That needs to be said in the classic Unreal Tournament style voice...
Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised to see violence as a response to automation, but I doubt that you'll be able to use explosives to take out all automation... a lot of that automation is happening outside of the physical/manufacturing realm, and is definitely happening in the IT world (see also DevOps, albeit that's still in its embryonic stages).
This means no one in our little realm should feel smug and safe; a good Puppet/cfengine config (coupled with good processes across the board from dev to release to maintenance) can knock off at least 20-30% of a given traditional mixed-environment sysadmin team's headcount, with the surviving employees still around for corner-cases, upgrades, and new technologies as they roll in. A good SCOM config (heh) can do the same to maybe 40-50% of a team of MCSE types in a Microsoft-only shop. QA types will likely see the greatest threat, though, given automated testing.
Devs? They'll likely remain fairly safe from automation, but they have their own headaches anyway (see also the greater ease of outsourcing/offshoring in that realm.)
All that said, this doesn't mean massive waves of unemployment... instead it means that the displaced folks (or those facing it) cannot afford to sit back and let things stand pat; I suspect that the pace of learning new stuff will quicken, perhaps back to the pace set by the dot-boom era.
Just offhand opinion though - YMMV of course. (Disclosure: I made the transition to DevOps awhile back, so take it as you will.)
It isn't when you consider that the plaintiff's goals may well have nothing to do with 'recovering damages', insomuch as they're probably doing it to shut her up and at the same time please/placate their investors.
Fuck them and their SCO-spirited kin in either case.
I agree with you; I do want to take semi-issue with one bit, however:
Now that I realize I'd have an easier time finding a unicorn in this culture than a woman who will truly commit to creating a family, I find it hard to find reasons not to sit and grow moss.
Ah, but you forget: There is the late thirty-something childless single woman, the ones who woke up one morning to realize that the ovular inventory is beginning to run a bit low. She then realizes that the men aren't hitting on her as much - most guys her age are married, gay, or losers at this point, and the younger guys are too busy chasing the younger babes around, where there's a closer-matched set of interests. The biological clock won't stop ticking, so she begins to cast about for solutions. If she's lucky, there may be a freshly-divorced Nice Guy(tm), but they get snapped up rather quick and they do come with some baggage (e.g. child support payments, weekends with his kids, etc.) Of course, there's the whole 'cougar' route, but really - unless you're a wealthy bombshell with powerful professional and/or social connections, that will fizzle out rather quickly since the younger guy will quickly get bored and bail, off to go play with the next shiny thing to grab his attention.
There are exceptions, of course - I recently visited a sweet 47-year-old woman and her 19-year-old live-in boyfriend. Then again, she's fairly well-off and he's unemployed, so I don't see things breaking off quite yet.
But... where was I? Oh, yes - a proposal to solve your dilemma. Back when I did the divorced single guy thing in Utah, I discovered that the quickest way to score was to meander over to the nearest Mormon "Singles' Ward", which was often packed to the rafters with single women whose husbands traded them in for a newer model, or ladies who were unable to get that dream Temple wedding. Personally, I don't subscribe to the religion so I abstained (plus it seems too damn creepy/evil/icky to lead on a desperate woman like that just to get laid - at the time I took a sabbatical from the whole commitment thing.) Here in Oregon you find similar situations, albeit more scattered and with different religions and social settings. If you're middle-aged, I'd suggest attending a church and getting social there... you may just surprise yourself; most available women there are all about building a family and staying loyal the whole time (YMMV, of course.)
Interesting comparison, considering that Jamestown eventually did pretty well (yeah, the mass die-off in the beginning sucked, but the end result turned out pretty well, considering that Jamestown was the first English colony in North America...)
Even here in wifi-heavy Portland, OR, you're going to have a hard time finding wifi signals you can glom onto w/o either knowing the WPA2 password, or going through some sort of web-based login screen - especially in the suburbs.
The second problem will arise when all those wifi WAP owners decide that they don't want their bandwidth sucked down by non-customers and/or other people (for legal liability issues, etc.) This will likely strangle the idea entirely (or some unscrupulous ass like Verizon will offer it as a plan with a massive mark-up for every minute/kB you use over their cell towers...)
