As opposed to now, where if something in the guidance system fails the car generally goes out of control and there are multiple injuries. See "I want to die like my grandfather, peacefully in my sleep while everyone else is screaming."
Or just like any of a number of other major non-guidance systems failures on a current car, e.g. catastrophic radiator failure.
Agricultural production had growth rates of around 0.6% / year in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The birth rate at the time would have produced unchecked population growth rather greater than that. The population did grow... to match the increased food production.
It wasn't famine, it was just life. Most people didn't have enough to eat. They were short, sickly, and most died as infants. Today we don't have those problems, because as a group, and mostly as individuals, we are all fabulously wealthy in comparison.
It's odd how we get trapped into a certain way of thinking hey?
If we replaced every worker with a robot, if nothing changed, sure "income" might drop to zero. That would mean "revenue" might drop to zero too. But all those robots are still making everything we ever made before. What does that mean? It means the price of everything also drops to zero. Welcome to the Star Trek economy.
Realistically, none of those things will actually go to zero. Their value in real terms will drop precipitously, just as they have several times in the past. We'll probably fudge the numbers so we won't notice though.
We forget that we've tried the free market experiment before, so we know the answers to these questions. In industrial revolution England it was apparently difficult to walk down the street without tripping over dead babies. It turns out that when pushed to desperation, mothers will kill a younger child to give an older one a better chance at survival.
Fortunately there are very, very few places in the world today that are actually under a free market. The conservatives on Slashdot like to call them hellholes.
Back when those weavers got replaced there were actual shortages of wealth. Lots of people had to die because there wasn't enough food to support the birth rate.
The situation has changed. There's plenty of wealth for everyone, particularly in western countries, especially in the US. The problems are only with distribution.
Workers who are displaced by machines should be retrained into new jobs or educated into fields that benefit society*, or if not possible, supported while their children are educated.
* those fields will increasingly be the arts and non-applied sciences as automation takes over critical jobs and we have more and more wealth to allocate to luxuries.
Not the OP, but he's half right. His first paragraph is wrong (100% of Americans are members of multiple protected classes). His second paragraph is pretty close to correct:
But white males aren't even the majority. Males are normally slightly in the majority of births, but are outnumbered by females overall because they have a higher death rate.
In California, white females are almost certainly the majority.
This indicates the danger of NOT paying attention to market cap. If you think buying Dodgy-coin at four cents per coin is a great deal (four cents is a lot less than $20,000!) you haven't properly evaluated the meaning of paying four cents for a 1 twenty-five billionth share of something some college students copied and pasted while high.
Negative interest rates are tricky. The central bank may post a negative rate, but that just means the government is giving money to the commercial banks.
The banks themselves are unlikely to actually have a negative lending rate, unless the government strong arms them into it. The banks may well *pay* negative interest though, charging you to keep your money in their bank.
The thing you're missing is that the majority of the money we spend is on luxuries. Food? You could probably do with less than half the food budget if you had to. Mortgage? Owning a home is a luxury. It's almost always a poor financial decision (the 2010s being a notable, and scary, exception). Buying a car? Buying a new car is a terrible financial decision, even worse than owning a house. Buying used is better, but you can probably get away with a fraction of the cost if you have to.
A modern economy is built on transactions. The money is mostly imaginary, the production and consumption is mostly frivolous, but all our metrics depend on money being exchanged. The thing that maintains the whole illusion is keeping that happening as much as possible. Inflation is a strong incentive to spend. Deflation is a strong disincentive to spend.
A friend of mine got a Google Home. He and his girlfriend were training it on their voices. I guess it takes a bit of hacking to change the wakup phrase for Google, but Amazon is apparently easier.
It's highly unlikely your iphone is spying on you. iPhones are subject to enough scrutiny from security researchers that would be caught pretty quickly. The same for any of the big brands, Google, Amazon, Microsoft.
That doesn't mean they won't start after they get you hooked, and it doesn't mean that knockoff brand isn't spying on you. It also doesn't mean your actual queries aren't being stored and analysed.
My friend recently got a Google Home. It's actually a pretty decent wifi speaker, and among the cheapest as well. Possibly worth buying and disabling the microphone.
I'm curious... can you cite a decent clinical study that suggests using any toothpaste is better than none at all? The American Dental Association's removal of the recommendation to floss due to a complete absence of evidence that it is beneficial comes to mind.
The evil didn't start after WWII, it just got more distilled. People who want to sell you stuff have always exploited our bias towards credulity. Where it gets really evil is when they start sponsoring school programs, or whole schools. Unfortunately that is also not a new phenomenon, but we used to at least pretend we thought it was a problem.
I've found it's a good idea to chew over anything you hear, particularly ads, before you swallow it. That is absolutely in spite of what the advertiser would prefer you do.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the US is not a good place for autonomous cars. GM should find good markets in the rest of the world though.
As opposed to now, where if something in the guidance system fails the car generally goes out of control and there are multiple injuries. See "I want to die like my grandfather, peacefully in my sleep while everyone else is screaming."
Or just like any of a number of other major non-guidance systems failures on a current car, e.g. catastrophic radiator failure.
You're willing to mine Mars for materials for a Mars base but to make an orbital habitat everything has to be lifted from Earth?
You'd build O'Neil cylinders using moon or asteroid material. Actually transporting them would probably be less work than transportation on Mars.
