I'm not defending anyone, or taking sides either way. All I'm saying is that Trump and the Republicans have the more persuasive argument.
Given that pretty much 100% of your statements are inaccurate, you're either a) totally defending Trump or b) too ignorant to making a comment about the argument at hand. Try reading all the other comments here, go look up some facts to see if those are true or not, and educate yourself.
Or just keep defending Trump and admit that. There really isn't a middle ground.
You don't have to be credulous, you just have to have a tiny bit of common sense.
Millennials:
* Probably aren't tied to an area due to owning a house, having a spouse who works there, and having kids in school there. * Probably don't have financial security, don't likely have a second income in the family since they likely don't have one, and likely have student loans to pay back. * May not be vested in the retirement system or are too young to get much of a benefit from it if they don't stick around for another 20 years.
All of this is probably not true for someone with 20+ years of service in their organization. If you're a decade or less from a decent retirement, it makes a ton of sense to get by for a month or two, and then get back to work. If you're not retiring for 30 years and don't have any other income or savings, it makes far more sense to scramble for anything else.
who only panders to non-rich voters by promising to harm "those people".
Every year that goes by, that becomes less and less of a winning strategy. The republican party has not been friendly to either women or minorities, and I can't imagine that they're all going to suddenly forget the party's history at some point in the coming decades and vote republican.
Are you saying it's democrats that are responsible for not just agreeing to whatever the hell trump wants? They would get nothing in return. That's not how congress works.
Yet that's how the Republican party thinks.
It started with Newt Gingrich, but really exploded under Obama, where they entrenched themselves as the anti-democrat resistance party. The Tea Party has really helped fuel this too.
"That's now how congress works." is exactly why we've got something like a 16% approval rating for congress as a whole right now. Because that's not working, and congress is not working.
and his only demand for any of it was $5.7 billion for border security
That's a lie.
That money was solely requested to fund his stupid fucking wall, which is not in any way related to border security. You're trying to reframe this to seem like the democrats are against border security, when they're not.
They're against us paying for an ineffective wall that Trump said over 200 times that Mexico would pay for.
You are trying to defend someone punishing the country because he's not getting something that he said someone else would give him. Do you not understand how utterly batshit insane that is?
I'm very much in favor of cripplingly high fines for employers of illegal immigrants. The way I see it, they are the cause of the biggest problems with said illegal immigration. If employers are hiring illegals instead of Americans, they're doing so because they can hire them for less than minimum wage while not paying for required benefits and employment taxes.
That may be the case in some places, but not all. I'm in the upper-midwest, farm country. The rural towns around here are dying. Fast. There's plenty of farmland, but there isn't a labor force to sustain the farms.
For the locals, "home" is a shitty little town in the middle of nowhere, with no way to ever pay for more than a run-down old house or a double-wide trailer. There's no real advancement, no way to strike it rich. So there's no reason to be invested in working and living there, other than because it's been home to the family for a few generations. There's a lot of migration out of the rural towns, and they are dying.
This has driven up the going rate for farm labor, which is now pushing $12/hr, sometimes going as high as $15/hr. The demand for labor and decent pay has brought in an influx of Mexican workers, and definitely not all of it them are legal. However, with this mix of legal and illegal, it seems the pay is largely the same across the board. Why? If you are absolutely desperate for workers, the last thing you want to do is piss them off, because they don't live here, and will happily drive 50 miles down the road to work for someone who's not a racist asshole. After all, they already have traveled a thousand plus miles for work.
But what's really, really surprised me is the attitude of the farmers hiring these Mexicans. A couple were interviewed in the papers in the last year or two and both said that they'd rather hire Mexicans than the locals. Why? Because they're hard working, they stay out of trouble, and they don't leave for greener pastures as soon as they see a potentially better option. If you treat them right, they settle down and get shit done. Why? They're sending most of their money back to their family, which is using it to build a better life. When they have their dream home, the kids are well educated, they've got some new cars, and a nice nest egg tucked away, they're planning to go back and live the good life. And the harder they work now, the faster they get there.
Immigration, legal and illegal, is benefiting both our countries in this regard. It's keeping these farms alive, that's making more money for the local area, the state, and potentially the US if any of those agriculture products get exported, and it's improving the lives of the families back home in Mexico. Yes, we'd rather have americans doing these jobs, but when they're not, even for what's regionally OK pay, what's the alternative? Active farms make money, fallow lands don't. And no other industry is going to replace tens of thousands of acres of farmland out in the middle of nowhere with minimal infrastructure around for miles.
