You're right that this makes more workers and that should be commented on an counted. But it's important to let the spouses work legally because THEY ARE GOING TO WORK. If we don't encourage them to work in a form where we can get income tax, they'll just work in the cash-only economy. This makes us more money. But clearly, that should be part of the announced numbers and is not.
Alex has more like a 50% failure rate for my family. But there are alternatives, including buttons. The point is still the same -- we have all sorts of high-level systems to control the lights. The switches themselves do not need to present them.
YES. And this illustrates the way that the industry doesn't understand itself.
You have a home automation system. You can dim your own damn lights. You don't need a dimmer slide on the switch. Just put a big, normal rocker switch on there with two positions. When it changes positions, you flip the state of the lights. If we want dim, we'll tell Alexa or Google to dim, or we can but a dimmer for the ROOM which is just a data presenter to the controlling hub -- and we can make that control a SET of switches. Why do you put a dimmer control ON THE SWITCH?
Because that's what you do on dumb light switches. It's like the horsewhip-holder on the earliest motor-cars. But here it's dominating the front of the switch.
I agree. I think this is because there are too many players trying to grab the whole pie, which is impossible.
We just need a simple, expandable open standard. If you make a wifi switch, the z-wave guys are not going to buy you. If you make a z-wave one, the zigbee folks won't buy you. So the market is already divided by at least three (probably unequal) parts. A device made for this arena cannot sell as well as a dumb device. This sabotages the vendors from the start.
Because of this there's not much competition in the market, the products kinda suck, and that makes the market even smaller. Comments above about "if it breaks and my wife cannot get into the garage" are spot on. We don't buy this stuff and move to it because we can SEE that this stuff is poorly designed and immature. We don't trust it in our walls.
If the big vendors could get together and SCRAP their standards, moving to something open, and building a development platform for the Raspberry PI, this stuff would be a huge hit in the UK and would get developed for all over. It would get ported to embedded systems and updates would be easy.
But that's not going to happen. No one wants to risk their 4% market share for a chance at 1% of 30-times bigger market. Businesses think in the short term.
And they always try to control the data with the hope of monetizing that. I don't think they get squat out of it, but they still try. I use a Hue hub and Zigbee because it's the only hub I can find which doesn't have to phone home. I can operate it with REST calls on my network. I cannot find any other hub which doesn't demand a cloud component. This is a nutty situation and keeps us from being able to buy the best light or switch for the situation and using it in our home. And again, this means a very small pool for any product.
Is anyone using an open-source hub which works well?
The voting machine companies arrived like there was a gold rush. The most important selling point of any voting machine system is "NO RECOUNTS" because A. recounts cost money, and B. The people counting the votes don't like them.
NO RECOUNT sets the bar pretty low -- "just throw a machine together that spits out an excel spreadsheet or an access database." NO RECOUNT actively discourages a paper trail.
The designs were stupid. The purchases were stupid. All money spent on them was a mistake. No one wants to admit that, so they double-down.
Hillary was a crap candidate and the DNC's shenanigans (I don't know that all of your points above are true -- I suspect many of them are false, but if every one were true it wouldn't change anything) were in HUGE part the reason we got into this mess. But the reality is we're now, quite blatantly a kleptocracy -- we've gone from a first world government to a third-world one over night. And the Republican party is frantically trying to stop anyone from doing anything about it.
The Democrats need to be back in power, because we have a CHANCE at decent government with them. We've seen how utterly corrupt the Republican party is. Comparing the rampant corruption of this administration to the previous one, or of the Republican party vs. the DNC, is seeming the mote where the beam is absurdly obvious. It's simply disingenuous.
The DNC needs to be overhauled. But that has to wait for a few more weeks, and needs to be finished or put on hold a solid 9 months before the next election.
This is all true, but it ignores the fact that we have partisan administration of the voting system, as well. And that's always the party in power. And we HAVE that "lot of corruption" necessary to make an impact.
