No, that makes no sense at all. If there are fewer trucks making the same deliveries, then each truck makes more deliveries, and hence travels further. Since the routing algorithm is specifically optimizing no left turns at the cost of distance traveled, the distance would lengthen, not shorten.
Obviously, there's a confounding factor here. That could be moving to a better algorithm that reduces distance even as it optimizes for right turns at the cost of distance. However, that means that the gasoline saved is not just from avoiding left turns. TFS says that "total distance covered by its 96,000 trucks was reduced by 747,000km, and 190,000 litres of fuel had been saved", so that's roughly a savings of four km per liter saved. I suspect UPS gets more than four kilometers per liter on its trucks (a top-of-the-head conversion suggests about ten miles per gallon), and if so the amount of gas per mile has gone down.
Yup, and you appear to have completely given up your earlier claim that the scientists were prejudiced and are now arguing that the scientific evidence is not sufficient to warrant large-scale intervention. I'm happy with that.
You cannot breed two animals together or cross pollinate two plants and get arbitrary genes that weren't there to begin with.
So, are you a Creationist or a Lamarckist? Evolution, as outlined by Darwin and confirmed and filled in by a very large number of smart and hard-working people, is based on having mutations create variations from the original that are then subject to natural selection. I suppose you could believe in what Creationists split off as micro-evolution because they can't admit that they're flat wrong, but changing species will require new genes.
The difference is that it doesn't really hurt anyone if you eat gluten-free food. In fact, it makes it a little easier for my friend who can't have gluten. I don't like anti-vaxxers, but I don't care about people who thing gluten is bad. There's enough stupid beliefs out there that I really can't worry about the harmless ones.
There are some people who can't eat gluten. I've got a friend who was diagnosed with congestive heart failure until she noticed other symptoms and had herself tested. Suddenly, instead of being unable to do much except wait, for not too long, for death, she was back in her usual activities. It doesn't matter to the rest of our friends. We're already used to reading nutrition labels because we've got a friend who has serious problems with sulfites, so no biggie for us.
50 years ago your doctor would hand you a pack of cigarettes because they were still selling the idea they were safe
It was about 50 years ago that Mad Magazine printed a long jingle on how bad cigarettes were for you to be sung to a tune from a cigarette commercial. Due to a misspent life, I can still remember most of it. "Coffin nails" was slang for cigarettes. Tobacco companies were still trying to imply safety, but it was a losing cause.
Last year, I joined one of those Community Supported Agriculture things (I give Farmer Jerry's organization money and get a box of veggies and stuff each week). The emails kept using "sweet" and "sweeter" as if sweetness was the most desirable thing in a foodstuff. Seemed a little off to me.
Back in the 60s, there was a big computer fraud case in the financial business (insurance, IIRC). It was computer fraud in that, since they had a computer, they could come up with stuff that fooled the other companies in their field who didn't have computers yet. I can't remember their name offhand, which I find annoying.
.Anyway, they went on business spending sprees, which gave them more credibility (gee, they must be doing great to buy all that stuff for the execs) and more fun. When the company was found out, people were surprised at how little money was left.
There's a difference between investing money with a founder who actually works to get the company going and one who is in it for the high living, and that may not be obvious on careful investigation, so I have some sympathy with the investors. I have much less for anyone who invests in his later startup.
Not that I'm a startup founder or investor, but I'd imagine the founder doesn't want to give up control at that stage, and so the investors might be unable to stop the founder's living it up on their dime.
Lately, I've been getting into the pattern where a difficult problem comes up, I work at it the rest of the day (however long that may be) without success, and realize the solution after I leave work (in one case, less than half a mile from the work parking lot). I'm starting to think that I'd be more productive with six four-hour days.
Like Knuth, this has fallen off my list of must-reads. There's a lot of it that's only relevant to 1960-era software development, some stuff that's wrong (the part on information hiding, for example), and some stuff that's common knowledge. If someone is going to read it anyway, they should get the Silver Anniversary edition, which has corrections and some good new insights.
A lot of the specifics in TAoCP are simply not relevant in a practical way anymore. (Disclaimer: I read the original volumes 1, 2, and 3 multiple times when I was significantly younger, and have only leafed through the volume 4 fascicles.) I can't see myself implementing a sort algorithm in C++ for anything besides amusement or exploration or something like that, when std::sort is much less typing and less error-prone. The stuff on external sorting is almost all on tape sorts. There's a long section on random numbers, and it doesn't even cover the algorithms in the C++ standard library. All the assembly language and machine code is based on MIX and MMIX, and MIX is antique. Knuth's algorithm complexity analysis is way overpicky.