Sure, you can take the free market approach of "if they're not profitable, let them die", but that's the same as saying, "I hate Mexicans so much I want to see both our countries poorer." We'd all like to see a functional immigration system, but I don't see that happening in the near future. If we go nuclear on illegal immigration, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. We'd like to think we're not, but that's just wishful thinking. What's more likely than a political solution is that automation will steadily reduce these jobs, until they're more trouble to find than they're worth.
It's at least possible. And some humans have higher level thinking skills, and they can step back and look at a system and see if it seems to be working the way it should, and producing the results that are desired. AI really doesn't have that at this time, and probably won't for a long time.
A second, far bigger problem is that we've always had humans who have held the process above all else. No exceptions to the process. And when the process is obviously flawed, they refuse to address this. If you can get in touch with a manager over them, that person might sometimes be able to circumvent or adjust the process to fix the issue.
With AI, who is managing it? Can they adjust it, if it's not working properly? The answers are likely 1) nobody, and 2) no. Retraining your machine learning/AI is a big deal. If you've just done a half-assed deployment, do you have the time and the data to retrain it? If it works 75% of the time but costs a lot less than a human who did it right 99.9% of the time, are you switching back to the human?
And if someone for whom it doesn't work well for asks, "Why?", what do you tell them? The answer almost assuredly is, "I don't know." Previously it was, "Brenda has her system but sometimes she doesn't quite get it right. I'll take care of it."
We're going to get into absolutely absurd situations in the very near future that will be front and center in comedy for decades or more to come.
* My car won't go down the street I need to go down, and I don't know why. But if I select a destination past it, then re-select my original destination, it turns around and goes down that street just fine. * "I'm sorry sir, but we can't sell that to you." "But I have sufficient credit! Hell, I can pay in cash!" "I don't know why sir. But the computer won't let me sell that to you." * AI phone trees that don't get you to where you need to go, no matter what. Hitting 0 gets you back to the AI. * AI deciding to order shit for you that you don't need or want. Amazon is already pushing subscription ordering. It's just a matter of time before this becomes "smart subscription ordering", where it sends you dog food every month, but then if you buy another dog bed it decides you have another dog and doubles the order. Or it decides that you need the "proper" amount of everything dog, and sends occasional collars, meds, etc. You buy a baby stroller to give to your sister for a shower gift, it's delivered to your address and not marked gift, so it subscribes you to diapers. (Target already got caught showing baby ads to a teen before she told her family she was pregnant!) * Google is already doing "smart" email filtering. That's going to get picked up by everyone for everything soon. AI is going to tell you what's important, and what you need to look at. That email from your estranged uncle leaving you his fortune? Binned because your interaction rating with him is 0%. That 97th crazy text message from your ex? Top of the pile, because you have a 99% interaction rating with them. And you'll have no way to understand WTF is happening, why, or do anything about it.
You can at least punch a person and feel some satisfaction. Breaking your expensive electronics doesn't really bring the same relief, because the new ones won't have learned anything different.
Decades? You're not familiar with US history then. Check out how much the railroad industry paid for their infrastructure and the land it lies on some time. Or the mining, logging, ranching, or farming industries.
I don't know where you lived, but everywhere I've lived every decent sized supermarket had a good selection of awesome local cheeses. My local places all generally stock cheddar aged anywhere between one year and a decade, cave aged blue cheese, funky barnyard smelling stuff, gooey soft cheeses, etc.
You can definitely find the fake stuff most places, since I guess there's some demand for it. But by and large, I've never lived in a place that hurt for good cheese. We get some nice European imports to compare against, so I can tell we're not doing too badly.
It seems to be part of a massive shift in the population as a whole. Have you watched any music videos in the last couple of years? Scenes don't generally last for more than a few seconds. Sometimes it's all of a second. This has started to pick up steam across all of media, where it's chop, chop, chop. Cutting from one shot, one idea, one talking point to the next.
I think social media helps fuel this fire of hyperactivity and ADD. Smart phones are a blast furnace for it. I'm constantly blown away by how many people let everything on their phone notify them of everything. It's a constant ding, ding, ding, pay attention to me! No me! No, over here! Pavlov would be having a field day doing research.
A sizable percent of the population no longer seems capable of having a conversation over a beer. I don't know how we fix that. I hope it's just the growing pains of the switch to the internet and hyperconnectivity, and that we'll figure it out in time. Note the other/. story where the bulk of fake news sharing is done by old people who didn't grow up with the internet - seems like the kids who did are far less trusting. I'm hopeful that kids growing up in the Pavlovian new world we have can see the impact it has on their parents, and realize that they need to take steps to prevent that.
