I remember when that annoying Crazy Frog ringtone was big fad. It drove my partner nuts that people could make millions of dollars off a stupid ringtone while we had to bust our assess selling software that did important and complicated things. It drove me nuts that my partner could have been in this business for almost twenty years and not understand that in technology support is what determines whether you make money or lose money.
When you are selling a $1.99 ringtone, nobody is ever going to call you with tech support. When you are selling a complex, massively customizable system people call you all the time, and you have to find a way to pay yourself for answering their questions. Or you have to tell your customers to go to hell.
To my mind a cheap smart TV is an economic nightmare. There's no such thing as a "Smart TV", what you're selling them is a computer. A computer which people expect to be as simple, predictable and benign as plain old TV. And for which they won't pay for support because they're not accustomed to doing that for TVs. That pretty much leaves you no choice but to route customers with problems into support purgatory and hope they go away. There's no financial way for the vendor to absorb two or three hours of free support on a $350 device.
Actually the Apple price point for its mobile products have always been consciously set to position them as "affordable luxuries". What that means I can explain by analogy with the popular disinfectant, "Bactine". Pouring "Bactine" into a wound stings because it has got alcohol in it. However it's not the alcohol that kills the germs, it's the benzalkonium chloride. So why is the alcohol there? Well, when they test marketed a version without the stinging alcohol consumers didn't like it, because they couldn't feel it working.
So the price of an "affordable luxury" is chosen to be low enough to be within reach of most people, but high enough to give you a little sting that tells you that you've treated yourself to something special.
It's not regulatory red tape, it's cheap fossil fuels. US natural gas spot prices dropped from $14 / MMBTU in 2006 to around $2.60 in 2016. Over the same period nuclear plants under construction were completed, but
Prior to that nuclear had to weather a 66% drop in coal prices from the 1970s to 2001 and a 8% drop in oil prices from 1980 to 1998.
There is really one and only one compelling economic argument for nuclear at this point: the climate change costs of fossil fuels are externalized, amounting to an involuntary public subsidy of fossil fuels.
What I understand is why people like you think anyone should care if you think something that brings them pleasure is ridiculous. I sincerely don't get it.
You know who tried doing more or less what you are mocking? One of my old MIT professors, Phil Morrison. He was the physicist who designed the explosive lenses used in the Trinity nuclear test and the Nagasaki bomb. He wrote about it in one of his popular science columns. He was especially delighted when neighbors asked whether they could harvest some of his leftover wheat, because that meant his experiment had reproduced a historical side effect of small-scale wheat domestic wheat production: gleaners.
Why would one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century waste his time growing wheat? Because he thought it would be interesting. If you don't understand that you're not a geek, you're a prig.
There's as fine line between living your life connected to other people and living your life to please other people. If someone else "lets themselves go" it's none of our damn business, but when we we lose someone due their impaired health it is still sad, and a reminder to take better care of ourselves.
This is what I taught my kids: everything good you experience through your body; everything you hope to accomplish in life is accomplished through your body. Even if you live by the keyboard your brain is supported by your body and deeply affected by your physical health.
So don't judge others for their appearance or health, but be firm and compassionate with yourself. Live the longest and healthiest life you can manage.
Well, I don't think anyone thinks Brooklyn is going to replace Idaho for potatoes or the Central Valley for Broccoli, but I can think of several reasons to add urban farming as a supplement to the great food-growing regions.
The first is to cater to local tastes. You see this particularly in cities that have large immigrant communities, many members of which have agricultural experience. Urban gardening is quite valuable in giving them access to familiar foods and to ease their transition into the United States. Extending that to a slightly larger market (say local restaurants) can help introduce new foods into the mainstream, and this is a great service to the traditional farmer.
We tend to forget that many crops we take for granted were once exotics -- like tomatoes. Peanuts were an exotic food that was explicitly pushed to give cotton farmers an alternative crop during the boll weevil crisis in the 1900s, and now we see them as part of our national and regional heritages.
As Thomas Jefferson said, "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." The way to do that is on a small scale near lots of people.
Another good reason is to provide access to crops that don't ship well. People who live far from where peaches grow literally have no idea what they're missing. You've never eat a real peach until you've had to do it leaning over the sink. Same goes for tomatoes, which are bred to ship well and are picked green, fake "ripened" with ethanol gas (a plant hormone). The result is boring bulk matter for your boring salad. A vine-ripe heirloom tomato is something to be enthusiastic about, but there's no way you're going to get it from Mexico to New York City. But I don't think having good locally grown tomatoes will hurt the market for supermarket tomatoes which are available year-round.
