Using tons of evidence Thomas Piketty points out in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century that capital will naturally always grow at a higher rate than the rate of economic growth (read: wages).
From Wkipedia: "The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability."
The rentier capitalist state is pretty much a done deal IMHO. The software subscription model being but a single case in point -- not to mention the cloud.
Remember the property grab during the last bubble burst? For those who are prepared with lots of cash these deflationary episodes are a peak opportunity. Market makers do their best to engineer them periodically (but not too often) to get equity at fire-sale prices as well as to scoop up real property, which can be rented, mined, developed, farmed, resold etc. Real estate is especially attractive in the long run because in the end there really is only land -- as any aristocrat will tell you. Control the land and you control.... everything. A few more bubble bursts and voila! Eighteenth Century France.
Bill Gates has suggested an income tax for robots. Such a levy could alter the calculus of profitability (slowing adoption), while at the same time creating a fund for retraining or even for a universal basic income. Some have argued that human labor will move off the line and back to an artisan model. Throw in UBI or Universal Basic Resources (Food Shelter Clothing Communications etc) and we could see improvements in quality of life. I say could. Hard to imagine our corrupt lawmakers milking the corporate cow that thoroughly.
Perhaps things people will only want people to do will be valued. Hand-made goods will accrue higher status. For example, the status of human sex workers could be elevated in the future. Maybe Philip K. Dick's Dystopian future will not evolve. Instead we will have a Utopian world where we will all get free $#!+ , write songs to sing to each other, make hand-tooled wallets, knit cashmere scarves, and bake awesome crafty cakes for each other on birthdays... Oh, wait. No, on second thought, let me upload my consciousness to a mining replicant.
Agreed. Trivial problem. The sensor package in my current vehicle works from the inside. Well away from road mess.
That would be yours truly.
A washable casing that is transparent to the sensor's stimuli should do the trick. Currently, I am protected by the car's windows. An analogous solution for a sensor/control package should be easy. Adds to the cost, of course. If needed, delicate sensors could retract and be subjected to cleaning internally.. Autonomous vehicles should garage themselves when practical.
All this might be beside the point. My guess is that these type of cars will rarely be parked on the street. We won't own them. We will summon them from some central location where routine maintenance such as cleaning will take place. It is also pretty clear that during really lousy weather, when travel advisories are in effect, they just won't operate. And you will be stuck wherever you are. Unless you know how to drive and have a legacy vehicle license. Which fewer and fewer people will know how to do. Those that do will charge an arm and a leg to pick you up from the bar on a snowy night. Oh, wait! They already do.
What percentage of millennials can efficiently navigate a city using a paper map and their memory I wonder? Unless, that is, they have been trained to do so by the military? Even those of us who came up knowing how to do that have probably lost the knack somewhat.
This is doubly useful because it also keeps effluvia off your mitts. Not nice if you are wearing short sleeves, though. Personally I use a big bandanna when I can. These come in handy for lots of stuff, including sneezes, but especially to dry my hands in places that lack towels. Also... Along the same lines... Hard honking nose blows can be counter productive -- albeit satisfying. The best method is to gently blow one nostril at a time while sealing the other. Hard blows actually send material deeper into the sinus cavity as well as out. IANAD, but I dated any number of nurses -- back in the day.
Faith allows one to believe the unbelievable. Indeed that is often the point. The anti-science firestorm we are witnessing is fascinating and somewhat scary, but it is nothing new. The other term for The Dark Ages is The Age of Faith. Truth was defined by a doctrine of authority, not necessarily by evidence. This served the power elite. Then the Church. We now have powerful institutions whose interests often run counter to scientific evidence. So they contrive a doctrine of authority deliberately by bribing and coercing people in authority (pols and preachers) to deny the relevant science. They do so just as the medievalists saw it to their advantage to deny the wisdom of the ancients because it threatened their temporal authority. The Ancient Greeks knew the earth was a sphere and Eratosthenes even calculated exactly how big it was. (Paradoxically elements within the church preserved the knowledge cast aside elsewhere. )
There will always be Flat Earthers in a literal as well as a figurative sense. Science demands we let go of preconceptions to interpret evidence. Some people see a flat earth stretching out before them on a beach holiday and perhaps cannot let go of their preconceptions despite evidence that their intuition is not the whole picture. Others, like scam artist Mad Mike, see their own interests and truth is of no account to them. Others stand up and are open to new ideas.
