Unless you are rich and can afford seven digits for a flat in town, you are likely living on the outskirts, and commuting, 25-30 miles each way.
These numbers looked quite suspect to me, so I did some googling, and found that the average American commute (driven, so I guess but I'm not sure that this excludes people walking, cycling, and taking public transport) is 16 miles one way, about two-thirds to half of what you state. Yes that's an average, so I'm sure there are lots of people driving 25-30 miles, I'm sure there are people driving more than 50 miles, but to say that one is "likely" to be driving 25-30 miles unless they are rich doesn't sound very plausible to me.
Second, China is comparing it to land it questionably annexed. Is this an indication they're withdrawing from the treaty for outer space and have the means to defend any territory?
And it is known to be a crappy system for collecting data, because it is full of garbage and doesn't have any effective system for filtering the noise.
Humans are a lot better at filtering the noise than any computer system, especially deep learning. This is proven by the simple example that a human child can see one cat, maybe two or three cats, and immediately recognize all other cats. Even realize that domestic cats and large wild cats are related. On the other hand, artificial neural networks need to see thousands of cats to be able to classify them properly...and then are still prone to seeing them where there are none.
This is why critical thinking is a more valuable learning skill than memorization.
Critical thinking is exactly the thing computers can't do. As you say, they are excellent at memorization.
Computers are excellent at memorization. So when an engineer builds an AI library that is actually an expert system for recombining certain classes of algorithms, the programmer using that library can simply receive knowledge about the API through the documentation, and the library itself gets received perfectly; an exact copy. So there is no noise at all, no garbage in the signal, other than explicit documentation mistakes. And those can be checked and measured by multiple parties over time, unlike when humans receive knowledge and it is stored inside their brains.
And anyways, the AI parts are being done by the library not by the recipient of the library. And those actions are designed around an objective logical system designed in layers on top of the CPU instructions themselves. This is not received knowledge, it is a self-contained logical system that can process instructions from humans and generate well-defined actions.
And this is exactly what makes it limited, and unable from ever being intelligent in the way a human is. You say "other than explicit documentation mistakes". Well that's exactly the point, any mistake added in by the programmer is there forever (until another programmer finds and corrects it, thus changing the structure), and there is no ability for adaptation. Well-defined actions is all it can generate. That's why it's not intelligent in the sense that humans, or even cats and dogs, are.
AI isn't built on pile of folksy wisdom passed down by programmers of the past, as common sense is. "Common sense" in programming is the same as anywhere else; it is bullshit that people repeat to each other that didn't manage to kill them yet, like "it doesn't matter what language you use," and "if I was told a problem was trivial, that means I don't have to worry about bugs when I implement it." Or more seriously, "always call free() after malloc()." Is it really always true, or is it merely often true? Does it matter if your absolutes aren't actually absolute? Are they still true?
Common sense is most definitely NOT just "bullshit that repeat to each other that didn't manage to kill them yet". Some common sense is bullshit, while a lot of it is a result of evolutionary adaptation that has a real purpose.
Put simply - most of the "Artificial Intelligence" you hear about in the news is really fancy pattern matching. So you can have software that can recognize voice commands, or faces in pictures, or general patterns in data.
What you don't have, and aren't even close to, are computers that can "think." That is, put different sets of data together in arbitrary ways and make sense of it. You can't feed in a bunch of musical information to a computer and have it spontaneously generate music. You can't feed in a bunch of economic data and have it decide that certain regulations are required to achieve some economic goal - unless someone specifically programs it to do so.
The underlying reason is computers lack any way of attaining "common sense." If you tell a computer a person is in a room, the computer has no concept of what you are talking about but will dutifully note that a person is in a room. To a computer that could mean the person is occupying all the space in the room, that the person is in every room that exists, that the person is in the room AND outside the room, or that a person IS a room. In actuality, the computer makes no inference beyond "something called a person is in something called a room, whatever that means."
Wasn't this obvious to anyone who has studied neural networks and deep learning? I mean I would shake my head each time someone would claim that deep learning would create functioning computer "minds".
Yes, it's obvious that our brains do a lot of very efficient pattern recognition (that often misfires, but when it does, it usually errs on the side of caution - clear evolutionary adaptation). However how can anyone in their right mind be so reductionist as to think that ALL that are brains do is fancy pattern recognition?
It's similar to AI hype of previous ages, when people thought that logical programming languages would create AI, as if human intelligence was logic only. The use of logic is only a subset of human intelligence and we use it less often than we like to think. Formal logic is a human construct, and replicating human-type thinking using formal logic only was never going to work. With deep learning we went completely the other way, throw enough artificial neurons and data at it and magically a mind will emerge. All this time we don't truly understand what a "mind" is in its totality, which makes replicating it in computers - things built to very deliberately follow precise instructions - like, really hard.