Years of intense study (and student loans) to get the right degrees
Yeah, that sucks. You get an engineering degree to go work for NASA, then they don't accept you, and you have to throw it away and go work for McDonalds.
MickeyD's, no. A more likely outcome would be a somewhat moderate salary at some manufacturer, government agency or pharmaceutical corp, or a relatively meager salary at some university. But, consider the result after all the effort and hardships put in.
Let me put it this way: I once had a junior sysadmin who was a former naval aviation officer. He had a degree in engineering, and shot for NASA but didn't make it in. The process burned him out pretty hard, and it took a couple of years for him to recover. He wound up saying 'fuck it' and went into IT, eventually reporting to me, a former USAF enlisted flightline grunt. Take what you will from that...
I wonder how many TV companies would shovel over billions for the rights to broadcast "The Real World"/"Survivor"/"Big Brother" Mars for long term funding.
I think they mentioned this as their main source of funding...
I will concede that they are pre-mature in selecting crew when I don't think they've even built what they need to make the trip (seems a few years off at best) and even what they will need once they get there (up to a decade off for discovering problems during production if there is a concerted effort).
Honestly, better money would be to develop 3d printer robots to build structures before landing and allow for future prospects.
Agreed, sadly. I avoided even signing up because of the time it would take (I'm in my mid-40's). Hopefully they tended towards college freshmen with a lot of potential, because I suspect that by the time they get the first people skyward, those freshmen will be staring at middle age.
This may sound trollish, but they got off cheaper than the average candidate who tries to go the 'work-for-NASA' route. Years of intense study (and student loans) to get the right degrees, years of kissing petty bureaucratic ass**, and an intense lifestyle that would put a physician's internship to shame? Seems that a relatively paltry application fee would be getting off light by comparison.
Not saying that the initial round of applicants were smarter, but TBH if this thing actually goes up, they had better odds of going, and at a far lower cost.
** The common saying among NASA astronaut candidates was "suck up to go up" if that helps explain things.
Funny thing... they only mentioned the end of civilization, not the end of humanity - there is a distinction.
Overall, there are only IMHO two that are probable (bad governance, economic/system collapse), and one distant potential (ecological destruction). Then again, it doesn't take a tinfoil-hat wearer or a bible thumper to appreciate them; they seem kind of straightforward.
I'm sorry, but the rest are either stacked with incredible/'winning-powerball-jackpot-two-times-in-a-row' level odds (e.g. asteroid strike), or are obviously driven by ideology more than anything else ("extreme climate change").
Few civilizations have lasted longer than a couple of centuries, and fewer still longer than a millennia or so. Of the small handful that have (China, India, Roman Empire), none of them have lasted too long without going through fundamental changes and a lot of bloodshed. I fully expect our current global civilization to collapse sometime within the next hundred years (sooner if the USD collapses), but it's the very nature of human civilization; there will be a dark period where some (hopefully most) knowledge is saved, followed by a rebirth of sorts lifetimes down the road.
Sounds depressing, but just be glad that you live in such a wondrous time, eh?
It was our money, until they got their hands on it through crime. Remember, Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly position, they were simply let off the hook by Ashcroft under Bush. That is not Bill Gates' money.
Microsoft also wound up being fined for that action. The money was given to his company freely by its customers, his company in turn paid him. They didn't break into your house and steal it (leaving behind a copy of Windows 95 on their way out...)
As for the "public relations" angle, ask yourself this: why are retired people with more money than most small countries give a damn what the public thinks of them?
Because Eat the Rich
Envy and anger are not reasons. Let me lead you to what I was getting at: I sincerely doubt that Bill Gates fears being executed by a mob of angry revolutionaries, insomuch as he fears that as Microsoft the company ages, public opinion may turn against said company, causing the vast majority of Gates' wealth (which is tied up in MSFT stock) to evaporate. For better or worse, he built the company, it's his baby, and he doesn't want it to die before he and his wife do.
