This was my thought too. I've been using wireless charging for at least 2 years now, and it works flawlessly on the Galaxies I have. It's just so convenient, and if I need a faster charge, I can just plug the phone in.
From what I read they were trying to drop 3 coils in the mat, so that 3 things could charge at once. This, of course, caused interference, and the lead engineers said it wouldn't work. Management persisted, and years later guess what? That doesn't work.
What i don't understand is why they didn't make a couple of single-device charging stand/mat/posts in the interim, and put them on the market. That's what I find the most baffling.
They put all their eggs in a basket with "charge 3 devices", and now have nothing. It should have been pretty trivial for a couple of engineers to make apple-branded wireless chargers and get them on the market.
Do you know what any of the words you just used mean? It doesn't seem like it, because most really have nothing in common with this program.
1) This is voluntary. 2 out of 3 of the things you mention aren't. 2) This is a paid educational opportunity. Nothing that you mentioned is. (Neither are college or trade school for that matter.) 3) You only have to pay for this education if you get a job paying more than $40k in the 5 years after the program. And they only take 20% of your salary for 2 years, so no 30 year student loan hanging over your head. That's fucking indentured servitude. I work with people who have kids in college, and they're both borrowing for their kids education while still paying for their own.
At the worst with this program, you got paid for learning, didn't go into debt, but it didn't lead to a job paying more than $40k. (And for the record, the average US household income is $61k.) This is like like the opposite of college, where you don't get paid for 2 to 5 years, and come out with a pile of debt and no job. At best, you got paid to learn and are now making a pile more money than you were before, making your "student loan" worth the education. That's a guarantee you don't get with traditional college.
Since your MO on slashdot is pissing and moaning about poorly paid programmers like yourself, you really should have been able to do a better job with this. You really failed at that, so I'll help you out:
This is just a new, creative way to further reduce programming wages by paying what is effectively $10/hr for short-term, no-benefit consultant gigs. They're contracting with companies for coding projects and effectively paying offshore wages to their "students" under the guise of a bootcamp. And I bet that when their bootcamp attendees can't find a job right after, they'll snap up round 2 of the bootcamp for another $10/hr consultant gig to make sure that the rent gets paid.
If you think I'm kidding, read the article. This is exactly what they're doing. Taking actors and baristas and getting them to do minimum wage coding and spinning it like it's good for everyone. The companies providing the work even have the opportunity to hire the "students" afterwards, and since they know they'll work for peanuts, that's what they'll be offering.
If this takes off, that's what we're all going to be competing with.
To have this view, you must never have personally coded anything complicated and large.......Find me a pool of teens that can write code that meets specs that include multi threading and bitwise operations who will do it for pocket change and you've found an endless revenue stream.
To have this view, you must never have personally worked in any of the millions of small businesses which just need some analyses a step above a pivot table or to automate some of the regular tasks that an employee has to do.
There are tons and tons of jobs for programmers which do not require any significant software engineering. Almost any business with more than six people could likely use someone hacking together some scripts and analyses to automate blue-collar tasks. An intranet inventory sheet that's shared. A primitive CMS or CRM. Automated backups of the general ledger. Transaction database with a front end and the ability to spit out a summary for taxes. Payroll.
If you've got less than a dozen or two employees, it's likely going to be cheaper to hire someone at $40k to build and maintain a primitive, custom version of a lot of COTS business software than buying it outright. Especially if you've got some unique needs, which small businesses often do.
And even in a larger business, there's a place for engineers, and there's a place for support staff. My first job was support staff. I'm not a degreed programmer, and thus I wasn't the one working on designing and building the new business software my organization needed. Instead I helped bugfix and work around issues in the current software, at the bargain basement price of like $30k/year.
When sales and marketing crashed stuff and broke things, I cleaned it up. I reverted their mistaken transactions in the general ledger database. I ran off-schedule batch jobs to take care of their past-deadline order submissions. I handled backups and restores. Wrote an automated billing script for customer service that defaulted to by-the-minute, by-the-call, or monthly flat-fee depending on the business customer, so that CS would stop fucking up their billing every month. (That saved the organization essentially 1/4 of an accounting position.)