I couldn't recommend it to someone learning to program anymore. There's still a lot of good stuff in it, and someone more advanced would learn from it, but for pretty much everything it covers there's less rigorous but more useful books.
Who agree on the general facts that we're warming up the earth by burning fossil fuels, and the results are generally going to be bad. That is a near-universal belief among climate scientists, regardless of which country they're in or how secure they are in their jobs. As for details, these are scientists, and scientists argue incessantly among themselves. It's part of research.
Much of it can be, and in those cases it works extremely well. However, you need to make sure that you're using the correct mathematical model, and that's typically not trivial. Even something well-known like gravity turned out to have a more complicated mathematical model than we thought for centuries. Econometric models don't have a really good record at predictions, and need to be verified carefully.
Simple examples are the most obvious--such that if you do indeed have a gallon of milk, and you take half of it into another container, you can't end with more than a gallon of milk total.
If you perform the actual experimentation with accurate and precise instrumentation, I think you'd be likely to find a slight difference. The mass will be conserved, not necessarily the volume.
We're back where we started. If we lower the labor required, the cost goes down; at the given margin, the price comes down; to keep the price the same, costs must go up; to increase costs, we must raise wages to compensate for decreased labor; and to have inflation, we must raise wages further than that. That's a mathematical relationship.
This is, I believe, the core of your problem. If we lower the labor required to build a widget, we lower the marginal cost. According to the law of supply and demand (which isn't a law in the sense of laws in physics), we lower the price on the widget. In a competitive market, the margin ends as about the same as before, but it may not with a monopoly. The downward pressure on price will be considerably higher in the competitive case. A monopolist can keep the price the same, missing out on some potential profit, but a competitor has to lower prices or be forced out of the market (or, if it isn't a commodity market, see market share drop). In no case will the manufacturer be compelled to raise worker pay in order to keep the marginal cost the same (the manufacturer might of course see other reasons to).
In fact, if the new widget plant needs fewer workers to run it, that reduces the demand for labor, and according to the law of supply and demand puts downward pressure on pay.
Back in the 1950s, industry depended very heavily on factories where lots of workers would each do one basic thing that didn't require skill. Since there was pressure to make more and more stuff, there were usually more available jobs for unskilled people willing to work hard than people to fill the jobs. This meant that a factory had to pay decent wages, or the workers would quit and go work at the factory down the road. This was the period where one guy with a job that didn't require much skill could own a small house and a fairly new used car and maybe a television, and the guy's wife stayed home, did the housework, and raised the kids. The guy would likely work most of his life at one company and retire with a modest pension. (Actual experiences would depend on skin tone, health, alcohol intake, and other factors, of course.)
Currently, there are jobs that don't require skill, but they pay minimum wage, which is not enough to raise a family in decent style in a suburb. Median incomes haven't been going up with productivity for decades now. Empirically, you're wrong.
I don't know, but there's been time to change it. I don't really know about the vetting process, except it's long and has been very successful. People keep complaining about it without telling me anything about it.
You're saying nothing useful about the overturn rate of Ninth Circuit Court decisions. I don't believe the Supreme Court has heard even 86% of their cases, so this suggests that, when one of their decisions is appealed, and the Supreme Court hears the appeal, they overturn it most of the time.
Now, I'd expect a case to be appealed primarily because one side thinks they've got a good chance on the appeal, and without checking I'd expect the Supreme Court to decide to hear cases they don't agree with, so I'd expect most Circuit Courts to have a high percentage of their decisions overturned.
Also, there's no reason to expect Americans to be killed by people from those countries. Our screening processes have been successful so far. This has been a useful battle to pick, since it shows the US public what Trump thinks of the US courts, even if it goes nowhere.
The people incapable of rational thought because they've been deranged by Trump are not his opponents (or, another word he used, "enemies").
Sure they want to earn money without the skills involved. And, at one point, I wanted a flying unicorn. The Universe is not terribly sensitive about human feelings. Making sure the path to skill is there, and making sure people get to take it, is a human thing. It's something we have control over.
Sure. In many ways, I'm a far better computer than has ever been built in silicon. That doesn't mean that what I do can't be partially replicated in a powerful computer. I'm using myself as a proof of concept, that it is possible to beat the resolution, not claiming that any given system is or is not able to do the same.
Why do you think current investments in wind and solar are bad? They've been quite successful so far for relatively new technology. Like any new and growing industry, there will be a lot more investment spending and work than in a dwindling industry, and there are problems that will only be found and solved in large-scale commercial use.