Do I think we'll be getting much sweet potatoes or wheat from urban farms? No. These are crops that are already widely popular and ship and store well. So urban farming won't supplant rural farming, or even offset it much. That doesn't mean it's not useful.
The story is that Facebook's Safety Check feature began to propagate a fake news story but that Facebook figured that out and shut it down.
If you don't know what that feature is, it detects what might be a big event like a terrorist bombing or a natural disaster and tells you how many of your friends are in the affected area. If you are in the affected area it prompts you to confirm that you are OK and relays that information to your friends. It's actually quite a useful feature but of course if activated in response to fake news could easily start a panic.
Robots like R. Daneel Olivaw or Commander Data or Number Six from Battlestar Galactica are functionally people. They just have different implementation details. There is no more reason against an android like Commander Data marrying a human woman than there would be an infertile man marrying someone.
So the marrying a robot question isn't really that interesting to me. I'm more interested in whether we could actually build an android like that, and where along the path to that end we'd have to consider an android a legal person.
But most of all I question whether the path to more advanced AI ends with something that resembles us at all. I suspect we will eventually succeed in developing AIs that are superior to us in most intellectual respects, but may end up having very little in common with us.
But you have to look at marginal effect; the election was won by a 3.8% margin. That means if roughly 600,000 people out of the 33 million who voted were swayed by those arguments (which were in fact made) then the election would have gone in a different direction.
Ultimately all elections are won by coalitions, not by homogeneous blocks of voters. Why the *major* reasons people vote a particular way are in fact important, unless they are decisive for a majority of voters then small contributors tot he winning coalition can play king-maker.
Well, arguably some of them voted to add £350 million / week to the NHS budget. Some of people voted to reduce the influx of low-priced Continental labor into the UK.
This is a myth -- there are plenty large unionized companies that compete successfully in the market. The reason is simple: the union might not have the shareholders' interests at heart, but success of their product in the marketplace is in their own interest.
Yes, you can point to instances where companies are saddled with bad union contracts -- GM notably. But GM was also notable for unimaginative, lazy management. The bad union contracts were a overall symptom of bad management.
Bad managers love to blame unions for their problems. Hostess Bakeries, for example. From the post WW2 period to the early 90s if an American bought bread, there is as a high chance it was Hostess's "Wonder Bread". We did it without thinking and taught our children to do the same. Then in the mid 90s new management decided to change the formula of Wonder Bread to extend its shelf life. The problem (as the company's unionized bakers pointed out) is that it changed Wonder Bread's signature light and airy texture, making it wet and gluey. Sales of the new-and-nasty Wonder Bread tanked, and the company's stock lost 82% of its value within just three years of introducing the new formula.
And keep in mind they did this just a five years after the entire "New Coke" fisaco. Why, with that cautionary example, would they mess with a profitable product that so many people bought without thinking? Especially as there was no "shelf life" problem -- Wonder Bread flew off the shelves. Management wanted even longer shelf life so they could close down local, unionized bakeries and consolidate operations in union-hostile states.
So this was management trying to kill the unions. They killed the company instead. So who did they blame? The unions. With a straight face they said the problem were union rules that didn't allow delivery truck drivers to help with loading the trucks -- which admittedly might be a ridiculous rule, but where is that on the absurdity scale compared to killing the company's 70 year-old cash cow?
I think the difference is who you're contracting with: the public as a whole or a single employer who can more efficiently exercise a divide-and-conquer strategy to force concessions from people doing the work.
It's not common, but it happens. It happened to me. Let me tell you about hotel managers: they cheerfully tackle any problem they can solve. Need another pillow? Right on it. Need another bottle of shampoo? On it's way sir. But you gave the room I booked to someone else and you're full? They'll treat you like a panhandler.
Well, if you search for the right definition you can make any statement true-ish.
By "capitalist" I mean someone who supports himself by investing in assets as opposed to someone who supports himself by labor. I'm not including everybody who might think that free markets are a good idea for some things.
Hotels do this too. And as much as it sucks to get bumped from a plane, it *really* sucks to show up at a hotel and not have a room, especially when there's a big event on in town.
