With modern radar and other guidance tech very few ships hit icebergs. On rare occasions they hit other ships, but that is about it. So, how likely would it be for the original Titanic design to sink in a normal lifespan if only the control room was modernized?
As I said, it kept up. When wage changes match inflation, inflation is high, and you have fixed rate loans, inflation is helping to reduce your loan payment to income ratio leaving you with more disposable income.
The problem you've mentioned with real wages is very real but unrelated to inflation. I generally prefer looking at it over the 1979-today period. 1979 is when the problem first started.
The real annual wage increase (the increase that is above inflation) since 1979 has been 21.3% for the bottom 90%, 43.8% for the 90-95th percentile, 68.5% for those in the 95-99th percentile, and 148.6% for those in the top 1%.
If we were to simply undo this change in income distribution, the average worker in the bottom 90% would receive an increase of around $7100 per year with no change in the American GDP.
So the next time you're told that your wages have gone overseas or that the American economy has not been growing enough to provide you with better wages, try looking at who is saying it. Often, it is a member of that top 1% saying it. If not, they are often saying it as a representative of that viewpoint. It is misdirection. It may have some relationship to their problem, but the problem of the bottom 90% has more to do with that $7100 that has shifted from us to them.
First, you don't just affect those that are actually AT the minimum wage. You affect all of those in between that and the new minimum too. In addition, you affect many above the new minimum.
If you were to take the minimum wage from the current sub $10 range to $15 per hour, most making less than somewhere around $25 per hour (which would be above the $49K / year average wage in my area and thus a majority) would be affected by the change because you don't leave an experienced worker currently making $15 per hour at that wage when the newbies are getting $15 per hour. And because you have to move them up to maintain differentiation in pay you'll have to move the people above them up to.
What ends up happening after about a year is that you reach a new stability where everyone through a significant range above the minimum wage has received a raise to restore a somewhat compressed version of the original salary steps.
Well if you don't have a job you aren't being paid anything. What's more you are probably consuming tax funded social services.
Having a job at a minimum wage below poverty level does not significantly affect consumption of social services. It just allows an employer to take advantage of a taxpayer subsidized asset.
You could lower the minimum wage to $1 and get 100% employment on that basis
Well seeing as the real minimum wage is always $0 aka unemployment that doesn't actually seem to work the way you think it does.
Out of curiosity just how much of the workforce do you think works for minimum ?
A very large percentage of the workforce is affected by the minimum wage. It is a base. When you raise the base you raise the level of the workforce near the base. It is much like compressing a spring. Those closest to the base usually get immediate but somewhat lesser raises along with those at the base while the raises lag in time a bit for those further from the base but happen as the system reaches a new stability that mostly restores the preexisting relative pay rates.
For the folks at the lower to middle end of the economic spectrum, some inflation can be really nice. The propaganda against it is based more on the concerns of the upper class.
I remember the days of hitting more than 10% in the late 70s-early 80s. In the middle class, wages managed to mostly keep up while many of the bills did not - especially their fixed rate loans on homes and cars. My parents did well during that time. In a short time, inflation reduced the lifetime costs of their homes and cars by a double-digit percentage. That became a significant amount of extra spending money in their pockets for years to come due to the reduction in the proportion of their income going to those major bills.
Moderately higher inflation, especially for short periods as in the adjustment after sudden raises, can be a boon for the struggling worker class and even for large corporations with heavy long-term fixed rate debt. It is publicized as bad because it hurts financial institutions holding those loans, reducing the profit they make off of the less affluent.
I'd be surprised if that research included creative disciplines. I doubt many painters, writers, songwriters, etc. limit themselves in such ways.
I can certainly see that being true for jobs that are repetitive though, especially assembly lines. I really admire people who can do those jobs. I couldn't take if for more than a few days. Who could do that for more than 40 hours week after week? I'd just commit suicide. People who can deal with that kind of life are truly remarkable.
