I understand why Apple locked down hardware interfaces on their devices back when you plugged most accessories into the bottom of your phone, but why do they still continue to do it now in the era of wireless? For example, the Bluetooth interface still doesn't let you open a serial port profile with another Bluetooth device unless you have paid silly amounts of money to get your product through MFI. What bad thing is my app accessing a wireless bluetooth serial port device going to do that I cannot do with a TCP/IP port onto the internet?
They relaxed things a tiny bit with BTLE, but they ensured the data rates on this were painful slow to the point of excluding a huge class of use cases. And then they ditched the headphone jack which removed a common hack used to get a signal in/out of iDevices. A whole world of external devices controlled by your phone would have been available to use years ago if Apple had had a reasonable wireless hardware policy (or at least had simplified its MFI program - you can't even find out how much it costs until you sign your life away).
Again, I totally understand the original motivation for regulating hardware devices, but with most of the devices people want to connect to being wireless that now seems redundant, and since Apple doesn't appear to be interested in building their own IOT ecosystem, I don't even see what they are gaining financially from the situation. If they opened up the bluetooth SPP there would an explosion in hardware gadgets that you can control with your iPhone.
I'm sure these workers, who were in stable employment working in the great outdoors, will adapt just fine to stuffing amazon boxes on a zero-hour contract in a windowless warehouse, sleeping in their cars, and watching their new employer desperately trying to robot away their job. I mean, its only a couple of decades of trying to keep in front of the boot of automation and then they get to die anyway so no biggie right?
Anyway, they can console themselves by thinking about how good all this progress will be for their children, once they get a better job so they afford to have them of course.
Europe doesn't have the same sort of venture capital culture as the US. Even in London there is no Sand Hill equivalent where you can rock on up with your MIT degree and Tony Robins positive energy and walk out with a few million to start you cat tracker app.
There are a huge number of UK startups and university spinoffs that run off angel money that requires the CEO to periodically attend snooty events with the remnants of Europe's landed gentry, or do deals with dodgy foreigners trying to laundering money. Those that get VC money are getting it from the offshoots of US firms, or even just through US firms directly with Delaware registered HQs to boot. Another approach is to convince some ageing celebrity (e.g. Richard Branson) to lend his name to your idea, so you can list on the exchanges and get a bunch of money from desperate pension funds.
For whatever reason, the USA seems to embrace the idea that throwing $1000 at 20 different crazy ideas is worth it on the chance that one succeeds, whereas in most other countries there needs to be a big investigation and lynching when one single $1000 investment fails.
This is why the EU needs public sector investment for this sort of stuff. In some EU countries the method has actually delivered results, while in others (e.g. UK) I suspect the public is just so conditioned to accept government incompetence that this is just a sort of path of least resistance thing.
Great. With them gone we will be free to repeat the mistake of history with abandon.
Great Depression 2.0 is already underway, a good dose of nationalism is bedding itself into many countries, and sweeping waves of technological change are on the way. I guess we don't have the monarchy anymore so that's a plus.
Publicly owned infrastructure used to be called Communism, but I guess they needed some re-branding.
No. Communism is public ownership of all assets. If there are still private assets it is not Communism. Communism is something rather more dramatic than most of the people who throw around the world Communism mean, but in recent years this has generally been done on purpose so that any idea that is not pure unfettered neoliberal capitalism can be shot down as 'crazy communism'.
Of course no country has actually ever had pure unfettered neo-liberal capitalism either, and very few people believe you can organise a society effectively without any form of 'community regulation of the means of production' - you know, things like food and drug safety standards, a centralised military and police force, competition and fraud rules for commerce. Stuff that is actually on the spectrum of Socialism (albeit the lighter end)
In the end though, this is all about trying to claim ownership of words so that the historical connotations associated with that word in popular culture can be loaded against an idea you don't like. So it doesn't matter what the merits of this idea actually are (and I question many of them), by claiming it is 'Communism' people will cease evaluating the idea rationally and just reject it because it is associated with bad stuff. In many ways, I think one of the most influential aspects of the1980s economic reforms was associating them with the word 'free'.
It's the same with consultants (though perhaps less legally questionable). e.g. CEO wants to outsource to somewhere, but doesn't want responsibility for the decision. Calls in management consultants. After paying them lots of money they write a report recommending outsourcing to somewhere. If outsourcing program works out, CEO claims responsibility. If it crashes and burns CEO blames the consultants.
Right. So this is like how Carillion (a big construction conglomerate in the UK) became insolvent just months after KPMG had given them the green light in an audit (for which they took millions in fees). Or how the various ratings agencies gave CDOs investment grade ratings despite them being based on total junk.
I mean, it is just a sort of formalised corruption at this point. In south east asian they do it with brown paper bags under the table, over here they just buy the politicians so that what they are doing is fully 'legal' in the sense that it doesn't break any of the laws they have paid to get written.
At least in Asia there is some semblance of equality in that the intrinsic power structure is weakened at all levels by corruption (a regular prole can still buy off the local cop). In the west the rigid formalised power structure means that only those at the top get all the benefits of 'flexible' rules while the rest of us are kept under the thumb.
It is a really weird failure. If you look at some of the photos around the place, you can see that it appears to be only one blade that has departed, and the rest of the fan looks remarkably undamaged. Rather than breaking free and flying into the fan housing (which is designed to contain a failure), it appears to have moved forward clear of the housing, and out through the engine cowling. Presumably from there it exited into the fuselage, or other bits of the cowling/ancillaries took out the window.
But I agree, incredibly unlucky for the passenger involved. It is still quite remarkable how safe air travel is though, all things considered.
