The problem is these miners are relying on other people to help pay the true costs of what they do. That's not our fucking problem.
And that's what leads me to suggest not subsidizing electricity at all. Then I don't have to worry about what you're using electricity for because I'm not paying for it. Simple, no?
Back here on Planet Earth, it seems a reasonable compromise is to just have tiered pricing. We do that for all sorts of things. You pay an artificially low rate for the first few units (which, ironically enough are the ones most valuable to me so I should be paying the highest rates) and higher rates as you use more. You set the tiers so most households pay only the cheap rate. Bitcoin miners, grow houses, people arc welding in their garage, they're the ones who pay more. Of course, that's also going to hit the electric car owners. I dunno, what are you going to do, audit their homes to document they actually plug in their electric car? Seems too invasive for me.
I humbly suggest you don't completely understand heat pumps. They heat up your house while cooling down down the earth. Similarly, an AC cools down your house while heating up the outside up the air. It's just moving energy around, not creating any. This is, by the way, why opening your refrigerator door won't cool your house down.
Umm, I think one of the LAWS of thermodynamics would like to talk to you.
They're not so much laws as...guidelines.
That's the great thing about heat pumps. A Joule of energy moves more than a Joule of heat around. For example, you use 100 Joules of electricity to move 200 Joules of heat from the ground to your house. Effectively, that's like having a 200% efficient electric heater. (Of course, I'm making up those numbers. The actual numbers will be way different.)
Technically, your air conditioner is a heat pump too. It uses a Joule to move more than a Joule of heat out of your house. In the field though, heat pumps transfer heat to and from the ground, not the air.
FWIW, PG&E, my power company, charges rates tiered by usage (e.g. the first N kW-Hours are cheaper than the second, third, and fourth N). You can also sign up for a time-of-day plan, which is cheaper most of the time, more expensive from around 2-8 PM. Finally, there's a program which gets you a bit of a discount all the time in exchange for exorbitantly expensive electricity on high demand days (basically scorching hot summer afternoons).
We used to be on the last plan. My wive loved the discount until we hit a heat wave. Then it sunk in that running the AC or anything else just got really expensive.
...if 100 micron bits of plastic are getting through the filters, there could be a slew of microbes, grit, and other impurities. Don't they filter this stuff at all?
I'm just going to drink from the backyard hose, the way God and The Beaver intended.
Well, to be fair, think of how dumb the average American is. Then realize that half are dumber than that. It's no wonder that most Americans think they're above average at most things.
I doubt the Lake Wobegon effect is purely an American thing.
Personally, I know I'm not the tallest, the most handsome, the best athlete the richest, or all that great a driver. But I compensate by knowing I'm the smartest guy in the room.:)
They're just angry. Usually because they lack good economic prospects.
OK, those two bozos are outliers. Ignore them. But I wonder about your comment. I suspect a lot of the protesters about this and that have good prospects and are seriously out of touch with those who don't. I can imagine (but can't prove) that poor people are too worried about paying rent and not getting harassed by the police to worry about self-driving cars.
I wonder if they used buggy whips on the offending cars...
Bite your tongue! Buggies are beautiful and gentle animals. Be grateful we are past the dark and savage era when someone could whip an innocent enslaved buggy with impunity!
Really? They can't throttle even a single engine down low enough? Wow. Just wow. So not only do they have to hit a tiny barge in the ocean, they have to hit that spot just as your velocity hits and inflection point. The synchronized landing seems less surprising (but no less amazing) now.
The math constantly surprises me. I'm astounded that nine engines roaring full throttle for two minutes gets the rocket mostly into space. Then they fire three engines for a few seconds and the near-empty booster has reversed directions. Another few seconds of re-entry burn and a few seconds at touchdown hardly seem sufficient to reverse all the fire and fury of launch.
For the space geeks, I did a little math. By the time you have a kilogram of payload at the space station, it has about eight times more kinetic energy than is has gravitational potential energy. In other words, you have to impart eight times as much energy getting it up to speed (7.7 km/sec) as it took to lift it 400 km in the air.
And that's just the payload, it doesn't cover any of the overhead for the booster, lifting fuel, etc.
Prices in the US are all over the map (har, har, har!). In most of the country, $220k will get you a pretty nice house, 3-5 bedrooms, decent sized yard, safe neighborhood. Go to high demand cities (Boston, New York, San Francisco, etc.) and the same house goes for $2.2 million if you can even find one.
I really want transfer booths so I can work here and live in Montana.
That 1% comparison must be done SOLELY within the same parity purchasing power.
