While the West Coast is finally getting its act together and doing its best to go heavier on transit/before/ it begins to mimic the super-high density of New England metropolitan areas, let's not rush to praise all of the novelty in recent transportation news.
The electric scootershare thing, for example, has been shown to actually make transportation worse. That sub-industry is not taking people out of their cars. It's convincing people who would have otherwise ridden the bus, subway, light rail, a bike, or just walked to pay to stand still. Few people use the scooters according to the law (most states ban them from the sidewalk) and cities are being sued for ADA violations because the cities haven't reacted quickly enough to have the scooters removed when they show up to operate without a business license.
Moreover, the race to "get big and win" within electric scootershare has encouraged companies to cut corners. As with the "hoverboards" fad, some companies are beginning to source lower and quality batteries so they can charge less and less per ride with fiery results. Similarly, they're using less reinforcing material, so they're breaking after less use. The wise cities are waiting to see who survives the race to the bottom and, if their communities support the inclusion of electric scootershare, how best to implement them locally.
Cities have been also reluctant to embrace self-driving cars because they don't yet operate with the consistency and adaptability required to gain trust. The whole idea of jumping from pure-human driving to never-human driving is a fantasy. We're going to slowly gain more and more autonomous features in our purchased vehicles before the majority of people begin to actually trust autonomous vehicles enough to fully relinquish control of who (or what) is driving their children to school. Most municipalities do not want to be testing grounds for such nascent technology that a contract must include clauses regarding death.
Sometimes, yes, the tag would be useful. When it comes to tax discussions, internet veterans have seen so many wacky ideas that people genuinely believe it that they just assume that almost all wacky suggestions are made in earnest.
1. How did you learn to code? 2. Besides HackerRank, which of these platforms do you use to learn how to code? 3. Which languages do employers need? 4. Which languages do students know? 5. Which languages do students plan to learn next? 6. Which frameworks do employers need? 7. Which frameworks do student developers know?
8. What do student developers want most in a job? Option (Global % / US %), +/- US Diff - Professional Growth & Learning (57.8 / 45.0), -13.8 - Good Work-Life Balance (52.2 / 52.9), +0.7 - Interesting Problems to Solve (45.9 / 43.0), -2.9 - Smart People/Team (43.3 / 37.0), -6.3 - Company Culture (32.3 / 44.9), +12.6 - Company Mission (19.9 / 17.8), -2.1 - Compensation (18.4 / 34.7), +16.3 - Impact with Product (16.6 / 14.3), -2.3 - Preferred Tech Stack (15.3 / 23.9), +8.6 - Perks (10.5 / 15.1), +4.6 - Proximity to Where You Live (8.9 / 7.4), -1.5 - Stability from a Large Company (8.7 / 11.1), +2.4 - Funding and Valuation (5.8 / 3.4), -2.4
9. What does work-life balance mean to U.S. students?
This is a survey of students, not people 3+ years into their career. They're MOST concerned with being taught all the stuff that they didn't learn in college so that they can actually earn good money. That's literally the first section after the table of contents in the linked article.
News comes FROM a source and is delivered VIA a medium.
Facebook does not participate in journalism or news distribution. People post articles from news media organizations on Facebook and people read them.
Similarly, one doesn't "get their news" from Google News. They get news from Reuters, New York Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, WSJ, etc. and its delivered via Google News.
Of course, one could also "get their news" from the New York Times via their print newspaper, but that's arguably inconsequentially different from reading the NYT online.
As someone who literally works in sustainable transportation, that list is pretty damning. It shows that the emissions reductions from Tesla Model 3 sales aren't what people tend to assume.
- There is zero emissions reduction going from a Nissan Leaf to a Tesla Model 3. - Going from a Prius to a to a Tesla Model 3 provides minimal reduction particularly if the Tesla is being charged in, say, Carlsbad where a portion of the electricity comes from burning oil. - Upgrades from the Accord or Civic provide bigger gains, but both of those vehicles are already pretty darn efficient.
And the purely gasoline-powered vehicles used as trade-ins aren't being destroyed or removed from the road. They're being resold. Tesla isn't a Cash-for-Clunkers deal where people with gross-polluting vehicles trade them in for a major subsidy on a significantly less polluting vehicle.
The cool thing about EVs is that the cleaner the power sources get, the cleaner the car gets. Compare that to a 25mpg vehicle that will (at best) pollute at the same level throughout its workable lifespan regardless of changes to the electrical grid.
I can't find a photo/video of a physical prototype anywhere. Like every other major tech hype, read the words carefully and check for graphical renderings. From the summary: "... could be in service within three years."
Wow... another startup saying that their potential product might be available sometime soon. "Please invest in us."
This is futurism crap. The tech doesn't exist yet and won't exist for a long time yet. When it does exist, it will cost more than this guy thinks it will AND THEN he'll have to admit that no one wants to fly inside Rubbermaid tub and thus to sell these and keep the potential mileage up, he'll have to use even more exotic materials. Suddenly, it becomes a green-taxi toy for the mega-wealthy instead of an "Electric Airplane Revolution".
We currently have nowhere near the battery power density (kW/kg) to make this a viable, safe, mass producible product yet. Until we do ALL these neat ideas will just be CGI renderings and VC failure fodder.
