An optical state can live forever. So if we had sent the pulse out into the night sky, it could live for billions of years in its [cat-like] state.
As I understand it, an optical pulse travels at the speed of light and is thus not an instant older when it is billions of light years away than it was at the moment it was produced. No optical pulse ever "lives" beyond a single quanta of time. From its point of view, it "lives" along its entire path from production to destruction in the same instant of time. Am I wrong?
If it looks right for 10 years from now, it isn't going to look right now. The product would fail. Many products fail because they are ahead of their time.
I think the number is too low because they considered getting machines to do the human's job instead of adapting the job to the machine or at least meet halfway. Often, you can't get the machine to do the same thing, but you can get the machine to do something else that can accomplish the same end in a way that a human couldn't.
The machines don't have to take over our jobs to eliminate them. For example, in some fields the numbers of scientists needed are decreasing rapidly because a few scientists are able to leverage AI to more quickly find a solution to a problem by testing numerous combinations of something instead of trying to think their way to a solution - much like the way the first Chess computers beat people at Chess. The AI is not doing the same thing, but remarkable results are being achieved.
I think that is actually the root of the issue. It used to be that you had extensive theory in the university, and then you got out and learned the vocation. I like to say that I went the college to earn the right to join a company and start the real learning. The theory background made it so you could learn anything and adapting to anything that came along in the vocation was natural.
When we started changing that, we moved a lot of vocational crap into the university curriculum. Many now train for specifics in the same time we used to train for the general. They are of course sacrificing the general knowledge to make room for the specifics. Then, when they hit the job, many are less able to adapt. They actually have little choice but to find the job they were vocationally trained for in the university. The employers are correct now to demand trained employees because the ones they get are less capable of retraining than before. Later, when the company needs shift, they are correct to part ways for the same reason.
I had a similar experience, but came to a different conclusion.
I was at my first employer (a Dow 20 company) for 13 years. During that time I received the maximum raise corporate policy allowed (1.5x the average) almost every year and was promoted 4 times. I also led some awesome projects, always on time and budget, but more importantly, that exposed me to a tremendous range of knowledge in my field. At the end of those 13 years, a local company offered me 50% to leave, and I finally took it. I went on from there a few years later to another company that offered me a bit more.
It was that second move that was my big mistake. It turned out to be a bait and switch in which they stuck me in management and started raising my salary even more. I'm great at business and management, but it isn't my passion, and I'm honest to a fault. Turned out honesty is not the best policy when getting negotiating government contracts. An ex-marine heading up a government facility tried to get me to make a promise I couldn't while attending our corporate Christmas party and asked me to go outside with him when I wouldn't mouth the lie he wanted.
In short, moving ended up souring me to the whole career which I abandoned.
A friend that I started with in '86 is still at that original employer though he was as talented as I was and could easily have asked for a similar raise to leave. I wish I'd stayed with him. He's much happier and more relaxed, and, he hasn't done so bad. His 401K and investments are in the multi-million level now since he saved 25% from day one in '86. But, he still lives in the same apartment. I now understand that.
Body builders put on weight quick and then work to harden it. Same thing here. Add 30%, trim 7% to harden the gain. Just because they are ramping up in China doesn't mean they will ramp down in the US. The China production will stay in Asia. US production will continue to grow after a brief pause to better assimilate recent gains.
I don't think more care in hiring works - especially when you need people quick. People can tell you anything and references are rarely responsive or reliable. You have to take your best shot and be willing to clean out the fluff. A 7% layoff after a rapid 30% buildup seems like about the level of true fluff I would expect. Many of the 30% just added aren't even beyond the trial period yet. Now is the time to get rid of those that didn't live up to their spiel.
In a typical hiring round, I expect about 1 in 10 hires to be what I really wanted, 6 or 7 in 10 to be acceptable folks that will never be stars, and 2 or 3 in 10 to be anti-productive mistakes. In most companies, I'd have trouble getting rid of even half the mistakes. Tesla doesn't seem to have that trouble.
Union folks may argue that this is why you need unions, but I've never found that union "training" filters for work ethics. Just knowing how to do a job doesn't mean you'll always bring your A-game to it. Unions tend to overprotect people who'd rather play games than bring their game.
He's not obsessed with image. He's obsessed with fake news.