Ah. Because there is only One True Way to compare the human condition around the world and over time.
Lighten up.
Yes, absolutely, comparing a single number like income, net worth, or even purchasing power gives you an incomplete view of the situation. The world is complex. Any single metric only gives you one view. Shoot, just looking at two together, gross income and net worth, already showed us something interesting.
One metric I like is hours-worked-to-acquire-item-X. The idea is to figure out how many hours person Y needs to work to buy item X. The good thing about this is you and I more or less get the same number of hours. If item X really is roughly the same, you get a pretty good normalized view of how "rich" each person is (or can be). Sometimes it's hard. How do I compare my Samsung phone with a telegraph of 1890? I can't. And is it reasonable to compare a 2,400 square foot house in a US suburb against a 100 square meter apartment in Tokyo? I dunno. It's complicated.
Fascinating. I didn't read that far down the article. I knew Americans are great at earning and equally great at spending, meaning we tend not to save a lot. I didn't realize the magnitude.
What a brain damaged comment. Name one thing that has been done in the last 2000 years that wasn't just a step on top of previous accomplishments..
I dunno, landing a booster on rocket power is pretty darn close. That was quite a quantum leap in rocketry. But point taken. Re-entry burns?
Old hat. Hovering on rocket power? Done (where's my Jet Pack?!?). Steering with vanes? Probably been done. Reusing the booster? Been doing that since 1980. Boostback? I don't know anyone had tried that before but only because there wasn't a reason.
Reality check: if you are living in a 220k home you ARE part of the 1% in the world.
If you earn $32,000 (or 30,000 euros or 2 million rupees), you're in the global 1%. I think that puts you at something like the 80% percentile in the US. The US is very, very rich, globally speaking. What's your point?
I just checked some home stats. The median new US house in 2015 was something like 2,400 square feet (about 220 square meters). I didn't find data on existing houses. The median price for all houses was $188,000 so a $220,000 house is above average but not outrageously so. (I think that buys a 500 square foot studio condo in SF Bay Area, where I live. I really gotta move.)
I probably should have said "automation" instead of "AI". Yes, clearly you don't necessarily need AI to take orders. I personally find order kiosks hard to use and would prefer to just talk to a human. As soon as speech recognition gets a bit better, the kiosk will be fine.
I'm sure McDonalds' CEO doesn't really care whether they automate away front line burger flippers or managers first. They'll automate whatever has the biggest bang for the buck. My intuition is automating away a manager is a lot harder than the order takers and burger makers but as you say, the return is lower too. It's all going to come down to dollars and cents.
No it isn't. This is a myth. The pace of replacement of human labor with automation is not accelerating, it is slowing down.
Interesting. I was thinking in terms of job churn: how long does a certain skill set stay relevant. I have absolutely zero data to back any of this up but here is my impression.
For ages, you just did what your father did, learning from him. Most likely you farmed just like your great-great-grandfather did. A few hundred years ago, things started opening up. You could apprentice to a master, learn a new skill, and you had an occupation for life. But once you apprenticed, it was rare to change jobs.
Around 100 years ago, the pace of change started really heating up. Innovation started coming faster and faster. By the time you got to the end of your career, the skills you learned as a young adult were increasingly likely to be obsolete. You had to be ready to learn new stuff. Either that, or the tail end of your career might get kinda bleak and you might wind up laid off and working a menial job for the last few years. But you could make it work and didn't necessarily have to find a new occupation when you turn 50.
Now, I think the reality is any skill you learn at 20 is really unlikely to be useful when you are 60. You better be ready to find something new, especially if you're in an industry which is rapidly automating. For example, machinists. My father-in-law was a drafter and machinist. He knew how to use a ruler, protractor, pens, and drawing board. He know how to operate a lathe and mill. Today, he'd need to know AutoCAD and CNC programming. Knowing how to tighten a three-jaw chuck is increasingly unimportant. And AutoCAD and CNCs really only came to dominate in the last 20 years.
Anyway, I'd be interested to see if anyone's researched this. What was the shelf life for skills over time? I'm sure it varies by trade and I don't know what else.
Sufficiently intelligent AI will have to become a legal person and will have some wishes too I suppose.
We're so, so far from artificial emotions and feelings. It's still at the idiot savant (accent on the "idiot") stage now.
Speaking of AIs with hopes and dreams, I just watched the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror. I'm still creeped out and horrified by one scene where an AI is tortured into submission. Drop everything and watch it. It's fracking awesome.
Will AI displace certain jobs? Of course, that's the idea. If your job involves taking orders at a counter, you should be worried. If you drive for a living, you also need to start planning for something else.