It was absolutely a programming McJob, and there are millions of them out there. If you think programming requires an engineering degree and is all about fancy architecture, you're missing like 95% of the programming that's done in the world. This bootcamp is essentially the first 5 months I was at my first job out of college. Pay isn't that far off either.
if AirBnb in indemnifying renters whose property gets damaged...
I assume you meant is, and that is just charming. AirBnB is an app and a website, and they take 0% liability and 0% risk. The owner and renter take on 100% and AirBnB walks away with a slice of the profit.
There have been bunches of stories about how homeowners have come back to trashed places, AirBnB won't help, and their homeowner's insurance won't cover it because they didn't have commercial renters insurance.
Like most startup/gig economy companies, you get what you pay for with AirBnB.
I'd ask Warren, though, why tractors are a special case.
I have it on good authority that she thinks someone's tractor is sexy.
But really, how else is one of the four horsemen of liberals going to pick up some of the rural, conservative vote? Medicade for all might help, but a LOT of small town farmers have gotten screwed by crap like this, and it may well resonate with them. I think it's a good idea on her part - she's trying to be the champion of the little people, and this is definitely an area where giant corporations are being very abusive.
Seems right in her wheelhouse, if a bit of a niche.
Yes, it means that people will have to find new jobs in new professions when their old one goes obsolete, but then again - it has always been like that.
It has been like that, but it's not going to be like that in the future.
I don't see how you can expect people to get paid to learn a new profession when they're most likely going to be the more expensive, slower, and less reliable option for doing that job.
If this was one sector that we were talking about, you might have a point. The problem is that it's all sectors, and in any scenario I can think of, any new job sector is going to be based around automation, robots, and machine learning/AI from the get-go. Nobody is going to come up with a new industry without immediately trying to stick AI into it. Nobody is gong to make a start-up that relies heavily on unskilled labor. That's not going to get venture capital dollars, and it's not going to be cost effective.
Anything new is going to start with minimal humans doing the work. There aren't going to be new professions. At least not enough to provide jobs for everyone about to lose their jobs due to automation.
The answer they always give is that, "We can't predict them, and we've never been able to, so just trust that they will happen. Who could have predicted 100 years ago that voice actor for GPS would be a job? That web design would be a job?"
To some extent I agree. If you'd asked me even a decade ago if "Social Media Personality" could be a viable career, I would have said no. Yet hundreds or thousands (maybe more? IDK) are making millions of dollars doing that now, with an order or magnitude more making enough that they've quit their day job.
The real issue is that when the jobs of the future (that we can't predict existing) suddenly do exist, our first stab at doing them won't involve humans. When we need a digital janitor for our holodeck, we're not going to slap someone in a motion capture suit, wire them up with a mic, and have them do all the tasks so we can digitize them. That's going to be constructed and automated from the start. When we invent an algae-based superfood which mimics prime rib and grows in vats, we're not going to have humans hanging it on a hook in a freezer and hacking chunks of it off. I doubt that it's going to be somebody's job to tune the fins in my hover-car.
There will definitely be tons of new things that need to be done in the future that we can't predict. However, it's really unlikely that most of those things will be done by humans.
There is an example of that in many small towns in the USA. Middle aged people of a limited skill set have lost their jobs, typically in things like clothing factories for the ladies, and the mines for men. The factories and the mines close, the mines especially become more automated. So you have people in their 50's with approximately 0 chance of being hired, between their skillset and age..... Social Security Disability pretty much filled the gap and kept them from living under bridges.
I've lived through this in a couple of states in the US now, and you're half-way there, but not all the way there.
What ultimately happens is that the small towns die, and these folks are the last people living there. In towns like these, people own their homes, often outright. They're often not much, but they generally own them. When they hit 50 and lose their jobs, their kids move to the larger towns or to the nearby city to find work. The parents stay in the little town and scrape by, using social services and doing part-time jobs, canning their vegetable garden, hunting, fishing, and bartering. To cut costs they generally forgo any maintenance on their home, and often will only buy 10+ year old vehicles and try to keep them running as long as they can.
Ultimately, with no kids staying in the town, and with no real money coming into the town, the businesses start dying off. With the businesses and houses all falling into disrepair, the town dies. The few people who still have money then have to decide if it's worth staying or giving up their house, because they won't be able to sell it. And as you noted, good luck finding a living wage elsewhere, even if you have the money to pack up and leave.