Basically, Trump knows the truth. He's like the dictionary - a master reference. And the biggest truth he knows is that he is the greatest and should top any poll. If he doesn't top the poll, then the poll is obviously wrong.
In addition, he is perfection personified. There is no reason for him to be obsessed with image because his image is the standard of perfection by which image is judged. Any concerns about his image are simply concerns about the correct reporting of it - fighting the fake news media.
So, when he asked Cohen to "fix" the poll, he truly meant "fix" as in "make correct". It was a public service - a simple correction offsetting the obvious cheating of others.
I leave all relevant email in the inbox forever. Irrelevant stuff gets trashed with a swipe. Search provides my "folders" for me on the rare occasion that I need to access anything not immediately visible at the top of the inbox. In general, anymore organization, even the time to set up automatic filtering to folders, would cost me more time to manage than it would save me in my lifetime.
Can't find it now, but I've seen a video (not animation) of this idea in action using a drone plane. It would fly to the wire and sort of stall over it so that it would fall backwards and a hook near the front bottom would snag the wire. After charging, it would then fly straight up to get off of the wire.
I think it would be cool if someone were to release drones like this "to the wild" that just flew around following power lines, charging when necessary, taking random videos or pictures, and acting as a server on any public WiFi it could connect to. About the smartest thing it might have to do is connect to a weather server now and then to know when it should just hang on the power line for a while to avoid a passing storm.
They are being obtuse about the charging distance too. The best spec I can find is "dozens of meters" on their site. The specification page indicates very little (despite being the obvious place to put a charging distance spec) but it does say the "Charge Spot Diameter" is "up to 8 meters". So, assuming dozens is 2 dozen, the device needs to hover within about a 25 ft diameter region up to 80 ft or so up. That isn't even always above treetop level.
In addition, the flight time carrying a load is only 16 minutes (also shown on their specification page). It is apparently never 30 minutes as the unloaded flight time appears to be 28 minutes. They don't indicate what speed it can fly at for those 16 minutes, but I'd guess that it isn't the maximum speed of 60 km/h.
So, assuming 8 minutes to charge, carrying a load you can only fly around 66% of the time. The rest of the time you must hover. Seems like it would be much better to get a drone with a decent flight time and just land it for charging than to spend $120,000 on their package of 1 charging station and 2 drones. I can't imagine the use case where this system becomes worth that much.
I was not in the least surprised to see the price drop and see the fact that they didn't drop it $3750 as a sign that they are still supply constrained.
There will be a bit of a drop off in US demand now, but it will be more than compensated for by a shift of more than half of the supply to the overseas markets which should be larger than the American market and will, once again, be soaking up the highest end Model 3s first keeping margins very high for the next half year though there will be a glitch in 1Q due to the need to fill the long supply pipeline to foreign markets. The pipeline depth will soak up at least 3 weeks production just to get it filled. Thus 1Q sales will likely be 3 weeks production short of 1Q production.
By the time they fill the high-end foreign demand backlog six to nine months from now, the low-end Model 3 will be ready to step in, and we'll be simultaneously discussing the impending Model Y and 1st Semi shipments while viewing videos of sightings of the pickup prototype. It will be a good year though 2020 will surpass it.
The performance of the Tesla Model 3 is better than that of my wife's BMW 330ci and you're comparing it to the Hyundai and Kia offerings? That is nuts.
Many, many Tesla owners bought because they want an EV and love it because they got a fun family vehicle that outperforms most sports cars. This has been making a slow but sure change in the reason people really buy Teslas, for the thrill of it.
An interesting note on the offerings in that 121 y/o catalog. The highest end TP product, in the second column, was marketed as "The Puritan" and was "guaranteed free from injurious chemicals". Oh how little really changes.
Here is an interesting shot of toilet paper being sold on toilet paper.:-)
Note toilet paper being sold in 1897 Sears Catalog. The offerings start at the bottom left corner of page 23 with a picture that is very much like the modern TP roll, perforations and all. A case of 100 rolls started at $2.25, an amount that was comparable to a day's pay at the time.
Whose "REAL life"? Your list seems to be based on yours.
I long ago recognized that the real life of those born in the past 30ish years is vastly different than my real life as someone born in the 60s. Most in these younger generations cannot relate to my experiences when I describe them. Their world is different in the extreme.