If you want to ensure that gig economy workers have the best wages and conditions, make sure that there are a large number of gig economy service providers competing with each other.
You do realise that conjuring up enough demand for workers has been a little bit of a problem for almost every country in the world since this thing called the 'great recession'. These are not developers earning $500 a day. They are low skill workers who are competing with robots, and the robots are getting better.
The far-right "Front National" reached the second round of the presidential elections - only the second time ever that they've managed this - and recorded their best ever score - 33.90%.
Not arguing that FN isn't an issue, but you do realise that the nature of the French presidential run-off system has the potential to create these sorts of overdramatic situations? A more representative level of support for them would be from the first round, where they got 21.3% vs Macron's 24%. If they had got just 1.3% less, or about 10% of Fillon's supports had backed Melenchon instead, then there would have been no 'big drama' in the second runoff.
Also, while Macron gained significant votes from other candidates in the second round, FN did not (when you account for those who voted in the first round but not the second and the 11.5% who nulled their ballots), so they remain a narrow but fervent group on the outside of mainstream French politics. Unless they can fix that, there is (and this was clear during the election) zero chance they can take over the presidency.
It is scary that 1/5 French voters support them, and France needs to deal with this, but there is not about to be a French Brexit/Trump. That part of it was the sensationalist media trying to drum up a story out of nothing.
It's not just developing countries that have this problem. Developed countries also have large swathes of the population that do not have skills that will out compete robotics. There is a limit to human utility, even if we could give everyone private tuition and a place at a top university. Humans also require large amounts of natural resources to run, and break down after about 30 years of operation. Robots are not constrained by these things. It is entirely feasible that we will be able to make robots that use less energy than growing a human, and can do most of a human's tasks. At that point, why would the economic system value humans? Our rubbish tips are full of discarded machines that are no longer economical to run vs their modern replacements.
Of course the great stabilizer in all of this is meant to be that humans are also the consumers in the economy. If we only consider the supply side, then the economy would shrink until only those with utility value, and their robots are left. But if our political goal is to grow GDP, then we have a problem, because many humans will lose the ability to trade for the goods and services they need creating deflationary conditions.
You might have noticed that this is already happening. The reason that our economic growth has become predicated on growing debt, and money printing by central banks, is precisely because consumers are not able to acquire either ownership of the means of production or adequate utility value to trade for the full amount of goods and services that can now be produced. So production sits idle. To counteract this deflationary force, central banks are making debt cheaper and governments are turning a blind eye to credit growth as this is the only way to boost the income (and spending capacity) of the middle class. This might even be sustainable if it was done in a more controlled way, rather than the lottery of home ownership it is now.
There is no clear solution. Before the financial liberalization of the 1980s the economy was constrained by the need for companies to drag workers (their consumers) along with them as the economy developed and to share the proceeds of capital with them. Of course this also held back economic growth because the process by which this occurred (labor conflicts, recessions) does not enhance productivity. But perhaps this 'inefficiency' was just part of what it means to live in a world inhabited by humans and not machines.
UBI may be a solution as well, though there are problems with that. The most balanced solution would probably be a tax on the value of assets, in particularly land, but this is now politically impossible because of the way monetary expansion has been directed at middle class homeowners over the last twenty years.
Self driving cars are mostly hype. They're primarily self driving on very good, very clean, very well mapped roads only. Take them out of perfect conditions, and they fail miserably.
But even a car that could drive under such conditions would be extremely useful. Take, for example, public buses. They just drive around the exact same route everyday, and the route in many places is upgraded with special lanes and signalling infrastructure to make their job easier. There is no reason why you couldn't start with replacing such bus routes in cities with moderate weather conditions. Over time a combination of roading infrastructure improvements (special lanes, intersection redesigns, beacons etc) and the tech getting better could easily expand out to cover the majority of vehicle uses in a city. Again, we do this for bicycles and buses, so why is it impossible to imagine it would make sense to do some road works to cater towards driver less cars?
Another example is motorway driving. Motorways are already an extremely controlled and regular environment. It would be great to have a driver less truck that can go door to door, but there is no reason why we can't start with depots built off the side of motorways where local human drivers pick up and drop off longhauled trailers. As for weather conditions guides in the road way and other navigation infrastructure could be added if these problems cannot be dealt with using lidar and cameras.
Yes, I agree that a car you can just dump into an unknown urban environment is a long long way off. But I don't understand the fascination with meeting this goal before driver less vehicles can be useful to us.
Since about 2-3 years ago I stopped using Facebook for personal stuff and now just post carefully curated things on it. I basically treat it as a public profile, so that if recruiters/customers etc go snooping for me they can have a look at some photos of my dog and see that I go on holiday every now and again. Pretty much like another linked-in.
Most other people I know do the same. We've moved family and friend groups to other networks, or just use email.
Does anyone actually share their life honestly on Facebook anymore? I don't even get many original posts from 'friends' now as my feed is always clogged up with adverts and viral videos. Personally I think the whole platform has jumped the shark, but will survive because lazy HR directors want to review job candidate's social media accounts instead of doing proper interviews.
When the world was on the gold standard, running a trade deficit was a big deal. If the deficit was not addressed quickly, gold reserves would run down, and the country could quickly find itself in a position where it did not have enough hard currency to buy the things it needed. Regular folk on the street could easily see the impact of not producing enough goods to sell overseas as you needed/wanted to import. Countries had industrial policies. Politicians lost power on account of not managing the trade deficit.