Computers beating humans at chess or go does not mean AI has arrived. Chess and go are human inventions, they are games invented with very clear and defined rules. Therefore it is possible to create other human constructs (computer programs) that can exploit these rules and large amounts of computational power to beat humans. It can be very hard, the solution can be very impressive, but it does not mean we have AI. In fact there is no rule about transferring chess skills into other, unrelated domains (Fischer and Gasparov come to mind, both not being quite sane in their post-chess careers), and the same goes for other very specific skills. Training a computer to be very good at face recognition says nothing about "AI", really.
Humans suffer from explanatory reductionism based on the dominant technological paradigm of the time. We try to explain the entire world using things which we know well. When we were an agricultural society, the world was a flat disk held up by giant pack animals. When Newton's theories revolutionized science and the industrial revolution revolutionized the economy, we saw the universe as a clockwork mechanism. After the computer revolution, we think everything can be reduced to some form of computation (and some posit that we are in fact living in a computer simulation).
a. Automation is going to put us all out of work and if we don't change how we distribute wealth everybody but a lucky few born into it will live like shit (think Indian reservations but on a global scale).
b. Right wing politics don't work, you know this and it makes you very uncomfortable. Stop reading Ayn Rand and hating yourself and start looking around at the deck stacked against you. You'll have an uncomfortable free years while you work out the demons put in your head by the billion dollar propaganda machines like Fox News and Rush but you'll be better for it.
Point "b" is pretty correct but I think you're wrong on point "a". Actually there's a whole bunch of jobs we could create if we distributed the wealth better. Well, first off, even without that, we are just terrible at imagining the jobs of the future. Think of all the entertainment-related jobs we have today, which 50, 100, or 200 years nobody could imagine, and if they could (or you told them) they'd think of a society with so many of those jobs as some sort of immoral dystopia. Tell someone in 1700 that in 300 years, only 2% of people will be farmers, they'd probably first ask you "so who killed off all the unnecessary farmers then?"
That put aside, back to the first point, which is the jobs I can imagine we could create. Think first of education, the current education paradigm is actually not very humane and is designed to create factory workers (which at some point in the future, will basically not be needed). 20, 30, 40 kids to a class? Ideally children should interact with their teachers in groups of 5-10 most of the time, and there should be a lot of 1:1 tutoring (this is how education actually was back before the industrial age, before it was a mass institution, and some high-quality (often private) institutions work this way still today). Then a whole bunch of social services, more people in health care, more people caring for the elderly (there's going to be a lot more of those folks around), and so on.
So you think being a landlord isn't a job just because you inherited the properties? To be landlord to enough renters to pay a full livable wage isn't a walk in the park. Go manage a property to see for yourself.
Oh, and actually nobody said being a landlord can't be a job. However if you look at the fact that, as I said in my first reply to you, that landlords usually outsource the property management to others, you have to conclude that usually, the value of the jobs related to property management is less (often significantly less, but that depends on the property market in a given place at a given time) than the value of the rent earned on those properties.
In other words, go and manage a property for someone else, and see whether your salary is equal to the full rent earned on the properties you're managing. I suspect it will be way below that.
So you think being a landlord isn't a job just because you inherited the properties? To be landlord to enough renters to pay a full livable wage isn't a walk in the park. Go manage a property to see for yourself.
Most* landlords don't manage their properties, they outsource that to a company that takes a cut of the rent (or charges a fixed fee, or a mix of both). If you've ever lived in a rental building, careful examination of your lease contract will likely reveal that the owner of the building (or in some cases, the particular apartment you're renting) and the management you interact with and pay your rent to are not the same entity (person or company).
* - I mean "most" as in those "those who own the most rental properties". It could be that the majority of "landlords" (in terms of individuals who rent out a piece of their property) are people renting out their basements who do the "property management" by themselves, but I wasn't talking about them. Also I did not include AirBnB and such.
And they get hundreds of billions of dollars of tax money and they still go bankrupt and commit suicide in droves because they cannot compete on the market.
Maybe the US could implement Canada's supply management system it likes to bash so much, thus creating a farming sector that is profitable without any government subsidies?
This would be a great comment except that there have been TWENTY FOUR new US medical schools established in the last ten years.
Do they still work based on the same principles as all the other medical schools? A type of graduate school basically (you don't have to actually have an undergraduate degree, but you had to have started studying for one), highly selective and very expensive?
The whole system in Canada & the US is set up to constrain the number of medical doctors in order to keep their wages artificially high. In most other countries, medicine is a "normal" university course that one can enrol in right after high school, just like engineering or science or whatever (same goes for law, btw). Medical degrees from other countries get recognized, not like in the US and Canada where they tell European-trained doctors that their degrees are equivalents of a BSc and that they have to go through medical school (or through a set of highly difficult accreditation exams - this tends to vary, state to state and province to province). In the US and Canada doctors tend to heavily out-earn similar highly educated workers such as engineers, whereas in much of Europe their salaries are comparable.