Something else to consider: With very few exceptions, most ultra-wealthy people see their fortunes near-literally squandered once they die, leaving their heirs broke and penniless. It happened with the Rockefellers and Howard Hughes, and it's currently happening with the Waltons, and it will happen with the Kennedys and Hiltons once the primary actors die off. Unless that cash is stashed into a *very* well-managed trust (or the heirs are somehow incredibly talented/lucky), it's going to go back to the public at large in one form or another, usually within 25-50 years of the original zillionaire's death. With a bit of luck maybe two generations will enjoy the dough, but that's usually the maximum. History has shown that this is the default with every other over-moneyed individual... they die, the kids blow the cash due to taxation, incompetence, ignorance and/or idiocy, and it all returns to the general pool of money floating around.
Damn thing sat there, then autoplayed right over a KMFDM song I had playing... took me nearly a minute before I realized the voiceover wasn't part of the song...
I don't care *why* they give back, the fact remains that they do. Besides, it's their money - not mine, not yours.
I won't say that society should run on profit only - in fact I provided two examples of how it doesn't. As for the "public relations" angle, ask yourself this: why are retired people with more money than most small countries give a damn what the public thinks of them? Answer that question, and you have the reason why society doesn't just run on mere profit.
Fun question: If women are truly paid less for the same job, then wouldn't it be more profitable to hire them instead, given that they're, oh, I dunno... *cheaper*?
Think about this - women are underrepresented in the industry, yet every company and its dog wants to keep employee overhead costs down as much as possible. So maybe you can tell us exactly *why* you think it is that there is some effort to exclude female job candidates - a few usable cites will help.
Now old factors such as pre-1964 era racism I could understand, but the argument you present makes zero sense, since there's no "girls are icky" factor to speak of (let alone prove) in STEM-oriented industries.
Which is, yet again, a great example how every little thing in a society shouldn't be run on profit motive only. There are lots of things worth doing for the good of everyone that might lead to a fat cat getting a little less money but are still worth doing.
...which explains why a pleasant number of fat cats actually give back to society, eh? (see also Carnegie, Gates, etc.)
The clamshell packages weren't made for you the consumer... it was originally designed for the retailer to slow down shoplifting.
After all, it's much harder to smuggle out a bigger-than-your-pocket-sized plastic container with a 64GB geek stick in it, than to simply smuggle out the geek stick itself. Being hard to open w/o damaging it prevents a shoplifter from just taking that 64GB geek stick out of its original package and putting it into a 8GB package (with an obviously cheaper price tag) before strolling to the checkout stand with it.
It would be a bit cheaper to just reconfigure and re-paint a few existing USAF C-5 Galaxies, no? It would have the bonus of having more interior room, yet able to land on the same runways as the existing 747.
The closest any third party has come to a presidential election was Ross Perot, in 1993. He had a very well-oiled hype machine and a shitload of money, which is why he got as far as he did. Even after he began stumbling and his campaign imploded (hard), he still got 13% of the vote... pretty impressive by most standards of the modern era.
On lower levels, Bernie Sanders (nominally a member of the Socialist party, but caucuses with the Democrats 99% of the time) is the only national candidate period to have made a national office since what, the 1950's?
It's going to take a radical change in attitudes, a really rotten national situation overall, and an even more radical amount of disgust with the current system before folks wander off to vote for a third party. Even when some ideological icon does run on his own (e.g. Ralph Nader), you will see the immediate (and dishearteningly effective) rallying cry of the threatened major party (in Nader's case, the Democrat party immediately started screaming "OMG you'll split the vote and then they will win!")
It'll take a lot to get a third party off the ground. Not impossible, but it'll take a lot to happen nonetheless.
How much competition is allowed for providing Internet access in any given US locale?
Why can we not have municipalities plant/string and own the local fiber/cable/POTS lines, then rent them out to competing ISPs for residential access purposes (see also Utah's UTOPIA initiative)?
Find the answers to those questions, and you'll find the root cause of the non-logistics problems that broadband faces in the US.
Maybe he wanted to be fired in a most spectacular way?
Then again, due to the federal workers' union I hear that it takes a *lot* to get fired as a federal employee... I mean, you practically have to murder some senator's kids or something.
Slashdot Mirror
That needs to be said in the classic Unreal Tournament style voice...
Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised to see violence as a response to automation, but I doubt that you'll be able to use explosives to take out all automation... a lot of that automation is happening outside of the physical/manufacturing realm, and is definitely happening in the IT world (see also DevOps, albeit that's still in its embryonic stages).