When the US ended the gold standard (because it ceased generating trade surpluses) and currencies floated, it gave politicians a number of new tools to manage (fudge) trade deficits. The first was that countries like the USA, which held global reserve status, could inflate away the value of their currencies and hence any debts owned in those currencies. You could just give a foreign country a bunch of dollar bills, then print the value of those away so when the foreigner came to buy some goods from you a little while later you didn't have to give them as much stuff.
As you can imagine, foreign countries didn't really like this (nor domestic savers) so politicians had to find other ways to balance the deficits. The biggest trick they found to doing this was in the form of liberalized international capital flows. Basically, this now meant that you could buy a bunch of goods from a foreign country, and instead of having to trade them back some hard goods, you just sold them part of the capital assets of your country. Houses (either directly, or in the form of ever growing mortgage debt), businesses, infrastructure. Even the future earnings of your children in the form of treasury bills (future tax obligations) and student loans. Politicians could just flog this all off so that the flow of cheap shiny toys would continue without their voters having to build the factories or perform the labor to earn them.
Of course countries like China are also playing a dangerous game, as US voters could eventually decide to default on those payments (e.g. foreign buyer bans), which is why China is rapidly trying to reduce its dependence on US trade. But for now most people are happy to trade their house and children for cheap manufactured goods, while simultaneously moaning that the Chinese want something in return.
I get your point, but the UK is not a subsistence society. There are people who drive around central London in £400,000 Rolls Royce phantoms as their work cars. I would like to think our society still feels it is a decent thing to help out those born into the other end of the luck spectrum.
I actually thought the rather large vertical stabilizer was probably there so it could pitch up and auto-rotate down in the case of total failure (the inertia of the out runner motors might even allow a landing flair). I also wonder if it uses those rotors to provide some auto-rotation lift during normal operation (essentially reducing the wing loading). That would be quite smart, as otherwise they are just massive amounts of appendage drag.
There are a lot of redundancy paths in this project. For rural transport where you don't have to be so smart about where you land in an emergency, and if weather patterns are stable, then I actually think it could work quite well. But yeah, I don't think we will be flying these to work anytime soon.
As an embedded developer I think USB-C is a pretty good standard (cobbled together for sure, but not overly expensive and lots of good backwards compatibility). The connector is also a nice size/shape and should serve us well for many years to come. Apple was definitely on the right track when it pushed USB-C over other connectors on its 2016 Macbook pros. But why on earth has it taken them nearly two years to allow accessory makers to use this through MFi?
Having worked for some big companies, it feels like they pushed USB-C into the MBP on ideology (and to be fair, they have pulled these shifts off before), but then lost interest in following through with developing the eco-system. Some junior engineer probably got given the job of trawling the not-inconsiderable USB-3.1 spec to come up with a policy document for MFi, and they've only just managed to get it sorted out.
They seem to be dropping the ball on a lot of stuff like this recently. Homepod was delayed. The air charging mat is not here yet. The delays on the Airpods. I know that no big company lasts forever, but surely all that work they did to infuse the organisation with 'steve jobs think' could keep the magic going a bit longer. Personally I feel that Cook has and always will act as a caretaker, wanting to make the smallest changes possible in the belief that the spirit of Jobs lives on. But the technology market moves at an immense pace. They still make great products, but without strong ideas and assertive changes of direction, the company is increasingly getting left behind.
This idea actually makes a lot of sense. The ultimate goal for driverless cars is an autonomous on-demand transport system. The biggest impediment to doing that right now is that the driverless cars have to work with existing road infrastructure and human drivers. This is a complicated problem and it is really the reason why autonomous cars are still some way from being viable. If we just wanted to build some autonomous cars that can only go around on a set of 'rails' physically separated from the public, then we have the tech to do that easily now. That is essentially what Musk is proposing. A re-hash of the old pod transport idea but with the pods travelling underground.
In the end though, most of these infrastructure projects fail because the cost of planning permission and consultation is absurd, and I don't see how Musk's high speed tunnel boring machine is going to speed up the legal system. I mean, it has been about 40 years now since the UK first started looking into expanding its airports in the South East, and millions of pounds later they still can't make a decision. Perhaps Musk should start a more efficient law firm next.
Indeed, yet JavaScript, for all its many, many foibles, is a much more universal computing platform than we have ever been able to achieve by other means. For this reason alone we shouldn't be in such a hurry to abandon it. Is anyone looking forward to going back to having to support Flash, Silverlight, java applets, and whatever new half-baked solution gets dreamed up by a bullying vendor.
We are still heading towards a good place. It took a long time to beat down IE and its deliberate consensus killing behavior, and to nudge JS into a form that is sufficiently standardised and supported. We are just a few short steps from asm.js becoming a reality, and all the benefits that will flow from there. Rather than rejecting JS outright, I think it is better to continue to find solutions to these sorts of problems. The web needs a common client side computing platform, and I don't see where any useful alternative is going to come from right now.
Sometime around 2005, I bought my first Thinkpad - second hand because they were pretty expensive machines - from a guy who had bought it overseas. I used it everyday as my work/home machine for about three years including travelling all over the world and taking it out on various work sites.
One day, the left shift key on the worn-smooth keyboard fell off. The clip had worked its way lose and the key no longer had a proper detent. I thought I had had a pretty good run with the thing, but figured I'd see what a spare part would cost. To my amazement, the machine was still under IBM's global warranty. I rang them up on the toll free number, gave them the serial number, and asked if the keyboard was still covered. They said the parts were, but not labour, and asked if I would be able to change the keyboard myself. About 3 days later a new keyboard was couriered to me. I screwed it into place and got another year of use out of it before it just became too slow.