Isaac Newton was reluctantly willing to forgo the Lucasian Chair in mathematics because he would not accept ordination as an Anglican priest, which would have required him to accept the trinity mystery -- which as a mathematician of sublime genius he would not do. Ordination was then a requirement for a Cambridge fellowship. King Charles II made an exception for Newton who had made a good case for himself. Score one for Science. As for Mad MIke? Well, clearly he wants to live to spend his skim.
End of the Automotive era. Longtime GM executive thinks the car industry as we know it is pretty much doomed.
This could be be pessimistic. Or optimistic. Depends on how you feel about driving. I used to like it. But with all the distracted drivers and vile traffic in my area I am ready to kiss it goodbye. Forty thousand dead on US roads. Robots couldn't do worse. Heck. Trained bears couldn't do worse.
You are right B.B. That is an unusual, unneeded, as well as a confusing contraction. The apostrophe "s" could even be mistaken to be the possessive form -- which makes no sense in this context. Quite right to drop the apostrophe "s" and write out "has". What is with all the unneeded apostrophes these days, anyway? They are everywhere. Drives me nuts.
Predictions are hard, particularly when they deal with the future.
Did AC realize that what he or she said was very funny in a Yogi Berra kind of way? Hard or easy, predictions are, by definition, always about the future. D'oh!
Either way the remark is a gem. I think my stock broker might have told me the same thing once.
When I was four I stuck a sterling silver spoon in a socket.I remember. Blue flash. Found myself against the other side of the hall. My savvy mother kept that blackened spoon in the kitchen drawer for years. And sometimes I wound up eating my tomato soup with it when I was still quite little. I never played with an electric socket again. I have no fear of electricity, but I do have respect for it.
As for all the different plugs. The British ones are generally recognized safest, but I do confess they reflect a nanny-state mentality. And as I tend to be careful... I am partial to the US's simple polarized fork. I have traveled quite a bit and have seen a lot of plugs. But the hidden issue here is the use of safety standards as a fig-leaf for good old trade protectionism. It is the classic end-run around trade agreements. Not to mention the ridiculous IT standards war over connections to peripherals.
And so now to the topic. I have a 5X, which I like fine. And in my personal experience the USB-C cable is great. Symmetrical so a final late-night hookup to charge just before sleep is a breeze. I was also sure to buy high-quality cables so I have had no issues. There is a Google Tech who dutifully tests them. Okay.. found him. Benson Leung But there is clearly a lot of corner-cutting crap.. I would love to see USB-C take over. So practical. Same at both ends with symmetrical connectors. I have a big box of USB alphabet soup (mini micro custom) that I would be happy to recycle. Not calling Goodwill yet, however.
So many problems are solved by working in three dimensions. And moving up off the ground -- where dogs, children, pedestrians, sheep and every other thing you can think of lives or stands to impede and surprise -- makes many problems trivial. Line of sight to talk with other vehicles is also a bonus. I see far fewer problems to solve with an airborne autonomy than with ground based autonomy. Although other problems do materialize, of course.
Much air travel is already autonomous truth be known. But such a commuter traffic system would have to be universal. Everything in the air would need to be under control. Sorry pilots you are SOL. Sit back and enjoy the view. Have a cocktail whydoncha?
As I heard it... The sad story of Wordperfect for Windows is a pretty clear example of MS EEE. The referenced Wikipedia article says: " Its (WordPerfect's) dominant position ended after a flubbed release for Microsoft Windows, followed by a long delay before introducing an improved version.
So here's the thing. The flubbed release was no accident... or so the story goes. The WordPerfect developers were apparently sabotaged by their Microsoft partners. In the process of bug fixing Microsoft supposedly cherry picked WordPerfect code and MS Word was born. Unlike WordPerfect, it worked on Windows! Perfectly! EEE.... QED
I will add that this was at a time when things were pretty collegial among developers (Or were expected to be). So the sandbagging was pretty unexpected and unsuspected... For a while.
Full disclosure. I am not a MS hater. Really. They raised a lot of other boats. But the company is a savage competitor and always has been. I would be skeptical that MS contributions to Linux would be truer to FOSS principles than to MS's long term goals..
Good question. And question is the operative word. First IMHO true AI should be indistinguishable from I. Einstein thought computers were uninteresting because they did not ask novel questions. They still don't. An AI should be able to synthesize data sets and generalize across them, posit questions and set novel goals and elucidate tasks to reach them. An AI should be able to see what isn't and ask , "Why not?"