Older people know the hype because they actually understand the current limitations of technology, the speed of technological advancement, the cost to research and mass produce, the required cost for consumers, and then reasonable alternatives that already exist.
- Flying cars - Jetpacks - Helicopters for everyone - Drone delivery - Personal automated drone cameramen - (Actual) Artificial Intelligence - Level 4/5 Autonomous Vehicles - 3D Printing EVERYTHING - Funding an "EV for the people" from the profits raised by selling luxury vehicles - Level 3/DC Fast charging everywhere
I always tell people to run all major communications, brands, and slogans through the theoretical "committee of 12-year old boys" to figure out how to anything can be turned on its head and made to look stupid. For tech, I advise asking a "committee of 40+ y/o engineers that don't live anywhere near Silicon Valley and don't follow anyone on Twitter".
Here are my rules for tech skepticism: 1. If someone says they have something that flies and it will carry people or precious cargo anddon't have a bunch of actual pilots and insurance onboard before getting their name out there, they're just looking for irrationally exuberant investor capital and will eventually change their product goal or just fold. 2. If someone says they're using "AI" but it's actually just algorithmic, they will hype and lie even more down the line. 3. If someone says they're going to mass-produce something via 3D printing and it will be cheaper/quicker/better than factory production, they're lying. 4. If someone says, "Once we get enough funding... we'll make an affordable version," they're lying (or are delusional). The thing about "funding" is that people who provide demand their money back plus profit. Once your business is built around that high-profit endeavor, your new stakeholders will do their damnedest to keep it that way. "Affordable" anything means less profit. 5. Level 3/DC Fast charging is INCREDIBLY expensive by comparison to level 1/level 2 charging. The idea of massively accessible electrical charging stations will not happen on cost alone. If battery-electric vehicles are to succeed, there needs to be massive funding for HOME charging (particularly in multi-family units) or a complete change to user-swappable battery rails.
Itâ(TM)s a bit disenguous to say that people ARENâ(TM)T riding New York transit. 2017 had 1.73 BILLION subway boardings alone.
The problem comes with ridehailing companies. While there are plenty of criticisms to be had about the medallion system, it did keep more private automobiles off the road and keep more people on transit than Uber or Lyft whose use has been directly correlated with reduced transit use nationwide.
As unpopular as transit is in much of the nation, when you get SO MANY people crunched into the same space, youâ(TM)ve simply got to ensure people donâ(TM)t drive or else the pollution, road risk, and quality of life simply ranks.
Repair's importance relative to innovation's importance is irrelevant unless they're mutually exclusive concepts-- which they're not. One can enhance/improve/maintain device repairability while furthering technological development. Repairability is simply be a constraint like weight, power consumption, dimensions, water resistance, etc. All of those factors are important and part of design. In certain applications, you may need to focus more on power consumption than maintaining water tightness, but for mass-market electronics, you need a healthy dose of each factor.
I hate house brands... usually. When they're not named for the company that sells them, it feels like the store is trying to trick me into believing that they're selling an industry-forged item. If Performance Bike sold "Performance Bike" branded bicycle saddles and tools, I wouldn't have a problem. But re-branding them as "Spin Doctor" to compete with the likes of Pedro's and Park Tool seems wrong. Why? Because I'm fairly certain that most house-brands are lower quality than national brands. Sometimes the lower quality is insignificant, but the discount is sufficient to make going with the house brand, but if you don't know the entire industry (as it is with most bicycle riders), you think you're getting a strong competitor's product at a reasonable price.
I like the "Amazon Basics" branding. I would be happy if Amazon's brand "NuPro" was actually "NuPro, an Amazon Brand" for a couple years until all the regular Amazon shoppers KNEW that NuPro was an Amazon brand and THEN they dropped the "an Amazon Brand" part.
I would 100% support a measure from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would require such labels.
I'm not a programmer or a system administrator. I'm a bit of a power-user and a trouble-shooter. I tend to master what I find useful. Back in 2003, I found use for Excel (pivot tables, specifically) for a hobby and from thereon out, it was a massive boon to me at work.
Today, having mentored a couple dozen interns and entry-level employees, I can tell you that teaching THEM pivot tables, data norming/data cleaning, and the like has made them extremely competitive in the job market. I tell them, "What I will teach you will not only get you instant interest when submitting an application, but will help make you indispensable to most organizations."
So ya, if your time is too valuable to help someone in Excel, don't tell them you're competent. But if you want to get a job or help others get jobs, learn and train others in the standard formulae (IF/Then, Count, etc.), more complex formulae (Vlookup, Index/Match, etc.), how to clean up data quickly, and pivot tables.
"Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals."
That's because people are desperate to be saved by non-humans. They want an app to change their world, not a person. They want a smartphone, not a philosophy. They would rather some form of modern technology revolutionize the simplification and security of their lives and possessions than accept that a comfortable life requires a lot of work. And they'll accept/believe a whole lot of BS just to ease their minds into believing that the great automated comfort is just a year or two away. It's mindless Futurism that's being fed by extreme political, economic, and social viewpoints constantly slinging mud at each other to the point where people would rather put a pox on both houses and leave the robots to rule.