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No, that makes no sense at all. If there are fewer trucks making the same deliveries, then each truck makes more deliveries, and hence travels further. Since the routing algorithm is specifically optimizing no left turns at the cost of distance traveled, the distance would lengthen, not shorten.
Obviously, there's a confounding factor here. That could be moving to a better algorithm that reduces distance even as it optimizes for right turns at the cost of distance. However, that means that the gasoline saved is not just from avoiding left turns. TFS says that "total distance covered by its 96,000 trucks was reduced by 747,000km, and 190,000 litres of fuel had been saved", so that's roughly a savings of four km per liter saved. I suspect UPS gets more than four kilometers per liter on its trucks (a top-of-the-head conversion suggests about ten miles per gallon), and if so the amount of gas per mile has gone down.
Yup, and you appear to have completely given up your earlier claim that the scientists were prejudiced and are now arguing that the scientific evidence is not sufficient to warrant large-scale intervention. I'm happy with that.
So, are you a Creationist or a Lamarckist? Evolution, as outlined by Darwin and confirmed and filled in by a very large number of smart and hard-working people, is based on having mutations create variations from the original that are then subject to natural selection. I suppose you could believe in what Creationists split off as micro-evolution because they can't admit that they're flat wrong, but changing species will require new genes.
That sounds reasonable for peanuts, but the first solid food we gave the kid was some sort of grain product in his formula. (He loved it.)
The difference is that it doesn't really hurt anyone if you eat gluten-free food. In fact, it makes it a little easier for my friend who can't have gluten. I don't like anti-vaxxers, but I don't care about people who thing gluten is bad. There's enough stupid beliefs out there that I really can't worry about the harmless ones.
There are some people who can't eat gluten. I've got a friend who was diagnosed with congestive heart failure until she noticed other symptoms and had herself tested. Suddenly, instead of being unable to do much except wait, for not too long, for death, she was back in her usual activities. It doesn't matter to the rest of our friends. We're already used to reading nutrition labels because we've got a friend who has serious problems with sulfites, so no biggie for us.
It was about 50 years ago that Mad Magazine printed a long jingle on how bad cigarettes were for you to be sung to a tune from a cigarette commercial. Due to a misspent life, I can still remember most of it. "Coffin nails" was slang for cigarettes. Tobacco companies were still trying to imply safety, but it was a losing cause.
Last year, I joined one of those Community Supported Agriculture things (I give Farmer Jerry's organization money and get a box of veggies and stuff each week). The emails kept using "sweet" and "sweeter" as if sweetness was the most desirable thing in a foodstuff. Seemed a little off to me.
Pearl Harbor was accompanied by a Japanese invasion of the Philippines and Guam, both of which were US possessions, for what it's worth.
Back in the 60s, there was a big computer fraud case in the financial business (insurance, IIRC). It was computer fraud in that, since they had a computer, they could come up with stuff that fooled the other companies in their field who didn't have computers yet. I can't remember their name offhand, which I find annoying.
There's a difference between investing money with a founder who actually works to get the company going and one who is in it for the high living, and that may not be obvious on careful investigation, so I have some sympathy with the investors. I have much less for anyone who invests in his later startup.
Not that I'm a startup founder or investor, but I'd imagine the founder doesn't want to give up control at that stage, and so the investors might be unable to stop the founder's living it up on their dime.
Once you IPO, you can cash in your own equity, but then you're spending your own money, which isn't nearly as much fun.
Lately, I've been getting into the pattern where a difficult problem comes up, I work at it the rest of the day (however long that may be) without success, and realize the solution after I leave work (in one case, less than half a mile from the work parking lot). I'm starting to think that I'd be more productive with six four-hour days.
"Oh, and the malware I just gave you for looking at my ad is no charge!"
Like Knuth, this has fallen off my list of must-reads. There's a lot of it that's only relevant to 1960-era software development, some stuff that's wrong (the part on information hiding, for example), and some stuff that's common knowledge. If someone is going to read it anyway, they should get the Silver Anniversary edition, which has corrections and some good new insights.
A lot of the specifics in TAoCP are simply not relevant in a practical way anymore. (Disclaimer: I read the original volumes 1, 2, and 3 multiple times when I was significantly younger, and have only leafed through the volume 4 fascicles.) I can't see myself implementing a sort algorithm in C++ for anything besides amusement or exploration or something like that, when std::sort is much less typing and less error-prone. The stuff on external sorting is almost all on tape sorts. There's a long section on random numbers, and it doesn't even cover the algorithms in the C++ standard library. All the assembly language and machine code is based on MIX and MMIX, and MIX is antique. Knuth's algorithm complexity analysis is way overpicky.