We have unfair poling place positioning and voter to polling place rations. We have voter suppression based on IDs. We have laws which forbid felons to vote. We have no penalties for targeted "accidental" mailing of the wrong date or location for voting by the partisan voting administrators. We have partisans disqualifying mail-in votes and not informing the senders that their vote won't count until it's too late for them to vote otherwise. Fun stuff.
If we had a federal standard for voting, it might indeed be worse than what we have. It might also be better. We're not going to get one either way, as the people who would vote on that derive their power from gerrymandered, voter-suppressed, locally-controlled election systems.
We had a candidate (Lawrence Lessig) who ran ENTIRELY on this, but he got nowhere, because it turns out nobody wants to elect a president who says he won't tackle foreign policy, education, taxes, the military, etc. and will quit once he fixes the one thing he was running for.
There's a lot we could learn about voting from looking at other countries and especially at Australia. We're not gonna do that, though, because the people making these decisions love it this way.
Technology hubris is a good thing, agreed. But you don't want the plastic dropping down. You want it near the top where it can be collected. Plastic on the bottom is out of sight out of mind, but still an issue.
Could we instead pick up the mats and monetize them somehow?
You would think that portion of it would actually be relatively easy to clean up. Patience and robotic determination (and some dangling hooks) could snag those with a lot less pushing of water out of the way. Grant you, that's going to get/kill a lot of fish, but I presume these floating nets are still getting fish, too.
Bottles, straws, etc. have got to be a lot harder to control, snag, collect, etc.
1000 times no. You're not INVESTING. You're cash hording.
When the US and other developed nations start paying for better packaging that is
fetishized elsewhere
produced for export in those target countries
a target for developing cheaper manufacturing processes all of these come together to make India's trash look more like what we want to see. It also makes it easier for us to point to the trash and say "all of this is unacceptable -- look at what we do."
You need to invest to make the world you want and to reap the profits. Who do you think is going to sell them the machines to make those packages?!?!? Who is going to make money on the patents? And who would otherwise have to pay for the cleanup? Who cares about being able to eat fish without plastic in it. US, US, US.
Sit on your pile of paper and watch it diminish in value or spend it wisely to make more? Only an idiot picks the first.
This is crazy talk. Foreign aid is a really cheap way of influencing how countries develop. The key is not to stop giving them aid, it's to aid the things you like (birth control, small businesses, intelligent policing) and not aid the things you don't (military policing, expansionist armies, trade agreements with China, etc.).
The key is to have a strong structure for negotiating and monitoring aid, rather than eviscerating the State Department based on nutty ideas about foreign aid not being cost-effective.
As in: Let's sell all our investments that MAKE money and just horde cash. Cash is KING!
If we can drive drown the price of robotics and drive up (this will happen naturally, unfortunately) the cost of raw materials, that garbage dump will turn into a mine. This really is the key -- monetize the garbage. When you can profit from your trash, you won't throw it in the river, and the developed nations will work to do a good job on recycling it en masse.
And that's been/being done. Some municipalities require stores to charge for bags. Usage is down and reuse of those purchased is up because they now are seen to have a cost/value.
Plastic microbeads have been largely banned in cosmetics. And so now straws. Keep looking for low hanging fruit. Find/attack all of it.
And when that mass of trash they collect comes back, look through it to see what's non-obvious but something we can eliminate/reduce. (The pile they bring back will not really be clean data -- it will be what they can collect, not what is out there per se but it's still data.)
And the number of people thinking they are imposters in that top 20% will be non-zero (assuming the sample size is decent). People think they are imposters because they are smart people who focus on their failings, not because they suck. "Imposter Syndrome" is not about actually being incompetent. The actually incompetent don't know they're incompetent.
Slashdot Mirror
I find your argument compelling.
You're right that this makes more workers and that should be commented on an counted. But it's important to let the spouses work legally because THEY ARE GOING TO WORK. If we don't encourage them to work in a form where we can get income tax, they'll just work in the cash-only economy. This makes us more money. But clearly, that should be part of the announced numbers and is not.
