..
Literally cheap electronic store junk nowadays. I've had one on my car for about 10 years now.
We no longer need to make cars that go at ludicrous speeds. My cheap run-of-the-mill car will easily do 130mph if I ask it to.
That's unnecessary.
All the safety features on modern cars are there for a reason. Your bumpers disintegrate because they will save your life much better than any older car. Airbags are everywhere, even the roof supports. Because it saves your life. None of those are repairable, you don't want them to be, because people will sell you a car with a second-hand replacement airbag that they bolted in after they rear-ended someone and you'll die.
The entertainment costs an absolute pittance of space and money. Usually the same wires as an ISO radio, maybe
a mic or two, and a couple of data cables. And yet they add satnav, in-car voice activation, bluetooth dialling etc. It's literally such a cheap bolt-on they give it away to you because people go "ooh" or consider it a necessity.
In terms of the *car*, the main engine and everything else, the repairability may have gone down but - you know what, few people care. The vast majority of people do not service their own car. It's just that simple.
My father's a mechanic, worked on fleets for decades. He is perfectly capable of building his own kit cars, making anything out of a pile of scrap, removing every single component of a car and engine, cleaning and servicing, and then refitting it all.
He hasn't for years because... he's not being paid to do it. He did it for me a couple of times for accident repair and literal engine failure, etc. but he wouldn't just do it.
The costs involved are all in the parts. He got trade prices. The rest is labour, which is enormous. The complications of all the modern tech is ridiculous, granted. Yet the computer tells him exactly what's wrong when it would take him hours to find out himself.
So even he would go out of his way to avoid promising anything more than an oil change, a brake-pad change or simple repairs / replacements (e.g. lambda sensors).
Not because he couldn't, but it's just not worth the hassle. And when you buy the kit - even a certified compatible, at trade prices, from a guy you've known 20+ years - it takes longer to fit and piss about than just taking it to a garage. It's not something he can afford to do any more as a favour to people.
ABS is mandated in Europe. No ABS on your car, it doesn't get off the forecourt for the model design. Entertainment and luxury stuff is literally just trim. My dad couldn't do anything about most of it or even approach anything techy, but it's all throwaway computer modules and switches in the seats, nothing complex or expensive. But the actual engine-running and safety features - nobody sits and pisses about with those any more, you can't afford to. Just replacing like-for-like costs a fortune because of the legislation on car design.
For example, seat-belt pre-tensioners. Literal explosives in the seatbelt. You can't mess with that stuff. Airbags in every corner and bracket and door and support. You can't mess with that stuff and even running cables around / near them can be a chore.
It's not that there's nothing to play with. It's not that you have to be an expert to do so. It's not that these features are "unnecessary". It's that there's so much in a modern car that you can't get cheaper parts to replace them and it's just not worth the effort to try.
My dad's already written off changing brakes on my car if they run low because it has an electronic handbrake. I didn't get the option on an entire raft of vehicle models. You get an electronic handbrake. And to safely adjust that means a piece of software from the manufacturer, a lesson in IT, and hours of pissing about.
But the consumer just sees "hill start assist" and doesn't think twice, because they don't care about the repairability. It will hardly ever be them repairing it.
Cars are more-so consumer items now than even computers and tablets and smartphones are. I sympathis
Though that might hold for most things based on the fact that there'll simply be more people as time goes by for quite a while yet, it won't hold generally.
For a start, depending on how broadly you define your industries, you can always cheat.
The people who made cars are... well... gone.
The people who ran music shops... gone.
The people who took orders at McDonald's... gone.
The people behind my bank counter... gone.
Now that doesn't mean that they can't have hired more bank tellers internally to the bank in other roles, it means that there aren't many bank tellers left. All those people who sat behind a bank branch handling cheques? Gone.
Replaced by a handful of computer technicians and people making machines to accept cheques, and people servicing that infrastructure, sure. But the role has gone. And I very, very much doubt that banks are hiring more people to fulfill that role even if they are hiring more people overall.