But, especially at that time in my life, if they had forced me to stop programming and head home after 40 hours, I'd have gone home and programmed. That's what I enjoyed doing. Some people entertain themselves with sports, some with movies or TV, others with going out to eat, I entertained myself and relaxed with programming. I went to work to have fun. If I forced myself to do anything else to relax, it might have been working logic puzzles, crosswords, etc. Much the same thing really.
How long will it be now before they make bots to submit patch requests that insert vulnerabilities - likely under the guise of fixing a true vulnerability and just making a mistake in doing so?
It isn't necessarily poor planning. We are creators, not workers on an assembly line. Often (always in my own experience) the crunch is because we are squeezing quality or features in that management didn't agree was necessary. Sure it creates an endless cycle, but at least I can have pride in what I've produced instead of hating it.
That just ends up causing people to work unpaid overtime.
I've been in a situation in which overtime beyond 60 hours a week was basically "illegal". I was working with Boeing on military contracts and the contract language limited such overtime. The result was rules against paying for that overtime. It resulted in my typical 90 hour weeks (I was young and loved what I was doing) having a large amount of unpaid time.
The work was exciting and I was certainly emotionally involved in my creations. I wouldn't have it any other way though. I've always said that if you wouldn't do the job for free (assuming you have some means to live otherwise), you should find a job you like. There are many careers and there must be one somewhere that is what you really want to do.
It's called evolution, and it has been going on for millions of years. We are here because of it, and, given its past success, odds are we will be replaced because of it.
The true best we can hope for is to go cyborg and evolve ourselves as fast as the robots. We should clear all of the obstacles from people who choose to experiment to try to make themselves better. Humans are plentiful. Give us true freedom. We will compete and evolve faster than pure robots. Many will fail, many monsters will be created, but there will also be success and advancement.
Everybody is an idiot at some point. Everyone drives distracted at some point in time, usually during some sort of emergency, while upset due to a fight, late for a date, etc. We are selfish and that doesn't mix well with the fact that choosing to drive is making a decision not just for yourself, but for everyone you interact with on the road. Most of those times, no problem. Every once in a while though, whammy.
Maybe we can come up with a way to detect adrenaline and exhaustion and disable driving of the vehicle by drivers with either state. That would indeed stop a lot of accidents.
If we could detect attentiveness to driving (we can't) and take over any time the driver isn't attentive for more than a few seconds, I'd bet 99%+ of people would have the wheel taken over at some point on every drive longer than a few minutes. The human mind is not truly able to multitask. If you ever talk to anyone while you're driving, think about any other portion of your day, get distracted by anything you pass, etc., you aren't truly paying attention. It isn't just about where your eyes are pointing.
I had an accident earlier this year when a grandmother U-turned between barrels in a construction zone right into my path. Pinned by a 2 foot drop off into the torn up road to my right, there was nothing I could do but hit the brakes and let the airbags do their job. As I understood it, she had never had an accident. But her grandson was in the hospital after some emergency. So she was driving while distraught to a hospital she had never been to at night, had taken a wrong turn, and in her hurry to get to her grandson made a bad choice to turn around in the middle of a construction zone. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but two vehicles were totalled.
During personal emergencies is one of the times that we should always turn the driving over to others. But, we make bad choices in emotional times.
Can a car understand a cop waving you around an accident?
I can't remember the last time a cop waved me around an accident. It has been at least a couple of decades. Hasn't directing traffic around accidents been banned as a practice for safety reasons - as in theirs?
Anyway, the least predictable thing in our environment is us. Just as that kid will run into the street, we can't look everywhere and often aren't really looking where our eyes are pointing because we're thinking about something. Everything from texting to simply driving while angry at somebody can lead to damage or death.
Augmented driving will likely happen for a while, but eventually, few will want to pay for it. And as cars start collecting data that reveals how bad we really are at driving, not just tens of thousands of deaths but millions of accidents that cost money at some level and hundreds of millions of near accidents, we'll gladly give up the madness of driving ourselves.
When it comes to the simplest statements, there just isn't enough content to tell whether it is a person or a bot. Many people pick up what bots say and amplify them and vice versa.