Agricultural production had growth rates of around 0.6% / year in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The birth rate at the time would have produced unchecked population growth rather greater than that. The population did grow... to match the increased food production.
It wasn't famine, it was just life. Most people didn't have enough to eat. They were short, sickly, and most died as infants. Today we don't have those problems, because as a group, and mostly as individuals, we are all fabulously wealthy in comparison.
Freedom!
Just in case you missed, I'm being sarcastic. Your point is one of the best one line indictments of American "free market" capitalism I've ever seen.
It's odd how we get trapped into a certain way of thinking hey?
If we replaced every worker with a robot, if nothing changed, sure "income" might drop to zero. That would mean "revenue" might drop to zero too. But all those robots are still making everything we ever made before. What does that mean? It means the price of everything also drops to zero. Welcome to the Star Trek economy.
Realistically, none of those things will actually go to zero. Their value in real terms will drop precipitously, just as they have several times in the past. We'll probably fudge the numbers so we won't notice though.
We forget that we've tried the free market experiment before, so we know the answers to these questions. In industrial revolution England it was apparently difficult to walk down the street without tripping over dead babies. It turns out that when pushed to desperation, mothers will kill a younger child to give an older one a better chance at survival.
Fortunately there are very, very few places in the world today that are actually under a free market. The conservatives on Slashdot like to call them hellholes.
Yes. Just not recently.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/201...
Capital is inanimate. The problem is that we as a society have entrusted all our capital to idiots.
Back when those weavers got replaced there were actual shortages of wealth. Lots of people had to die because there wasn't enough food to support the birth rate.
The situation has changed. There's plenty of wealth for everyone, particularly in western countries, especially in the US. The problems are only with distribution.
Workers who are displaced by machines should be retrained into new jobs or educated into fields that benefit society*, or if not possible, supported while their children are educated.
* those fields will increasingly be the arts and non-applied sciences as automation takes over critical jobs and we have more and more wealth to allocate to luxuries.
Why, how can you have a truly free market if you can't do whatever you want with impunity?
Not the OP, but he's half right. His first paragraph is wrong (100% of Americans are members of multiple protected classes). His second paragraph is pretty close to correct:
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...
As others have pointed out, no.
But white males aren't even the majority. Males are normally slightly in the majority of births, but are outnumbered by females overall because they have a higher death rate.
In California, white females are almost certainly the majority.
This indicates the danger of NOT paying attention to market cap. If you think buying Dodgy-coin at four cents per coin is a great deal (four cents is a lot less than $20,000!) you haven't properly evaluated the meaning of paying four cents for a 1 twenty-five billionth share of something some college students copied and pasted while high.
Negative interest rates are tricky. The central bank may post a negative rate, but that just means the government is giving money to the commercial banks.
The banks themselves are unlikely to actually have a negative lending rate, unless the government strong arms them into it. The banks may well *pay* negative interest though, charging you to keep your money in their bank.
The thing you're missing is that the majority of the money we spend is on luxuries. Food? You could probably do with less than half the food budget if you had to. Mortgage? Owning a home is a luxury. It's almost always a poor financial decision (the 2010s being a notable, and scary, exception). Buying a car? Buying a new car is a terrible financial decision, even worse than owning a house. Buying used is better, but you can probably get away with a fraction of the cost if you have to.
A modern economy is built on transactions. The money is mostly imaginary, the production and consumption is mostly frivolous, but all our metrics depend on money being exchanged. The thing that maintains the whole illusion is keeping that happening as much as possible. Inflation is a strong incentive to spend. Deflation is a strong disincentive to spend.
Something *I've been told* I don't like.
"being an asshole is what goes deeper."
I actually goes all the way through and comes out the other side.
Judging by my last teleconference, I'm pretty sure that would incur a more severe performance penalty.
By "rewrite it as a native iOS application" I don't think he meant "create an 'app' that's really just a crippled web browser to show your web app."
A friend of mine got a Google Home. He and his girlfriend were training it on their voices. I guess it takes a bit of hacking to change the wakup phrase for Google, but Amazon is apparently easier.
I'm tempted to get one just so I can name it asshole. Hey asshole, what's the weather like?
You've nicely described confirmation bias.
It's highly unlikely your iphone is spying on you. iPhones are subject to enough scrutiny from security researchers that would be caught pretty quickly. The same for any of the big brands, Google, Amazon, Microsoft.
That doesn't mean they won't start after they get you hooked, and it doesn't mean that knockoff brand isn't spying on you. It also doesn't mean your actual queries aren't being stored and analysed.
My friend recently got a Google Home. It's actually a pretty decent wifi speaker, and among the cheapest as well. Possibly worth buying and disabling the microphone.
I'm curious... can you cite a decent clinical study that suggests using any toothpaste is better than none at all? The American Dental Association's removal of the recommendation to floss due to a complete absence of evidence that it is beneficial comes to mind.
The evil didn't start after WWII, it just got more distilled. People who want to sell you stuff have always exploited our bias towards credulity. Where it gets really evil is when they start sponsoring school programs, or whole schools. Unfortunately that is also not a new phenomenon, but we used to at least pretend we thought it was a problem.
I've found it's a good idea to chew over anything you hear, particularly ads, before you swallow it. That is absolutely in spite of what the advertiser would prefer you do.