The real question is, will there be a net increase or decrease in jobs? That is, optimists like me observe that ever time we've automated jobs away, people found new, more productive things to do. When it was all said and done, those displaced workers found new things to do and we have no reason to believe this transition will be any different.
As others have mentioned, it's the pace which seems different now. My sense (and I can't prove it) was that in the past, transitions happened generationally. A farmer of the '30s didn't personally move to a factory, he worked his farm and retired there. Either that or he sold the farm and got a job working a menial job for his last few years because re-training him was too hard late in life. It's his kids who made the transition by not farming in the first place. They went straight to a city and got a factory job.
If jobs are transitioning faster now, people will have to adjust their career choices during their lifetimes and maybe that's what makes this different.
I doubt anyone thinks AI won't displace jobs. That's kinda the point, to use AI instead of natural intelligence, just like tools and motors displaced human muscle.
The pace of the transition is intimidating. So is the massive transition of rural farmers to cities all over southeast Asia and Africa. I have no idea how we'll all adjust but we're clever and motivated. I'm hopeful that 7 billion minds can figure something out.
Apparently during ignition TEA-TEB is kept running until engine parameters are within the "I am working correctly" range. Consumption changes depending on various conditions such as engine temperature or air speed, which were different for the center core.
Ah. I see. That makes a ton of sense. Thanks. This is truly news for nerds, stuff that is totally irrelevant to our daily lives.
Experiments will sometimes work, and sometimes won't. They are obviously figuring out just how much TEA-TEB they need.
That's what seems odd. They've re-lit Falcon engines dozens of times by now. I'm surprised the amount of igniter varies by much so I expected the knew how much they needed. Does the amount of igniter vary much based on, say, the speed and altitude of the booster? Do those parameters vary by that much between normal Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy flights?
I'm guessing it must vary by more than I expect. These guys are rocket scientists after all. If it was that simple and predictable, we wouldn't have a new clip for the blooper reel.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is these miners are relying on other people to help pay the true costs of what they do. That's not our fucking problem.
And that's what leads me to suggest not subsidizing electricity at all. Then I don't have to worry about what you're using electricity for because I'm not paying for it. Simple, no?
Back here on Planet Earth, it seems a reasonable compromise is to just have tiered pricing. We do that for all sorts of things. You pay an artificially low rate for the first few units (which, ironically enough are the ones most valuable to me so I should be paying the highest rates) and higher rates as you use more. You set the tiers so most households pay only the cheap rate. Bitcoin miners, grow houses, people arc welding in their garage, they're the ones who pay more. Of course, that's also going to hit the electric car owners. I dunno, what are you going to do, audit their homes to document they actually plug in their electric car? Seems too invasive for me.
Thank you, Dr Pedant, for that learned and insightful commentary.
Oh, and 2^20 bytes is a mebibyte, one MiB, not a megabyte.
Pedantically yours,
Dr. Pedant.
I understand heat pumps.
I humbly suggest you don't completely understand heat pumps. They heat up your house while cooling down down the earth. Similarly, an AC cools down your house while heating up the outside up the air. It's just moving energy around, not creating any. This is, by the way, why opening your refrigerator door won't cool your house down.
Umm, I think one of the LAWS of thermodynamics would like to talk to you.
They're not so much laws as...guidelines.
That's the great thing about heat pumps. A Joule of energy moves more than a Joule of heat around. For example, you use 100 Joules of electricity to move 200 Joules of heat from the ground to your house. Effectively, that's like having a 200% efficient electric heater. (Of course, I'm making up those numbers. The actual numbers will be way different.)
Technically, your air conditioner is a heat pump too. It uses a Joule to move more than a Joule of heat out of your house. In the field though, heat pumps transfer heat to and from the ground, not the air.
FWIW, PG&E, my power company, charges rates tiered by usage (e.g. the first N kW-Hours are cheaper than the second, third, and fourth N). You can also sign up for a time-of-day plan, which is cheaper most of the time, more expensive from around 2-8 PM. Finally, there's a program which gets you a bit of a discount all the time in exchange for exorbitantly expensive electricity on high demand days (basically scorching hot summer afternoons).
We used to be on the last plan. My wive loved the discount until we hit a heat wave. Then it sunk in that running the AC or anything else just got really expensive.
...if 100 micron bits of plastic are getting through the filters, there could be a slew of microbes, grit, and other impurities. Don't they filter this stuff at all?
I'm just going to drink from the backyard hose, the way God and The Beaver intended.