Even the simplest things have changed. For example, I have no trouble with dogs running around fighting each other and have been bitten in a manner that caused puncture wounds several times in my life and thought little of it. I never went to a doctor or even put a bandaid over it. It was no different to me than the many times I've stepped on a nail and drove it through my foot. No dog was put to sleep. We learned how to handle such situations. Today, there is almost no area within 50 miles of me that a dog can legally be unleashed and running free to get in the daily dog fights I grew up with or chase the many kids riding bikes (on public streets without sidewalks and without supervision at the age of 5). There are many people that have no training about simple safety things like, "let them fight - never get between them". There are near universal calls to put a dog down when it bites someone or even when it bites another dog. Those dogs acting in very natural ways are considered bad and live in peril of their life. I can't personally relate to that at all and find it sad that we have caged them to the current degree. But I can understand why the new attitudes exist and not fight the right of the new generations to take their place and shape the coming world with their choices.
The young we are training in schools today will still be working 50-65 years from now - not today. We need to try to imagine what their REAL life will be like and attempt to prepare them for it. We're trying to imagine this during one of the most intensive periods of disruptive change in history, but the disruption itself is nothing new.
You mention agriculture first. US agriculture sans forestry employed 90% of the labor force in 1790, 69% in 1840, 64% in 1850, 58% in 1860, 53% in 1850, 49% in 1880, 43% in 1890, 38% in 1900,... , 3.4% in 1980, 2.6% in 1990, and about 1.1% today. Efficiency has been increasing faster than population growth since about 1910 so that the real numbers, not just percentage, employed has been pretty steadily going down since then. There are a couple of flat areas on the curve in recent years that were belied by a huge one year drop in the 2009 time frame. The ability to achieve the drop that didn't recover while production remained good shows that the recent flats are an indication that we've somehow been forcing employment to remain that isn't needed. This is a problem to be solved.
One thing that should be noted in those numbers is that the rate of decrease as a percentage of those in agriculture has been accelerating as we approach zero. The change from 1890 to 1900 was about (1-38/43) or about -12%. The change from 1980 to 1990 was about (1-2.6/3.4) or about -24%.
I've glanced around at some of the other occupations that you mentioned and they've all seen similar declines. This is nothing new.
I've seen a team of three experienced carpenters frame a ranch home over a basement in 2 days. In the 1990s, one of the construction firms in the St. Louis area was achieving the construction of a 1200 sq ft plus basement ranch home in under 100 man-days without using modular type construction. This was achieved by having extremely specialized teams, such as that framing team, roving among large numbers of construction sites. All of the construction from the pouring of a basement to sodding the lawn took a total of about 20 working days usually spread over a six-week period with many days just spent waiting for the next team to hit it.
Note that there is already no need for people working construction in modern systems like that to know how to build a house. They just need to know how to perform one basic skill with extreme efficien
Sort of. That competition forced them to brick and mortar. Prior to those stores building out in rural regions, Sears had a catalog / mail order based monopoly in much of America which was far more rural at the time.
Essentially, what Walmart / Target / KMart did to Sears is what many would like to see happen to Amazon.
Ironically, it opened the door for Amazon to be the one ready to take advantage of new technologies that gave new life to the very old mail order business.
The downfall of Sears is a consequence of the migration of commerce from brick-and-mortar to online.
Which is pretty crazy considering they were the original mail order phenomenon. Sears' past is not a brick and mortar past. It was catalog orders and many of its customers never saw a store.
They were essentially beat at the game they pioneered. The only real differences between Amazon and the Sears of years ago (that was the only source for goods in much of rural America) is a live catalog versus a paper catalog and a modernization of the distribution system to take advantage of computer-based tracking and organization to partially decentralize it.
I'd have to look carefully at the numbers to decide if Amazon is any more dominant today than Sears was in rural America in the early 1900s.
The rules, if applied with strict interpretation, would pretty much shut down any modern retailer of any type, not just the big guys. It essentially bans having fixed arrangements with suppliers - of having supply chains period.
Virtually all chains have deals they've made with suppliers. Enforced strictly, this bans modern commerce.
Therefore, it will not be enforced strictly. It will be enforced selectively.
This is the kind of thing you come up with as a gift to government officials. The public reason is just an excuse. It is a beautiful setup for a graft. Pay the right folks the right amounts, no problems.