This means no one in our little realm should feel smug and safe; a good Puppet/cfengine config (coupled with good processes across the board from dev to release to maintenance) can knock off at least 20-30% of a given traditional mixed-environment sysadmin team's headcount, with the surviving employees still around for corner-cases, upgrades, and new technologies as they roll in. A good SCOM config (heh) can do the same to maybe 40-50% of a team of MCSE types in a Microsoft-only shop. QA types will likely see the greatest threat, though, given automated testing.
Devs? They'll likely remain fairly safe from automation, but they have their own headaches anyway (see also the greater ease of outsourcing/offshoring in that realm.)
All that said, this doesn't mean massive waves of unemployment... instead it means that the displaced folks (or those facing it) cannot afford to sit back and let things stand pat; I suspect that the pace of learning new stuff will quicken, perhaps back to the pace set by the dot-boom era.
Just offhand opinion though - YMMV of course.
(Disclosure: I made the transition to DevOps awhile back, so take it as you will.)
Monty Cottonmouth? Can't seem to find that on Google...
(/me ducks and runs like hell...)
It isn't when you consider that the plaintiff's goals may well have nothing to do with 'recovering damages', insomuch as they're probably doing it to shut her up and at the same time please/placate their investors.
Fuck them and their SCO-spirited kin in either case.
I agree with you; I do want to take semi-issue with one bit, however:
Now that I realize I'd have an easier time finding a unicorn in this culture than a woman who will truly commit to creating a family, I find it hard to find reasons not to sit and grow moss.
Ah, but you forget: There is the late thirty-something childless single woman, the ones who woke up one morning to realize that the ovular inventory is beginning to run a bit low. She then realizes that the men aren't hitting on her as much - most guys her age are married, gay, or losers at this point, and the younger guys are too busy chasing the younger babes around, where there's a closer-matched set of interests. The biological clock won't stop ticking, so she begins to cast about for solutions. If she's lucky, there may be a freshly-divorced Nice Guy(tm), but they get snapped up rather quick and they do come with some baggage (e.g. child support payments, weekends with his kids, etc.) Of course, there's the whole 'cougar' route, but really - unless you're a wealthy bombshell with powerful professional and/or social connections, that will fizzle out rather quickly since the younger guy will quickly get bored and bail, off to go play with the next shiny thing to grab his attention.
There are exceptions, of course - I recently visited a sweet 47-year-old woman and her 19-year-old live-in boyfriend. Then again, she's fairly well-off and he's unemployed, so I don't see things breaking off quite yet.
But... where was I? Oh, yes - a proposal to solve your dilemma. Back when I did the divorced single guy thing in Utah, I discovered that the quickest way to score was to meander over to the nearest Mormon "Singles' Ward", which was often packed to the rafters with single women whose husbands traded them in for a newer model, or ladies who were unable to get that dream Temple wedding. Personally, I don't subscribe to the religion so I abstained (plus it seems too damn creepy/evil/icky to lead on a desperate woman like that just to get laid - at the time I took a sabbatical from the whole commitment thing.) Here in Oregon you find similar situations, albeit more scattered and with different religions and social settings. If you're middle-aged, I'd suggest attending a church and getting social there... you may just surprise yourself; most available women there are all about building a family and staying loyal the whole time (YMMV, of course.)
Interesting comparison, considering that Jamestown eventually did pretty well (yeah, the mass die-off in the beginning sucked, but the end result turned out pretty well, considering that Jamestown was the first English colony in North America...)
Dunno about the others, but the Comcast ones require that you be an existing Comcast customer and log in with your user ID before using it.
Even here in wifi-heavy Portland, OR, you're going to have a hard time finding wifi signals you can glom onto w/o either knowing the WPA2 password, or going through some sort of web-based login screen - especially in the suburbs.
The second problem will arise when all those wifi WAP owners decide that they don't want their bandwidth sucked down by non-customers and/or other people (for legal liability issues, etc.) This will likely strangle the idea entirely (or some unscrupulous ass like Verizon will offer it as a plan with a massive mark-up for every minute/kB you use over their cell towers...)
Years of intense study (and student loans) to get the right degrees
Yeah, that sucks. You get an engineering degree to go work for NASA, then they don't accept you, and you have to throw it away and go work for McDonalds.