And it's so blatantly mindless. From solar roadways/sidewalks, to supporting "disruptive technology" regardless of its harms, or putting a massive amount of faith in celebrity CEOs based on their futuristic sci-fi visions instead the real-world success of their work.
The author is right in that this happy blindness mirrors the run-up to the mortgage crisis because people *knew* that housing values could not go up forever and they knew that they would have to come crashing down because of BS investment methods. But they didn't want to miss out. They would rather blindly hope that the people who made and managed those financial instruments had somehow found the Holy Grail and everyone was going to get rich without having to work for it.
And then the lying game fell apart.
I always say that if economics, politics, or infrastructure is exciting enough to make the nightly news, something's broken. Those things should be boring. Interesting, but absolutely undramatic when they work well. And my god are people rabidly excited about social media, ride-hailing, dockless shared mobility, autonomous vehicles, and Tesla Motors specifically.
I work with transit agencies, city planners, major employers, and the commuters themselves. Here's what I know to be the causes:
1. Low population density - If you go to the denser parts of LA, you get good transit. Same with SF, NYC, etc. If you head out to the land of single-family homes, population density drops to the point where you need massive subsidies to keep a route going. But then, you're fighting against...
2. Suburban Road Network Design - When you have mile-long block-faces along arterials, you guarantee that transit riders will need to walk.5-.75 miles on average to a bus route... not even likely the route they need. Then there's the whole issue of...
3. People Don't Live Near Work - Most people have to balance housing affordability, proximity to work, and living in a home they like. Part of that is because those who can afford to buy a home typically want a back yard, front yard, and a two car garage (see #s 1 and 2) and the other part is that given the demand to live near major work centers, the cost per square foot to live near work is pretty damn high. And then there's the issue of people buying up homes for investment (rentals) instead of living in them thereby exasperating the "drive til you qualify" problem, but that's a whole other discussion.
4. Free parking and ignorance of the cost of commutes - People don't want to pay for public transit they're not using, so they vote down funding. That increases user fees and thus makes it unattractive to use because most people don't have separate parking fees. Instead, employers underpay their workers to fund parking costs. Moreover, people assume that "gas need to be bought" so they don't factor the cost of fuel into their commutes and thus can't accurately compare the cost of a monthly transit pass to the cost of a drive-alone commute.
5. Transit Fare Interoperability - Transit systems are typically city-wide or county-wide. Very few cross county jurisdictional boundaries. They are thus, in effect, silo'd. They have their own fare/rate structure (cost per boarding, discounts for multi-boarding passes), pass structure (monthly passes vs. 30-day passes), and absent a multi-jurisdictional agreement (Like Clipper in the Bay Area), many people need to purchase and maintain multiple bus passes for daily commutes. State SHOULD pass laws that require that each county get onboard with multi-jurisdictional pass/pricing schemes by 202X and then set another deadline to have groups of neighboring counties merge their pass/pricing schema until we have statewide transit passes. After all, it has taken over 20 years for the SF Bay area Clipper Card to get to where it is and it still only includes 22 of the local transit agencies. There are over 164 transit agencies in California alone.
Was I the only one that had to look up "GRU" and "IRA Troll Farm" because neither the article nor summary explained it?
From Wiki: The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russia... and still commonly known by its previous abbreviation GRU... is the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation... whose heads report directly to the president of Russia.
The Internet Research Agency... is a Russian company, based in Saint Petersburg, engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests.
"People have a really hard time understanding URLs"
Well, no, not really- not in the infinitive sense. URLs can be ugly and thus hard to decipher unless you have a little bit of education or experience on the matter.
It's hard as in "People have a really hard time doing long division" (until they're taught it) and not ""People have a really hard time understanding hypercubes" (because thinking beyond 3-dimensional space is foreign to the human experience).
If we simply teach people the standards ins and outs of file paths (C:\... ; very easy to understand) and tell them that they're directly correlated in pattern to URLs, then the job is done. Engineering around ignorance does nothing to help people.
I know a lot of defaults are from distance learning and for-profit schools (University of Phoenix, DeVry, etc.) as well as college drop-outs, so what happens when we control for those?
What is the loan risk/default rate is for students who actually graduate from 4-year brick-and-mortar school.
Yep, I live in an area and work among people who are die-hard futurists by career choice whereas I'm an operations person who needs to invest in tangible and plannable products.
I attended a conference earlier this year focused on vehicle electrification (currently available, but hard to facilitate), ride-hailing (here, but implemented in an exploitative manner), and autonomous cars (very far off). It was a two day conference and people were just fawning over the speakers who droned on about how "they're almost here" and when asked when autonomous electric ride-hailing vehicles would be in our town, one researcher said that they will inundate Northern California by mid-2019.
Hogwash.
Another guy gave a presentation arguing that the cost of autonomous vehicle components are dropping like stones. He showed the approximate price of a LiDAR system as being $75,000 in 2010 and based on that ONE POINT OF DATA extrapolated that they'll be down to $2,000 in 2020.
Bullshit.