The examples cited in the article are silly...I mean it's silly to use them to argue that "this was the year". Automated cashiers at supermarkets? That's been a thing for ages. Yes, over time more have been popping up....but I've yet to see one that's faster and more convenient than an actual human cashier (they used to be faster when most people avoided them, meaning there was no line...but now that they are used, I find them usually quite slower than the human-run line). Self-service kiosks at fast food restaurants? Geez, I saw that at McDonald's at least 6-7 years ago.
Service jobs have been automated away for a long time now (yet, there is still a ton of them). People forget all the paper pushers that computers put out of a job from the 70s through to the 90s. What 1 corporate accountant does today on a computer used to require literally a room full of people. "Calculator" was a job description. On the other hand, "social media outreach coordinator" was definitely not a job description in 1965, yet it very much is today.
Maybe it has accelerated or reached some kind of inflection point, but it certainly didn't "begin" this year.
I doubt we've reached any inflection point. It's just that we're in the middle of an AI hype which thinks deep learning will be able to everything human brains can, which feeds the OMG AUTOMATION THERE AREN'T GONNA BE NO JOBS memes. It's all way overblown...for example, Japan, which is way ahead of everyone else on the automation front, especially in services (you can buy almost anything from a vending machine...there are restaurants where you order from a vending machine even), has an unemployment rate of...wait for it...2.5 percent. Japan is kind of a fast-forward picture of the entire developed world, because they aged the fastest. We are actually going to need a lot of automation going forward because we won't have enough people to do the jobs...since we're going to have a huge retired population that will no longer work, but will still require services.
On the other hand, in poor countries, people are simply still cheaper than machines in most service jobs. Automating supermarket cashiers just doesn't make sense in say a poor African country, since it costs less to just pay people to man them.
I don't know if you were exaggerating but are there any headphones that last 20 years (or close)?
I've a pair of Sony earbuds purchased a long time ago, most likely in the early / mid 90s. They still work fine. Also lots of cheap ones that have definitely lasted more than 1.5 years (although I had plenty of those which broke in some way after 6-12 months or even less)
Great then for people who use Apple products almost exclusively and don't mind spending $159 on AirPods...let me know when this becomes a standard feature on every new BT-enabled device, and works seamlessly across devices with different manufacturers. The way many other transmission standards do (like WiFi).
Well, that's news to me, thanks. I stand corrected. I've been repeatedly told in the past by flight attendants that anything that has any kind of wireless transmission is a no-no.
If you want a high-end iPhone, that's the price to pay. Unlike Samsung in the Android world, the iPhone has no competitors. iPhones and Android based phones are still very different, mainly in terms of security, and ergonomics.
Yeah, I'm also at a loss as to why anyone would want an iPhone of any variety, but I guess that's just me.
A car stereo with Bluetooth costs $15. Walmart also sells Bluetooth adapters in the impulse bins at the check-out counters.
So? Lack of a headphone jack has nothing to do with annoying audiophiles...in fact it's more annoying to just us regular folk.
I have bluetooth headphones. The sound is great for my needs and they're pretty cool. But...
- They're wireless (duh), so you need to charge them. Another piece of equipment you need a cable for and a charger and that you have to worry about plugging in at night. Annoying.
- Bluetooth is far from a perfect technology...in the past it was horribly buggy, now it's got better but it's still not seamless. If you use just one pair of equipment (a single set of headphones with a single phone for example) it'll work OK most of the time but once you start swapping pairs around the problems multiply. Which headset do you pair to this device? Which is the default audio output? Did it automatically pair with another nearby device with which it was paired in the past and currently has its Bluetooth on? Etc. etc.
- The communication is ultimately software-based, which means software updates can break things. For example, an update for my OS broke the ability of my computer to stream full stereo sound to my bluetooth headphones.
- The whole pairing process is still so 1995, compare to the much more straightforward process of connecting to WiFi.
- Declining battery life means your bluetooth headphones are going to need replacing sooner than your regular headphones most likely. Take earbuds. I can go the cheap route and pay $5-10, those will probably break within a year. But hey, they're dirt cheap who cares? Or if I choose to spend $30+ on earbuds those will probably last me 20 years. I also get to use them with a whole variety of equipment. Which pair of bluetooth headphones will last me 20 years? Which one of them will plug into my 10-15 year old sound system? Etc.
- What happens all the time is that exactly when I need to use the headphones, the battery is empty.
- More on the phone side: the main way I listen to music at home now is by plugging in my tablet or phone into my sound system and playing music off Spotify, Youtube, internet radio, MP3s, whatever. Hard without a 3.5 mm jack, and yeah, I like the ability of being able to charge the phone/tablet simultaneously.