But, bots aren't just spreading simple messages. The better ones are spreading messages handcrafted for effect by people. The lobbyist, or whatever we want to call the person using the bot to manipulate, writes the initial messages. They aren't from a bot. Then bots are used to amplify the message as well as tie it in by linking both to it and to parties that the message will likely resonate with. The better bots may also search out similar messages and amplify them as well as use AI to paraphrase the message in new ways and spread it in different forms.
It is all under human control though and getting more and more difficult to recognize.
Though vital, the command prompt is not where I do my most typing. Documentation, messaging, and email are among the applications that I enter the most characters in and speech is working well for me in all of those cases. My editor has not yet succumbed though and likely won't for a while. That will take a lot more AI. I edit programs into existence at a much faster pace than I can speak.
It is the editing that keeps me from saying that the majority of the characters I enter are entered via speech which is the point at which I'd declare that my keyboard has been "replaced" even though it will still be on my desk.
Honestly, I'm close to using voice for typing more than the keyboard now. So, in a sense, voice will replace qwerty. Editing is the issue that keeps my keyboard here for now. There is no way I can describe edits out loud as fast as I do them with a keyboard.
Chorded keyboards have been around since the 1800s - including some that use tapping as opposed to pressing keys.
I used one in the mid-90s for a while that I can't find at the moment. It was an ergonomic grip designed to be a one-handed keyboard replacement operated at your side. There was more than one contact per finger to give 10 keys with 1024 possible combinations and software to allow words and phrases to be assigned combinations. The multiple contacts were hit with different parts of your fingers which at first doesn't seem possible to learn but was and allowed 10 contacts without the need to move your fingertip from one contact to another. It took about a month to reach a speed in the ballpark of my QWERTY keyboard skills. Mine broke after a few months and the device didn't catch on.
The Twiddler 3 offers similar functionality to what I remember, but is not as ergonomic and requires the fingertips to be moved around.
So, the answer is that these devices have tried to replace QWERTY and failed though they have had enough success to create a stable niche. The Twiddler devices have been around since '92.
I don't see it as regulation. Just fixing the bug in the system that is being exploited to abuse.
What else can we do? Block all of our neighbors... because that's about what it would take to continue with the current blocking approach. The ones that have been calling me more than once a day lately never use the same number twice and they use the numbers of real local customers.
Switch to a pure whitelist approach? Enough do that and I guarantee they'll just figure out who is on our whitelist and spoof those numbers. It doesn't fix the problem.
I think finding a way to give everyone back control of how their numbers are utilized is a nice approach. If you want to call that regulation, so be it. Regulate then. Even animals have regulations.
Funny how people always bring up security concerns as an argument against anything that improves security.
At the moment, it's the wild west. You can spoof almost any number you want with an investment within the reach of almost anyone over the poverty line who knows how. Prosecution is rare unless you annoy millions even though it is illegal to do it. Any protection at all against people misusing numbers would be an improvement. You have to start somewhere.
One national database with provisions for trusted sources to do the registering so that, for example, Google and others like them won't be overly burdened in registering their millions of users.
The true owner of a phone number should also be able to see any apps or parties currently authorized to spoof it.
It is needed. For example, my Google Home spoofs my cellular number when I use it to make a call. This is valuable and increases information to the callee because they know my cellular number.
It just needs to be registered and blocked by carriers when not registered.
All of the calls from my local exchange I've been getting lately have been spoofing assigned numbers that do not belong to them. When I call them back, I get people who are truly "neighbors" and have no idea that their numbers have been utilized. This is, of course, blatantly illegal, but the scamsters don't care.
I realize that spoofing has value. It is how my Google Home makes calls using my actual number, for example.
Spoofing needs to be allowed only for registered situations and blocked using technology at the carrier level, not laws, if the registration isn't found.
I'll believe a fix only when it happens though. The reason we don't have a fix today is because it would block unauthorized, illegal political calls made by 3rd parties that the politicians can claim they don't control or know about but, in truth, rely heavily on.
The major restaurants already sell all of that data. It's amazing what you can buy if you dig into the demographics data market.