We really need to get back to a place where we can have deep, introspective conversations about complicated topics. That's the only way we can really make progress in the world.
Not sure where you are, but when I went looking for a new TV several months ago, there really weren't any dumb TVs available. And yeah, the "smart" ones were damn cheap. 55" 4k TV for $400 cheap.
Cheap enough that I now think I'll upgrade my little media box, since it's struggling to output stuff at that size and resolution now. Sad when I have to downgrade online streams to 720p to keep them from stuttering.
To add to this, removing a good employee from a job which can be automated means you have one spare good employee. So many managers can't see that automating a job is the exact same thing as saying, "Hey, we've got a great employee who is going to work for free. What could you use them for?" It's always, "We've got one employee too many", in their minds.
It's more often the case that a business could be more productive than it is if it could just shift a few employees around and tweak some things. Sure, cut dead wood when you find it, but if you don't know what to do with a good employee, ask your employees. They know where the weak points in the organization are, and what could make their lives easier. And if you can follow that path, you can iterate through automation and efficiency gains.
There are so many companies working in an Outlook + Excel + Word culture where they don't have any real processes, nobody knows what anybody else is doing, and they aren't really taking full advantage of the computers sitting on their desks.
I've helped a couple of them, with varying levels of success. It really takes management to be not only on board but exemplars of using any new process, or the organization doesn't break that cycle.
One where I was able to mostly break that up (fuck marketing) had some visionary leaders, and they were willing to engage in some workplace disruption for the sake of change. We had gone to a centralized knowledge bank over a sea of personal MS Office docs and personal knowledge, documenting processes and workflows, data structures and filetypes, etc. This was pitched partly as a business continuity process, and partly as an efficiency process - that's what got most of the management very engaged. Some had recently been burned by key staff leaving with an excessive amount of institutional knowledge, while others were feeling the squeeze to become more efficient. As a family owned business, the family part of management was largely on board with it which helped a lot.
Once we had organizational visibility of the business processes, people found that other people were largely doing the same thing, or that they were just a useless cog in a chain. That drove a lot of efficiency changes, as people questioned, "why do I spend X hrs every week doing this, when the person before me could just give it to me in a better format?" Or, "Six people are addressing data quality problems in this process chain. Can we address this further upstream?" A particularly hilarious thing we found was a linear chain which needed to be a fork instead. One person got some data, manipulated it in a necessary but rather extreme way to do their job, then passed it to someone else who subsequently spent a lot of time getting it back largely into its original form. Lightbulb moment when everyone realized, "Oh, we should probably just send the data to both of them, and not have the second guy spend all that time fixing what the first one broke."
Making those changes did eliminate or radically change some jobs, but they made everyone happier. (We found more productive things for most people to do, other than a couple pieces of utterly dead wood.) However, the only way these things could really come up was by documenting, in detail, how the business worked, and letting everyone see those processes and examine their role in them. Most of the people who saw radical job changes drove that change themselves saying, "Why am I spending all my time doing X, when it really looks like we could use Y?"
One job where I wasn't able to break that up had management split or ambivalent on whether or not it would be worth it. After one department pitched a fit because their workflow was changing, and they didn't like it, it got shut down as an organizational change. Some departments still embraced a move to well documented business processes and flourished, but they always had some cruft around the edges where they interacted with the departments who refused. It became a game of insulating the sensible departments from the crazy ones, and building in processes to handle their inconsistencies and incoherent processes and systems.
There's a ton more efficiency to be had in a lot of businesses. I just don't know what percent will be institutionally able to make that change before going under. It always surprises me how few people it takes to utterly derail progress.
I spoke to my manager and she said it was our duty to make things more efficient for our customer and that if we didn't someone else would.
I think that's the really important thing to consider when looking at the impacts of automation, innovation, and efficiency changes.
Amazon vs Sears. Netflix vs Blockbuster. Etc.
If you just hamstring your organization and don't get better, you'll probably keep most of the jobs in the short-term, but lose most of them in the long-term. A few people getting laid off can find new jobs fairly easily. When an entire organization or even department gets shut down, it becomes a lot harder as everyone is now fighting for what jobs are available locally.
And if someone's job can be automated, how meaningful of a job is it really? At least at the current point in time, what we're automating is usually boring, repetitive, and work that's generally necessary but which doesn't make the organization any money. The things I've automated are things like data entry work, data format conversion work, manual QC/QA jobs, etc.
All of the MITM work has been done. You just snag the github code, deploy it on a server, tell it a URL to impersonate, and then get people to go to that serer. It's script-kid ready. You don't need to know how to code to deploy this. You don't even really need to know much about how the internet works.