- You officially aren't allowed to use Bluetooth on an airplane.
So yeah, I have Bluetooth headphones, but more or less I always carry a pair of ordinary earbuds as backup. Don't remove my 3.5mm jack, thanks.
The line between smartphones and laptops is now close to indistinguishable.
No it isn't. Smartphones generally (99,99% of them) can't/don't run PC operating systems which enable the doing of real work...and I set the bar of "real work" pretty low, i.e. starting from a full-featured office suite. No matter how close the hardware specs, things that run Android and iOS are closer to appliances and game consoles than they are to laptop and desktop PCs.
Indeed. Phones are already too thin, so thin and fragile you have to put them in a case to stop them from breaking (or even just bending in your pocket or bag). Guess what, that makes them thicker...so what's the point again? Oh, marketing, so we can wow people with how thin our phone is compared to the competition. The fact that 90% of the phone's users will admire the thinness only while looking at the store display and for the first few hours/days they take their phone out of the box (before they permanently stick it in a case) seems lost on most people.
I'm really at a loss as to why people pay $800-1000 for a smartphone in today's market.
My most expensive smartphone was my first one, an HTC Legend, I think I paid around $600 for that one. I used it for 5 years (it still works, although the power button is screwed up so turning on/off is annoying and you can't run any up-to-date software on it - the phone is now 8.5 years old).
My next phone, a huge upgrade in every way, was an Asus ZenPhone (ZE500) and that cost me around $280. It lasted me a good 3 years, the main reason I decided to replace it was the fact that I dropped it on the street and broke its screen (it's still usable btw). It did have a few other issues (was geting a bit slow, had some strange software bugs, and some mechanical issues with the power button and the SIM card slot), but had I not broken the screen I could've easily used it for another year.
A few months ago I got a Motorola Moto G for about $350. Again, a big upgrade in every way...works absolutely great. All this makes sense to me, as technology improves you should be able to get more bang for less buck. This is generally the case, I mean check out what you can get now in a Xiami phone for $200 (my girlfriend has one). Yet, the prices of the flagship models seem to be increasing (Apple breaks the price ceiling with each new generation top of the line iPhone) while adding rather dubious "features", such as the lack of a headphone jack, incompatibility with existing peripherals, phones so thin that they bend in your pocket and which you then need to embed in a two-times thicker case to ensure they don't break...I don't see why I should ever pay more than $500 for a smartphone again.
It's obvious you don't know either the argument being made nor how a power grid has to work.
Oh, really, how does a power grid "have" to work? Just because the gird mostly works in a certain way today, does it mean it must always be so? Renewables have to "fit" into the existing grid and its principles while they are the "minority" source of supply. If they ever become the main supply, it's highly likely that the grid will adapt to serve them. There is a lot of research going on with this, like about DC microgrids powered by renewables that co-exist with the main grid...and so on.
The PROBLEM with Wind and Solar is that they are unreliable, you cannot schedule them to meet demand, you have to take the power and use it, store it or throw it away when it is generated from these sources.
Yes in that sense they are "unreliable" but they also have some benefits. For example, especially in the summer, peak power demand often coincides with peak solar production. So you don't need energy set aside to handle that peak, it's being produced and consumed then. Btw, the same applies for all other power plants to an extent - why do you think electricity is far cheaper at night in most places? Because large power plants can't be shut down that easily (i.e. shutting them down and re-starting them often does not make economic sense, and is technically difficult), so the low prices exist to shift some demand to the night to consume that electricity.
Sure, you could dump it into batteries and use it later, but this is extremely inefficient and expensive to do on an industrial scale.
I don't know about the price, but I'm pretty sure it's not inefficient. You can charge a battery with 90+% efficiency and discharge it so as well...on the other hand, combined cycle gas turbines convert gas to elictricity at an efficiency of about 60%, whereas other fossil-fueled generators are worse. Coal is at about 33%.
Currently there is reserve capacity provided by mechanically rotating machines, to keep things stable and in specifications, this reserve covers for instantaneous demand changes, transmission line failure induced transients and things like that.
Reserve capacity is also provided by dams holding back rivers or pumped-up reservoirs. Which brings up the point that you could store wind and solar-generated energy using pumped hydro as well...this would probably be cheaper, but a less efficient than using batteries.
it will only be worth its money if it is in its original state.
Basically no classic car is in its "original state". I would venture as to say that no car, period, is in its "original state" after about 5 years. However this especially applies to cars which are decades old. Most of these classic cars have been re-worked and restored many times.
Whether a classic roadster converted to an EV is worthless is in the eye of the beholder. I have zero interest in buying a classic roadster with its old sputtering engine, this just has no appeal to me. On the other hand, if I could buy a car that looks like an old roadster from the outside but is actually a new EV on the inside, I'd go for it. I'm also sure there are people to whom both would appeal.
nobody is driving these classic cars anyway, except maybe once or twice a year to go to a meeting or somesuch.