If you account for "natural inflation", in that there are just that many more customers, branches and people around, then some industries are indeed dying off. Say, staff-per-customer. That's plummeting in some industries. And there's a reason for that.
Whether the *number* of jobs grows isn't the bet here. It's the proportion (i.e. less humans, more machines, proportionally).
Even IT... I can manage a thousand machines from one desktop. I couldn't do that 20 years before. It simply wasn't possible. But I might have the same team-size as I did back then. The problem is, the other guy is nothing but a keyboard jockey, and proportionally I'm servicing twice as many users as I was back then too.
Thus, though the number may not have changed, the proportion and skills has drastically shifted to the machines instead of the people.
Travel agencies died with the advent of online travel price comparison sites (flights, hotels, etc.). Their replacements may have generated more IT jobs, maybe even more sales jobs, but it didn't make more jobs in the actual travel industry, just the opposite.
Whatever way you look at it, that's a hit. And it's predicated on one problem... that as things get more automated, more of those industry jobs go to IT (whether coding, server support, datacentre rookie, or just plain tech support). And more and more of IT is getting automated. You don't even speak to advisers on websites any more, little AI chatbots cut the simple questions out.
Before long there will be a significant hit to other areas. Big supermarkets and shops probably spend more on their online services now than they do on ground staff... it's ground rent that's killing them and pushing them out of the high-street. Do you know how many big-name high-street retailers have gone out of business in the UK in the last 10 years alone? To be replaced with websites.
And last time I changed car insurer, it was all done online (there's an industry that's almost dead offline), and LITERALLY the backend/company/underwriters that actually insured me for my old and new policies from two different brand names were the same place. Same web interface. Same underwriting clauses. Same technical data access. But two different "brands" offering the same insurance policy at completely different prices.
If anything, that's a perfect example that shows you what will happen - an enormous shift to IT-running of these places, everything operated on the basis of algorithms, no human-face at all (even the customer support lines are way understaffed and refer you to the website more than anything) and then an enormous consolidation of those services from all kinds of places into one place that they all outsource to.
It's slow. There are ALWAYS jobs if you want to go looking for them. But it's inevitable, measurable and inexorable.
I'd go for Insurance as the industry. And I'd say that once things like PPI claims etc. are past their expiry dates, those numbers will plummet. Because, as an industry, they just don't nee
I think it's not about "who you are" but "who you decide to be".
Everyone has a natural base, which includes all kinds of unwanted behaviour.
You can either be an adult and compensate for it, literally biting your tongue as necessary or just realising "What does it matter? I'll come back in ten minutes and write a better response." Or you can just live off instinct forever.
Note that I am hypocrite #1 in one sense... because I rarely bite my tongue and when I do so, I do it in a way that people know I'm doing it, which is a message within itself.
However, I also work with a huge bunch of very demanding customers. Which means that I have also learned the proper "Oh, you're an idiot, but I'll deal with you as if you weren't and you'll never tell that I think that" response too.
No, you can't *stop* your brain reacting the way you do. But you can stop your body/mouth reacting that way. Same way that we don't all go out and just force sex on people because we are attracted to them. Brain says one thing, subconsciously, and consciously we know that, know it's not appropriate and moderate any response we may want to give.
That said, I don't think Torvalds is at all bad in this regard. For sure, I'd be a lot worse. He's pretty focused on results, and he gets them, so I think his rants are valuable. There's a big difference between his "No, look, you're just not doing it the wrong way, but I get what you're aiming for" and his "What the hell is this shit?" that tell you everything you need to know.
It's not about what you do.
It's about what you CAN do.
How long before the FBI are insisting that you silently include a way for them to do the same and bring any Tesla they want to a halt or track it's location? They're doing it for everything from ISPs to encryption, you think they never would want to stop a car? Or that they wouldn't insist you do it under a serious NDA?