Of course, the more you understand, the more effective this could be. There are enough dumbasses out there that if they click to a page that's identical to the one they are looking for, despite the URL being wrong, they will still log in. Everything else that you could do to make the URL look better just ups the number of people that might log in.
The hard work is done. It's basically a MITM app that you deploy and feed a URL, and you're up and running.
I believe the prevailing notion around themohaline circulation (THC) is that it is slowing down. As such, if it slows, we'll actually see global cooling...
You've got a smattering of truth there, but a whole lot wrong.
The oceans have already taken up about half the CO2 and the related warming that we've caused as humans. This warmer water is generally surface water, but does make it into the thermohaline circulation. If that slows, and we don't have really great evidence that it is globally, we won't see global cooling but rather more warming. The warm surface waters won't sink, and colder water won't be pulled to the surface if that circulation slows down or stops. In addition, a lot of warm water gets moved to the poles by this circulation, where it cools and sinks. This warms the polar regions, and cools the equatorial regions. Stopping this makes the polar regions colder, but the equatorial regions warmer.
Regionally, there may well be dramatic cooling. The Day After Tomorrow is a pretty shit movie from a science point of view, but the concept is pretty sound. All of northern Europe gets its temperate weather from the gulf stream. If that part of the ocean circulation shuts down, they will start to look a lot more like Canada or Siberia over there, since they're at that latitude. However the gulf of Mexico won't get cooler - it will get hotter because those hot waters will no longer be flowing out and up to Europe.
Just as concerning is that we're stocking away a lot of CO2 in the deep ocean right now. If that circulation slows or stops, the atmospheric CO2 levels will go up even faster. That's definitely not conducive for another ice age.
Long-term, it might be that the colder poles will be able to form bigger ice caps further towards the equator, and that will reflect more sunlight, leading to cooling. However, it's not clear whether or not that can happen with the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. A prevailing theory for what ended snowball earth is actually CO2 building up in the atmosphere.
It surprised me. And I eat a lot of meat. Definitely give it a couple of tries. Like any food, it's not consistent from time to time and place to place.
Try it. It's surprisingly good. Better than most fast-food burgers you've ever had. I have 2 complaints about it. 1) Too expensive, and 2) the cheese was obviously fake.
FIx the cheese, and I'm pretty ok with it. Make it cheap, and I'm going to choose it most of the time.
I was not expecting to even tolerate it, let alone like it. I'm a big meat eater, and we don't buy less than 2lbs of meat at a time. But that burger? Better than a good 30% that I've had. With good cheese, would be in the top 50%.
I concur. The two I've had were in the $10-$15 range for just a burger. (The $15 One was in CA, so knock off like $5 for the rest of the country.) Too expensive to replace fast food burgers, but I did think it was tastier than any fast food burger I'd ever had. There's a revolution there, for sure. All it's going to take is one major chain to roll it out, and then it's going to be cheaper and better than the average fast food burger. And healthier.
As someone who loves to cook, and who's killed, dressed, and cooked my own meat, I was not expecting to really like that burger. But I liked it. A lot. I just needed non-fake cheese on it, because fake cheese is unforgivable.
I've had one. The worst part was the fake cheese. Put some good cheddar on it, and it wouldn't be the best burger I've ever had, but it would be far from the worst. As it was, with the obviously fake cheese, I'd put it in the bottom 1/3 of burgers I've had. If it had good cheese on it, it would be in the top 50%.
For someone with a smoker who smoked 15lbs of brisket for christmas dinner, giving a vegetarian burger a top 50% slot in my life-long burger eating surprised the hell out of me. It was actually really, really tasty. Definitely above fast-food burgers. That tells me that the fast food joints could probably adopt it and nobody would be the wiser. I've definitely had far more disappointing burgers at fast food joints.
Your typical gastropub burger? This one gets close but probably won't pass it. Anything gourmet? Probably not.
But it could replace the average fast food burger, and that's a big deal. The question is if they can be cheaper than a fast food burger. At the moment, the answer is no. However, all it will take is one of them to jump in on this, and they might be able to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
See, now that's something a lot of people could accept. That's the sort of thinking we need in congress. Get your ass in there!
I'm not defending anyone, or taking sides either way. All I'm saying is that Trump and the Republicans have the more persuasive argument.
Given that pretty much 100% of your statements are inaccurate, you're either a) totally defending Trump or b) too ignorant to making a comment about the argument at hand. Try reading all the other comments here, go look up some facts to see if those are true or not, and educate yourself.