If you're concerned, simply don't use the assistant or any online system (or even a direct phone call unless you block your number) to make your reservations, always pay cash at any restaurant (or any other chain business since they all track their sales to your cards which are easily linked to your identity these days), turn the location data off on your phone, and don't utilize the restaurant's WiFi. If you already do anything less than that, the Google Assistant's records will add no new information to the systems.
Though "many" doesn't mean a majority when used as an adjective, it does mean majority when used as a noun and carries a connotation of something closer to that than not over to the adjective case because of that. A number that is much less than 1% just doesn't rise to the normal usage of the word and ends up being misleading (as likely intended in this case).
I can think of many reasons. The article stated that they were interested in diseases that may be fatal before or shortly after birth. So waiting longer would certainly be a bit of a problem.
But many genetic flaws cause the body to grow abnormally. Fixing the genetic flaw won't repair what has already grown incorrectly.
One genetic flaw that I'm familiar with is Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy. It is an interesting one that has a nearly unique cause that should make it a candidate for being among the first to be corrected. It is caused by the presence of a base pair sequence that is sort of against the rules of properly formed DNA, a CTG sequence. During replication, this sequence can get repeated so that CTG becomes CTGCTG, then CTGCTGCTGCTG, etc. Note that since lengthening of the repeated sequence occurs in replication, this is a genetic issue that gets worse over the generations. Lower numbers of repeats aren't a big problem until later life, but in extreme cases the repeats can get into the thousands and cause problems to manifest before birth. In one case I know, the baby was born at 32 weeks due to congenital-onset Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy.
As I understand it, all that would be necessary to fix Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy is to recognize and remove all occurrences of CTGCTG. Nothing has to be inserted in its place. Just chop it out and join the ends of the gap back together.
But, it causes both development issues in many types of body tissues including brain, so you'd want to do it as early in the fetal stages as you can. Otherwise, irreparable harm will be present throughout life despite having fixed the genetic cause.
Slashdot Mirror
With modern radar and other guidance tech very few ships hit icebergs. On rare occasions they hit other ships, but that is about it. So, how likely would it be for the original Titanic design to sink in a normal lifespan if only the control room was modernized?
:-) Forgot the data. Wishing for that edit button again. Here is a great summary from the Economic Policy Institute.
As I said, it kept up. When wage changes match inflation, inflation is high, and you have fixed rate loans, inflation is helping to reduce your loan payment to income ratio leaving you with more disposable income.
The problem you've mentioned with real wages is very real but unrelated to inflation. I generally prefer looking at it over the 1979-today period. 1979 is when the problem first started.
The real annual wage increase (the increase that is above inflation) since 1979 has been 21.3% for the bottom 90%, 43.8% for the 90-95th percentile, 68.5% for those in the 95-99th percentile, and 148.6% for those in the top 1%.
If we were to simply undo this change in income distribution, the average worker in the bottom 90% would receive an increase of around $7100 per year with no change in the American GDP.
So the next time you're told that your wages have gone overseas or that the American economy has not been growing enough to provide you with better wages, try looking at who is saying it. Often, it is a member of that top 1% saying it. If not, they are often saying it as a representative of that viewpoint. It is misdirection. It may have some relationship to their problem, but the problem of the bottom 90% has more to do with that $7100 that has shifted from us to them.
First, you don't just affect those that are actually AT the minimum wage. You affect all of those in between that and the new minimum too. In addition, you affect many above the new minimum.
If you were to take the minimum wage from the current sub $10 range to $15 per hour, most making less than somewhere around $25 per hour (which would be above the $49K / year average wage in my area and thus a majority) would be affected by the change because you don't leave an experienced worker currently making $15 per hour at that wage when the newbies are getting $15 per hour. And because you have to move them up to maintain differentiation in pay you'll have to move the people above them up to.
What ends up happening after about a year is that you reach a new stability where everyone through a significant range above the minimum wage has received a raise to restore a somewhat compressed version of the original salary steps.
Well if you don't have a job you aren't being paid anything. What's more you are probably consuming tax funded social services.