I guess you payed for it in the price back then, but that is how you do customer service.
The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product.
Actually it does, just not for people who have access to the money faucet that is the financial industry. If you are near the fountain of wealth that is perpetual arbitrary loan creation by private investment banks, backstopped by the fed, then I totally agree with your statement. However, for those still stuck in the real economy hyper competitive market forces are working quite well to pummel their value towards zero.
The difference now is that engineers were not traditionally so close to the money supply, but alas, someone has to be digging the hole, or else all the layers of management/consulting/finance have no foundation on which to build their scam.
Don't be fooled though - you are still the shovel worker in the hole compared to what the real players are getting.
That's not how it is meant to work though. The idea behind the 'worth' of widget X is that it is at least marginally comparable to some widget X2 produced by a different competitor in the market. Each competitor tries to find a way to make their product worth slightly more than their competitors or for a cheaper cost, and the customer ultimately decides whether they agree with that effort. However, if each competitor cannot do that, then prices simply fall to the cost of manufacturer/supply plus a profit margin at which potential new competitors find other opportunities more attractive. That's supposedly the idea anyway.
As for the value of a business, well the price is actually quite well defined - it should be an appropriate amount of return above the risk free rate of return (basically what you can get on a government bond) based on the the business' income producing ability/potential and the risk of it meeting that potential or going under. Of course there is a level of perception around the 'risk' there, but in normal times, it would be quite easy to define some reasonable upper and lower limits for a business' value, and you can then start working from there.
The problem with all these quite reasonable value finding mechanism is that they assume that money is some sort of scarce commodity that investors/customers are wary of wasting. That ceased to be the case sometime in the 1990s when the financial industry was deregulated. After many years of creating rubbish credit (which creates money) all that credit got shown to be the garbage it was by successive financial crises, and governments responded by bailing everyone out and driving interest rates down to make that debt 'sustainable'. Now interest rates are broadly negative, and we wonder why there is no rationality to asset valuations any longer. The bankers know that as long as they stay away from anything that will affect the inflation goods basket, they can run bubble casinos on whatever other assets they want. And frankly, many regular folk are quite happy to join in the game while they are winning.
My guess is that at the next crash they will just ban cash and implement aggressively negative interest rates. We can probably get another 10 years out of running 1-3% negative nominal rates (with the continual promise that it is an emergency measure). After that, I think people will just bail on fiat currency again like they normally do. Crypto-currencies have shown that we can come up with working alternatives that meet our modern transaction needs if it really comes to it. It will take a big shock though, but I'm sure the bankers will get us there in the end.
As a higher earner (well, when I'm not in startup mode), I don't actually have a problem with being taxed more - provided those that earn even more than me are not able to avoid the tax. The thing is, once you earn over about $100k, pretty much all your extra money is just going into bidding up the prices of a limited pool of assets such as housing. This doesn't benefit you or your fellow high earners, because if we can't build more, say, London housing when a rickety Victorian hovel costs over $1 million, then bidding up the prices to even more ridiculous levels isn't going to deal with the fundamental supply issue. All that happens is a parasite class forms around these things, consisting of speculators, gamblers and real estate agents. The same houses are still being traded between the same pool of high earners.
If we had higher taxes, then it would help to curb speculation activity by preventing this form of asset inflation, and governments could use the money to redirect economic resources towards, say, actually creating new housing supply through transport infrastructure or training new engineers and doctors. Of course there is a big if there, because the government could also just use those resources to create more bureaucracy, but that is probably still better than real estate agents.
The big problem, though, is that once you move into the 0.1% nobody is paying any taxes. I mean, the wealthy are even quite open about this - its not some sort of conspiracy. The problem then is that if you just tax the upper middle income earners more, all you do is allow the ultra rich to hoover up all the assets off them even faster than they are doing now. It is a one way road towards neo-feudalism.
There is no easy solution. Probably a land tax would help, but that is almost impossible to achieve politically. France tried a wealth tax, and London is now stuffed full of rich French people. An aggressive death tax is probably the best solution, but again this is incredibly hard to achieve politically. Of course the natural solution is a revolution where the masses just confiscate everything. I really hope we can avoid this.
The military doesn't have the luxury of holding back because of the worry about all the negative consequences of new military technology. If the technology can exist, someone will develop it. The best defense I can think of is developing it yourself so at least you can understand the true dangers and potentially build countermeasures against them.
Yet we use this 'luxury' when it comes to many types of existing weapons. And what choice does humanity have? We are well beyond local tribes with spears and shields. The western minority powers can literally make everybody on the planet extinct if they want. If we must just accept that there is no way to build lasting peace, then we are simply counting down to our own extinction as every generation of smartphone gets better at ordering pizza and looking up trivia.
The thing that scares me the most about these weapons however, is that it removes the democratic element of war. to fight a war you need a powerful army but also a loyal army. That same mass of armed civilians can turn against a ruler if they lose their populous appeal. This is why countries like north korean must run massive propaganda campaigns, and why much of the key to the rise of fascism was its ability to use new forms of mass media. It is why a free press and education are seen as essential elements in the fight against a repeat of humanity's past atrocities.
But once you have autonomous armies, you no longer need trained civilians. A government can indeed use that army to control citizens and ensure it remains in power against majority rule. The political implications of this should scare anyone - we have never really had such a threat before. For me this threat from within is far greater than the meaningless risk of open conflict between nuclear armed states.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand why Apple locked down hardware interfaces on their devices back when you plugged most accessories into the bottom of your phone, but why do they still continue to do it now in the era of wireless? For example, the Bluetooth interface still doesn't let you open a serial port profile with another Bluetooth device unless you have paid silly amounts of money to get your product through MFI. What bad thing is my app accessing a wireless bluetooth serial port device going to do that I cannot do with a TCP/IP port onto the internet?