Well maybe to some people that would be the point of an EV conversion? What good is a car that just sits in a garage most of the time? Might as well be in a museum then. Converting it to EV might allow you to actually drive it regularly.
France is unusual in that it uses electricity to provide a lot of home and industrial heating since it's cheap and readily available.
It's not that unusual, the Province of Quebec is like this as well, but due to the abundant hydroelectricity available as opposed to nuclear in France.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you are rich and can afford seven digits for a flat in town, you are likely living on the outskirts, and commuting, 25-30 miles each way.
These numbers looked quite suspect to me, so I did some googling, and found that the average American commute (driven, so I guess but I'm not sure that this excludes people walking, cycling, and taking public transport) is 16 miles one way, about two-thirds to half of what you state. Yes that's an average, so I'm sure there are lots of people driving 25-30 miles, I'm sure there are people driving more than 50 miles, but to say that one is "likely" to be driving 25-30 miles unless they are rich doesn't sound very plausible to me.
Second, China is comparing it to land it questionably annexed. Is this an indication they're withdrawing from the treaty for outer space and have the means to defend any territory?
To what are they comparing it and where?
And it is known to be a crappy system for collecting data, because it is full of garbage and doesn't have any effective system for filtering the noise.
Humans are a lot better at filtering the noise than any computer system, especially deep learning. This is proven by the simple example that a human child can see one cat, maybe two or three cats, and immediately recognize all other cats. Even realize that domestic cats and large wild cats are related. On the other hand, artificial neural networks need to see thousands of cats to be able to classify them properly...and then are still prone to seeing them where there are none.
This is why critical thinking is a more valuable learning skill than memorization.
Critical thinking is exactly the thing computers can't do. As you say, they are excellent at memorization.
Computers are excellent at memorization. So when an engineer builds an AI library that is actually an expert system for recombining certain classes of algorithms, the programmer using that library can simply receive knowledge about the API through the documentation, and the library itself gets received perfectly; an exact copy. So there is no noise at all, no garbage in the signal, other than explicit documentation mistakes. And those can be checked and measured by multiple parties over time, unlike when humans receive knowledge and it is stored inside their brains.
And anyways, the AI parts are being done by the library not by the recipient of the library. And those actions are designed around an objective logical system designed in layers on top of the CPU instructions themselves. This is not received knowledge, it is a self-contained logical system that can process instructions from humans and generate well-defined actions.
And this is exactly what makes it limited, and unable from ever being intelligent in the way a human is. You say "other than explicit documentation mistakes". Well that's exactly the point, any mistake added in by the programmer is there forever (until another programmer finds and corrects it, thus changing the structure), and there is no ability for adaptation. Well-defined actions is all it can generate. That's why it's not intelligent in the sense that humans, or even cats and dogs, are.
AI isn't built on pile of folksy wisdom passed down by programmers of the past, as common sense is. "Common sense" in programming is the same as anywhere else; it is bullshit that people repeat to each other that didn't manage to kill them yet, like "it doesn't matter what language you use," and "if I was told a problem was trivial, that means I don't have to worry about bugs when I implement it." Or more seriously, "always call free() after malloc()." Is it really always true, or is it merely often true? Does it matter if your absolutes aren't actually absolute? Are they still true?
Common sense is most definitely NOT just "bullshit that repeat to each other that didn't manage to kill them yet". Some common sense is bullshit, while a lot of it is a result of evolutionary adaptation that has a real purpose.
Put simply - most of the "Artificial Intelligence" you hear about in the news is really fancy pattern matching. So you can have software that can recognize voice commands, or faces in pictures, or general patterns in data.
What you don't have, and aren't even close to, are computers that can "think." That is, put different sets of data together in arbitrary ways and make sense of it. You can't feed in a bunch of musical information to a computer and have it spontaneously generate music. You can't feed in a bunch of economic data and have it decide that certain regulations are required to achieve some economic goal - unless someone specifically programs it to do so.
The underlying reason is computers lack any way of attaining "common sense." If you tell a computer a person is in a room, the computer has no concept of what you are talking about but will dutifully note that a person is in a room. To a computer that could mean the person is occupying all the space in the room, that the person is in every room that exists, that the person is in the room AND outside the room, or that a person IS a room. In actuality, the computer makes no inference beyond "something called a person is in something called a room, whatever that means."
Wasn't this obvious to anyone who has studied neural networks and deep learning? I mean I would shake my head each time someone would claim that deep learning would create functioning computer "minds".
Yes, it's obvious that our brains do a lot of very efficient pattern recognition (that often misfires, but when it does, it usually errs on the side of caution - clear evolutionary adaptation). However how can anyone in their right mind be so reductionist as to think that ALL that are brains do is fancy pattern recognition?