Or just keep defending Trump and admit that. There really isn't a middle ground.
You don't have to be credulous, you just have to have a tiny bit of common sense.
Millennials:
* Probably aren't tied to an area due to owning a house, having a spouse who works there, and having kids in school there.
* Probably don't have financial security, don't likely have a second income in the family since they likely don't have one, and likely have student loans to pay back.
* May not be vested in the retirement system or are too young to get much of a benefit from it if they don't stick around for another 20 years.
All of this is probably not true for someone with 20+ years of service in their organization. If you're a decade or less from a decent retirement, it makes a ton of sense to get by for a month or two, and then get back to work. If you're not retiring for 30 years and don't have any other income or savings, it makes far more sense to scramble for anything else.
who only panders to non-rich voters by promising to harm "those people".
Every year that goes by, that becomes less and less of a winning strategy. The republican party has not been friendly to either women or minorities, and I can't imagine that they're all going to suddenly forget the party's history at some point in the coming decades and vote republican.
Are you saying it's democrats that are responsible for not just agreeing to whatever the hell trump wants? They would get nothing in return. That's not how congress works.
Yet that's how the Republican party thinks.
It started with Newt Gingrich, but really exploded under Obama, where they entrenched themselves as the anti-democrat resistance party. The Tea Party has really helped fuel this too.
"That's now how congress works." is exactly why we've got something like a 16% approval rating for congress as a whole right now. Because that's not working, and congress is not working.
and his only demand for any of it was $5.7 billion for border security
That's a lie.
That money was solely requested to fund his stupid fucking wall, which is not in any way related to border security. You're trying to reframe this to seem like the democrats are against border security, when they're not.
They're against us paying for an ineffective wall that Trump said over 200 times that Mexico would pay for.
You are trying to defend someone punishing the country because he's not getting something that he said someone else would give him. Do you not understand how utterly batshit insane that is?
I'm very much in favor of cripplingly high fines for employers of illegal immigrants. The way I see it, they are the cause of the biggest problems with said illegal immigration. If employers are hiring illegals instead of Americans, they're doing so because they can hire them for less than minimum wage while not paying for required benefits and employment taxes.
That may be the case in some places, but not all. I'm in the upper-midwest, farm country. The rural towns around here are dying. Fast. There's plenty of farmland, but there isn't a labor force to sustain the farms.
For the locals, "home" is a shitty little town in the middle of nowhere, with no way to ever pay for more than a run-down old house or a double-wide trailer. There's no real advancement, no way to strike it rich. So there's no reason to be invested in working and living there, other than because it's been home to the family for a few generations. There's a lot of migration out of the rural towns, and they are dying.
This has driven up the going rate for farm labor, which is now pushing $12/hr, sometimes going as high as $15/hr. The demand for labor and decent pay has brought in an influx of Mexican workers, and definitely not all of it them are legal. However, with this mix of legal and illegal, it seems the pay is largely the same across the board. Why? If you are absolutely desperate for workers, the last thing you want to do is piss them off, because they don't live here, and will happily drive 50 miles down the road to work for someone who's not a racist asshole. After all, they already have traveled a thousand plus miles for work.
But what's really, really surprised me is the attitude of the farmers hiring these Mexicans. A couple were interviewed in the papers in the last year or two and both said that they'd rather hire Mexicans than the locals. Why? Because they're hard working, they stay out of trouble, and they don't leave for greener pastures as soon as they see a potentially better option. If you treat them right, they settle down and get shit done. Why? They're sending most of their money back to their family, which is using it to build a better life. When they have their dream home, the kids are well educated, they've got some new cars, and a nice nest egg tucked away, they're planning to go back and live the good life. And the harder they work now, the faster they get there.
Immigration, legal and illegal, is benefiting both our countries in this regard. It's keeping these farms alive, that's making more money for the local area, the state, and potentially the US if any of those agriculture products get exported, and it's improving the lives of the families back home in Mexico. Yes, we'd rather have americans doing these jobs, but when they're not, even for what's regionally OK pay, what's the alternative? Active farms make money, fallow lands don't. And no other industry is going to replace tens of thousands of acres of farmland out in the middle of nowhere with minimal infrastructure around for miles.
Sure, you can take the free market approach of "if they're not profitable, let them die", but that's the same as saying, "I hate Mexicans so much I want to see both our countries poorer." We'd all like to see a functional immigration system, but I don't see that happening in the near future. If we go nuclear on illegal immigration, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. We'd like to think we're not, but that's just wishful thinking. What's more likely than a political solution is that automation will steadily reduce these jobs, until they're more trouble to find than they're worth.