Currently, I see AI as just a marketing term for highly capable systems that can perform tasks that people have performed historically. I am not being flippant when I say that, though many of these tasks are performed by people who possess intelligence, the tasks themselves require little of it. (Or none of it.) Not to say that the tasks are simple or that the do not require high levels of skill and ability.
A deterministic system will perform a task as assigned. An artificial intelligence will say, "You know, boss, I have evaluated your request and I think there is a faster way to achieve the goal you defined. Shall I proceed as requested or do you wish me to elaborate on my observation? Coffee?"
Tacos at MexiKhan are great. As are the other items. Popular with the locals, too. Salsa lessons every Saturday. Run by a charming Cubano gentleman named Ernesto. Mongolians are quite different from the Chinese. Just ask them.
I learned to dictate with a human secretary more years ago than I care to contemplate. Dragon was an easy transition for me and I love it. I would love to see a good FOSS speech-to-text program. Nothing compares to Dragon. Android's speech to text is passable, but often fails in hilarious (and dangerous) ways.
GIMP vs PS. User of PS since 1.0 so it is almost instinctive. When PS went to subscription in a fit of pique I decided to undergo the pain of learning the unfortunately-named G.I.M.P. I find it quirky, but usable and flexible once it's counter-intuitive eccentricities are mastered. I will allow that my PS experience may bias my perception. I will also allow that there are things about GIMP that I like better. "Crop to selection" comes to mind.
Artificial sweeteners fool the belly buds and trigger a cascade of responses normally associated with sugar.
This is one citation, but there are others I have seen. This is pretty settled science it appears.
Slashdot Mirror
Using tons of evidence Thomas Piketty points out in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century that capital will naturally always grow at a higher rate than the rate of economic growth (read: wages).
From Wkipedia: "The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability."
The rentier capitalist state is pretty much a done deal IMHO. The software subscription model being but a single case in point -- not to mention the cloud.
Remember the property grab during the last bubble burst? For those who are prepared with lots of cash these deflationary episodes are a peak opportunity. Market makers do their best to engineer them periodically (but not too often) to get equity at fire-sale prices as well as to scoop up real property, which can be rented, mined, developed, farmed, resold etc. Real estate is especially attractive in the long run because in the end there really is only land -- as any aristocrat will tell you. Control the land and you control.... everything. A few more bubble bursts and voila! Eighteenth Century France.
Bill Gates has suggested an income tax for robots. Such a levy could alter the calculus of profitability (slowing adoption), while at the same time creating a fund for retraining or even for a universal basic income. Some have argued that human labor will move off the line and back to an artisan model. Throw in UBI or Universal Basic Resources (Food Shelter Clothing Communications etc) and we could see improvements in quality of life. I say could. Hard to imagine our corrupt lawmakers milking the corporate cow that thoroughly.
Perhaps things people will only want people to do will be valued. Hand-made goods will accrue higher status. For example, the status of human sex workers could be elevated in the future. Maybe Philip K. Dick's Dystopian future will not evolve. Instead we will have a Utopian world where we will all get free $#!+ , write songs to sing to each other, make hand-tooled wallets, knit cashmere scarves, and bake awesome crafty cakes for each other on birthdays... Oh, wait. No, on second thought, let me upload my consciousness to a mining replicant.
Agreed. Trivial problem. The sensor package in my current vehicle works from the inside. Well away from road mess. That would be yours truly.
A washable casing that is transparent to the sensor's stimuli should do the trick. Currently, I am protected by the car's windows. An analogous solution for a sensor/control package should be easy. Adds to the cost, of course. If needed, delicate sensors could retract and be subjected to cleaning internally.. Autonomous vehicles should garage themselves when practical.
All this might be beside the point. My guess is that these type of cars will rarely be parked on the street. We won't own them. We will summon them from some central location where routine maintenance such as cleaning will take place. It is also pretty clear that during really lousy weather, when travel advisories are in effect, they just won't operate. And you will be stuck wherever you are. Unless you know how to drive and have a legacy vehicle license. Which fewer and fewer people will know how to do. Those that do will charge an arm and a leg to pick you up from the bar on a snowy night. Oh, wait! They already do.
What percentage of millennials can efficiently navigate a city using a paper map and their memory I wonder? Unless, that is, they have been trained to do so by the military? Even those of us who came up knowing how to do that have probably lost the knack somewhat.