It's similar to AI hype of previous ages, when people thought that logical programming languages would create AI, as if human intelligence was logic only. The use of logic is only a subset of human intelligence and we use it less often than we like to think. Formal logic is a human construct, and replicating human-type thinking using formal logic only was never going to work. With deep learning we went completely the other way, throw enough artificial neurons and data at it and magically a mind will emerge. All this time we don't truly understand what a "mind" is in its totality, which makes replicating it in computers - things built to very deliberately follow precise instructions - like, really hard.
Computers beating humans at chess or go does not mean AI has arrived. Chess and go are human inventions, they are games invented with very clear and defined rules. Therefore it is possible to create other human constructs (computer programs) that can exploit these rules and large amounts of computational power to beat humans. It can be very hard, the solution can be very impressive, but it does not mean we have AI. In fact there is no rule about transferring chess skills into other, unrelated domains (Fischer and Gasparov come to mind, both not being quite sane in their post-chess careers), and the same goes for other very specific skills. Training a computer to be very good at face recognition says nothing about "AI", really.
Humans suffer from explanatory reductionism based on the dominant technological paradigm of the time. We try to explain the entire world using things which we know well. When we were an agricultural society, the world was a flat disk held up by giant pack animals. When Newton's theories revolutionized science and the industrial revolution revolutionized the economy, we saw the universe as a clockwork mechanism. After the computer revolution, we think everything can be reduced to some form of computation (and some posit that we are in fact living in a computer simulation).
a. Automation is going to put us all out of work and if we don't change how we distribute wealth everybody but a lucky few born into it will live like shit (think Indian reservations but on a global scale).
b. Right wing politics don't work, you know this and it makes you very uncomfortable. Stop reading Ayn Rand and hating yourself and start looking around at the deck stacked against you. You'll have an uncomfortable free years while you work out the demons put in your head by the billion dollar propaganda machines like Fox News and Rush but you'll be better for it.
Point "b" is pretty correct but I think you're wrong on point "a". Actually there's a whole bunch of jobs we could create if we distributed the wealth better. Well, first off, even without that, we are just terrible at imagining the jobs of the future. Think of all the entertainment-related jobs we have today, which 50, 100, or 200 years nobody could imagine, and if they could (or you told them) they'd think of a society with so many of those jobs as some sort of immoral dystopia. Tell someone in 1700 that in 300 years, only 2% of people will be farmers, they'd probably first ask you "so who killed off all the unnecessary farmers then?"
That put aside, back to the first point, which is the jobs I can imagine we could create. Think first of education, the current education paradigm is actually not very humane and is designed to create factory workers (which at some point in the future, will basically not be needed). 20, 30, 40 kids to a class? Ideally children should interact with their teachers in groups of 5-10 most of the time, and there should be a lot of 1:1 tutoring (this is how education actually was back before the industrial age, before it was a mass institution, and some high-quality (often private) institutions work this way still today). Then a whole bunch of social services, more people in health care, more people caring for the elderly (there's going to be a lot more of those folks around), and so on.
So you think being a landlord isn't a job just because you inherited the properties? To be landlord to enough renters to pay a full livable wage isn't a walk in the park. Go manage a property to see for yourself.
Oh, and actually nobody said being a landlord can't be a job. However if you look at the fact that, as I said in my first reply to you, that landlords usually outsource the property management to others, you have to conclude that usually, the value of the jobs related to property management is less (often significantly less, but that depends on the property market in a given place at a given time) than the value of the rent earned on those properties.
In other words, go and manage a property for someone else, and see whether your salary is equal to the full rent earned on the properties you're managing. I suspect it will be way below that.
So you think being a landlord isn't a job just because you inherited the properties? To be landlord to enough renters to pay a full livable wage isn't a walk in the park. Go manage a property to see for yourself.
Most* landlords don't manage their properties, they outsource that to a company that takes a cut of the rent (or charges a fixed fee, or a mix of both). If you've ever lived in a rental building, careful examination of your lease contract will likely reveal that the owner of the building (or in some cases, the particular apartment you're renting) and the management you interact with and pay your rent to are not the same entity (person or company).
* - I mean "most" as in those "those who own the most rental properties". It could be that the majority of "landlords" (in terms of individuals who rent out a piece of their property) are people renting out their basements who do the "property management" by themselves, but I wasn't talking about them. Also I did not include AirBnB and such.
And they get hundreds of billions of dollars of tax money and they still go bankrupt and commit suicide in droves because they cannot compete on the market.
Maybe the US could implement Canada's supply management system it likes to bash so much, thus creating a farming sector that is profitable without any government subsidies?
Not only that, but the US has also aged during that time. Generally, older people need more medical care.