It's at least possible. And some humans have higher level thinking skills, and they can step back and look at a system and see if it seems to be working the way it should, and producing the results that are desired. AI really doesn't have that at this time, and probably won't for a long time.
A second, far bigger problem is that we've always had humans who have held the process above all else. No exceptions to the process. And when the process is obviously flawed, they refuse to address this. If you can get in touch with a manager over them, that person might sometimes be able to circumvent or adjust the process to fix the issue.
With AI, who is managing it? Can they adjust it, if it's not working properly? The answers are likely 1) nobody, and 2) no. Retraining your machine learning/AI is a big deal. If you've just done a half-assed deployment, do you have the time and the data to retrain it? If it works 75% of the time but costs a lot less than a human who did it right 99.9% of the time, are you switching back to the human?
And if someone for whom it doesn't work well for asks, "Why?", what do you tell them? The answer almost assuredly is, "I don't know." Previously it was, "Brenda has her system but sometimes she doesn't quite get it right. I'll take care of it."
We're going to get into absolutely absurd situations in the very near future that will be front and center in comedy for decades or more to come.
* My car won't go down the street I need to go down, and I don't know why. But if I select a destination past it, then re-select my original destination, it turns around and goes down that street just fine.
* "I'm sorry sir, but we can't sell that to you." "But I have sufficient credit! Hell, I can pay in cash!" "I don't know why sir. But the computer won't let me sell that to you."
* AI phone trees that don't get you to where you need to go, no matter what. Hitting 0 gets you back to the AI.
* AI deciding to order shit for you that you don't need or want. Amazon is already pushing subscription ordering. It's just a matter of time before this becomes "smart subscription ordering", where it sends you dog food every month, but then if you buy another dog bed it decides you have another dog and doubles the order. Or it decides that you need the "proper" amount of everything dog, and sends occasional collars, meds, etc. You buy a baby stroller to give to your sister for a shower gift, it's delivered to your address and not marked gift, so it subscribes you to diapers. (Target already got caught showing baby ads to a teen before she told her family she was pregnant!)
* Google is already doing "smart" email filtering. That's going to get picked up by everyone for everything soon. AI is going to tell you what's important, and what you need to look at. That email from your estranged uncle leaving you his fortune? Binned because your interaction rating with him is 0%. That 97th crazy text message from your ex? Top of the pile, because you have a 99% interaction rating with them. And you'll have no way to understand WTF is happening, why, or do anything about it.
You can at least punch a person and feel some satisfaction. Breaking your expensive electronics doesn't really bring the same relief, because the new ones won't have learned anything different.
Decades? You're not familiar with US history then. Check out how much the railroad industry paid for their infrastructure and the land it lies on some time. Or the mining, logging, ranching, or farming industries.
I don't know where you lived, but everywhere I've lived every decent sized supermarket had a good selection of awesome local cheeses. My local places all generally stock cheddar aged anywhere between one year and a decade, cave aged blue cheese, funky barnyard smelling stuff, gooey soft cheeses, etc.
You can definitely find the fake stuff most places, since I guess there's some demand for it. But by and large, I've never lived in a place that hurt for good cheese. We get some nice European imports to compare against, so I can tell we're not doing too badly.
It seems to be part of a massive shift in the population as a whole. Have you watched any music videos in the last couple of years? Scenes don't generally last for more than a few seconds. Sometimes it's all of a second. This has started to pick up steam across all of media, where it's chop, chop, chop. Cutting from one shot, one idea, one talking point to the next.
I think social media helps fuel this fire of hyperactivity and ADD. Smart phones are a blast furnace for it. I'm constantly blown away by how many people let everything on their phone notify them of everything. It's a constant ding, ding, ding, pay attention to me! No me! No, over here! Pavlov would be having a field day doing research.
A sizable percent of the population no longer seems capable of having a conversation over a beer. I don't know how we fix that. I hope it's just the growing pains of the switch to the internet and hyperconnectivity, and that we'll figure it out in time. Note the other /. story where the bulk of fake news sharing is done by old people who didn't grow up with the internet - seems like the kids who did are far less trusting. I'm hopeful that kids growing up in the Pavlovian new world we have can see the impact it has on their parents, and realize that they need to take steps to prevent that.
We really need to get back to a place where we can have deep, introspective conversations about complicated topics. That's the only way we can really make progress in the world.
Not sure where you are, but when I went looking for a new TV several months ago, there really weren't any dumb TVs available. And yeah, the "smart" ones were damn cheap. 55" 4k TV for $400 cheap.