There's a reason anger and fear really works with the rural, conservative voter. Why a cultural war really resonates. For a lot of them, they're watching their world crumble around them, and they're seeing the place they call home disappearing. My family hates that I moved away to the city, but the bank closed up, the pharmacy closed up, the diner was in such bad shape that when the owner died nobody wanted to take it over....it was clear that I didn't have a future in the places my family has always called home. And when my parents are gone, probably half their town will be gone, and I won't have a reason to go back.
What scares me is that this isn't constrained to small towns - look at Detroit for an example of it on the large scale. With the migration to cities, we're setting ourselves up for a lot of Detroits. I agree that there is rather a lot of historical disruptions. I'm concerned that we're setting ourselves up for one the scale of which we've never seen before.
I'd highly recommend at least reading the summary before commenting. It might help you to not be 100% wrong.
The ONS said that, of the jobs at risk, 39% were held by people whose educational attainment level was GCSE or below...
You're barking up the wrong tree regardless.
The trend has not been to make specialized robots to do exactly what humans have been doing. The trend has been to redesign tasks so that robots can do them, or re-engineer things so that they don't need to be done.
Scrubbing toilets and tubs: Replaced by hydrophobic coatings. Welding: No longer needed due to 3D printing
Have you ever seen one of the burger machines in action? Go check out some of the youtube videos. They're not making a robot with an arm and a spatula to replace a line cook. They're redesigning the entire line and stuffing it into a machine. A human can't take over and do part of the job, because it's not designed for that to happen. The whole thing is fundamentally different than the job it's replacing, despite producing the same end-product.
Right now they are niche demonstrators. But when the major fast food chains start mass-producing burger machines and installing them, goodbye fry cooks. A half dozen jobs will be turned into two or three, to travel around and service the machines, clean them, and restock them. Until they build a self-cleaning mechanism into them, and automate the restocking from the walk-in....
Honestly, I don't think he should be charged at all. If a business is so fucking sloppy that they can't keep track of who they owe what, they don't deserve to be in business. Because that means they're likely defrauding their employees, customers, and other organizations they actually do business with.
Showing that they don't have functional accountants is a public service that should be rewarded and not punished.
Oh....but wait....they have tax attorneys that can make sure that they don't pay taxes. So double fuck them, and let that guy go free. If they spent half as much keeping track of their money as they spend hiding from taxes this wouldn't happen. If this is how they want to allocate resources, I'm very much OK with the result.
Since humans can't tell the difference between honest text and sarcastic text, and nor can they reliably determine what's trolling and what's not, I highly doubt that AI will be able to.
And even if it's able to, a good percent of humans won't agree! What's the use in that then?
You've helpfully volunteered a perfect example for why both humans and AI fail at this, DickBreath, I know that AI won't get this right, and there's a good chance half the humans won't either.
I really don't understand how people are allowed to continue in their position after writing and approving headlines like these. And I don't understand how their bosses are allowed to continue in their position after not dealing with their employees' appalling inability to think critically or write functionally.
As you point out, the scooters won't share "your" location with LA, only theirs. On top of that, "your" is a very, very small number of people (scooter riders in LA) compared to all the people who will be reading that headline. How fucking hard is it to write, "LA now requires rental scooter GPS reporting to enforce permits"?
Like weather predictions of 30% chance of rain at 2 pm, did it actually rain 30% of the time?
That sort of research is done all the time. Usually it's on far more specific parts of weather models than the overall model. Weather models are ridiculously complicated, and scientists spend a lot of time on minor components of them like modeling aerosols better since they form the nuclei of clouds and thus rain, or the vertical humidity profile, or boundary layer dynamics. There are so many minor processes that make up weather that most of the research effort goes into things that 99.9% of the population never will even know even exist. In conjunction, all of these things will be what predict rain or temperature at a certain time.
I 100% disagree. A TPK sometimes is what the story requires, and what it deserves. A TPK can sometimes drive the story forward in a way that bullshitting around the epic failure of a party can't do. If the PCs know that no matter what they do the DM will bail them out, they play without fear, and without consequence.