When I worked in the non-profit sector I had some old-money (literally came over on the Mayflower types) trust fund kids working for me. I visited their parents' houses and they were full of treasures, but not bling. You had to stop and look to realize that the table you were sitting at was 250 years old or the portrait of great-grandpa hanging int he stairway was painted by John Singer Sergeant. I noticed in one dining room that the side board had a massive cast iron base; when I asked about it, I was told it was the 12.7 liter inline eight cylinder engine from a 1931 Bugatti Royale. When I expressed interest in that I was then shown what looked like a child's toy ride-in car under the piano in the living room, and was told was a tiny but fully functional automobile that had been hand built by Ettore Bugatti himself.
I mean, geez, it's not something anyone actually would have a use for, but as pointless things go it was literally a wonder.
After seeing the ancestral houses I can kind of understand the contempt people like the Boston Brahmins and Philadelphia Main Liners have for the nouveau riche; it's like these people were brought up in a museum full of exquisite and historically significant things. A lot like it in fact; in a way they're more like caretakers than owners, handing stuff they got from their distant ancestors down to their descendants.
I would argue that Javascript until fairly recently was barely used in the real world. As someone who learned to program at MIT in the early 80s, Javascript feels a lot like Scheme -- a dialect of Lisp. But until Node came along people were using it like Visual Basic.
As for Lisp in the real world, it definitely *is* used, but largely for things companies like to keep close to their vests -- defense, finance, that kind of thing. You can search for lisp jobs -- there are plenty out there, but they're not code monkey positions.
Actually this is an inevitable property of any kind of utopian scheme in literature. That's because protagonists need to have agency; they need to do things that matter, and in a Utopia there is nothing to be accomplished. Usually literary utopias are totalitarian, forcing people into the roles they would ideally play in the utopian scheme.
The main exception is Star Trek, which sets its human utopian in a non-utopian galaxy. No matter how many planets are brought to Federation standards of enlightenment, the final frontier is still out there, beyond which lay as yet unenlightened societies.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when that annoying Crazy Frog ringtone was big fad. It drove my partner nuts that people could make millions of dollars off a stupid ringtone while we had to bust our assess selling software that did important and complicated things. It drove me nuts that my partner could have been in this business for almost twenty years and not understand that in technology support is what determines whether you make money or lose money.
When you are selling a $1.99 ringtone, nobody is ever going to call you with tech support. When you are selling a complex, massively customizable system people call you all the time, and you have to find a way to pay yourself for answering their questions. Or you have to tell your customers to go to hell.
To my mind a cheap smart TV is an economic nightmare. There's no such thing as a "Smart TV", what you're selling them is a computer. A computer which people expect to be as simple, predictable and benign as plain old TV. And for which they won't pay for support because they're not accustomed to doing that for TVs. That pretty much leaves you no choice but to route customers with problems into support purgatory and hope they go away. There's no financial way for the vendor to absorb two or three hours of free support on a $350 device.
Actually the Apple price point for its mobile products have always been consciously set to position them as "affordable luxuries". What that means I can explain by analogy with the popular disinfectant, "Bactine". Pouring "Bactine" into a wound stings because it has got alcohol in it. However it's not the alcohol that kills the germs, it's the benzalkonium chloride. So why is the alcohol there? Well, when they test marketed a version without the stinging alcohol consumers didn't like it, because they couldn't feel it working.
So the price of an "affordable luxury" is chosen to be low enough to be within reach of most people, but high enough to give you a little sting that tells you that you've treated yourself to something special.
It's not regulatory red tape, it's cheap fossil fuels. US natural gas spot prices dropped from $14 / MMBTU in 2006 to around $2.60 in 2016. Over the same period nuclear plants under construction were completed, but
Prior to that nuclear had to weather a 66% drop in coal prices from the 1970s to 2001 and a 8% drop in oil prices from 1980 to 1998.
There is really one and only one compelling economic argument for nuclear at this point: the climate change costs of fossil fuels are externalized, amounting to an involuntary public subsidy of fossil fuels.
As a rule people who see others responding to X and say, "Well what about Y?" don't give a shit about X or Y.
What I understand is why people like you think anyone should care if you think something that brings them pleasure is ridiculous. I sincerely don't get it.
You know who tried doing more or less what you are mocking? One of my old MIT professors, Phil Morrison. He was the physicist who designed the explosive lenses used in the Trinity nuclear test and the Nagasaki bomb. He wrote about it in one of his popular science columns. He was especially delighted when neighbors asked whether they could harvest some of his leftover wheat, because that meant his experiment had reproduced a historical side effect of small-scale wheat domestic wheat production: gleaners.