Alex has more like a 50% failure rate for my family. But there are alternatives, including buttons. The point is still the same -- we have all sorts of high-level systems to control the lights. The switches themselves do not need to present them.
YES. And this illustrates the way that the industry doesn't understand itself.
You have a home automation system. You can dim your own damn lights. You don't need a dimmer slide on the switch. Just put a big, normal rocker switch on there with two positions. When it changes positions, you flip the state of the lights. If we want dim, we'll tell Alexa or Google to dim, or we can but a dimmer for the ROOM which is just a data presenter to the controlling hub -- and we can make that control a SET of switches. Why do you put a dimmer control ON THE SWITCH?
Because that's what you do on dumb light switches. It's like the horsewhip-holder on the earliest motor-cars. But here it's dominating the front of the switch.
I agree. I think this is because there are too many players trying to grab the whole pie, which is impossible.
We just need a simple, expandable open standard. If you make a wifi switch, the z-wave guys are not going to buy you. If you make a z-wave one, the zigbee folks won't buy you. So the market is already divided by at least three (probably unequal) parts. A device made for this arena cannot sell as well as a dumb device. This sabotages the vendors from the start.
Because of this there's not much competition in the market, the products kinda suck, and that makes the market even smaller. Comments above about "if it breaks and my wife cannot get into the garage" are spot on. We don't buy this stuff and move to it because we can SEE that this stuff is poorly designed and immature. We don't trust it in our walls.
If the big vendors could get together and SCRAP their standards, moving to something open, and building a development platform for the Raspberry PI, this stuff would be a huge hit in the UK and would get developed for all over. It would get ported to embedded systems and updates would be easy.
But that's not going to happen. No one wants to risk their 4% market share for a chance at 1% of 30-times bigger market. Businesses think in the short term.
And they always try to control the data with the hope of monetizing that. I don't think they get squat out of it, but they still try. I use a Hue hub and Zigbee because it's the only hub I can find which doesn't have to phone home. I can operate it with REST calls on my network. I cannot find any other hub which doesn't demand a cloud component. This is a nutty situation and keeps us from being able to buy the best light or switch for the situation and using it in our home. And again, this means a very small pool for any product.
Is anyone using an open-source hub which works well?
Yes.
Right. Not invented here. Therefore of no value. Yep. Good point.
Let's all go back to polishing our flintlocks.
The voting machine companies arrived like there was a gold rush. The most important selling point of any voting machine system is "NO RECOUNTS" because A. recounts cost money, and B. The people counting the votes don't like them.
NO RECOUNT sets the bar pretty low -- "just throw a machine together that spits out an excel spreadsheet or an access database."
NO RECOUNT actively discourages a paper trail.
The designs were stupid. The purchases were stupid. All money spent on them was a mistake. No one wants to admit that, so they double-down.
Hillary was a crap candidate and the DNC's shenanigans (I don't know that all of your points above are true -- I suspect many of them are false, but if every one were true it wouldn't change anything) were in HUGE part the reason we got into this mess. But the reality is we're now, quite blatantly a kleptocracy -- we've gone from a first world government to a third-world one over night. And the Republican party is frantically trying to stop anyone from doing anything about it.
The Democrats need to be back in power, because we have a CHANCE at decent government with them. We've seen how utterly corrupt the Republican party is. Comparing the rampant corruption of this administration to the previous one, or of the Republican party vs. the DNC, is seeming the mote where the beam is absurdly obvious. It's simply disingenuous.
The DNC needs to be overhauled. But that has to wait for a few more weeks, and needs to be finished or put on hold a solid 9 months before the next election.
It's in full swing:
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and...
https://www.americanbar.org/pu...
Hell, even wikipedia has it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is all true, but it ignores the fact that we have partisan administration of the voting system, as well. And that's always the party in power. And we HAVE that "lot of corruption" necessary to make an impact.