Yet another person who works for the City of San Jose said that cities need to start planning for MASS VEHICLE ABANDONMENT because Uber is going to imminently go live with autonomous electric ride hailing that will be so cheap that people will be abandoning their cars on the sides of the road because they don't want to pay for proper disposal.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
It was great that, on the second day, a former head of the FHWA or NHTSA (I can't remember which) went to speak for the opening keynote and basically shot everyone down. Be basically said, "Yes, people are working on vehicle autonomy, but a safe and reliable system is still very far off." He continued, "You have to understand that people will not accept autonomous vehicles that are not NEARLY PERFECT. And companies will not be able to survive the centralized liability of vehicles that are only 98% perfect."
The rest of the conference was focused on planning to provide equitable (income-scaling) access to autonomous electric ride-hailing which to many of us is like debating which carpets to have living room in our mansion after we win the lottery.
Google allows someone to quickly find information related to their interest. If someone is interested in learning something generally productive, searches for that thing on Google, and absorbs that information, Google can be said to have aided in making that person more informed or "smarter". If Google also directs that person to areas where discourse on that topic are had and the user can then gain analytical insight, then Google has again aided in making that person "smarter".
But what if the subject is already (generally) smart? Google can be used as a crutch to relinquish the need to remember so many things because easy access to the information via an internet search giant could arguably make that person "dumber". I know that there are many facts that I used to desperately grasp onto based on the expectation of needing to recall them instantly (various mathematical formulae), but given the prevalence of internet connectivity, I've just allowed myself to forget them because I can look them us as needed.
Really, all Google does is help you be more of what you want to be. If you want to be smarter, learn new things, learn how to think better, etc. then Google can help point you in the right direction. If you just want to read about conspiracy theories and entertainment news, then Google can direct you to that as well.
Teachers have been doing their best to do this for decades... but then parents get a say in their kids' educations as well. If the parents are biased, they will help to install a biased system that will punish teachers who teach against their biases. Speak to any teacher (grade 7-12) who teachers history, civics, biology, or physics how much parent protest plays into their curriculum decisions and you'll get some stories about being accused of "shoving evolution down the throats of kids", liberal indoctrination, or anti-religious intent.
So what do you do when it's a basic principal of American government to include public input and steering, but such a large proportion of the public is so literally wrong about their understanding of facts that they choose to install their own reality?
Iâ(TM)ve worked in public higher ed since I was seeking my BA myself. My generation was targeted by credit card companies and we also saw the massive defunding of public higher education and thus the increase of cost to the students themselves.
But what most people donâ(TM)t know is that, behind the scenes, the bigger public universities we able offset a major portion of that increased tuition/fees with grants funded be increasing out of state and international admissions (who get charged much more than in state students). This means that while the total âoecostâ of higher education has officially increased, the proportional amount paid by students has only gone up a bit.
But still, there is a newer MAJOR fear of accumulating student debt. I left with $45k in debt, paid my minimums until I could pay more, took a payment hiatus due to unemployment, and then focused again on repayment. It took me 10 years to pay off the debt.
Today, I see students who are desperately afraid of taking on HALF as much debt as I did and as a result of hungry. Itâ(TM)s stunning how much more the students will self-educate about student debt by reading about the overall numbers of student loan default while not controlling for degree completion or the school from which the education was received (distance learning and for-profit schools are MASSIVELY more likely to pump out students that default on loans).
So, while there has been an increase in the direct costs of higher education, it has not been so much that students can not afford food. Instead, students have been taught to fear student debt as an extreme (sometimes politically motivated) reaction to poorly reported upon statistics.
Moral of the story: take the grants and scholarship without worry. Know what youâ(TM)re getting into with a federally subsidized loan, but donâ(TM)t let the big numbers scare you. We ALL go through repayment. Itâ(TM)s not wonderful or fun, but donâ(TM)t go hungry for 4-5 years just because you donâ(TM)t want to make payments.
While I fully acknowledge and support an owner's copyrights, I also believe that in absence of clear, genuine use or capitalization upon a particular copyright, certain IP should enter the a "semi-public" domain wherein limited duration licensing to those copyrights may be sold on behalf of the holder.
Example: If Nintendo is still making money on "Pokemon" in general, good for them. However, if they don't find it financially viable to re-make the original GameBoy Pokemon games and thus choose not to make them available on modern platforms, people should be able to pay a fair value semi-public domain license to replicate or acquire those games for use on any platform. The license could be limited (1 year) and affordable ($2/year) with at least 50% of that licensing going to Nintendo with the remaining going to support this semi-public domain licensing system.
This would be better for everyone. Nintendo doesn't have to ramp up their lawyer pool to squeeze blood from stones (users and distributors of emulators and games) and those "stones" could pay their share in small amounts. Nintendo continues get to get paid and retain control while users get their games and don't get dragged to court.
The same could be done for books no longer in print (I have a couple I'd like to replace but cannot find anywhere) and movies that haven't made the transition to digital media. Hell, I'd happily pay a flat $0.50/DVD to be able to rip them and store them for my own convenient watching while being 100% certain that I can never be sued for having done so (instead of having to argue fair use in court).
Slashdot Mirror
While the West Coast is finally getting its act together and doing its best to go heavier on transit /before/ it begins to mimic the super-high density of New England metropolitan areas, let's not rush to praise all of the novelty in recent transportation news.