If you're seeing TPKs often, yeah, that's a total fail on the part of the DM. Once in a blue moon they can be really awesome, especially if they become part of the lore of that world. Here are a couple examples:
We were set up to be rabble-rousers under the thumb of an evil, barbaric Duke. At the start of the campaign we're given some flavor text where the Duke is being a right bastard to an old grandma, and one of the PCs decides to run up and kick him in the balls from behind. The guards grab him, we decide to save him the guards grab us, and the Duke has us beheaded right there in the street, and leaves our bodies there to rot in the gutter. Everyone is too afraid to remove them.
We make up new characters, including relatives of some of the dead ones, and now the story in every tavern is the deaths of our old characters. We became the example of how brutal he is. And now some of us have sworn vengeance. We have to slip out in the cover of darkness and retrieve a couple of rotting corpses to give them a proper burial. In the tavern where someone jokes, "Better not say that too loud, or the Duke will take your head.", "THAT WAS MY BROTHER, ASSHOLE."
The depth the story got due to that TPK and the depth that the new characters got made that adventure special. It would have been a far less interesting story if the typical trope of us being jailed, escaping, and going on with life was used. The Duke wouldn't have been as scary, and our characters wouldn't have been the very serious, very ruthless freedom fighters they turned out to be. That TPK set the tone in a way that any amount of flavor text wouldn't have. It was a punch in the guts, a very "holy shit he's serious" foundational moment for the campaign.
Another time I had a bunch of players show up for a vampire hunting mission. They were supposed to get together and make characters ahead of time, but didn't. They all came with their characters, and we had fighters, rogues, and rangers. No priests or paladins, no magic users, nobody who could cast light, heal, or make a saving throw against charm. I asked if they wanted to play another ad-hoc adventure, or make up new characters, because they were utterly unprepared to go vampire hunting. I couldn't really even dumb it down, and I couldn't run enough NPCs to even make it work for them.
No. They were serious. Their characters had volunteered for this mission, and they were going to go on it. Some noble willing to face death, some cocky thinking they were invincible. They played those characters, knowing full well in real life that they were likely utterly fucked. And the vampire had a pile of fun, and the night ended early as expected.
They made up new characters for the next session, this time an actual balanced party with a chance, and went "to see what happened to the last party". And surprise, I attacked them with their former characters, now vampire spawn, using their tactics, skills, and equipment. It was brutal. Easily three times harder than the mission was supposed to be, but it made sense. And it too could have been a TPK, but they managed to survive. If it had been, they wouldn't have complained. Because that TPK the first time was the logical outcome, and the turning of the first party on them was as well.
After they took out the vampire they brought back the story of what happened to the first party. That became a cautionary tale in the community, and future rumors of vampires were dealt with by a specialty vampire-hunting force.
TPKs can be done well, and add to the story. The real challenge is in realizing when that's the case, and not doing it for any other reason than that's what the story really deserves.
But too often the rules could get in the way of a good time - witness all the tropes about rules lawyers. By simplifying the rules, they shifted emphasis back to the storytelling, instead of the minutiae of the rules.
I was 100% against 5e as yet another money grab after 4e, and ignored it for a few years. Finally played one evening when I was visiting some old friends, and was instantly sold because of this.
It helped I had people who I knew well and who knew me well and I could ask, "what's the basic stuff I need to know?" They told me, tossed me a character, and I just ran with it. Didn't read the PHB, didn't worry about the rules because it was the D&D I knew and loved, just with most of the bookkeeping removed.
"I want to jump off the roof and motherfucking assassin's creed that guy in the back." "That's going to be a really high difficulty bit of acrobatics." "Sure, but don't I have advantage since I have the high ground and the element of surprise?" "DC 21. Go for it."
And we're done. Roll two dice, take the bigger number, add one number, and we have the answer. Previously it would be rolling a die, adding a skill, figuring out if a height bonus applied, a stealth bonus, a size bonus, what if I have bless, but he's got a displacer cloak so it's -6 and....shit I'm a drow and I get a -2 to everything in daylight....
Now if there's at least one advantage and one disadvantage, they all cancel out, so once you find one of each, you're done. No reason to keep doing bookkeeping, just role the damn die and get on with life.