MickeyD's, no. A more likely outcome would be a somewhat moderate salary at some manufacturer, government agency or pharmaceutical corp, or a relatively meager salary at some university. But, consider the result after all the effort and hardships put in.
Let me put it this way: I once had a junior sysadmin who was a former naval aviation officer. He had a degree in engineering, and shot for NASA but didn't make it in. The process burned him out pretty hard, and it took a couple of years for him to recover. He wound up saying 'fuck it' and went into IT, eventually reporting to me, a former USAF enlisted flightline grunt. Take what you will from that...
I wonder how many TV companies would shovel over billions for the rights to broadcast "The Real World"/"Survivor"/"Big Brother" Mars for long term funding.
I think they mentioned this as their main source of funding...
I will concede that they are pre-mature in selecting crew when I don't think they've even built what they need to make the trip (seems a few years off at best) and even what they will need once they get there (up to a decade off for discovering problems during production if there is a concerted effort).
Honestly, better money would be to develop 3d printer robots to build structures before landing and allow for future prospects.
Agreed, sadly. I avoided even signing up because of the time it would take (I'm in my mid-40's). Hopefully they tended towards college freshmen with a lot of potential, because I suspect that by the time they get the first people skyward, those freshmen will be staring at middle age.
202,586 Idiots scammed out of their money.
This may sound trollish, but they got off cheaper than the average candidate who tries to go the 'work-for-NASA' route. Years of intense study (and student loans) to get the right degrees, years of kissing petty bureaucratic ass**, and an intense lifestyle that would put a physician's internship to shame? Seems that a relatively paltry application fee would be getting off light by comparison.
Not saying that the initial round of applicants were smarter, but TBH if this thing actually goes up, they had better odds of going, and at a far lower cost.
** The common saying among NASA astronaut candidates was "suck up to go up" if that helps explain things.
Damn - there's a few corps I know of here in the US that would love to get that kind of law on the books...
Funny thing... they only mentioned the end of civilization, not the end of humanity - there is a distinction.
Overall, there are only IMHO two that are probable (bad governance, economic/system collapse), and one distant potential (ecological destruction). Then again, it doesn't take a tinfoil-hat wearer or a bible thumper to appreciate them; they seem kind of straightforward.
I'm sorry, but the rest are either stacked with incredible/'winning-powerball-jackpot-two-times-in-a-row' level odds (e.g. asteroid strike), or are obviously driven by ideology more than anything else ("extreme climate change").
Few civilizations have lasted longer than a couple of centuries, and fewer still longer than a millennia or so. Of the small handful that have (China, India, Roman Empire), none of them have lasted too long without going through fundamental changes and a lot of bloodshed. I fully expect our current global civilization to collapse sometime within the next hundred years (sooner if the USD collapses), but it's the very nature of human civilization; there will be a dark period where some (hopefully most) knowledge is saved, followed by a rebirth of sorts lifetimes down the road.
Sounds depressing, but just be glad that you live in such a wondrous time, eh?
It was our money, until they got their hands on it through crime. Remember, Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly position, they were simply let off the hook by Ashcroft under Bush. That is not Bill Gates' money.
Microsoft also wound up being fined for that action. The money was given to his company freely by its customers, his company in turn paid him. They didn't break into your house and steal it (leaving behind a copy of Windows 95 on their way out...)
As for the "public relations" angle, ask yourself this: why are retired people with more money than most small countries give a damn what the public thinks of them?
Because Eat the Rich
Envy and anger are not reasons. Let me lead you to what I was getting at: I sincerely doubt that Bill Gates fears being executed by a mob of angry revolutionaries, insomuch as he fears that as Microsoft the company ages, public opinion may turn against said company, causing the vast majority of Gates' wealth (which is tied up in MSFT stock) to evaporate. For better or worse, he built the company, it's his baby, and he doesn't want it to die before he and his wife do.
Something else to consider: With very few exceptions, most ultra-wealthy people see their fortunes near-literally squandered once they die, leaving their heirs broke and penniless. It happened with the Rockefellers and Howard Hughes, and it's currently happening with the Waltons, and it will happen with the Kennedys and Hiltons once the primary actors die off. Unless that cash is stashed into a *very* well-managed trust (or the heirs are somehow incredibly talented/lucky), it's going to go back to the public at large in one form or another, usually within 25-50 years of the original zillionaire's death. With a bit of luck maybe two generations will enjoy the dough, but that's usually the maximum. History has shown that this is the default with every other over-moneyed individual... they die, the kids blow the cash due to taxation, incompetence, ignorance and/or idiocy, and it all returns to the general pool of money floating around.