Sig hyle!
Whistle physics
I want to see the hockey puck moving like lightning on the ice. Okay?
Dell had an updated BIOS ready on the 10th of Jan. Intel® Core i3-6098P Processor -- Skylake
This is doubly useful because it also keeps effluvia off your mitts. Not nice if you are wearing short sleeves, though. Personally I use a big bandanna when I can. These come in handy for lots of stuff, including sneezes, but especially to dry my hands in places that lack towels. Also... Along the same lines... Hard honking nose blows can be counter productive -- albeit satisfying. The best method is to gently blow one nostril at a time while sealing the other. Hard blows actually send material deeper into the sinus cavity as well as out. IANAD, but I dated any number of nurses -- back in the day.
Faith allows one to believe the unbelievable. Indeed that is often the point. The anti-science firestorm we are witnessing is fascinating and somewhat scary, but it is nothing new. The other term for The Dark Ages is The Age of Faith. Truth was defined by a doctrine of authority, not necessarily by evidence. This served the power elite. Then the Church. We now have powerful institutions whose interests often run counter to scientific evidence. So they contrive a doctrine of authority deliberately by bribing and coercing people in authority (pols and preachers) to deny the relevant science. They do so just as the medievalists saw it to their advantage to deny the wisdom of the ancients because it threatened their temporal authority. The Ancient Greeks knew the earth was a sphere and Eratosthenes even calculated exactly how big it was. (Paradoxically elements within the church preserved the knowledge cast aside elsewhere. )
There will always be Flat Earthers in a literal as well as a figurative sense. Science demands we let go of preconceptions to interpret evidence. Some people see a flat earth stretching out before them on a beach holiday and perhaps cannot let go of their preconceptions despite evidence that their intuition is not the whole picture. Others, like scam artist Mad Mike, see their own interests and truth is of no account to them. Others stand up and are open to new ideas.
Isaac Newton was reluctantly willing to forgo the Lucasian Chair in mathematics because he would not accept ordination as an Anglican priest, which would have required him to accept the trinity mystery -- which as a mathematician of sublime genius he would not do. Ordination was then a requirement for a Cambridge fellowship. King Charles II made an exception for Newton who had made a good case for himself. Score one for Science. As for Mad MIke? Well, clearly he wants to live to spend his skim.
End of the Automotive era. Longtime GM executive thinks the car industry as we know it is pretty much doomed.
This could be be pessimistic. Or optimistic. Depends on how you feel about driving. I used to like it. But with all the distracted drivers and vile traffic in my area I am ready to kiss it goodbye. Forty thousand dead on US roads. Robots couldn't do worse. Heck. Trained bears couldn't do worse.
You are right B.B. That is an unusual, unneeded, as well as a confusing contraction. The apostrophe "s" could even be mistaken to be the possessive form -- which makes no sense in this context. Quite right to drop the apostrophe "s" and write out "has". What is with all the unneeded apostrophes these days, anyway? They are everywhere. Drives me nuts.
Predictions are hard, particularly when they deal with the future.
Did AC realize that what he or she said was very funny in a Yogi Berra kind of way? Hard or easy, predictions are, by definition, always about the future. D'oh! Either way the remark is a gem. I think my stock broker might have told me the same thing once.
Here are a few more Yogi-isms.
FYI I recall reading once that many of these witticisms were supplied by Mr Berra's publicist. Does not make them less funny.
When I was four I stuck a sterling silver spoon in a socket.I remember. Blue flash. Found myself against the other side of the hall. My savvy mother kept that blackened spoon in the kitchen drawer for years. And sometimes I wound up eating my tomato soup with it when I was still quite little. I never played with an electric socket again. I have no fear of electricity, but I do have respect for it.
As for all the different plugs. The British ones are generally recognized safest, but I do confess they reflect a nanny-state mentality. And as I tend to be careful ... I am partial to the US's simple polarized fork. I have traveled quite a bit and have seen a lot of plugs. But the hidden issue here is the use of safety standards as a fig-leaf for good old trade protectionism. It is the classic end-run around trade agreements. Not to mention the ridiculous IT standards war over connections to peripherals.