The electric scootershare thing, for example, has been shown to actually make transportation worse. That sub-industry is not taking people out of their cars. It's convincing people who would have otherwise ridden the bus, subway, light rail, a bike, or just walked to pay to stand still. Few people use the scooters according to the law (most states ban them from the sidewalk) and cities are being sued for ADA violations because the cities haven't reacted quickly enough to have the scooters removed when they show up to operate without a business license.
Moreover, the race to "get big and win" within electric scootershare has encouraged companies to cut corners. As with the "hoverboards" fad, some companies are beginning to source lower and quality batteries so they can charge less and less per ride with fiery results. Similarly, they're using less reinforcing material, so they're breaking after less use. The wise cities are waiting to see who survives the race to the bottom and, if their communities support the inclusion of electric scootershare, how best to implement them locally.
Cities have been also reluctant to embrace self-driving cars because they don't yet operate with the consistency and adaptability required to gain trust. The whole idea of jumping from pure-human driving to never-human driving is a fantasy. We're going to slowly gain more and more autonomous features in our purchased vehicles before the majority of people begin to actually trust autonomous vehicles enough to fully relinquish control of who (or what) is driving their children to school. Most municipalities do not want to be testing grounds for such nascent technology that a contract must include clauses regarding death.
Isn't this what Enron did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_entity
Sometimes, yes, the tag would be useful. When it comes to tax discussions, internet veterans have seen so many wacky ideas that people genuinely believe it that they just assume that almost all wacky suggestions are made in earnest.
1. How did you learn to code?
2. Besides HackerRank, which of these platforms do you use to learn how to code?
3. Which languages do employers need?
4. Which languages do students know?
5. Which languages do students plan to learn next?
6. Which frameworks do employers need?
7. Which frameworks do student developers know?
8. What do student developers want most in a job?
Option (Global % / US %), +/- US Diff
- Professional Growth & Learning (57.8 / 45.0), -13.8
- Good Work-Life Balance (52.2 / 52.9), +0.7
- Interesting Problems to Solve (45.9 / 43.0), -2.9
- Smart People/Team (43.3 / 37.0), -6.3
- Company Culture (32.3 / 44.9), +12.6
- Company Mission (19.9 / 17.8), -2.1
- Compensation (18.4 / 34.7), +16.3
- Impact with Product (16.6 / 14.3), -2.3
- Preferred Tech Stack (15.3 / 23.9), +8.6
- Perks (10.5 / 15.1), +4.6
- Proximity to Where You Live (8.9 / 7.4), -1.5
- Stability from a Large Company (8.7 / 11.1), +2.4
- Funding and Valuation (5.8 / 3.4), -2.4
9. What does work-life balance mean to U.S. students?
This is a survey of students, not people 3+ years into their career. They're MOST concerned with being taught all the stuff that they didn't learn in college so that they can actually earn good money. That's literally the first section after the table of contents in the linked article.
News comes FROM a source and is delivered VIA a medium.
Facebook does not participate in journalism or news distribution. People post articles from news media organizations on Facebook and people read them.
Similarly, one doesn't "get their news" from Google News. They get news from Reuters, New York Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, WSJ, etc. and its delivered via Google News.
Of course, one could also "get their news" from the New York Times via their print newspaper, but that's arguably inconsequentially different from reading the NYT online.
As someone who literally works in sustainable transportation, that list is pretty damning. It shows that the emissions reductions from Tesla Model 3 sales aren't what people tend to assume.
- There is zero emissions reduction going from a Nissan Leaf to a Tesla Model 3.
- Going from a Prius to a to a Tesla Model 3 provides minimal reduction particularly if the Tesla is being charged in, say, Carlsbad where a portion of the electricity comes from burning oil.
- Upgrades from the Accord or Civic provide bigger gains, but both of those vehicles are already pretty darn efficient.
And the purely gasoline-powered vehicles used as trade-ins aren't being destroyed or removed from the road. They're being resold. Tesla isn't a Cash-for-Clunkers deal where people with gross-polluting vehicles trade them in for a major subsidy on a significantly less polluting vehicle.
The sources are getting cleaner (in California). http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOut...
The cool thing about EVs is that the cleaner the power sources get, the cleaner the car gets. Compare that to a 25mpg vehicle that will (at best) pollute at the same level throughout its workable lifespan regardless of changes to the electrical grid.
I can't find a photo/video of a physical prototype anywhere. Like every other major tech hype, read the words carefully and check for graphical renderings. From the summary: "... could be in service within three years."
Wow... another startup saying that their potential product might be available sometime soon. "Please invest in us."
This is futurism crap. The tech doesn't exist yet and won't exist for a long time yet. When it does exist, it will cost more than this guy thinks it will AND THEN he'll have to admit that no one wants to fly inside Rubbermaid tub and thus to sell these and keep the potential mileage up, he'll have to use even more exotic materials. Suddenly, it becomes a green-taxi toy for the mega-wealthy instead of an "Electric Airplane Revolution".
We currently have nowhere near the battery power density (kW/kg) to make this a viable, safe, mass producible product yet. Until we do ALL these neat ideas will just be CGI renderings and VC failure fodder.