It's rather obvious that we'll send a boring machine to solve the radiation problem. Why do you really think TBC's work has been focused on making it smaller, lighter, able to be reused on multiple tunnels instead of just left in place, and electric powered?
I mean, unless I've missed it, there doesn't seem to be any post here thinking about how to make this "true".
Sure, the study was ridiculous and intended to make a unrelated point, but the nerds should be focusing on the fact that there have been survivors of high falls without parachutes. So the most important barrier to serious R&D has been broken - the possibility is provably there!
In looking at many of the accounts on the web of high falls, I have to discount those that had parachutes that didn't open properly or were likely within the wreckage of an aircraft for most of the fall. Those were likely slowed down by things like the drag of a defective parachute or the body of a plane.
The more intriguing accounts are the falls from high buildings. In most cases, they seem to have been helped by landing on something that absorbed some of the shock of landing. Several landed on roofs. A very intriguing one landed on the roof of a car after a fall of 22 stories and "walked away" with only a broken elbow.
One can imagine that these folks likely benefited from some combination of positioning their bodies for high drag and/or maneuvers that translated vertical speed to horizontal speed that was bled off by traversing more air distance and landing in some particular way on a surface that absorbed a lot of the shock.
So how might a compact device that could be carried at all times enhance the possibility of surviving something like this?
A smartphone app could detect the freefall as well as that it is still on the person. If connected to cameras around the area it might be able to spot the best surface to hit. Guiding the arms and legs of the person to positions that will fly them toward that while minimizing downward airspeed would be problematic. That would seem to require either an exoskeleton (maybe a soft motor one) built into clothing or some muscle control interface like those being experimented with on paralyzed people. So that's a stretch today. As for having to find a roof or car to hit, that might be made less necessary with something like a personal explosive airbag and some means of ground proximity detection.
It is an interesting rabbit trail that could have application in something like the construction industry, as a failsafe for climbers, military, etc.
But, we must always allow for the exceptions to the rule. They are always there.
The problem comes in that no "mental" work is entirely that. Even "mental" work is usually far more perspiration that inspiration.
As a computer engineer I frequently wrote software. During my peak years there was one very large project for an embedded system with many processors and custom boards linked together that I took on that took two years.
As leader of a team of 10 that worked the software, I reviewed every line of every code, participated in most of the testing, and wrote the most code. I routinely worked 90 hour weeks for two years.
The thing is, I knew what needed to be written before we started. My primary limitations were in the bandwidth of human I/O both to the members of my team and through my keyboard. Much of my actual mental work after the project started was in figuring out ways to speed that up.
Some of the things I did to speed things up included creating extensions to ANSI C that supported our project and writing a compiler to compile that new language to pure ANSI C, automating much of the testing, creating an extensive set of PERL scripts that scanned everyone's code for the patterns of their usual mistakes, and writing a lot of transformation macros for our code that automated coding of common patterns.
While doing all of that, I also wrote the operating system and all of the drivers for the device.
It was two years of hell, but we completed the project on time and on budget.
Most importantly, in the first year of deployment of the new device, there were a total of 5 bugs reported. To put that in perspective, over 3 million lines of new code had been written.
Nobody could ever convince me that we could have done the same thing working 40 hour weeks. We wrote code for over 180 processors and programmable devices every one of which was performing a unique job during those two years. My primary limitation was only being able to type about 60 wpm.
Even if what you say is true (and I don't agree that it is), the extra $500 billion the politicians decide to spend in your example likely came from the psychology of tax cuts.
In a complex system, you must pay attention to all reactions, not just the ones you choose. You chose to credit the economic burst to the tax cuts but not the spending increases. That makes no sense. Without all of the fuzzy math floating around letting them make the argument that the economic increase will be much greater, the increases wouldn't have happened.
Furthermore, the economics won't last. There are limitations to the economy other than what people spend on taxes. Some of those limitations involve finite things like how many workers we have. If you over-rev the economy up and smash it into those walls, the backlash can put you back further than where you started. But, a lot of wheeler and dealers will walk away richer, so I guess it serves a purpose for someone.
Slashdot Mirror
An optical state can live forever. So if we had sent the pulse out into the night sky, it could live for billions of years in its [cat-like] state.