I have a 2016 model Ford. I know that the car can't talk home because it just doesn't have that capability. Without the capability, it can't be made to do anything, by anyone. Nobody can remotely apply its brakes or disable its engine. It just doesn't have that level of technology.
Hell, there's an option. I could buy a 3G dongle and connect it to the net and that might well let it talk home and thus be able to do those things. But why would I? And why would I have that dongle all ALL THE TIME?
Like with government controls, ID cards, etc. etc. it's not what you ARE doing, it's what you COULD do if you so desired, and hence what - say - a dictator, rogue intern or enemy state could do if they wanted. Your girlfriend works for the FBI or Tesla? Better hope they don't allow her to see the map data that rats you out, or cut your braking power remotely.
If you don't have the CAPABILITY to do things like that, they can't be misused.
Caffeine addiction is nowhere near as severe as nicotine addiction.
Literally, grown adults will be reduced to neurotic, screaming, shaking wrecks because they don't get their fix of nicotine. I've never ONCE met a smoker who "could give it up any time" who then actually does. Even ones where they were told it was killing them, where they had bits of their body REMOVED because it had killed them (lung cancer, etc.) and still they kept smoking.
Caffeine? You get a headache and a bit cranky. You know how I know? I'm addicted to caffeine. I drink 2 litres of caffeinated drink almost every day and have done for... almost 20 years? Caffeine literally has no effect on me any more - I can drink litres of Coke and then just nod off to sleep no problem. It doesn't ever make me alert or hyper, and lack of it even for extended periods (months) doesn't make me grumpy or tired.
Guess what the first thing to go is when I am low on cash? The caffeine. Guess what the LAST thing a smoker will give up when they're low on cash? Nicotine. Difference being I literally would not notice if I went without caffeine for a month, or stop drinking it. (I drink it because I don't like water, don't enjoy tea/coffee, etc. and Coke/Pepsi is good enough throughout the world to be fairly consistent and always be available).
I speak as someone who lived with a smoker for my entire childhood, who has lived with smokers as young as 18 (just last year in fact), who has worked closely with smokers in their early twenties, etc. They all say "I could give it up". And then I say "You can't." And then they say "Give up your caffeine then". And I guarantee you that every time they challenge me to give up caffeine for as long as they give up nicotine, I win. Every time. Hands down. Sometimes I double, triple, quadruple the time they gave up just to prove the point.
The 18-year-old and my work-colleague were POTLESS, they had no money at all. Totally skint. One was on minimum wage, the other was trying to fund his first ever rented apartment with his also-20, also-smoker girlfriend. They endlessly complained about money, they did tricks on the McDonald's kiosks that gave them a full adult meal (in about 10 parts from children's meals!) for ridiculously low prices just so they could eat.
And yet when I added up their smoking habits it was their largest expenditure of all, with the only exception being rent. More than they spend on food, clothes, their car, or anything else.
The reason for that is addiction. They can't do without it. Both "tried" in a challenge with me. One lasted literally one day (but then pretended to last two weeks because she was so ashamed, but I'd already seen her smoking and confronted her with it when she tried to collect on the bet!), the other a few weeks on a nicotine patch - literally ripping it off his arm in front of me and throwing a strop in work (a school!) to storm off and have a cigarette.
Nicotine addiction is powerful, more powerful than anything else normal people do in daily life. It's not on the same scale. And it makes teenagers with no money go without food or clothes or a house so they can burn it into their lungs.
Cigarettes are not legal for kids. Not anywhere civilised.
Nor should e-cigarettes with addictive components be but the law was slow to catch up.
Nicotine dependence isn't something to encourage in children especially if they are being given the message "this stuff doesn't harm you" which is what e-cigarettes are claiming (though give it 30 years and that might turn out to be a mistake).
I don't think you can argue that children shouldn't be consuming something known to be highly addictive, which shouldn't be available to them, even if the end-result isn't directly damaging to their lungs.
And, no, sugar etc. isn't addictive, and even alcohol isn't nearly as addictive and is regulated for minors just as tough.