Older people know the hype because they actually understand the current limitations of technology, the speed of technological advancement, the cost to research and mass produce, the required cost for consumers, and then reasonable alternatives that already exist.
- Flying cars
- Jetpacks
- Helicopters for everyone
- Drone delivery
- Personal automated drone cameramen
- (Actual) Artificial Intelligence
- Level 4/5 Autonomous Vehicles
- 3D Printing EVERYTHING
- Funding an "EV for the people" from the profits raised by selling luxury vehicles
- Level 3/DC Fast charging everywhere
I always tell people to run all major communications, brands, and slogans through the theoretical "committee of 12-year old boys" to figure out how to anything can be turned on its head and made to look stupid. For tech, I advise asking a "committee of 40+ y/o engineers that don't live anywhere near Silicon Valley and don't follow anyone on Twitter".
Here are my rules for tech skepticism:
1. If someone says they have something that flies and it will carry people or precious cargo anddon't have a bunch of actual pilots and insurance onboard before getting their name out there, they're just looking for irrationally exuberant investor capital and will eventually change their product goal or just fold.
2. If someone says they're using "AI" but it's actually just algorithmic, they will hype and lie even more down the line.
3. If someone says they're going to mass-produce something via 3D printing and it will be cheaper/quicker/better than factory production, they're lying.
4. If someone says, "Once we get enough funding... we'll make an affordable version," they're lying (or are delusional). The thing about "funding" is that people who provide demand their money back plus profit. Once your business is built around that high-profit endeavor, your new stakeholders will do their damnedest to keep it that way. "Affordable" anything means less profit.
5. Level 3/DC Fast charging is INCREDIBLY expensive by comparison to level 1/level 2 charging. The idea of massively accessible electrical charging stations will not happen on cost alone. If battery-electric vehicles are to succeed, there needs to be massive funding for HOME charging (particularly in multi-family units) or a complete change to user-swappable battery rails.
Itâ(TM)s a bit disenguous to say that people ARENâ(TM)T riding New York transit. 2017 had 1.73 BILLION subway boardings alone.
The problem comes with ridehailing companies. While there are plenty of criticisms to be had about the medallion system, it did keep more private automobiles off the road and keep more people on transit than Uber or Lyft whose use has been directly correlated with reduced transit use nationwide.
As unpopular as transit is in much of the nation, when you get SO MANY people crunched into the same space, youâ(TM)ve simply got to ensure people donâ(TM)t drive or else the pollution, road risk, and quality of life simply ranks.
Repair's importance relative to innovation's importance is irrelevant unless they're mutually exclusive concepts-- which they're not. One can enhance/improve/maintain device repairability while furthering technological development. Repairability is simply be a constraint like weight, power consumption, dimensions, water resistance, etc. All of those factors are important and part of design. In certain applications, you may need to focus more on power consumption than maintaining water tightness, but for mass-market electronics, you need a healthy dose of each factor.
I hate house brands... usually. When they're not named for the company that sells them, it feels like the store is trying to trick me into believing that they're selling an industry-forged item. If Performance Bike sold "Performance Bike" branded bicycle saddles and tools, I wouldn't have a problem. But re-branding them as "Spin Doctor" to compete with the likes of Pedro's and Park Tool seems wrong. Why? Because I'm fairly certain that most house-brands are lower quality than national brands. Sometimes the lower quality is insignificant, but the discount is sufficient to make going with the house brand, but if you don't know the entire industry (as it is with most bicycle riders), you think you're getting a strong competitor's product at a reasonable price.
I like the "Amazon Basics" branding. I would be happy if Amazon's brand "NuPro" was actually "NuPro, an Amazon Brand" for a couple years until all the regular Amazon shoppers KNEW that NuPro was an Amazon brand and THEN they dropped the "an Amazon Brand" part.
I would 100% support a measure from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would require such labels.
I'm not a programmer or a system administrator. I'm a bit of a power-user and a trouble-shooter. I tend to master what I find useful. Back in 2003, I found use for Excel (pivot tables, specifically) for a hobby and from thereon out, it was a massive boon to me at work.
Today, having mentored a couple dozen interns and entry-level employees, I can tell you that teaching THEM pivot tables, data norming/data cleaning, and the like has made them extremely competitive in the job market. I tell them, "What I will teach you will not only get you instant interest when submitting an application, but will help make you indispensable to most organizations."
So ya, if your time is too valuable to help someone in Excel, don't tell them you're competent. But if you want to get a job or help others get jobs, learn and train others in the standard formulae (IF/Then, Count, etc.), more complex formulae (Vlookup, Index/Match, etc.), how to clean up data quickly, and pivot tables.
I Google'd "deaths per terawatt" and found this: https://www.statista.com/stati...
"Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals."
That's because people are desperate to be saved by non-humans. They want an app to change their world, not a person. They want a smartphone, not a philosophy. They would rather some form of modern technology revolutionize the simplification and security of their lives and possessions than accept that a comfortable life requires a lot of work. And they'll accept/believe a whole lot of BS just to ease their minds into believing that the great automated comfort is just a year or two away. It's mindless Futurism that's being fed by extreme political, economic, and social viewpoints constantly slinging mud at each other to the point where people would rather put a pox on both houses and leave the robots to rule.