As I understand it, an optical pulse travels at the speed of light and is thus not an instant older when it is billions of light years away than it was at the moment it was produced. No optical pulse ever "lives" beyond a single quanta of time. From its point of view, it "lives" along its entire path from production to destruction in the same instant of time. Am I wrong?
If it looks right for 10 years from now, it isn't going to look right now. The product would fail. Many products fail because they are ahead of their time.
I think the number is too low because they considered getting machines to do the human's job instead of adapting the job to the machine or at least meet halfway. Often, you can't get the machine to do the same thing, but you can get the machine to do something else that can accomplish the same end in a way that a human couldn't.
The machines don't have to take over our jobs to eliminate them. For example, in some fields the numbers of scientists needed are decreasing rapidly because a few scientists are able to leverage AI to more quickly find a solution to a problem by testing numerous combinations of something instead of trying to think their way to a solution - much like the way the first Chess computers beat people at Chess. The AI is not doing the same thing, but remarkable results are being achieved.
I think that is actually the root of the issue. It used to be that you had extensive theory in the university, and then you got out and learned the vocation. I like to say that I went the college to earn the right to join a company and start the real learning. The theory background made it so you could learn anything and adapting to anything that came along in the vocation was natural.
When we started changing that, we moved a lot of vocational crap into the university curriculum. Many now train for specifics in the same time we used to train for the general. They are of course sacrificing the general knowledge to make room for the specifics. Then, when they hit the job, many are less able to adapt. They actually have little choice but to find the job they were vocationally trained for in the university. The employers are correct now to demand trained employees because the ones they get are less capable of retraining than before. Later, when the company needs shift, they are correct to part ways for the same reason.
I had a similar experience, but came to a different conclusion.
I was at my first employer (a Dow 20 company) for 13 years. During that time I received the maximum raise corporate policy allowed (1.5x the average) almost every year and was promoted 4 times. I also led some awesome projects, always on time and budget, but more importantly, that exposed me to a tremendous range of knowledge in my field. At the end of those 13 years, a local company offered me 50% to leave, and I finally took it. I went on from there a few years later to another company that offered me a bit more.
It was that second move that was my big mistake. It turned out to be a bait and switch in which they stuck me in management and started raising my salary even more. I'm great at business and management, but it isn't my passion, and I'm honest to a fault. Turned out honesty is not the best policy when getting negotiating government contracts. An ex-marine heading up a government facility tried to get me to make a promise I couldn't while attending our corporate Christmas party and asked me to go outside with him when I wouldn't mouth the lie he wanted.
In short, moving ended up souring me to the whole career which I abandoned.
A friend that I started with in '86 is still at that original employer though he was as talented as I was and could easily have asked for a similar raise to leave. I wish I'd stayed with him. He's much happier and more relaxed, and, he hasn't done so bad. His 401K and investments are in the multi-million level now since he saved 25% from day one in '86. But, he still lives in the same apartment. I now understand that.
Body builders put on weight quick and then work to harden it. Same thing here. Add 30%, trim 7% to harden the gain. Just because they are ramping up in China doesn't mean they will ramp down in the US. The China production will stay in Asia. US production will continue to grow after a brief pause to better assimilate recent gains.
I don't think more care in hiring works - especially when you need people quick. People can tell you anything and references are rarely responsive or reliable. You have to take your best shot and be willing to clean out the fluff. A 7% layoff after a rapid 30% buildup seems like about the level of true fluff I would expect. Many of the 30% just added aren't even beyond the trial period yet. Now is the time to get rid of those that didn't live up to their spiel.
In a typical hiring round, I expect about 1 in 10 hires to be what I really wanted, 6 or 7 in 10 to be acceptable folks that will never be stars, and 2 or 3 in 10 to be anti-productive mistakes. In most companies, I'd have trouble getting rid of even half the mistakes. Tesla doesn't seem to have that trouble.
Union folks may argue that this is why you need unions, but I've never found that union "training" filters for work ethics. Just knowing how to do a job doesn't mean you'll always bring your A-game to it. Unions tend to overprotect people who'd rather play games than bring their game.
He's not obsessed with image. He's obsessed with fake news.
Basically, Trump knows the truth. He's like the dictionary - a master reference. And the biggest truth he knows is that he is the greatest and should top any poll. If he doesn't top the poll, then the poll is obviously wrong.