Why would one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century waste his time growing wheat? Because he thought it would be interesting. If you don't understand that you're not a geek, you're a prig.
There's as fine line between living your life connected to other people and living your life to please other people. If someone else "lets themselves go" it's none of our damn business, but when we we lose someone due their impaired health it is still sad, and a reminder to take better care of ourselves.
This is what I taught my kids: everything good you experience through your body; everything you hope to accomplish in life is accomplished through your body. Even if you live by the keyboard your brain is supported by your body and deeply affected by your physical health.
So don't judge others for their appearance or health, but be firm and compassionate with yourself. Live the longest and healthiest life you can manage.
Well, I don't think anyone thinks Brooklyn is going to replace Idaho for potatoes or the Central Valley for Broccoli, but I can think of several reasons to add urban farming as a supplement to the great food-growing regions.
The first is to cater to local tastes. You see this particularly in cities that have large immigrant communities, many members of which have agricultural experience. Urban gardening is quite valuable in giving them access to familiar foods and to ease their transition into the United States. Extending that to a slightly larger market (say local restaurants) can help introduce new foods into the mainstream, and this is a great service to the traditional farmer.
We tend to forget that many crops we take for granted were once exotics -- like tomatoes. Peanuts were an exotic food that was explicitly pushed to give cotton farmers an alternative crop during the boll weevil crisis in the 1900s, and now we see them as part of our national and regional heritages.
As Thomas Jefferson said, "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." The way to do that is on a small scale near lots of people.
Another good reason is to provide access to crops that don't ship well. People who live far from where peaches grow literally have no idea what they're missing. You've never eat a real peach until you've had to do it leaning over the sink. Same goes for tomatoes, which are bred to ship well and are picked green, fake "ripened" with ethanol gas (a plant hormone). The result is boring bulk matter for your boring salad. A vine-ripe heirloom tomato is something to be enthusiastic about, but there's no way you're going to get it from Mexico to New York City. But I don't think having good locally grown tomatoes will hurt the market for supermarket tomatoes which are available year-round.
Do I think we'll be getting much sweet potatoes or wheat from urban farms? No. These are crops that are already widely popular and ship and store well. So urban farming won't supplant rural farming, or even offset it much. That doesn't mean it's not useful.
Oh, it's terrible that poor people get to eat good food. Especially people you don't like.
The story is that Facebook's Safety Check feature began to propagate a fake news story but that Facebook figured that out and shut it down.
If you don't know what that feature is, it detects what might be a big event like a terrorist bombing or a natural disaster and tells you how many of your friends are in the affected area. If you are in the affected area it prompts you to confirm that you are OK and relays that information to your friends. It's actually quite a useful feature but of course if activated in response to fake news could easily start a panic.
Once we have robots who can qualify as persons.
Robots like R. Daneel Olivaw or Commander Data or Number Six from Battlestar Galactica are functionally people. They just have different implementation details. There is no more reason against an android like Commander Data marrying a human woman than there would be an infertile man marrying someone.
So the marrying a robot question isn't really that interesting to me. I'm more interested in whether we could actually build an android like that, and where along the path to that end we'd have to consider an android a legal person.
But most of all I question whether the path to more advanced AI ends with something that resembles us at all. I suspect we will eventually succeed in developing AIs that are superior to us in most intellectual respects, but may end up having very little in common with us.
But you have to look at marginal effect; the election was won by a 3.8% margin. That means if roughly 600,000 people out of the 33 million who voted were swayed by those arguments (which were in fact made) then the election would have gone in a different direction.
Ultimately all elections are won by coalitions, not by homogeneous blocks of voters. Why the *major* reasons people vote a particular way are in fact important, unless they are decisive for a majority of voters then small contributors tot he winning coalition can play king-maker.
Well, arguably some of them voted to add £350 million / week to the NHS budget. Some of people voted to reduce the influx of low-priced Continental labor into the UK.
However the unspoken corrollary of "Brexit means Brexit" is that Brexit means none of those other things people were voting for.
This is a myth -- there are plenty large unionized companies that compete successfully in the market. The reason is simple: the union might not have the shareholders' interests at heart, but success of their product in the marketplace is in their own interest.
Yes, you can point to instances where companies are saddled with bad union contracts -- GM notably. But GM was also notable for unimaginative, lazy management. The bad union contracts were a overall symptom of bad management.