They relaxed things a tiny bit with BTLE, but they ensured the data rates on this were painful slow to the point of excluding a huge class of use cases. And then they ditched the headphone jack which removed a common hack used to get a signal in/out of iDevices. A whole world of external devices controlled by your phone would have been available to use years ago if Apple had had a reasonable wireless hardware policy (or at least had simplified its MFI program - you can't even find out how much it costs until you sign your life away).
Again, I totally understand the original motivation for regulating hardware devices, but with most of the devices people want to connect to being wireless that now seems redundant, and since Apple doesn't appear to be interested in building their own IOT ecosystem, I don't even see what they are gaining financially from the situation. If they opened up the bluetooth SPP there would an explosion in hardware gadgets that you can control with your iPhone.
I'm sure these workers, who were in stable employment working in the great outdoors, will adapt just fine to stuffing amazon boxes on a zero-hour contract in a windowless warehouse, sleeping in their cars, and watching their new employer desperately trying to robot away their job. I mean, its only a couple of decades of trying to keep in front of the boot of automation and then they get to die anyway so no biggie right?
Anyway, they can console themselves by thinking about how good all this progress will be for their children, once they get a better job so they afford to have them of course.
[end of sarcasm]
Europe doesn't have the same sort of venture capital culture as the US. Even in London there is no Sand Hill equivalent where you can rock on up with your MIT degree and Tony Robins positive energy and walk out with a few million to start you cat tracker app.
There are a huge number of UK startups and university spinoffs that run off angel money that requires the CEO to periodically attend snooty events with the remnants of Europe's landed gentry, or do deals with dodgy foreigners trying to laundering money. Those that get VC money are getting it from the offshoots of US firms, or even just through US firms directly with Delaware registered HQs to boot. Another approach is to convince some ageing celebrity (e.g. Richard Branson) to lend his name to your idea, so you can list on the exchanges and get a bunch of money from desperate pension funds.
For whatever reason, the USA seems to embrace the idea that throwing $1000 at 20 different crazy ideas is worth it on the chance that one succeeds, whereas in most other countries there needs to be a big investigation and lynching when one single $1000 investment fails.
This is why the EU needs public sector investment for this sort of stuff. In some EU countries the method has actually delivered results, while in others (e.g. UK) I suspect the public is just so conditioned to accept government incompetence that this is just a sort of path of least resistance thing.
Great. With them gone we will be free to repeat the mistake of history with abandon.
Great Depression 2.0 is already underway, a good dose of nationalism is bedding itself into many countries, and sweeping waves of technological change are on the way. I guess we don't have the monarchy anymore so that's a plus.
Publicly owned infrastructure used to be called Communism, but I guess they needed some re-branding.
No. Communism is public ownership of all assets. If there are still private assets it is not Communism. Communism is something rather more dramatic than most of the people who throw around the world Communism mean, but in recent years this has generally been done on purpose so that any idea that is not pure unfettered neoliberal capitalism can be shot down as 'crazy communism'.
Of course no country has actually ever had pure unfettered neo-liberal capitalism either, and very few people believe you can organise a society effectively without any form of 'community regulation of the means of production' - you know, things like food and drug safety standards, a centralised military and police force, competition and fraud rules for commerce. Stuff that is actually on the spectrum of Socialism (albeit the lighter end)
In the end though, this is all about trying to claim ownership of words so that the historical connotations associated with that word in popular culture can be loaded against an idea you don't like. So it doesn't matter what the merits of this idea actually are (and I question many of them), by claiming it is 'Communism' people will cease evaluating the idea rationally and just reject it because it is associated with bad stuff. In many ways, I think one of the most influential aspects of the1980s economic reforms was associating them with the word 'free'.
It's the same with consultants (though perhaps less legally questionable). e.g. CEO wants to outsource to somewhere, but doesn't want responsibility for the decision. Calls in management consultants. After paying them lots of money they write a report recommending outsourcing to somewhere. If outsourcing program works out, CEO claims responsibility. If it crashes and burns CEO blames the consultants.
I think of them as professional fall guys.
Right. So this is like how Carillion (a big construction conglomerate in the UK) became insolvent just months after KPMG had given them the green light in an audit (for which they took millions in fees). Or how the various ratings agencies gave CDOs investment grade ratings despite them being based on total junk.
I mean, it is just a sort of formalised corruption at this point. In south east asian they do it with brown paper bags under the table, over here they just buy the politicians so that what they are doing is fully 'legal' in the sense that it doesn't break any of the laws they have paid to get written.
At least in Asia there is some semblance of equality in that the intrinsic power structure is weakened at all levels by corruption (a regular prole can still buy off the local cop). In the west the rigid formalised power structure means that only those at the top get all the benefits of 'flexible' rules while the rest of us are kept under the thumb.
It is a really weird failure. If you look at some of the photos around the place, you can see that it appears to be only one blade that has departed, and the rest of the fan looks remarkably undamaged. Rather than breaking free and flying into the fan housing (which is designed to contain a failure), it appears to have moved forward clear of the housing, and out through the engine cowling. Presumably from there it exited into the fuselage, or other bits of the cowling/ancillaries took out the window.
But I agree, incredibly unlucky for the passenger involved. It is still quite remarkable how safe air travel is though, all things considered.