I couldn't recommend it to someone learning to program anymore. There's still a lot of good stuff in it, and someone more advanced would learn from it, but for pretty much everything it covers there's less rigorous but more useful books.
Who agree on the general facts that we're warming up the earth by burning fossil fuels, and the results are generally going to be bad. That is a near-universal belief among climate scientists, regardless of which country they're in or how secure they are in their jobs. As for details, these are scientists, and scientists argue incessantly among themselves. It's part of research.
Much of it can be, and in those cases it works extremely well. However, you need to make sure that you're using the correct mathematical model, and that's typically not trivial. Even something well-known like gravity turned out to have a more complicated mathematical model than we thought for centuries. Econometric models don't have a really good record at predictions, and need to be verified carefully.
If you perform the actual experimentation with accurate and precise instrumentation, I think you'd be likely to find a slight difference. The mass will be conserved, not necessarily the volume.
This is, I believe, the core of your problem. If we lower the labor required to build a widget, we lower the marginal cost. According to the law of supply and demand (which isn't a law in the sense of laws in physics), we lower the price on the widget. In a competitive market, the margin ends as about the same as before, but it may not with a monopoly. The downward pressure on price will be considerably higher in the competitive case. A monopolist can keep the price the same, missing out on some potential profit, but a competitor has to lower prices or be forced out of the market (or, if it isn't a commodity market, see market share drop). In no case will the manufacturer be compelled to raise worker pay in order to keep the marginal cost the same (the manufacturer might of course see other reasons to).
In fact, if the new widget plant needs fewer workers to run it, that reduces the demand for labor, and according to the law of supply and demand puts downward pressure on pay.
Back in the 1950s, industry depended very heavily on factories where lots of workers would each do one basic thing that didn't require skill. Since there was pressure to make more and more stuff, there were usually more available jobs for unskilled people willing to work hard than people to fill the jobs. This meant that a factory had to pay decent wages, or the workers would quit and go work at the factory down the road. This was the period where one guy with a job that didn't require much skill could own a small house and a fairly new used car and maybe a television, and the guy's wife stayed home, did the housework, and raised the kids. The guy would likely work most of his life at one company and retire with a modest pension. (Actual experiences would depend on skin tone, health, alcohol intake, and other factors, of course.)
Currently, there are jobs that don't require skill, but they pay minimum wage, which is not enough to raise a family in decent style in a suburb. Median incomes haven't been going up with productivity for decades now. Empirically, you're wrong.
I don't know, but there's been time to change it. I don't really know about the vetting process, except it's long and has been very successful. People keep complaining about it without telling me anything about it.
You're saying nothing useful about the overturn rate of Ninth Circuit Court decisions. I don't believe the Supreme Court has heard even 86% of their cases, so this suggests that, when one of their decisions is appealed, and the Supreme Court hears the appeal, they overturn it most of the time.
Now, I'd expect a case to be appealed primarily because one side thinks they've got a good chance on the appeal, and without checking I'd expect the Supreme Court to decide to hear cases they don't agree with, so I'd expect most Circuit Courts to have a high percentage of their decisions overturned.
Also, there's no reason to expect Americans to be killed by people from those countries. Our screening processes have been successful so far. This has been a useful battle to pick, since it shows the US public what Trump thinks of the US courts, even if it goes nowhere.
The people incapable of rational thought because they've been deranged by Trump are not his opponents (or, another word he used, "enemies").
Sure they want to earn money without the skills involved. And, at one point, I wanted a flying unicorn. The Universe is not terribly sensitive about human feelings. Making sure the path to skill is there, and making sure people get to take it, is a human thing. It's something we have control over.
Sure. In many ways, I'm a far better computer than has ever been built in silicon. That doesn't mean that what I do can't be partially replicated in a powerful computer. I'm using myself as a proof of concept, that it is possible to beat the resolution, not claiming that any given system is or is not able to do the same.
Thanks. In other words, people the lender has less confidence in pay more, just like every other lending decision I know of.
Why do you think current investments in wind and solar are bad? They've been quite successful so far for relatively new technology. Like any new and growing industry, there will be a lot more investment spending and work than in a dwindling industry, and there are problems that will only be found and solved in large-scale commercial use.
Yup. I'm happy being an Alpha. Social media are for Betas and Gammas, who live dull non-intellectual lives.