Bad managers love to blame unions for their problems. Hostess Bakeries, for example. From the post WW2 period to the early 90s if an American bought bread, there is as a high chance it was Hostess's "Wonder Bread". We did it without thinking and taught our children to do the same. Then in the mid 90s new management decided to change the formula of Wonder Bread to extend its shelf life. The problem (as the company's unionized bakers pointed out) is that it changed Wonder Bread's signature light and airy texture, making it wet and gluey. Sales of the new-and-nasty Wonder Bread tanked, and the company's stock lost 82% of its value within just three years of introducing the new formula.
And keep in mind they did this just a five years after the entire "New Coke" fisaco. Why, with that cautionary example, would they mess with a profitable product that so many people bought without thinking? Especially as there was no "shelf life" problem -- Wonder Bread flew off the shelves. Management wanted even longer shelf life so they could close down local, unionized bakeries and consolidate operations in union-hostile states.
So this was management trying to kill the unions. They killed the company instead. So who did they blame? The unions. With a straight face they said the problem were union rules that didn't allow delivery truck drivers to help with loading the trucks -- which admittedly might be a ridiculous rule, but where is that on the absurdity scale compared to killing the company's 70 year-old cash cow?
I think the difference is who you're contracting with: the public as a whole or a single employer who can more efficiently exercise a divide-and-conquer strategy to force concessions from people doing the work.
They hold out great promise, and it doesn't really hurt to try. But I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
If you go back far enough you have a choice of Lisp or COBOL for inspiration.
if China KFC is anything like the American version most people when they get to the checkout knows what they want.
Perhaps not. In the US fried chicken is comfort food you grandma may have cooked. In China it's exotic foreign swill.
It's not common, but it happens. It happened to me. Let me tell you about hotel managers: they cheerfully tackle any problem they can solve. Need another pillow? Right on it. Need another bottle of shampoo? On it's way sir. But you gave the room I booked to someone else and you're full? They'll treat you like a panhandler.
Well, if you search for the right definition you can make any statement true-ish.
By "capitalist" I mean someone who supports himself by investing in assets as opposed to someone who supports himself by labor. I'm not including everybody who might think that free markets are a good idea for some things.
Hotels do this too. And as much as it sucks to get bumped from a plane, it *really* sucks to show up at a hotel and not have a room, especially when there's a big event on in town.
When I worked in the non-profit sector I had some old-money (literally came over on the Mayflower types) trust fund kids working for me. I visited their parents' houses and they were full of treasures, but not bling. You had to stop and look to realize that the table you were sitting at was 250 years old or the portrait of great-grandpa hanging int he stairway was painted by John Singer Sergeant. I noticed in one dining room that the side board had a massive cast iron base; when I asked about it, I was told it was the 12.7 liter inline eight cylinder engine from a 1931 Bugatti Royale. When I expressed interest in that I was then shown what looked like a child's toy ride-in car under the piano in the living room, and was told was a tiny but fully functional automobile that had been hand built by Ettore Bugatti himself.
I mean, geez, it's not something anyone actually would have a use for, but as pointless things go it was literally a wonder.
After seeing the ancestral houses I can kind of understand the contempt people like the Boston Brahmins and Philadelphia Main Liners have for the nouveau riche; it's like these people were brought up in a museum full of exquisite and historically significant things. A lot like it in fact; in a way they're more like caretakers than owners, handing stuff they got from their distant ancestors down to their descendants.
Being rich doesn't mean you have taste or sense.
The scientists in the Public Health Agency of Canada are capitalists?
I would argue that Javascript until fairly recently was barely used in the real world. As someone who learned to program at MIT in the early 80s, Javascript feels a lot like Scheme -- a dialect of Lisp. But until Node came along people were using it like Visual Basic.
As for Lisp in the real world, it definitely *is* used, but largely for things companies like to keep close to their vests -- defense, finance, that kind of thing. You can search for lisp jobs -- there are plenty out there, but they're not code monkey positions.
Actually this is an inevitable property of any kind of utopian scheme in literature. That's because protagonists need to have agency; they need to do things that matter, and in a Utopia there is nothing to be accomplished. Usually literary utopias are totalitarian, forcing people into the roles they would ideally play in the utopian scheme.
The main exception is Star Trek, which sets its human utopian in a non-utopian galaxy. No matter how many planets are brought to Federation standards of enlightenment, the final frontier is still out there, beyond which lay as yet unenlightened societies.