Well, to be fair, think of how dumb the average American is. Then realize that half are dumber than that. It's no wonder that most Americans think they're above average at most things.
I doubt the Lake Wobegon effect is purely an American thing.
Personally, I know I'm not the tallest, the most handsome, the best athlete the richest, or all that great a driver. But I compensate by knowing I'm the smartest guy in the room. :)
They're just angry. Usually because they lack good economic prospects.
OK, those two bozos are outliers. Ignore them. But I wonder about your comment. I suspect a lot of the protesters about this and that have good prospects and are seriously out of touch with those who don't. I can imagine (but can't prove) that poor people are too worried about paying rent and not getting harassed by the police to worry about self-driving cars.
I wonder if they used buggy whips on the offending cars...
Bite your tongue! Buggies are beautiful and gentle animals. Be grateful we are past the dark and savage era when someone could whip an innocent enslaved buggy with impunity!
You sir are a cad!
Tell us how great the bay area is again?
Even the rest of the Bay Area thinks San Franciscans (and Berkeley) are a bit over the top.
Really? They can't throttle even a single engine down low enough? Wow. Just wow. So not only do they have to hit a tiny barge in the ocean, they have to hit that spot just as your velocity hits and inflection point. The synchronized landing seems less surprising (but no less amazing) now.
The math constantly surprises me. I'm astounded that nine engines roaring full throttle for two minutes gets the rocket mostly into space. Then they fire three engines for a few seconds and the near-empty booster has reversed directions. Another few seconds of re-entry burn and a few seconds at touchdown hardly seem sufficient to reverse all the fire and fury of launch.
For the space geeks, I did a little math. By the time you have a kilogram of payload at the space station, it has about eight times more kinetic energy than is has gravitational potential energy. In other words, you have to impart eight times as much energy getting it up to speed (7.7 km/sec) as it took to lift it 400 km in the air. And that's just the payload, it doesn't cover any of the overhead for the booster, lifting fuel, etc.
Prices in the US are all over the map (har, har, har!). In most of the country, $220k will get you a pretty nice house, 3-5 bedrooms, decent sized yard, safe neighborhood. Go to high demand cities (Boston, New York, San Francisco, etc.) and the same house goes for $2.2 million if you can even find one.
I really want transfer booths so I can work here and live in Montana.
That 1% comparison must be done SOLELY within the same parity purchasing power.
Ah. Because there is only One True Way to compare the human condition around the world and over time.
Lighten up.
Yes, absolutely, comparing a single number like income, net worth, or even purchasing power gives you an incomplete view of the situation. The world is complex. Any single metric only gives you one view. Shoot, just looking at two together, gross income and net worth, already showed us something interesting.
One metric I like is hours-worked-to-acquire-item-X. The idea is to figure out how many hours person Y needs to work to buy item X. The good thing about this is you and I more or less get the same number of hours. If item X really is roughly the same, you get a pretty good normalized view of how "rich" each person is (or can be). Sometimes it's hard. How do I compare my Samsung phone with a telegraph of 1890? I can't. And is it reasonable to compare a 2,400 square foot house in a US suburb against a 100 square meter apartment in Tokyo? I dunno. It's complicated.
Fascinating. I didn't read that far down the article. I knew Americans are great at earning and equally great at spending, meaning we tend not to save a lot. I didn't realize the magnitude.
What a brain damaged comment. Name one thing that has been done in the last 2000 years that wasn't just a step on top of previous accomplishments..
I dunno, landing a booster on rocket power is pretty darn close. That was quite a quantum leap in rocketry. But point taken. Re-entry burns? Old hat. Hovering on rocket power? Done (where's my Jet Pack?!?). Steering with vanes? Probably been done. Reusing the booster? Been doing that since 1980. Boostback? I don't know anyone had tried that before but only because there wasn't a reason.
Add it all up and it's a pretty neat trick.
Reality check: if you are living in a 220k home you ARE part of the 1% in the world.
If you earn $32,000 (or 30,000 euros or 2 million rupees), you're in the global 1%. I think that puts you at something like the 80% percentile in the US. The US is very, very rich, globally speaking. What's your point?
I just checked some home stats. The median new US house in 2015 was something like 2,400 square feet (about 220 square meters). I didn't find data on existing houses. The median price for all houses was $188,000 so a $220,000 house is above average but not outrageously so. (I think that buys a 500 square foot studio condo in SF Bay Area, where I live. I really gotta move.)
For example, see this fine article. There are many more. I believe the original research was done at UCLA but I don't remember by whom.