I can't believe how many hours we used to sit around doing bookkeeping to play this game. Outside of the actual game we'd be going through everything to try to figure out how to maximize our math, reading up on what stacks with what, and what doesn't stack. Coming up with tricks to mess up the enemy's math tricks.
Now it's so much more about the story, and we never worry about "can I do that within the bounds of the rules?" A good DM and the answer is almost always yes. Pick an appropriate skill, figure out if there's advantage or disadvantage, handwave a DC, and lets do it!
The last couple of groups I've played with would sit down and talk through why that hole existed, and come to consensus on it, then move on.
"If it was a dead-end alley, how could he have escaped from the guards?" "He must have given them a sign they recognized." "Ok, but who is so powerful that the guards wouldn't risk arresting them?" "Sounds like the Merchant Guild, or maybe a member of the Royal family." "Why not both?" "Ok, so why the hell would he be there in the first place?" "Guess we'll just have to find out."
As a GM, I'm rarely vested in the minor details. I spend most of my time framing the large picture, hammering out bigger structural pieces that serve as the foundation of the story. What are the rules of the kingdom, and who enforces them? Who is the kingdom at war with, who do they trade with, what's the political 101. Then I work with (and largely let) the PCs to fill in all these interesting details, which make the story what it is.
So now we've got a member of the Royal family slinking around in the shadows, and the guards won't touch him. Sounds to me like that's a plan by the king's second son to kill off his father and brother and take the throne.
Did I plan on this? Nope. All I had was a guy escaping from incompetent guards as a bit of flavor text, and the PCs created a story of Royal shenanigans based off that. Then I took that and put an evil twist on it, and now the PCs are going to find the town in lock-down as the king tries to find the traitors who killed the crown prince and almost killed him. That's going to impact trade with the neighbors, and that's going to upset the local economy, and now pubs are running out of ale and people are getting angry at the king, and there's a black market springing up to get goods into the city and the PCs are getting caught up all of this crap.
All because they took some flavor text about incompetent guards and built their own story on it, and I had structural components in place already I could consider reacting based on what they were proposing.
Your experience largely mirrors my own. The one difference is that I was in a new place with new friends who had never played D&D when 4th came out, so I grabbed it and ran with it for a few years. It's a decent edition for teaching someone what D&D is if they've not grown up with it, due to how simple it is. It is definitely NOT a good D&D system. But it doesn't require players to be knowledgeable or good, nor the DM to be particularly skillful.
I swore off 5e, because of how bad 4e was. It just looked like they were adding more cars to the money train. It wasn't until I played 5e for an evening with some longtime gaming friends that I realized how damn good it really is. The catch is that I think you need a good DM to unlock all of the best parts of 5e because that flexibility requires a deft hand, and can get someone into trouble if they don't know what they're doing.
In addition to what people have noted about the visibility of the game in mass media, people like Vin Diesel, Dwane Johnson, Tim Duncan, and Curt Schilling are breaking the stereotype of who plays RPGs. They make it a lot harder to ridicule people playing the game, and a lot easier for people to consider poking their head into what they previously thought was solely the realm of nerddom.
And while I think a lot of people will consider this heresy, 4th and 5th edition (and pathfinder, to an extent) made it a lot easier for new people to get into the game. 4th with MMO balance and unkillable low level characters, and 5th in the hands of a good DM with the ability to just get out of the way and let people play.
The first few editions were hard, broken, and cumbersome. 3rd exploded with so many add-ons that nobody could keep track of all the prestige classes and new classes, and it allowed the creation of some amazingly overpowered characters. It just became a quagmire of shit, where the only way to have a functional game was to decide ahead of time what select add-ons the group would allow. That's just daunting for a new player.
I took a group of brand new players and got a 4th campaign up and running with no issues. It was not a hard learning curve. I didn't like it, but it was a hell of a lot more accessible than 3.5 was for them. I resisted 5th for a long time assuming it was just another money grab, but finally guested in a game with some of my old gaming friends, and was instantly taken with it. Brought that back and convinced my group to jump from 4th to 5th, and everyone both made the change with ease, and really, really appreciated how good this edition is. I shudder to think about trying to teach someone how to play 1st or 2nd edition at this point. They were really really bad. I have super fond memories, but man, I can't imagine how much better it would have been to start with a more modern version.