And it's so blatantly mindless. From solar roadways/sidewalks, to supporting "disruptive technology" regardless of its harms, or putting a massive amount of faith in celebrity CEOs based on their futuristic sci-fi visions instead the real-world success of their work.
The author is right in that this happy blindness mirrors the run-up to the mortgage crisis because people *knew* that housing values could not go up forever and they knew that they would have to come crashing down because of BS investment methods. But they didn't want to miss out. They would rather blindly hope that the people who made and managed those financial instruments had somehow found the Holy Grail and everyone was going to get rich without having to work for it.
And then the lying game fell apart.
I always say that if economics, politics, or infrastructure is exciting enough to make the nightly news, something's broken. Those things should be boring. Interesting, but absolutely undramatic when they work well. And my god are people rabidly excited about social media, ride-hailing, dockless shared mobility, autonomous vehicles, and Tesla Motors specifically.
I work with transit agencies, city planners, major employers, and the commuters themselves. Here's what I know to be the causes:
1. Low population density - If you go to the denser parts of LA, you get good transit. Same with SF, NYC, etc. If you head out to the land of single-family homes, population density drops to the point where you need massive subsidies to keep a route going. But then, you're fighting against...
2. Suburban Road Network Design - When you have mile-long block-faces along arterials, you guarantee that transit riders will need to walk .5-.75 miles on average to a bus route... not even likely the route they need. Then there's the whole issue of...
3. People Don't Live Near Work - Most people have to balance housing affordability, proximity to work, and living in a home they like. Part of that is because those who can afford to buy a home typically want a back yard, front yard, and a two car garage (see #s 1 and 2) and the other part is that given the demand to live near major work centers, the cost per square foot to live near work is pretty damn high. And then there's the issue of people buying up homes for investment (rentals) instead of living in them thereby exasperating the "drive til you qualify" problem, but that's a whole other discussion.
4. Free parking and ignorance of the cost of commutes - People don't want to pay for public transit they're not using, so they vote down funding. That increases user fees and thus makes it unattractive to use because most people don't have separate parking fees. Instead, employers underpay their workers to fund parking costs. Moreover, people assume that "gas need to be bought" so they don't factor the cost of fuel into their commutes and thus can't accurately compare the cost of a monthly transit pass to the cost of a drive-alone commute.
5. Transit Fare Interoperability - Transit systems are typically city-wide or county-wide. Very few cross county jurisdictional boundaries. They are thus, in effect, silo'd. They have their own fare/rate structure (cost per boarding, discounts for multi-boarding passes), pass structure (monthly passes vs. 30-day passes), and absent a multi-jurisdictional agreement (Like Clipper in the Bay Area), many people need to purchase and maintain multiple bus passes for daily commutes. State SHOULD pass laws that require that each county get onboard with multi-jurisdictional pass/pricing schemes by 202X and then set another deadline to have groups of neighboring counties merge their pass/pricing schema until we have statewide transit passes. After all, it has taken over 20 years for the SF Bay area Clipper Card to get to where it is and it still only includes 22 of the local transit agencies. There are over 164 transit agencies in California alone.
I could go on....
Was I the only one that had to look up "GRU" and "IRA Troll Farm" because neither the article nor summary explained it?
From Wiki: The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russia... and still commonly known by its previous abbreviation GRU... is the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation ... whose heads report directly to the president of Russia.
The Internet Research Agency... is a Russian company, based in Saint Petersburg, engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests.
"People have a really hard time understanding URLs"
Well, no, not really- not in the infinitive sense. URLs can be ugly and thus hard to decipher unless you have a little bit of education or experience on the matter.
It's hard as in "People have a really hard time doing long division" (until they're taught it) and not ""People have a really hard time understanding hypercubes" (because thinking beyond 3-dimensional space is foreign to the human experience).
If we simply teach people the standards ins and outs of file paths (C:\ ... ; very easy to understand) and tell them that they're directly correlated in pattern to URLs, then the job is done. Engineering around ignorance does nothing to help people.
I know a lot of defaults are from distance learning and for-profit schools (University of Phoenix, DeVry, etc.) as well as college drop-outs, so what happens when we control for those?
What is the loan risk/default rate is for students who actually graduate from 4-year brick-and-mortar school.
Yep, I live in an area and work among people who are die-hard futurists by career choice whereas I'm an operations person who needs to invest in tangible and plannable products.
I attended a conference earlier this year focused on vehicle electrification (currently available, but hard to facilitate), ride-hailing (here, but implemented in an exploitative manner), and autonomous cars (very far off). It was a two day conference and people were just fawning over the speakers who droned on about how "they're almost here" and when asked when autonomous electric ride-hailing vehicles would be in our town, one researcher said that they will inundate Northern California by mid-2019.
Hogwash.
Another guy gave a presentation arguing that the cost of autonomous vehicle components are dropping like stones. He showed the approximate price of a LiDAR system as being $75,000 in 2010 and based on that ONE POINT OF DATA extrapolated that they'll be down to $2,000 in 2020.