I probably should have said "automation" instead of "AI". Yes, clearly you don't necessarily need AI to take orders. I personally find order kiosks hard to use and would prefer to just talk to a human. As soon as speech recognition gets a bit better, the kiosk will be fine.
I'm sure McDonalds' CEO doesn't really care whether they automate away front line burger flippers or managers first. They'll automate whatever has the biggest bang for the buck. My intuition is automating away a manager is a lot harder than the order takers and burger makers but as you say, the return is lower too. It's all going to come down to dollars and cents.
No it isn't. This is a myth. The pace of replacement of human labor with automation is not accelerating, it is slowing down.
Interesting. I was thinking in terms of job churn: how long does a certain skill set stay relevant. I have absolutely zero data to back any of this up but here is my impression.
For ages, you just did what your father did, learning from him. Most likely you farmed just like your great-great-grandfather did. A few hundred years ago, things started opening up. You could apprentice to a master, learn a new skill, and you had an occupation for life. But once you apprenticed, it was rare to change jobs.
Around 100 years ago, the pace of change started really heating up. Innovation started coming faster and faster. By the time you got to the end of your career, the skills you learned as a young adult were increasingly likely to be obsolete. You had to be ready to learn new stuff. Either that, or the tail end of your career might get kinda bleak and you might wind up laid off and working a menial job for the last few years. But you could make it work and didn't necessarily have to find a new occupation when you turn 50.
Now, I think the reality is any skill you learn at 20 is really unlikely to be useful when you are 60. You better be ready to find something new, especially if you're in an industry which is rapidly automating. For example, machinists. My father-in-law was a drafter and machinist. He knew how to use a ruler, protractor, pens, and drawing board. He know how to operate a lathe and mill. Today, he'd need to know AutoCAD and CNC programming. Knowing how to tighten a three-jaw chuck is increasingly unimportant. And AutoCAD and CNCs really only came to dominate in the last 20 years.
Anyway, I'd be interested to see if anyone's researched this. What was the shelf life for skills over time? I'm sure it varies by trade and I don't know what else.
Sufficiently intelligent AI will have to become a legal person and will have some wishes too I suppose.
We're so, so far from artificial emotions and feelings. It's still at the idiot savant (accent on the "idiot") stage now.
Speaking of AIs with hopes and dreams, I just watched the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror. I'm still creeped out and horrified by one scene where an AI is tortured into submission. Drop everything and watch it. It's fracking awesome.
Here's where the headline is misleading.
Will AI displace certain jobs? Of course, that's the idea. If your job involves taking orders at a counter, you should be worried. If you drive for a living, you also need to start planning for something else.
The real question is, will there be a net increase or decrease in jobs? That is, optimists like me observe that ever time we've automated jobs away, people found new, more productive things to do. When it was all said and done, those displaced workers found new things to do and we have no reason to believe this transition will be any different.
As others have mentioned, it's the pace which seems different now. My sense (and I can't prove it) was that in the past, transitions happened generationally. A farmer of the '30s didn't personally move to a factory, he worked his farm and retired there. Either that or he sold the farm and got a job working a menial job for his last few years because re-training him was too hard late in life. It's his kids who made the transition by not farming in the first place. They went straight to a city and got a factory job.
If jobs are transitioning faster now, people will have to adjust their career choices during their lifetimes and maybe that's what makes this different.
I doubt anyone thinks AI won't displace jobs. That's kinda the point, to use AI instead of natural intelligence, just like tools and motors displaced human muscle.
The pace of the transition is intimidating. So is the massive transition of rural farmers to cities all over southeast Asia and Africa. I have no idea how we'll all adjust but we're clever and motivated. I'm hopeful that 7 billion minds can figure something out.
Apparently during ignition TEA-TEB is kept running until engine parameters are within the "I am working correctly" range. Consumption changes depending on various conditions such as engine temperature or air speed, which were different for the center core.
Ah. I see. That makes a ton of sense. Thanks. This is truly news for nerds, stuff that is totally irrelevant to our daily lives.
I assumed it was the normal three burns: boost back (if needed), reentry, and landing. As another poster mentioned, there might also have been a leak.
Experiments will sometimes work, and sometimes won't. They are obviously figuring out just how much TEA-TEB they need.
That's what seems odd. They've re-lit Falcon engines dozens of times by now. I'm surprised the amount of igniter varies by much so I expected the knew how much they needed. Does the amount of igniter vary much based on, say, the speed and altitude of the booster? Do those parameters vary by that much between normal Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy flights?
I'm guessing it must vary by more than I expect. These guys are rocket scientists after all. If it was that simple and predictable, we wouldn't have a new clip for the blooper reel.