And so now to the topic. I have a 5X, which I like fine. And in my personal experience the USB-C cable is great. Symmetrical so a final late-night hookup to charge just before sleep is a breeze. I was also sure to buy high-quality cables so I have had no issues. There is a Google Tech who dutifully tests them. Okay.. found him. Benson Leung But there is clearly a lot of corner-cutting crap.. I would love to see USB-C take over. So practical. Same at both ends with symmetrical connectors. I have a big box of USB alphabet soup (mini micro custom) that I would be happy to recycle. Not calling Goodwill yet, however.
So many problems are solved by working in three dimensions. And moving up off the ground -- where dogs, children, pedestrians, sheep and every other thing you can think of lives or stands to impede and surprise -- makes many problems trivial. Line of sight to talk with other vehicles is also a bonus. I see far fewer problems to solve with an airborne autonomy than with ground based autonomy. Although other problems do materialize, of course.
Much air travel is already autonomous truth be known. But such a commuter traffic system would have to be universal. Everything in the air would need to be under control. Sorry pilots you are SOL. Sit back and enjoy the view. Have a cocktail whydoncha?
My next rig will be AMD from stem to stern no matter what Intel is shipping.
Once air temperature nears body temperature (~98 F) it's officially hotter'n Hell. Fans and breezes have little to no cooling effect.
As I heard it... The sad story of Wordperfect for Windows is a pretty clear example of MS EEE. The referenced Wikipedia article says: " Its (WordPerfect's) dominant position ended after a flubbed release for Microsoft Windows, followed by a long delay before introducing an improved version.
So here's the thing. The flubbed release was no accident... or so the story goes. The WordPerfect developers were apparently sabotaged by their Microsoft partners. In the process of bug fixing Microsoft supposedly cherry picked WordPerfect code and MS Word was born. Unlike WordPerfect, it worked on Windows! Perfectly! EEE.... QED
I will add that this was at a time when things were pretty collegial among developers (Or were expected to be). So the sandbagging was pretty unexpected and unsuspected... For a while.
Full disclosure. I am not a MS hater. Really. They raised a lot of other boats. But the company is a savage competitor and always has been. I would be skeptical that MS contributions to Linux would be truer to FOSS principles than to MS's long term goals..
Good question. And question is the operative word. First IMHO true AI should be indistinguishable from I. Einstein thought computers were uninteresting because they did not ask novel questions. They still don't. An AI should be able to synthesize data sets and generalize across them, posit questions and set novel goals and elucidate tasks to reach them. An AI should be able to see what isn't and ask , "Why not?"
Currently, I see AI as just a marketing term for highly capable systems that can perform tasks that people have performed historically. I am not being flippant when I say that, though many of these tasks are performed by people who possess intelligence, the tasks themselves require little of it. (Or none of it.) Not to say that the tasks are simple or that the do not require high levels of skill and ability.
A deterministic system will perform a task as assigned. An artificial intelligence will say, "You know, boss, I have evaluated your request and I think there is a faster way to achieve the goal you defined. Shall I proceed as requested or do you wish me to elaborate on my observation? Coffee?"
Tacos at MexiKhan are great. As are the other items. Popular with the locals, too. Salsa lessons every Saturday. Run by a charming Cubano gentleman named Ernesto. Mongolians are quite different from the Chinese. Just ask them.
I learned to dictate with a human secretary more years ago than I care to contemplate. Dragon was an easy transition for me and I love it. I would love to see a good FOSS speech-to-text program. Nothing compares to Dragon. Android's speech to text is passable, but often fails in hilarious (and dangerous) ways.
GIMP vs PS. User of PS since 1.0 so it is almost instinctive. When PS went to subscription in a fit of pique I decided to undergo the pain of learning the unfortunately-named G.I.M.P. I find it quirky, but usable and flexible once it's counter-intuitive eccentricities are mastered. I will allow that my PS experience may bias my perception. I will also allow that there are things about GIMP that I like better. "Crop to selection" comes to mind.
Artificial sweeteners fool the belly buds and trigger a cascade of responses normally associated with sugar. This is one citation, but there are others I have seen. This is pretty settled science it appears.
You will be on a flight like this one day.
No way to lock 'em on a hill. But they win on smooth level ground.
Pardon me while I chuckle gently. This is the way it is going to be, my poor innocent child.
Introducing The...
Secure Home Internet Of Things
We like to call it
SHIoT
*NOTE* Marketing Meeting in the cafeteria at 7:00 AM to discuss the new SHIoT campaign. All hands on dick!
Sincerely,
Cedrick Rashbottom
Director of Sales