In addition, he is perfection personified. There is no reason for him to be obsessed with image because his image is the standard of perfection by which image is judged. Any concerns about his image are simply concerns about the correct reporting of it - fighting the fake news media.
So, when he asked Cohen to "fix" the poll, he truly meant "fix" as in "make correct". It was a public service - a simple correction offsetting the obvious cheating of others.
/s
I leave all relevant email in the inbox forever. Irrelevant stuff gets trashed with a swipe. Search provides my "folders" for me on the rare occasion that I need to access anything not immediately visible at the top of the inbox. In general, anymore organization, even the time to set up automatic filtering to folders, would cost me more time to manage than it would save me in my lifetime.
In similar fashion, my Google Home is set to spoof my cell's Verizon number whenever I use it to call out.
Can't find it now, but I've seen a video (not animation) of this idea in action using a drone plane. It would fly to the wire and sort of stall over it so that it would fall backwards and a hook near the front bottom would snag the wire. After charging, it would then fly straight up to get off of the wire.
I think it would be cool if someone were to release drones like this "to the wild" that just flew around following power lines, charging when necessary, taking random videos or pictures, and acting as a server on any public WiFi it could connect to. About the smartest thing it might have to do is connect to a weather server now and then to know when it should just hang on the power line for a while to avoid a passing storm.
Exactly.
They are being obtuse about the charging distance too. The best spec I can find is "dozens of meters" on their site. The specification page indicates very little (despite being the obvious place to put a charging distance spec) but it does say the "Charge Spot Diameter" is "up to 8 meters". So, assuming dozens is 2 dozen, the device needs to hover within about a 25 ft diameter region up to 80 ft or so up. That isn't even always above treetop level.
In addition, the flight time carrying a load is only 16 minutes (also shown on their specification page). It is apparently never 30 minutes as the unloaded flight time appears to be 28 minutes. They don't indicate what speed it can fly at for those 16 minutes, but I'd guess that it isn't the maximum speed of 60 km/h.
So, assuming 8 minutes to charge, carrying a load you can only fly around 66% of the time. The rest of the time you must hover. Seems like it would be much better to get a drone with a decent flight time and just land it for charging than to spend $120,000 on their package of 1 charging station and 2 drones. I can't imagine the use case where this system becomes worth that much.
And it is changing again. Tariff walls will take it back to everyone for themselves alone. This is the true meaning of America first.
I was not in the least surprised to see the price drop and see the fact that they didn't drop it $3750 as a sign that they are still supply constrained.
There will be a bit of a drop off in US demand now, but it will be more than compensated for by a shift of more than half of the supply to the overseas markets which should be larger than the American market and will, once again, be soaking up the highest end Model 3s first keeping margins very high for the next half year though there will be a glitch in 1Q due to the need to fill the long supply pipeline to foreign markets. The pipeline depth will soak up at least 3 weeks production just to get it filled. Thus 1Q sales will likely be 3 weeks production short of 1Q production.
By the time they fill the high-end foreign demand backlog six to nine months from now, the low-end Model 3 will be ready to step in, and we'll be simultaneously discussing the impending Model Y and 1st Semi shipments while viewing videos of sightings of the pickup prototype. It will be a good year though 2020 will surpass it.
The performance of the Tesla Model 3 is better than that of my wife's BMW 330ci and you're comparing it to the Hyundai and Kia offerings? That is nuts.
Many, many Tesla owners bought because they want an EV and love it because they got a fun family vehicle that outperforms most sports cars. This has been making a slow but sure change in the reason people really buy Teslas, for the thrill of it.
An interesting note on the offerings in that 121 y/o catalog. The highest end TP product, in the second column, was marketed as "The Puritan" and was "guaranteed free from injurious chemicals". Oh how little really changes.
Here is an interesting shot of toilet paper being sold on toilet paper. :-)
Note toilet paper being sold in 1897 Sears Catalog. The offerings start at the bottom left corner of page 23 with a picture that is very much like the modern TP roll, perforations and all. A case of 100 rolls started at $2.25, an amount that was comparable to a day's pay at the time.
Whose "REAL life"? Your list seems to be based on yours.