If you want to ensure that gig economy workers have the best wages and conditions, make sure that there are a large number of gig economy service providers competing with each other.
You do realise that conjuring up enough demand for workers has been a little bit of a problem for almost every country in the world since this thing called the 'great recession'. These are not developers earning $500 a day. They are low skill workers who are competing with robots, and the robots are getting better.
#fakenews
The far-right "Front National" reached the second round of the presidential elections - only the second time ever that they've managed this - and recorded their best ever score - 33.90%.
Not arguing that FN isn't an issue, but you do realise that the nature of the French presidential run-off system has the potential to create these sorts of overdramatic situations? A more representative level of support for them would be from the first round, where they got 21.3% vs Macron's 24%. If they had got just 1.3% less, or about 10% of Fillon's supports had backed Melenchon instead, then there would have been no 'big drama' in the second runoff.
Also, while Macron gained significant votes from other candidates in the second round, FN did not (when you account for those who voted in the first round but not the second and the 11.5% who nulled their ballots), so they remain a narrow but fervent group on the outside of mainstream French politics. Unless they can fix that, there is (and this was clear during the election) zero chance they can take over the presidency.
It is scary that 1/5 French voters support them, and France needs to deal with this, but there is not about to be a French Brexit/Trump. That part of it was the sensationalist media trying to drum up a story out of nothing.
It's not just developing countries that have this problem. Developed countries also have large swathes of the population that do not have skills that will out compete robotics. There is a limit to human utility, even if we could give everyone private tuition and a place at a top university. Humans also require large amounts of natural resources to run, and break down after about 30 years of operation. Robots are not constrained by these things. It is entirely feasible that we will be able to make robots that use less energy than growing a human, and can do most of a human's tasks. At that point, why would the economic system value humans? Our rubbish tips are full of discarded machines that are no longer economical to run vs their modern replacements.
Of course the great stabilizer in all of this is meant to be that humans are also the consumers in the economy. If we only consider the supply side, then the economy would shrink until only those with utility value, and their robots are left. But if our political goal is to grow GDP, then we have a problem, because many humans will lose the ability to trade for the goods and services they need creating deflationary conditions.
You might have noticed that this is already happening. The reason that our economic growth has become predicated on growing debt, and money printing by central banks, is precisely because consumers are not able to acquire either ownership of the means of production or adequate utility value to trade for the full amount of goods and services that can now be produced. So production sits idle. To counteract this deflationary force, central banks are making debt cheaper and governments are turning a blind eye to credit growth as this is the only way to boost the income (and spending capacity) of the middle class. This might even be sustainable if it was done in a more controlled way, rather than the lottery of home ownership it is now.
There is no clear solution. Before the financial liberalization of the 1980s the economy was constrained by the need for companies to drag workers (their consumers) along with them as the economy developed and to share the proceeds of capital with them. Of course this also held back economic growth because the process by which this occurred (labor conflicts, recessions) does not enhance productivity. But perhaps this 'inefficiency' was just part of what it means to live in a world inhabited by humans and not machines.
UBI may be a solution as well, though there are problems with that. The most balanced solution would probably be a tax on the value of assets, in particularly land, but this is now politically impossible because of the way monetary expansion has been directed at middle class homeowners over the last twenty years.
Self driving cars are mostly hype. They're primarily self driving on very good, very clean, very well mapped roads only. Take them out of perfect conditions, and they fail miserably.
But even a car that could drive under such conditions would be extremely useful. Take, for example, public buses. They just drive around the exact same route everyday, and the route in many places is upgraded with special lanes and signalling infrastructure to make their job easier. There is no reason why you couldn't start with replacing such bus routes in cities with moderate weather conditions. Over time a combination of roading infrastructure improvements (special lanes, intersection redesigns, beacons etc) and the tech getting better could easily expand out to cover the majority of vehicle uses in a city. Again, we do this for bicycles and buses, so why is it impossible to imagine it would make sense to do some road works to cater towards driver less cars?
Another example is motorway driving. Motorways are already an extremely controlled and regular environment. It would be great to have a driver less truck that can go door to door, but there is no reason why we can't start with depots built off the side of motorways where local human drivers pick up and drop off longhauled trailers. As for weather conditions guides in the road way and other navigation infrastructure could be added if these problems cannot be dealt with using lidar and cameras.
Yes, I agree that a car you can just dump into an unknown urban environment is a long long way off. But I don't understand the fascination with meeting this goal before driver less vehicles can be useful to us.
Since about 2-3 years ago I stopped using Facebook for personal stuff and now just post carefully curated things on it. I basically treat it as a public profile, so that if recruiters/customers etc go snooping for me they can have a look at some photos of my dog and see that I go on holiday every now and again. Pretty much like another linked-in.
Most other people I know do the same. We've moved family and friend groups to other networks, or just use email.
Does anyone actually share their life honestly on Facebook anymore? I don't even get many original posts from 'friends' now as my feed is always clogged up with adverts and viral videos. Personally I think the whole platform has jumped the shark, but will survive because lazy HR directors want to review job candidate's social media accounts instead of doing proper interviews.
When the world was on the gold standard, running a trade deficit was a big deal. If the deficit was not addressed quickly, gold reserves would run down, and the country could quickly find itself in a position where it did not have enough hard currency to buy the things it needed. Regular folk on the street could easily see the impact of not producing enough goods to sell overseas as you needed/wanted to import. Countries had industrial policies. Politicians lost power on account of not managing the trade deficit.