This would be a great comment except that there have been TWENTY FOUR new US medical schools established in the last ten years.
Do they still work based on the same principles as all the other medical schools? A type of graduate school basically (you don't have to actually have an undergraduate degree, but you had to have started studying for one), highly selective and very expensive?
The whole system in Canada & the US is set up to constrain the number of medical doctors in order to keep their wages artificially high. In most other countries, medicine is a "normal" university course that one can enrol in right after high school, just like engineering or science or whatever (same goes for law, btw). Medical degrees from other countries get recognized, not like in the US and Canada where they tell European-trained doctors that their degrees are equivalents of a BSc and that they have to go through medical school (or through a set of highly difficult accreditation exams - this tends to vary, state to state and province to province). In the US and Canada doctors tend to heavily out-earn similar highly educated workers such as engineers, whereas in much of Europe their salaries are comparable.
It didn't just start.
Exactly!
The examples cited in the article are silly...I mean it's silly to use them to argue that "this was the year". Automated cashiers at supermarkets? That's been a thing for ages. Yes, over time more have been popping up....but I've yet to see one that's faster and more convenient than an actual human cashier (they used to be faster when most people avoided them, meaning there was no line...but now that they are used, I find them usually quite slower than the human-run line). Self-service kiosks at fast food restaurants? Geez, I saw that at McDonald's at least 6-7 years ago.
Service jobs have been automated away for a long time now (yet, there is still a ton of them). People forget all the paper pushers that computers put out of a job from the 70s through to the 90s. What 1 corporate accountant does today on a computer used to require literally a room full of people. "Calculator" was a job description. On the other hand, "social media outreach coordinator" was definitely not a job description in 1965, yet it very much is today.
Maybe it has accelerated or reached some kind of inflection point, but it certainly didn't "begin" this year.
I doubt we've reached any inflection point. It's just that we're in the middle of an AI hype which thinks deep learning will be able to everything human brains can, which feeds the OMG AUTOMATION THERE AREN'T GONNA BE NO JOBS memes. It's all way overblown...for example, Japan, which is way ahead of everyone else on the automation front, especially in services (you can buy almost anything from a vending machine...there are restaurants where you order from a vending machine even), has an unemployment rate of...wait for it...2.5 percent. Japan is kind of a fast-forward picture of the entire developed world, because they aged the fastest. We are actually going to need a lot of automation going forward because we won't have enough people to do the jobs...since we're going to have a huge retired population that will no longer work, but will still require services.
On the other hand, in poor countries, people are simply still cheaper than machines in most service jobs. Automating supermarket cashiers just doesn't make sense in say a poor African country, since it costs less to just pay people to man them.
I don't know if you were exaggerating but are there any headphones that last 20 years (or close)?
I've a pair of Sony earbuds purchased a long time ago, most likely in the early / mid 90s. They still work fine. Also lots of cheap ones that have definitely lasted more than 1.5 years (although I had plenty of those which broke in some way after 6-12 months or even less)
Uhm, and the iPhone is the only smartphone lineup in existence?
Great then for people who use Apple products almost exclusively and don't mind spending $159 on AirPods...let me know when this becomes a standard feature on every new BT-enabled device, and works seamlessly across devices with different manufacturers. The way many other transmission standards do (like WiFi).
Well, that's news to me, thanks. I stand corrected. I've been repeatedly told in the past by flight attendants that anything that has any kind of wireless transmission is a no-no.
If you want a high-end iPhone, that's the price to pay. Unlike Samsung in the Android world, the iPhone has no competitors. iPhones and Android based phones are still very different, mainly in terms of security, and ergonomics.
Yeah, I'm also at a loss as to why anyone would want an iPhone of any variety, but I guess that's just me.
A car stereo with Bluetooth costs $15. Walmart also sells Bluetooth adapters in the impulse bins at the check-out counters.
So? Lack of a headphone jack has nothing to do with annoying audiophiles...in fact it's more annoying to just us regular folk.
I have bluetooth headphones. The sound is great for my needs and they're pretty cool. But...
So yeah, I have Bluetooth headphones, but more or less I always carry a pair of ordinary earbuds as backup. Don't remove my 3.5mm jack, thanks.
The line between smartphones and laptops is now close to indistinguishable.
No it isn't. Smartphones generally (99,99% of them) can't/don't run PC operating systems which enable the doing of real work...and I set the bar of "real work" pretty low, i.e. starting from a full-featured office suite. No matter how close the hardware specs, things that run Android and iOS are closer to appliances and game consoles than they are to laptop and desktop PCs.
Indeed. Phones are already too thin, so thin and fragile you have to put them in a case to stop them from breaking (or even just bending in your pocket or bag). Guess what, that makes them thicker...so what's the point again? Oh, marketing, so we can wow people with how thin our phone is compared to the competition. The fact that 90% of the phone's users will admire the thinness only while looking at the store display and for the first few hours/days they take their phone out of the box (before they permanently stick it in a case) seems lost on most people.