Damn thing sat there, then autoplayed right over a KMFDM song I had playing... took me nearly a minute before I realized the voiceover wasn't part of the song...
Seriously, "eat the rich"?
I don't care *why* they give back, the fact remains that they do. Besides, it's their money - not mine, not yours.
I won't say that society should run on profit only - in fact I provided two examples of how it doesn't. As for the "public relations" angle, ask yourself this: why are retired people with more money than most small countries give a damn what the public thinks of them? Answer that question, and you have the reason why society doesn't just run on mere profit.
Fun question: If women are truly paid less for the same job, then wouldn't it be more profitable to hire them instead, given that they're, oh, I dunno... *cheaper*?
Think about this - women are underrepresented in the industry, yet every company and its dog wants to keep employee overhead costs down as much as possible. So maybe you can tell us exactly *why* you think it is that there is some effort to exclude female job candidates - a few usable cites will help.
Now old factors such as pre-1964 era racism I could understand, but the argument you present makes zero sense, since there's no "girls are icky" factor to speak of (let alone prove) in STEM-oriented industries.
Which is, yet again, a great example how every little thing in a society shouldn't be run on profit motive only. There are lots of things worth doing for the good of everyone that might lead to a fat cat getting a little less money but are still worth doing.
...which explains why a pleasant number of fat cats actually give back to society, eh? (see also Carnegie, Gates, etc.)
Screw that - be a man and use Hexadecimal version numbers... wusses.
(warning: might cause *some* confusion initially, so don't take it seriously, eh?)
The clamshell packages weren't made for you the consumer... it was originally designed for the retailer to slow down shoplifting.
After all, it's much harder to smuggle out a bigger-than-your-pocket-sized plastic container with a 64GB geek stick in it, than to simply smuggle out the geek stick itself. Being hard to open w/o damaging it prevents a shoplifter from just taking that 64GB geek stick out of its original package and putting it into a 8GB package (with an obviously cheaper price tag) before strolling to the checkout stand with it.
It would be a bit cheaper to just reconfigure and re-paint a few existing USAF C-5 Galaxies, no? It would have the bonus of having more interior room, yet able to land on the same runways as the existing 747.
If only I had mod points...
The closest any third party has come to a presidential election was Ross Perot, in 1993. He had a very well-oiled hype machine and a shitload of money, which is why he got as far as he did. Even after he began stumbling and his campaign imploded (hard), he still got 13% of the vote... pretty impressive by most standards of the modern era.
On lower levels, Bernie Sanders (nominally a member of the Socialist party, but caucuses with the Democrats 99% of the time) is the only national candidate period to have made a national office since what, the 1950's?
It's going to take a radical change in attitudes, a really rotten national situation overall, and an even more radical amount of disgust with the current system before folks wander off to vote for a third party. Even when some ideological icon does run on his own (e.g. Ralph Nader), you will see the immediate (and dishearteningly effective) rallying cry of the threatened major party (in Nader's case, the Democrat party immediately started screaming "OMG you'll split the vote and then they will win!")
It'll take a lot to get a third party off the ground. Not impossible, but it'll take a lot to happen nonetheless.
Ask these questions:
How much competition is allowed for providing Internet access in any given US locale?
Why can we not have municipalities plant/string and own the local fiber/cable/POTS lines, then rent them out to competing ISPs for residential access purposes (see also Utah's UTOPIA initiative)?
Find the answers to those questions, and you'll find the root cause of the non-logistics problems that broadband faces in the US.
Nope - instead it'll milk the (soon to be announced) 'broadband improvement initiative' tax incentive cow for all that's worth.
Silly rabbit, corporate tax loopholes can be found wherever your lobbyists can dig them. ;)
Maybe he wanted to be fired in a most spectacular way?
Then again, due to the federal workers' union I hear that it takes a *lot* to get fired as a federal employee... I mean, you practically have to murder some senator's kids or something.