When the US ended the gold standard (because it ceased generating trade surpluses) and currencies floated, it gave politicians a number of new tools to manage (fudge) trade deficits. The first was that countries like the USA, which held global reserve status, could inflate away the value of their currencies and hence any debts owned in those currencies. You could just give a foreign country a bunch of dollar bills, then print the value of those away so when the foreigner came to buy some goods from you a little while later you didn't have to give them as much stuff.
As you can imagine, foreign countries didn't really like this (nor domestic savers) so politicians had to find other ways to balance the deficits. The biggest trick they found to doing this was in the form of liberalized international capital flows. Basically, this now meant that you could buy a bunch of goods from a foreign country, and instead of having to trade them back some hard goods, you just sold them part of the capital assets of your country. Houses (either directly, or in the form of ever growing mortgage debt), businesses, infrastructure. Even the future earnings of your children in the form of treasury bills (future tax obligations) and student loans. Politicians could just flog this all off so that the flow of cheap shiny toys would continue without their voters having to build the factories or perform the labor to earn them.
Of course countries like China are also playing a dangerous game, as US voters could eventually decide to default on those payments (e.g. foreign buyer bans), which is why China is rapidly trying to reduce its dependence on US trade. But for now most people are happy to trade their house and children for cheap manufactured goods, while simultaneously moaning that the Chinese want something in return.
I get your point, but the UK is not a subsistence society. There are people who drive around central London in £400,000 Rolls Royce phantoms as their work cars. I would like to think our society still feels it is a decent thing to help out those born into the other end of the luck spectrum.
I actually thought the rather large vertical stabilizer was probably there so it could pitch up and auto-rotate down in the case of total failure (the inertia of the out runner motors might even allow a landing flair). I also wonder if it uses those rotors to provide some auto-rotation lift during normal operation (essentially reducing the wing loading). That would be quite smart, as otherwise they are just massive amounts of appendage drag.
There are a lot of redundancy paths in this project. For rural transport where you don't have to be so smart about where you land in an emergency, and if weather patterns are stable, then I actually think it could work quite well. But yeah, I don't think we will be flying these to work anytime soon.
As an embedded developer I think USB-C is a pretty good standard (cobbled together for sure, but not overly expensive and lots of good backwards compatibility). The connector is also a nice size/shape and should serve us well for many years to come. Apple was definitely on the right track when it pushed USB-C over other connectors on its 2016 Macbook pros. But why on earth has it taken them nearly two years to allow accessory makers to use this through MFi?
Having worked for some big companies, it feels like they pushed USB-C into the MBP on ideology (and to be fair, they have pulled these shifts off before), but then lost interest in following through with developing the eco-system. Some junior engineer probably got given the job of trawling the not-inconsiderable USB-3.1 spec to come up with a policy document for MFi, and they've only just managed to get it sorted out.
They seem to be dropping the ball on a lot of stuff like this recently. Homepod was delayed. The air charging mat is not here yet. The delays on the Airpods. I know that no big company lasts forever, but surely all that work they did to infuse the organisation with 'steve jobs think' could keep the magic going a bit longer. Personally I feel that Cook has and always will act as a caretaker, wanting to make the smallest changes possible in the belief that the spirit of Jobs lives on. But the technology market moves at an immense pace. They still make great products, but without strong ideas and assertive changes of direction, the company is increasingly getting left behind.
This idea actually makes a lot of sense. The ultimate goal for driverless cars is an autonomous on-demand transport system. The biggest impediment to doing that right now is that the driverless cars have to work with existing road infrastructure and human drivers. This is a complicated problem and it is really the reason why autonomous cars are still some way from being viable. If we just wanted to build some autonomous cars that can only go around on a set of 'rails' physically separated from the public, then we have the tech to do that easily now. That is essentially what Musk is proposing. A re-hash of the old pod transport idea but with the pods travelling underground.
In the end though, most of these infrastructure projects fail because the cost of planning permission and consultation is absurd, and I don't see how Musk's high speed tunnel boring machine is going to speed up the legal system. I mean, it has been about 40 years now since the UK first started looking into expanding its airports in the South East, and millions of pounds later they still can't make a decision. Perhaps Musk should start a more efficient law firm next.
Indeed, yet JavaScript, for all its many, many foibles, is a much more universal computing platform than we have ever been able to achieve by other means. For this reason alone we shouldn't be in such a hurry to abandon it. Is anyone looking forward to going back to having to support Flash, Silverlight, java applets, and whatever new half-baked solution gets dreamed up by a bullying vendor.
We are still heading towards a good place. It took a long time to beat down IE and its deliberate consensus killing behavior, and to nudge JS into a form that is sufficiently standardised and supported. We are just a few short steps from asm.js becoming a reality, and all the benefits that will flow from there. Rather than rejecting JS outright, I think it is better to continue to find solutions to these sorts of problems. The web needs a common client side computing platform, and I don't see where any useful alternative is going to come from right now.
Did Orwell's 1984 stop being a basic high school literature requirement in the last 20 years?
Right about the time it became the official establishment instruction manual.
If ultra-liberalism fails, then they fall back to Animal Farm.
Sometime around 2005, I bought my first Thinkpad - second hand because they were pretty expensive machines - from a guy who had bought it overseas. I used it everyday as my work/home machine for about three years including travelling all over the world and taking it out on various work sites.
One day, the left shift key on the worn-smooth keyboard fell off. The clip had worked its way lose and the key no longer had a proper detent. I thought I had had a pretty good run with the thing, but figured I'd see what a spare part would cost. To my amazement, the machine was still under IBM's global warranty. I rang them up on the toll free number, gave them the serial number, and asked if the keyboard was still covered. They said the parts were, but not labour, and asked if I would be able to change the keyboard myself. About 3 days later a new keyboard was couriered to me. I screwed it into place and got another year of use out of it before it just became too slow.