I long ago recognized that the real life of those born in the past 30ish years is vastly different than my real life as someone born in the 60s. Most in these younger generations cannot relate to my experiences when I describe them. Their world is different in the extreme.
Even the simplest things have changed. For example, I have no trouble with dogs running around fighting each other and have been bitten in a manner that caused puncture wounds several times in my life and thought little of it. I never went to a doctor or even put a bandaid over it. It was no different to me than the many times I've stepped on a nail and drove it through my foot. No dog was put to sleep. We learned how to handle such situations. Today, there is almost no area within 50 miles of me that a dog can legally be unleashed and running free to get in the daily dog fights I grew up with or chase the many kids riding bikes (on public streets without sidewalks and without supervision at the age of 5). There are many people that have no training about simple safety things like, "let them fight - never get between them". There are near universal calls to put a dog down when it bites someone or even when it bites another dog. Those dogs acting in very natural ways are considered bad and live in peril of their life. I can't personally relate to that at all and find it sad that we have caged them to the current degree. But I can understand why the new attitudes exist and not fight the right of the new generations to take their place and shape the coming world with their choices.
The young we are training in schools today will still be working 50-65 years from now - not today. We need to try to imagine what their REAL life will be like and attempt to prepare them for it. We're trying to imagine this during one of the most intensive periods of disruptive change in history, but the disruption itself is nothing new.
You mention agriculture first. US agriculture sans forestry employed 90% of the labor force in 1790, 69% in 1840, 64% in 1850, 58% in 1860, 53% in 1850, 49% in 1880, 43% in 1890, 38% in 1900, ... , 3.4% in 1980, 2.6% in 1990, and about 1.1% today. Efficiency has been increasing faster than population growth since about 1910 so that the real numbers, not just percentage, employed has been pretty steadily going down since then. There are a couple of flat areas on the curve in recent years that were belied by a huge one year drop in the 2009 time frame. The ability to achieve the drop that didn't recover while production remained good shows that the recent flats are an indication that we've somehow been forcing employment to remain that isn't needed. This is a problem to be solved.
One thing that should be noted in those numbers is that the rate of decrease as a percentage of those in agriculture has been accelerating as we approach zero. The change from 1890 to 1900 was about (1-38/43) or about -12%. The change from 1980 to 1990 was about (1-2.6/3.4) or about -24%.
I've glanced around at some of the other occupations that you mentioned and they've all seen similar declines. This is nothing new.
I've seen a team of three experienced carpenters frame a ranch home over a basement in 2 days. In the 1990s, one of the construction firms in the St. Louis area was achieving the construction of a 1200 sq ft plus basement ranch home in under 100 man-days without using modular type construction. This was achieved by having extremely specialized teams, such as that framing team, roving among large numbers of construction sites. All of the construction from the pouring of a basement to sodding the lawn took a total of about 20 working days usually spread over a six-week period with many days just spent waiting for the next team to hit it.
Note that there is already no need for people working construction in modern systems like that to know how to build a house. They just need to know how to perform one basic skill with extreme efficien
Sort of. That competition forced them to brick and mortar. Prior to those stores building out in rural regions, Sears had a catalog / mail order based monopoly in much of America which was far more rural at the time.
Essentially, what Walmart / Target / KMart did to Sears is what many would like to see happen to Amazon.
Ironically, it opened the door for Amazon to be the one ready to take advantage of new technologies that gave new life to the very old mail order business.
The downfall of Sears is a consequence of the migration of commerce from brick-and-mortar to online.
Which is pretty crazy considering they were the original mail order phenomenon. Sears' past is not a brick and mortar past. It was catalog orders and many of its customers never saw a store.
They were essentially beat at the game they pioneered. The only real differences between Amazon and the Sears of years ago (that was the only source for goods in much of rural America) is a live catalog versus a paper catalog and a modernization of the distribution system to take advantage of computer-based tracking and organization to partially decentralize it.
I'd have to look carefully at the numbers to decide if Amazon is any more dominant today than Sears was in rural America in the early 1900s.
The rules, if applied with strict interpretation, would pretty much shut down any modern retailer of any type, not just the big guys. It essentially bans having fixed arrangements with suppliers - of having supply chains period.
Virtually all chains have deals they've made with suppliers. Enforced strictly, this bans modern commerce.