Having a job at a minimum wage below poverty level does not significantly affect consumption of social services. It just allows an employer to take advantage of a taxpayer subsidized asset.
You could lower the minimum wage to $1 and get 100% employment on that basis
Well seeing as the real minimum wage is always $0 aka unemployment that doesn't actually seem to work the way you think it does.
Out of curiosity just how much of the workforce do you think works for minimum ?
A very large percentage of the workforce is affected by the minimum wage. It is a base. When you raise the base you raise the level of the workforce near the base. It is much like compressing a spring. Those closest to the base usually get immediate but somewhat lesser raises along with those at the base while the raises lag in time a bit for those further from the base but happen as the system reaches a new stability that mostly restores the preexisting relative pay rates.
For the folks at the lower to middle end of the economic spectrum, some inflation can be really nice. The propaganda against it is based more on the concerns of the upper class.
I remember the days of hitting more than 10% in the late 70s-early 80s. In the middle class, wages managed to mostly keep up while many of the bills did not - especially their fixed rate loans on homes and cars. My parents did well during that time. In a short time, inflation reduced the lifetime costs of their homes and cars by a double-digit percentage. That became a significant amount of extra spending money in their pockets for years to come due to the reduction in the proportion of their income going to those major bills.
Moderately higher inflation, especially for short periods as in the adjustment after sudden raises, can be a boon for the struggling worker class and even for large corporations with heavy long-term fixed rate debt. It is publicized as bad because it hurts financial institutions holding those loans, reducing the profit they make off of the less affluent.
I'd be surprised if that research included creative disciplines. I doubt many painters, writers, songwriters, etc. limit themselves in such ways.
I can certainly see that being true for jobs that are repetitive though, especially assembly lines. I really admire people who can do those jobs. I couldn't take if for more than a few days. Who could do that for more than 40 hours week after week? I'd just commit suicide. People who can deal with that kind of life are truly remarkable.
But, especially at that time in my life, if they had forced me to stop programming and head home after 40 hours, I'd have gone home and programmed. That's what I enjoyed doing. Some people entertain themselves with sports, some with movies or TV, others with going out to eat, I entertained myself and relaxed with programming. I went to work to have fun. If I forced myself to do anything else to relax, it might have been working logic puzzles, crosswords, etc. Much the same thing really.
How long will it be now before they make bots to submit patch requests that insert vulnerabilities - likely under the guise of fixing a true vulnerability and just making a mistake in doing so?
It isn't necessarily poor planning. We are creators, not workers on an assembly line. Often (always in my own experience) the crunch is because we are squeezing quality or features in that management didn't agree was necessary. Sure it creates an endless cycle, but at least I can have pride in what I've produced instead of hating it.
That just ends up causing people to work unpaid overtime.
I've been in a situation in which overtime beyond 60 hours a week was basically "illegal". I was working with Boeing on military contracts and the contract language limited such overtime. The result was rules against paying for that overtime. It resulted in my typical 90 hour weeks (I was young and loved what I was doing) having a large amount of unpaid time.
The work was exciting and I was certainly emotionally involved in my creations. I wouldn't have it any other way though. I've always said that if you wouldn't do the job for free (assuming you have some means to live otherwise), you should find a job you like. There are many careers and there must be one somewhere that is what you really want to do.
It's called evolution, and it has been going on for millions of years. We are here because of it, and, given its past success, odds are we will be replaced because of it.
The true best we can hope for is to go cyborg and evolve ourselves as fast as the robots. We should clear all of the obstacles from people who choose to experiment to try to make themselves better. Humans are plentiful. Give us true freedom. We will compete and evolve faster than pure robots. Many will fail, many monsters will be created, but there will also be success and advancement.
Everybody is an idiot at some point. Everyone drives distracted at some point in time, usually during some sort of emergency, while upset due to a fight, late for a date, etc. We are selfish and that doesn't mix well with the fact that choosing to drive is making a decision not just for yourself, but for everyone you interact with on the road. Most of those times, no problem. Every once in a while though, whammy.