Cheap enough that I now think I'll upgrade my little media box, since it's struggling to output stuff at that size and resolution now. Sad when I have to downgrade online streams to 720p to keep them from stuttering.
To add to this, removing a good employee from a job which can be automated means you have one spare good employee. So many managers can't see that automating a job is the exact same thing as saying, "Hey, we've got a great employee who is going to work for free. What could you use them for?" It's always, "We've got one employee too many", in their minds.
It's more often the case that a business could be more productive than it is if it could just shift a few employees around and tweak some things. Sure, cut dead wood when you find it, but if you don't know what to do with a good employee, ask your employees. They know where the weak points in the organization are, and what could make their lives easier. And if you can follow that path, you can iterate through automation and efficiency gains.
There are so many companies working in an Outlook + Excel + Word culture where they don't have any real processes, nobody knows what anybody else is doing, and they aren't really taking full advantage of the computers sitting on their desks.
I've helped a couple of them, with varying levels of success. It really takes management to be not only on board but exemplars of using any new process, or the organization doesn't break that cycle.
One where I was able to mostly break that up (fuck marketing) had some visionary leaders, and they were willing to engage in some workplace disruption for the sake of change. We had gone to a centralized knowledge bank over a sea of personal MS Office docs and personal knowledge, documenting processes and workflows, data structures and filetypes, etc. This was pitched partly as a business continuity process, and partly as an efficiency process - that's what got most of the management very engaged. Some had recently been burned by key staff leaving with an excessive amount of institutional knowledge, while others were feeling the squeeze to become more efficient. As a family owned business, the family part of management was largely on board with it which helped a lot.
Once we had organizational visibility of the business processes, people found that other people were largely doing the same thing, or that they were just a useless cog in a chain. That drove a lot of efficiency changes, as people questioned, "why do I spend X hrs every week doing this, when the person before me could just give it to me in a better format?" Or, "Six people are addressing data quality problems in this process chain. Can we address this further upstream?" A particularly hilarious thing we found was a linear chain which needed to be a fork instead. One person got some data, manipulated it in a necessary but rather extreme way to do their job, then passed it to someone else who subsequently spent a lot of time getting it back largely into its original form. Lightbulb moment when everyone realized, "Oh, we should probably just send the data to both of them, and not have the second guy spend all that time fixing what the first one broke."
Making those changes did eliminate or radically change some jobs, but they made everyone happier. (We found more productive things for most people to do, other than a couple pieces of utterly dead wood.) However, the only way these things could really come up was by documenting, in detail, how the business worked, and letting everyone see those processes and examine their role in them. Most of the people who saw radical job changes drove that change themselves saying, "Why am I spending all my time doing X, when it really looks like we could use Y?"
One job where I wasn't able to break that up had management split or ambivalent on whether or not it would be worth it. After one department pitched a fit because their workflow was changing, and they didn't like it, it got shut down as an organizational change. Some departments still embraced a move to well documented business processes and flourished, but they always had some cruft around the edges where they interacted with the departments who refused. It became a game of insulating the sensible departments from the crazy ones, and building in processes to handle their inconsistencies and incoherent processes and systems.
There's a ton more efficiency to be had in a lot of businesses. I just don't know what percent will be institutionally able to make that change before going under. It always surprises me how few people it takes to utterly derail progress.
It's especially rewarding when the quality goes up, the speed goes up, and the problems go down.
And it's so much easier to debug and re-run a script than a person.
I spoke to my manager and she said it was our duty to make things more efficient for our customer and that if we didn't someone else would.
I think that's the really important thing to consider when looking at the impacts of automation, innovation, and efficiency changes.
Amazon vs Sears. Netflix vs Blockbuster. Etc.
If you just hamstring your organization and don't get better, you'll probably keep most of the jobs in the short-term, but lose most of them in the long-term. A few people getting laid off can find new jobs fairly easily. When an entire organization or even department gets shut down, it becomes a lot harder as everyone is now fighting for what jobs are available locally.
And if someone's job can be automated, how meaningful of a job is it really? At least at the current point in time, what we're automating is usually boring, repetitive, and work that's generally necessary but which doesn't make the organization any money. The things I've automated are things like data entry work, data format conversion work, manual QC/QA jobs, etc.
Didn't read the summary, eh?
All of the MITM work has been done. You just snag the github code, deploy it on a server, tell it a URL to impersonate, and then get people to go to that serer. It's script-kid ready. You don't need to know how to code to deploy this. You don't even really need to know much about how the internet works.