I'm really at a loss as to why people pay $800-1000 for a smartphone in today's market.
My most expensive smartphone was my first one, an HTC Legend, I think I paid around $600 for that one. I used it for 5 years (it still works, although the power button is screwed up so turning on/off is annoying and you can't run any up-to-date software on it - the phone is now 8.5 years old).
My next phone, a huge upgrade in every way, was an Asus ZenPhone (ZE500) and that cost me around $280. It lasted me a good 3 years, the main reason I decided to replace it was the fact that I dropped it on the street and broke its screen (it's still usable btw). It did have a few other issues (was geting a bit slow, had some strange software bugs, and some mechanical issues with the power button and the SIM card slot), but had I not broken the screen I could've easily used it for another year.
A few months ago I got a Motorola Moto G for about $350. Again, a big upgrade in every way...works absolutely great. All this makes sense to me, as technology improves you should be able to get more bang for less buck. This is generally the case, I mean check out what you can get now in a Xiami phone for $200 (my girlfriend has one). Yet, the prices of the flagship models seem to be increasing (Apple breaks the price ceiling with each new generation top of the line iPhone) while adding rather dubious "features", such as the lack of a headphone jack, incompatibility with existing peripherals, phones so thin that they bend in your pocket and which you then need to embed in a two-times thicker case to ensure they don't break...I don't see why I should ever pay more than $500 for a smartphone again.
It's obvious you don't know either the argument being made nor how a power grid has to work.
Oh, really, how does a power grid "have" to work? Just because the gird mostly works in a certain way today, does it mean it must always be so? Renewables have to "fit" into the existing grid and its principles while they are the "minority" source of supply. If they ever become the main supply, it's highly likely that the grid will adapt to serve them. There is a lot of research going on with this, like about DC microgrids powered by renewables that co-exist with the main grid...and so on.
The PROBLEM with Wind and Solar is that they are unreliable, you cannot schedule them to meet demand, you have to take the power and use it, store it or throw it away when it is generated from these sources.
Yes in that sense they are "unreliable" but they also have some benefits. For example, especially in the summer, peak power demand often coincides with peak solar production. So you don't need energy set aside to handle that peak, it's being produced and consumed then. Btw, the same applies for all other power plants to an extent - why do you think electricity is far cheaper at night in most places? Because large power plants can't be shut down that easily (i.e. shutting them down and re-starting them often does not make economic sense, and is technically difficult), so the low prices exist to shift some demand to the night to consume that electricity.
Sure, you could dump it into batteries and use it later, but this is extremely inefficient and expensive to do on an industrial scale.
I don't know about the price, but I'm pretty sure it's not inefficient. You can charge a battery with 90+% efficiency and discharge it so as well...on the other hand, combined cycle gas turbines convert gas to elictricity at an efficiency of about 60%, whereas other fossil-fueled generators are worse. Coal is at about 33%.
Currently there is reserve capacity provided by mechanically rotating machines, to keep things stable and in specifications, this reserve covers for instantaneous demand changes, transmission line failure induced transients and things like that.
Reserve capacity is also provided by dams holding back rivers or pumped-up reservoirs. Which brings up the point that you could store wind and solar-generated energy using pumped hydro as well...this would probably be cheaper, but a less efficient than using batteries.
it will only be worth its money if it is in its original state.
Basically no classic car is in its "original state". I would venture as to say that no car, period, is in its "original state" after about 5 years. However this especially applies to cars which are decades old. Most of these classic cars have been re-worked and restored many times.
Whether a classic roadster converted to an EV is worthless is in the eye of the beholder. I have zero interest in buying a classic roadster with its old sputtering engine, this just has no appeal to me. On the other hand, if I could buy a car that looks like an old roadster from the outside but is actually a new EV on the inside, I'd go for it. I'm also sure there are people to whom both would appeal.
nobody is driving these classic cars anyway, except maybe once or twice a year to go to a meeting or somesuch.
Well maybe to some people that would be the point of an EV conversion? What good is a car that just sits in a garage most of the time? Might as well be in a museum then. Converting it to EV might allow you to actually drive it regularly.
The big problem that I have with EVs is that they're all new. In other words, they all have "navigation systems." In other words, they all spy on you.
Here's an EV that's just a car (well, a truck), without any fancy-schmancy nav or other tech. Look at the dashboard...
You have an option not from Google, it's called Chromium, the open-source project that the new Edge will be based on.
France is unusual in that it uses electricity to provide a lot of home and industrial heating since it's cheap and readily available.
It's not that unusual, the Province of Quebec is like this as well, but due to the abundant hydroelectricity available as opposed to nuclear in France.