Maybe we can come up with a way to detect adrenaline and exhaustion and disable driving of the vehicle by drivers with either state. That would indeed stop a lot of accidents.
If we could detect attentiveness to driving (we can't) and take over any time the driver isn't attentive for more than a few seconds, I'd bet 99%+ of people would have the wheel taken over at some point on every drive longer than a few minutes. The human mind is not truly able to multitask. If you ever talk to anyone while you're driving, think about any other portion of your day, get distracted by anything you pass, etc., you aren't truly paying attention. It isn't just about where your eyes are pointing.
I had an accident earlier this year when a grandmother U-turned between barrels in a construction zone right into my path. Pinned by a 2 foot drop off into the torn up road to my right, there was nothing I could do but hit the brakes and let the airbags do their job. As I understood it, she had never had an accident. But her grandson was in the hospital after some emergency. So she was driving while distraught to a hospital she had never been to at night, had taken a wrong turn, and in her hurry to get to her grandson made a bad choice to turn around in the middle of a construction zone. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but two vehicles were totalled.
During personal emergencies is one of the times that we should always turn the driving over to others. But, we make bad choices in emotional times.
Can a car understand a cop waving you around an accident?
I can't remember the last time a cop waved me around an accident. It has been at least a couple of decades. Hasn't directing traffic around accidents been banned as a practice for safety reasons - as in theirs?
Anyway, the least predictable thing in our environment is us. Just as that kid will run into the street, we can't look everywhere and often aren't really looking where our eyes are pointing because we're thinking about something. Everything from texting to simply driving while angry at somebody can lead to damage or death.
Augmented driving will likely happen for a while, but eventually, few will want to pay for it. And as cars start collecting data that reveals how bad we really are at driving, not just tens of thousands of deaths but millions of accidents that cost money at some level and hundreds of millions of near accidents, we'll gladly give up the madness of driving ourselves.
When it comes to the simplest statements, there just isn't enough content to tell whether it is a person or a bot. Many people pick up what bots say and amplify them and vice versa.
But, bots aren't just spreading simple messages. The better ones are spreading messages handcrafted for effect by people. The lobbyist, or whatever we want to call the person using the bot to manipulate, writes the initial messages. They aren't from a bot. Then bots are used to amplify the message as well as tie it in by linking both to it and to parties that the message will likely resonate with. The better bots may also search out similar messages and amplify them as well as use AI to paraphrase the message in new ways and spread it in different forms.
It is all under human control though and getting more and more difficult to recognize.
Though vital, the command prompt is not where I do my most typing. Documentation, messaging, and email are among the applications that I enter the most characters in and speech is working well for me in all of those cases. My editor has not yet succumbed though and likely won't for a while. That will take a lot more AI. I edit programs into existence at a much faster pace than I can speak.
It is the editing that keeps me from saying that the majority of the characters I enter are entered via speech which is the point at which I'd declare that my keyboard has been "replaced" even though it will still be on my desk.
Honestly, I'm close to using voice for typing more than the keyboard now. So, in a sense, voice will replace qwerty. Editing is the issue that keeps my keyboard here for now. There is no way I can describe edits out loud as fast as I do them with a keyboard.
Chorded keyboards have been around since the 1800s - including some that use tapping as opposed to pressing keys.
I used one in the mid-90s for a while that I can't find at the moment. It was an ergonomic grip designed to be a one-handed keyboard replacement operated at your side. There was more than one contact per finger to give 10 keys with 1024 possible combinations and software to allow words and phrases to be assigned combinations. The multiple contacts were hit with different parts of your fingers which at first doesn't seem possible to learn but was and allowed 10 contacts without the need to move your fingertip from one contact to another. It took about a month to reach a speed in the ballpark of my QWERTY keyboard skills. Mine broke after a few months and the device didn't catch on.
The Twiddler 3 offers similar functionality to what I remember, but is not as ergonomic and requires the fingertips to be moved around.
So, the answer is that these devices have tried to replace QWERTY and failed though they have had enough success to create a stable niche. The Twiddler devices have been around since '92.