Of course, the more you understand, the more effective this could be. There are enough dumbasses out there that if they click to a page that's identical to the one they are looking for, despite the URL being wrong, they will still log in. Everything else that you could do to make the URL look better just ups the number of people that might log in.
The hard work is done. It's basically a MITM app that you deploy and feed a URL, and you're up and running.
That's a pie in the sky idea. Never going to happen. I'm just holding out for one that goes up to 11. That's at least possible, I think.
I believe the prevailing notion around themohaline circulation (THC) is that it is slowing down. As such, if it slows, we'll actually see global cooling...
You've got a smattering of truth there, but a whole lot wrong.
The oceans have already taken up about half the CO2 and the related warming that we've caused as humans. This warmer water is generally surface water, but does make it into the thermohaline circulation. If that slows, and we don't have really great evidence that it is globally, we won't see global cooling but rather more warming. The warm surface waters won't sink, and colder water won't be pulled to the surface if that circulation slows down or stops. In addition, a lot of warm water gets moved to the poles by this circulation, where it cools and sinks. This warms the polar regions, and cools the equatorial regions. Stopping this makes the polar regions colder, but the equatorial regions warmer.
Regionally, there may well be dramatic cooling. The Day After Tomorrow is a pretty shit movie from a science point of view, but the concept is pretty sound. All of northern Europe gets its temperate weather from the gulf stream. If that part of the ocean circulation shuts down, they will start to look a lot more like Canada or Siberia over there, since they're at that latitude. However the gulf of Mexico won't get cooler - it will get hotter because those hot waters will no longer be flowing out and up to Europe.
Just as concerning is that we're stocking away a lot of CO2 in the deep ocean right now. If that circulation slows or stops, the atmospheric CO2 levels will go up even faster. That's definitely not conducive for another ice age.
Long-term, it might be that the colder poles will be able to form bigger ice caps further towards the equator, and that will reflect more sunlight, leading to cooling. However, it's not clear whether or not that can happen with the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. A prevailing theory for what ended snowball earth is actually CO2 building up in the atmosphere.
Then you are missing a classic bit of comedy. Check out Monty Python's Fish License skit.
It surprised me. And I eat a lot of meat. Definitely give it a couple of tries. Like any food, it's not consistent from time to time and place to place.
Try it. It's surprisingly good. Better than most fast-food burgers you've ever had. I have 2 complaints about it. 1) Too expensive, and 2) the cheese was obviously fake.
FIx the cheese, and I'm pretty ok with it. Make it cheap, and I'm going to choose it most of the time.
I was not expecting to even tolerate it, let alone like it. I'm a big meat eater, and we don't buy less than 2lbs of meat at a time. But that burger? Better than a good 30% that I've had. With good cheese, would be in the top 50%.
Seriously - try it before you write it off.
Why the fuck would you want to?
I'm a hunting, killing, smoking, grilling meat eater, and I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole. That's fucking disgusting.
I'd take the vegan burger over that in a heartbeat, because a) it's not disgusting, and b) it won't kill me.
If your life is winning food eating dares, you really need to reconsider your life. Because that's healthy neither for your body nor your mind.
I concur. The two I've had were in the $10-$15 range for just a burger. (The $15 One was in CA, so knock off like $5 for the rest of the country.) Too expensive to replace fast food burgers, but I did think it was tastier than any fast food burger I'd ever had. There's a revolution there, for sure. All it's going to take is one major chain to roll it out, and then it's going to be cheaper and better than the average fast food burger. And healthier.
As someone who loves to cook, and who's killed, dressed, and cooked my own meat, I was not expecting to really like that burger. But I liked it. A lot. I just needed non-fake cheese on it, because fake cheese is unforgivable.
I've had one. The worst part was the fake cheese. Put some good cheddar on it, and it wouldn't be the best burger I've ever had, but it would be far from the worst. As it was, with the obviously fake cheese, I'd put it in the bottom 1/3 of burgers I've had. If it had good cheese on it, it would be in the top 50%.
For someone with a smoker who smoked 15lbs of brisket for christmas dinner, giving a vegetarian burger a top 50% slot in my life-long burger eating surprised the hell out of me. It was actually really, really tasty. Definitely above fast-food burgers. That tells me that the fast food joints could probably adopt it and nobody would be the wiser. I've definitely had far more disappointing burgers at fast food joints.
Your typical gastropub burger? This one gets close but probably won't pass it. Anything gourmet? Probably not.
But it could replace the average fast food burger, and that's a big deal. The question is if they can be cheaper than a fast food burger. At the moment, the answer is no. However, all it will take is one of them to jump in on this, and they might be able to do it.