We have unfair poling place positioning and voter to polling place rations. We have voter suppression based on IDs. We have laws which forbid felons to vote. We have no penalties for targeted "accidental" mailing of the wrong date or location for voting by the partisan voting administrators. We have partisans disqualifying mail-in votes and not informing the senders that their vote won't count until it's too late for them to vote otherwise. Fun stuff.
If we had a federal standard for voting, it might indeed be worse than what we have. It might also be better. We're not going to get one either way, as the people who would vote on that derive their power from gerrymandered, voter-suppressed, locally-controlled election systems.
We had a candidate (Lawrence Lessig) who ran ENTIRELY on this, but he got nowhere, because it turns out nobody wants to elect a president who says he won't tackle foreign policy, education, taxes, the military, etc. and will quit once he fixes the one thing he was running for.
There's a lot we could learn about voting from looking at other countries and especially at Australia. We're not gonna do that, though, because the people making these decisions love it this way.
Technology hubris is a good thing, agreed. But you don't want the plastic dropping down. You want it near the top where it can be collected. Plastic on the bottom is out of sight out of mind, but still an issue.
Could we instead pick up the mats and monetize them somehow?
You would think that portion of it would actually be relatively easy to clean up. Patience and robotic determination (and some dangling hooks) could snag those with a lot less pushing of water out of the way. Grant you, that's going to get/kill a lot of fish, but I presume these floating nets are still getting fish, too.
Bottles, straws, etc. have got to be a lot harder to control, snag, collect, etc.
or a small rock?
That's later, when we figure out how to make money from what they pick up.
Right, so packaging needs to become a foreign aid talking point.
1000 times no. You're not INVESTING. You're cash hording.
When the US and other developed nations start paying for better packaging that is
fetishized elsewhere
produced for export in those target countries
a target for developing cheaper manufacturing processes
all of these come together to make India's trash look more like what we want to see. It also makes it easier for us to point to the trash and say "all of this is unacceptable -- look at what we do."
You need to invest to make the world you want and to reap the profits. Who do you think is going to sell them the machines to make those packages?!?!? Who is going to make money on the patents? And who would otherwise have to pay for the cleanup? Who cares about being able to eat fish without plastic in it. US, US, US.
Sit on your pile of paper and watch it diminish in value or spend it wisely to make more? Only an idiot picks the first.
This is crazy talk. Foreign aid is a really cheap way of influencing how countries develop. The key is not to stop giving them aid, it's to aid the things you like (birth control, small businesses, intelligent policing) and not aid the things you don't (military policing, expansionist armies, trade agreements with China, etc.).
The key is to have a strong structure for negotiating and monitoring aid, rather than eviscerating the State Department based on nutty ideas about foreign aid not being cost-effective.
As in: Let's sell all our investments that MAKE money and just horde cash. Cash is KING!
Dude, it's worse than THAT.
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
If we can drive drown the price of robotics and drive up (this will happen naturally, unfortunately) the cost of raw materials, that garbage dump will turn into a mine. This really is the key -- monetize the garbage. When you can profit from your trash, you won't throw it in the river, and the developed nations will work to do a good job on recycling it en masse.
Right now, garbage is not worth enough.
Glass recycling is more about reducing raw material consumption/removal than saving energy.
Honestly, this sounds smart. Not as a 'don't-do-the-ocean-thing-now' but as a cheaper preventative.
What rivers? Where should the traps go?
And that's been/being done. Some municipalities require stores to charge for bags. Usage is down and reuse of those purchased is up because they now are seen to have a cost/value.
Plastic microbeads have been largely banned in cosmetics. And so now straws. Keep looking for low hanging fruit. Find/attack all of it.
And when that mass of trash they collect comes back, look through it to see what's non-obvious but something we can eliminate/reduce. (The pile they bring back will not really be clean data -- it will be what they can collect, not what is out there per se but it's still data.)
Boom! Prior art! Nice work!
And the number of people thinking they are imposters in that top 20% will be non-zero (assuming the sample size is decent). People think they are imposters because they are smart people who focus on their failings, not because they suck. "Imposter Syndrome" is not about actually being incompetent. The actually incompetent don't know they're incompetent.