The economics are hard to wrap our heads around, for sure. I honestly don't know how they will work out. But one thing that seems missing is that people near the bottom of the poverty rung spend most of their money. Giving them more means they will just spend more. And the more they spend, the more goods and services they need, and the more jobs those things require.
The economy runs on monetary velocity, not absolute used. One dude buying a $1b island doesn't fire the economy like 500m people spending $2 on something. UBI means more people buying more stuff, and needing more people to provide that stuff. All that means more sales and income taxes, which helps fund UBI.
All the "UBI experiments" have been limited in funds and scope, and don't look at the broader economic impacts of people with more free cash to spend. We're not going to really have an answer of how well UBI works until it's fully implemented for the first time. That's a terrifying proposition, but one I really hope some country is brave enough to try in the near future. It's the answer to whether we get a star-trek no-scarcity future, or if we continue to fund the rich on the suffering of the poor.
Imagine if everyone had PV on their roofs to supply a net of 100% of their needs (including businesses). The power company would be left with utility lines to maintain, and they would have to buy power at night to provide power when the sun goes down (or pay for fuel if they own the plants).
What power company? If everyone has the ability to generate 100% of their energy needs, there is no need for a power company.
So where does that sequence break down? With EV charging, it's not practical to store enough power to charge your cars overnight, so the grid is still needed.
You are rather confused, aren't you? Either people have enough PV to supply 100% of their needs, or they don't. If they do, they don't need a power company. If they don't, they need one. At some point, it's quite possible that so few people need one that they stop existing.
Over the last 20 years my electricity bills have been going down, and not only am I not cutting anything out of my life, I keep moving into bigger and bigger places and I have more electronics. 10 years ago I was in a 900 sq ft apartment. Now I'm in a 2400 sq ft house. My electric bill is lower now than it was back then. The next furnace and AC I purchase will be far more efficient than the current ones. The next appliances I buy will be more efficient. Next TV, next computer, etc.
Currently, the average household energy expenditure in the US is about 900 kWh per month. I'm at half that, in a bigass house, with no real skimping on anything. Efficiency is half the battle when we're talking about going to renewables.
Teslas can come equipped with a 100 kWh battery, which gets you 330 miles. The average person in the US drives about 13,500 miles every year. That's 41 charge cycles, or 4100 kWh every year, which is 341 kWh every month. That plus my current electricity usage doesn't rise to the level of what the average household is currently using.
Lets say you have 2 electric cars, and my current electricity usage. That hits about 1200 kWh per month. Living in the upper midwest, it looks like I'd need a 13,140W solar system. Given a standard 320W panel, that's about 41 panels. Most homes top out at about 20 panels for rooftop solar, so that's going to require some creativity or a neighborhood solar park for the other half of the panels.
But we're close even with current technology! That I could run my house and two electric cars on twice the available roof-top solar is fucking crazy!
All it's going to take is another decade or two of solar PV innovations combined with more efficient everything, and I'm really not going to need to be tied to the grid. Nobody will really be. And I'm in the cold north, and not somewhere particularly good for solar! Everywhere south of here is going to get there far quicker.
Today it's not quite doable. But we are tantalizingly close to being able to be self-sufficient in terms of energy use.
1) You didn't grow up with it, and it's really unfamiliar to you. 2) More than likely, you've seen a bit of the middle, but not the fundamentals necessary to get there. 3) What you think is being taught is likely not what's being taught. 4) The teacher teaching it didn't grow up with it either, and may not be all that good at teaching it.
To the third point, where we learned one thing by rote learning, kids now are instead learning several methodological skills that accomplish the same thing, but which can later extend into higher order math. Rote learning doesn't provide that foundation. We look at them and say, "Why the hell are they making multiplication so fucking difficult?" In reality, they're not teaching multiplication, at least not the way we learned it. Entwined in what they're teaching are some linear algebra concepts and some matrix math.
Instead of doing rote memorization of times tables, they're teaching the process to multiply any numbers together. What's really confusing is that they're doing this at the point in school where we all just memorized the times tables up to maybe 12x12. If you don't understand that what they're teaching is fundamentally different than what you were taught, yeah, it looks crazy if you're expecting those kids to be memorizing what 8 * 6 is. That's not what they're doing.