Bullshit.
Yet another person who works for the City of San Jose said that cities need to start planning for MASS VEHICLE ABANDONMENT because Uber is going to imminently go live with autonomous electric ride hailing that will be so cheap that people will be abandoning their cars on the sides of the road because they don't want to pay for proper disposal.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
It was great that, on the second day, a former head of the FHWA or NHTSA (I can't remember which) went to speak for the opening keynote and basically shot everyone down. Be basically said, "Yes, people are working on vehicle autonomy, but a safe and reliable system is still very far off." He continued, "You have to understand that people will not accept autonomous vehicles that are not NEARLY PERFECT. And companies will not be able to survive the centralized liability of vehicles that are only 98% perfect."
The rest of the conference was focused on planning to provide equitable (income-scaling) access to autonomous electric ride-hailing which to many of us is like debating which carpets to have living room in our mansion after we win the lottery.
Google allows someone to quickly find information related to their interest. If someone is interested in learning something generally productive, searches for that thing on Google, and absorbs that information, Google can be said to have aided in making that person more informed or "smarter". If Google also directs that person to areas where discourse on that topic are had and the user can then gain analytical insight, then Google has again aided in making that person "smarter".
But what if the subject is already (generally) smart? Google can be used as a crutch to relinquish the need to remember so many things because easy access to the information via an internet search giant could arguably make that person "dumber". I know that there are many facts that I used to desperately grasp onto based on the expectation of needing to recall them instantly (various mathematical formulae), but given the prevalence of internet connectivity, I've just allowed myself to forget them because I can look them us as needed.
Really, all Google does is help you be more of what you want to be. If you want to be smarter, learn new things, learn how to think better, etc. then Google can help point you in the right direction. If you just want to read about conspiracy theories and entertainment news, then Google can direct you to that as well.
Teachers have been doing their best to do this for decades... but then parents get a say in their kids' educations as well. If the parents are biased, they will help to install a biased system that will punish teachers who teach against their biases. Speak to any teacher (grade 7-12) who teachers history, civics, biology, or physics how much parent protest plays into their curriculum decisions and you'll get some stories about being accused of "shoving evolution down the throats of kids", liberal indoctrination, or anti-religious intent.
So what do you do when it's a basic principal of American government to include public input and steering, but such a large proportion of the public is so literally wrong about their understanding of facts that they choose to install their own reality?
Iâ(TM)ve worked in public higher ed since I was seeking my BA myself. My generation was targeted by credit card companies and we also saw the massive defunding of public higher education and thus the increase of cost to the students themselves.
But what most people donâ(TM)t know is that, behind the scenes, the bigger public universities we able offset a major portion of that increased tuition/fees with grants funded be increasing out of state and international admissions (who get charged much more than in state students). This means that while the total âoecostâ of higher education has officially increased, the proportional amount paid by students has only gone up a bit.
But still, there is a newer MAJOR fear of accumulating student debt. I left with $45k in debt, paid my minimums until I could pay more, took a payment hiatus due to unemployment, and then focused again on repayment. It took me 10 years to pay off the debt.
Today, I see students who are desperately afraid of taking on HALF as much debt as I did and as a result of hungry. Itâ(TM)s stunning how much more the students will self-educate about student debt by reading about the overall numbers of student loan default while not controlling for degree completion or the school from which the education was received (distance learning and for-profit schools are MASSIVELY more likely to pump out students that default on loans).
So, while there has been an increase in the direct costs of higher education, it has not been so much that students can not afford food. Instead, students have been taught to fear student debt as an extreme (sometimes politically motivated) reaction to poorly reported upon statistics.
Moral of the story: take the grants and scholarship without worry. Know what youâ(TM)re getting into with a federally subsidized loan, but donâ(TM)t let the big numbers scare you. We ALL go through repayment. Itâ(TM)s not wonderful or fun, but donâ(TM)t go hungry for 4-5 years just because you donâ(TM)t want to make payments.
While I fully acknowledge and support an owner's copyrights, I also believe that in absence of clear, genuine use or capitalization upon a particular copyright, certain IP should enter the a "semi-public" domain wherein limited duration licensing to those copyrights may be sold on behalf of the holder.
Example: If Nintendo is still making money on "Pokemon" in general, good for them. However, if they don't find it financially viable to re-make the original GameBoy Pokemon games and thus choose not to make them available on modern platforms, people should be able to pay a fair value semi-public domain license to replicate or acquire those games for use on any platform. The license could be limited (1 year) and affordable ($2/year) with at least 50% of that licensing going to Nintendo with the remaining going to support this semi-public domain licensing system.
This would be better for everyone. Nintendo doesn't have to ramp up their lawyer pool to squeeze blood from stones (users and distributors of emulators and games) and those "stones" could pay their share in small amounts. Nintendo continues get to get paid and retain control while users get their games and don't get dragged to court.
The same could be done for books no longer in print (I have a couple I'd like to replace but cannot find anywhere) and movies that haven't made the transition to digital media. Hell, I'd happily pay a flat $0.50/DVD to be able to rip them and store them for my own convenient watching while being 100% certain that I can never be sued for having done so (instead of having to argue fair use in court).