Therefore, it will not be enforced strictly. It will be enforced selectively.
This is the kind of thing you come up with as a gift to government officials. The public reason is just an excuse. It is a beautiful setup for a graft. Pay the right folks the right amounts, no problems.
It's rather obvious that we'll send a boring machine to solve the radiation problem. Why do you really think TBC's work has been focused on making it smaller, lighter, able to be reused on multiple tunnels instead of just left in place, and electric powered?
I mean, unless I've missed it, there doesn't seem to be any post here thinking about how to make this "true".
Sure, the study was ridiculous and intended to make a unrelated point, but the nerds should be focusing on the fact that there have been survivors of high falls without parachutes. So the most important barrier to serious R&D has been broken - the possibility is provably there!
In looking at many of the accounts on the web of high falls, I have to discount those that had parachutes that didn't open properly or were likely within the wreckage of an aircraft for most of the fall. Those were likely slowed down by things like the drag of a defective parachute or the body of a plane.
The more intriguing accounts are the falls from high buildings. In most cases, they seem to have been helped by landing on something that absorbed some of the shock of landing. Several landed on roofs. A very intriguing one landed on the roof of a car after a fall of 22 stories and "walked away" with only a broken elbow.
One can imagine that these folks likely benefited from some combination of positioning their bodies for high drag and/or maneuvers that translated vertical speed to horizontal speed that was bled off by traversing more air distance and landing in some particular way on a surface that absorbed a lot of the shock.
So how might a compact device that could be carried at all times enhance the possibility of surviving something like this?
A smartphone app could detect the freefall as well as that it is still on the person. If connected to cameras around the area it might be able to spot the best surface to hit. Guiding the arms and legs of the person to positions that will fly them toward that while minimizing downward airspeed would be problematic. That would seem to require either an exoskeleton (maybe a soft motor one) built into clothing or some muscle control interface like those being experimented with on paralyzed people. So that's a stretch today. As for having to find a roof or car to hit, that might be made less necessary with something like a personal explosive airbag and some means of ground proximity detection.
It is an interesting rabbit trail that could have application in something like the construction industry, as a failsafe for climbers, military, etc.
But, we must always allow for the exceptions to the rule. They are always there.
The problem comes in that no "mental" work is entirely that. Even "mental" work is usually far more perspiration that inspiration.
As a computer engineer I frequently wrote software. During my peak years there was one very large project for an embedded system with many processors and custom boards linked together that I took on that took two years.
As leader of a team of 10 that worked the software, I reviewed every line of every code, participated in most of the testing, and wrote the most code. I routinely worked 90 hour weeks for two years.
The thing is, I knew what needed to be written before we started. My primary limitations were in the bandwidth of human I/O both to the members of my team and through my keyboard. Much of my actual mental work after the project started was in figuring out ways to speed that up.
Some of the things I did to speed things up included creating extensions to ANSI C that supported our project and writing a compiler to compile that new language to pure ANSI C, automating much of the testing, creating an extensive set of PERL scripts that scanned everyone's code for the patterns of their usual mistakes, and writing a lot of transformation macros for our code that automated coding of common patterns.
While doing all of that, I also wrote the operating system and all of the drivers for the device.
It was two years of hell, but we completed the project on time and on budget.
Most importantly, in the first year of deployment of the new device, there were a total of 5 bugs reported. To put that in perspective, over 3 million lines of new code had been written.
Nobody could ever convince me that we could have done the same thing working 40 hour weeks. We wrote code for over 180 processors and programmable devices every one of which was performing a unique job during those two years. My primary limitation was only being able to type about 60 wpm.
Even if what you say is true (and I don't agree that it is), the extra $500 billion the politicians decide to spend in your example likely came from the psychology of tax cuts.
In a complex system, you must pay attention to all reactions, not just the ones you choose. You chose to credit the economic burst to the tax cuts but not the spending increases. That makes no sense. Without all of the fuzzy math floating around letting them make the argument that the economic increase will be much greater, the increases wouldn't have happened.
Furthermore, the economics won't last. There are limitations to the economy other than what people spend on taxes. Some of those limitations involve finite things like how many workers we have. If you over-rev the economy up and smash it into those walls, the backlash can put you back further than where you started. But, a lot of wheeler and dealers will walk away richer, so I guess it serves a purpose for someone.