I guess you payed for it in the price back then, but that is how you do customer service.
The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product.
Actually it does, just not for people who have access to the money faucet that is the financial industry. If you are near the fountain of wealth that is perpetual arbitrary loan creation by private investment banks, backstopped by the fed, then I totally agree with your statement. However, for those still stuck in the real economy hyper competitive market forces are working quite well to pummel their value towards zero.
The difference now is that engineers were not traditionally so close to the money supply, but alas, someone has to be digging the hole, or else all the layers of management/consulting/finance have no foundation on which to build their scam.
Don't be fooled though - you are still the shovel worker in the hole compared to what the real players are getting.
That's not how it is meant to work though. The idea behind the 'worth' of widget X is that it is at least marginally comparable to some widget X2 produced by a different competitor in the market. Each competitor tries to find a way to make their product worth slightly more than their competitors or for a cheaper cost, and the customer ultimately decides whether they agree with that effort. However, if each competitor cannot do that, then prices simply fall to the cost of manufacturer/supply plus a profit margin at which potential new competitors find other opportunities more attractive. That's supposedly the idea anyway.
As for the value of a business, well the price is actually quite well defined - it should be an appropriate amount of return above the risk free rate of return (basically what you can get on a government bond) based on the the business' income producing ability/potential and the risk of it meeting that potential or going under. Of course there is a level of perception around the 'risk' there, but in normal times, it would be quite easy to define some reasonable upper and lower limits for a business' value, and you can then start working from there.
The problem with all these quite reasonable value finding mechanism is that they assume that money is some sort of scarce commodity that investors/customers are wary of wasting. That ceased to be the case sometime in the 1990s when the financial industry was deregulated. After many years of creating rubbish credit (which creates money) all that credit got shown to be the garbage it was by successive financial crises, and governments responded by bailing everyone out and driving interest rates down to make that debt 'sustainable'. Now interest rates are broadly negative, and we wonder why there is no rationality to asset valuations any longer. The bankers know that as long as they stay away from anything that will affect the inflation goods basket, they can run bubble casinos on whatever other assets they want. And frankly, many regular folk are quite happy to join in the game while they are winning.
My guess is that at the next crash they will just ban cash and implement aggressively negative interest rates. We can probably get another 10 years out of running 1-3% negative nominal rates (with the continual promise that it is an emergency measure). After that, I think people will just bail on fiat currency again like they normally do. Crypto-currencies have shown that we can come up with working alternatives that meet our modern transaction needs if it really comes to it. It will take a big shock though, but I'm sure the bankers will get us there in the end.
As a higher earner (well, when I'm not in startup mode), I don't actually have a problem with being taxed more - provided those that earn even more than me are not able to avoid the tax. The thing is, once you earn over about $100k, pretty much all your extra money is just going into bidding up the prices of a limited pool of assets such as housing. This doesn't benefit you or your fellow high earners, because if we can't build more, say, London housing when a rickety Victorian hovel costs over $1 million, then bidding up the prices to even more ridiculous levels isn't going to deal with the fundamental supply issue. All that happens is a parasite class forms around these things, consisting of speculators, gamblers and real estate agents. The same houses are still being traded between the same pool of high earners.
If we had higher taxes, then it would help to curb speculation activity by preventing this form of asset inflation, and governments could use the money to redirect economic resources towards, say, actually creating new housing supply through transport infrastructure or training new engineers and doctors. Of course there is a big if there, because the government could also just use those resources to create more bureaucracy, but that is probably still better than real estate agents.
The big problem, though, is that once you move into the 0.1% nobody is paying any taxes. I mean, the wealthy are even quite open about this - its not some sort of conspiracy. The problem then is that if you just tax the upper middle income earners more, all you do is allow the ultra rich to hoover up all the assets off them even faster than they are doing now. It is a one way road towards neo-feudalism.
There is no easy solution. Probably a land tax would help, but that is almost impossible to achieve politically. France tried a wealth tax, and London is now stuffed full of rich French people. An aggressive death tax is probably the best solution, but again this is incredibly hard to achieve politically. Of course the natural solution is a revolution where the masses just confiscate everything. I really hope we can avoid this.
The military doesn't have the luxury of holding back because of the worry about all the negative consequences of new military technology. If the technology can exist, someone will develop it. The best defense I can think of is developing it yourself so at least you can understand the true dangers and potentially build countermeasures against them.
Yet we use this 'luxury' when it comes to many types of existing weapons. And what choice does humanity have? We are well beyond local tribes with spears and shields. The western minority powers can literally make everybody on the planet extinct if they want. If we must just accept that there is no way to build lasting peace, then we are simply counting down to our own extinction as every generation of smartphone gets better at ordering pizza and looking up trivia.
The thing that scares me the most about these weapons however, is that it removes the democratic element of war. to fight a war you need a powerful army but also a loyal army. That same mass of armed civilians can turn against a ruler if they lose their populous appeal. This is why countries like north korean must run massive propaganda campaigns, and why much of the key to the rise of fascism was its ability to use new forms of mass media. It is why a free press and education are seen as essential elements in the fight against a repeat of humanity's past atrocities.
But once you have autonomous armies, you no longer need trained civilians. A government can indeed use that army to control citizens and ensure it remains in power against majority rule. The political implications of this should scare anyone - we have never really had such a threat before. For me this threat from within is far greater than the meaningless risk of open conflict between nuclear armed states.