Links to 9 million streams or it didn't happen!
I don't see it as regulation. Just fixing the bug in the system that is being exploited to abuse.
What else can we do? Block all of our neighbors... because that's about what it would take to continue with the current blocking approach. The ones that have been calling me more than once a day lately never use the same number twice and they use the numbers of real local customers.
Switch to a pure whitelist approach? Enough do that and I guarantee they'll just figure out who is on our whitelist and spoof those numbers. It doesn't fix the problem.
I think finding a way to give everyone back control of how their numbers are utilized is a nice approach. If you want to call that regulation, so be it. Regulate then. Even animals have regulations.
Funny how people always bring up security concerns as an argument against anything that improves security.
At the moment, it's the wild west. You can spoof almost any number you want with an investment within the reach of almost anyone over the poverty line who knows how. Prosecution is rare unless you annoy millions even though it is illegal to do it. Any protection at all against people misusing numbers would be an improvement. You have to start somewhere.
One national database with provisions for trusted sources to do the registering so that, for example, Google and others like them won't be overly burdened in registering their millions of users.
The true owner of a phone number should also be able to see any apps or parties currently authorized to spoof it.
It is needed. For example, my Google Home spoofs my cellular number when I use it to make a call. This is valuable and increases information to the callee because they know my cellular number.
It just needs to be registered and blocked by carriers when not registered.
All of the calls from my local exchange I've been getting lately have been spoofing assigned numbers that do not belong to them. When I call them back, I get people who are truly "neighbors" and have no idea that their numbers have been utilized. This is, of course, blatantly illegal, but the scamsters don't care.
I realize that spoofing has value. It is how my Google Home makes calls using my actual number, for example.
Spoofing needs to be allowed only for registered situations and blocked using technology at the carrier level, not laws, if the registration isn't found.
I'll believe a fix only when it happens though. The reason we don't have a fix today is because it would block unauthorized, illegal political calls made by 3rd parties that the politicians can claim they don't control or know about but, in truth, rely heavily on.
The major restaurants already sell all of that data. It's amazing what you can buy if you dig into the demographics data market.
If you're concerned, simply don't use the assistant or any online system (or even a direct phone call unless you block your number) to make your reservations, always pay cash at any restaurant (or any other chain business since they all track their sales to your cards which are easily linked to your identity these days), turn the location data off on your phone, and don't utilize the restaurant's WiFi. If you already do anything less than that, the Google Assistant's records will add no new information to the systems.
Though "many" doesn't mean a majority when used as an adjective, it does mean majority when used as a noun and carries a connotation of something closer to that than not over to the adjective case because of that. A number that is much less than 1% just doesn't rise to the normal usage of the word and ends up being misleading (as likely intended in this case).
I can think of many reasons. The article stated that they were interested in diseases that may be fatal before or shortly after birth. So waiting longer would certainly be a bit of a problem.
But many genetic flaws cause the body to grow abnormally. Fixing the genetic flaw won't repair what has already grown incorrectly.
One genetic flaw that I'm familiar with is Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy. It is an interesting one that has a nearly unique cause that should make it a candidate for being among the first to be corrected. It is caused by the presence of a base pair sequence that is sort of against the rules of properly formed DNA, a CTG sequence. During replication, this sequence can get repeated so that CTG becomes CTGCTG, then CTGCTGCTGCTG, etc. Note that since lengthening of the repeated sequence occurs in replication, this is a genetic issue that gets worse over the generations. Lower numbers of repeats aren't a big problem until later life, but in extreme cases the repeats can get into the thousands and cause problems to manifest before birth. In one case I know, the baby was born at 32 weeks due to congenital-onset Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy.
As I understand it, all that would be necessary to fix Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy is to recognize and remove all occurrences of CTGCTG. Nothing has to be inserted in its place. Just chop it out and join the ends of the gap back together.
But, it causes both development issues in many types of body tissues including brain, so you'd want to do it as early in the fetal stages as you can. Otherwise, irreparable harm will be present throughout life despite having fixed the genetic cause.