"Why not just teach multiplication?" It's a valid question, but that presumes how we were taught multiplication is the best way. We really learned most of our math by brute forcing it all on rote memory. As that's our muscle memory, it seems to us that that's the easiest path forward. When we got to linear algebra and some of the higher order math, for a lot of us it was the same "new concepts, smash until understand" process that we learned in our earlier math classes. The idea with this new way of teaching math is to dispatch with all of that, and instead build in methods and processes from the beginning that can be leveraged in later math classes.
Fundamentally, it's pretty damn sound. Unfortunately, we're living in the first generation of a new way to do mathematics, and dealing with that sometimes rocky transition.
To the last point, I think that the next generation of math teachers will likely do a much better job teaching it, because they grew up with it. But it's a chicken and egg problem - kids can't learn a new way to do math if the teachers don't teach it, and the teachers can't teach it until they learn it. Unfortunately a whole lot of teachers haven't really learned it yet, in part because of the same cogitative dissonance we experience when looking at it. It's going to be a generation or two until math teachers are good at it, and unfortunately we're the ones that are suffering through it in the mean time.
Why do you show up in every EV article and bitch and whine about EVs because you you're dirt poor and live on a mountain in Canada and they won't work for you at the present time?
Seriously dude, get over yourself. If an EV doesn't fit your lifestyle stop bitching about them and get on with life.
Slashdot Mirror
This was my thought too. I've been using wireless charging for at least 2 years now, and it works flawlessly on the Galaxies I have. It's just so convenient, and if I need a faster charge, I can just plug the phone in.
From what I read they were trying to drop 3 coils in the mat, so that 3 things could charge at once. This, of course, caused interference, and the lead engineers said it wouldn't work. Management persisted, and years later guess what? That doesn't work.
What i don't understand is why they didn't make a couple of single-device charging stand/mat/posts in the interim, and put them on the market. That's what I find the most baffling.
They put all their eggs in a basket with "charge 3 devices", and now have nothing. It should have been pretty trivial for a couple of engineers to make apple-branded wireless chargers and get them on the market.
Do you know what any of the words you just used mean? It doesn't seem like it, because most really have nothing in common with this program.
1) This is voluntary. 2 out of 3 of the things you mention aren't.
2) This is a paid educational opportunity. Nothing that you mentioned is. (Neither are college or trade school for that matter.)
3) You only have to pay for this education if you get a job paying more than $40k in the 5 years after the program. And they only take 20% of your salary for 2 years, so no 30 year student loan hanging over your head. That's fucking indentured servitude. I work with people who have kids in college, and they're both borrowing for their kids education while still paying for their own.
At the worst with this program, you got paid for learning, didn't go into debt, but it didn't lead to a job paying more than $40k. (And for the record, the average US household income is $61k.) This is like like the opposite of college, where you don't get paid for 2 to 5 years, and come out with a pile of debt and no job. At best, you got paid to learn and are now making a pile more money than you were before, making your "student loan" worth the education. That's a guarantee you don't get with traditional college.
Since your MO on slashdot is pissing and moaning about poorly paid programmers like yourself, you really should have been able to do a better job with this. You really failed at that, so I'll help you out:
This is just a new, creative way to further reduce programming wages by paying what is effectively $10/hr for short-term, no-benefit consultant gigs. They're contracting with companies for coding projects and effectively paying offshore wages to their "students" under the guise of a bootcamp. And I bet that when their bootcamp attendees can't find a job right after, they'll snap up round 2 of the bootcamp for another $10/hr consultant gig to make sure that the rent gets paid.
If you think I'm kidding, read the article. This is exactly what they're doing. Taking actors and baristas and getting them to do minimum wage coding and spinning it like it's good for everyone. The companies providing the work even have the opportunity to hire the "students" afterwards, and since they know they'll work for peanuts, that's what they'll be offering.
If this takes off, that's what we're all going to be competing with.
(You're welcome.)
To have this view, you must never have personally coded anything complicated and large.......Find me a pool of teens that can write code that meets specs that include multi threading and bitwise operations who will do it for pocket change and you've found an endless revenue stream.
To have this view, you must never have personally worked in any of the millions of small businesses which just need some analyses a step above a pivot table or to automate some of the regular tasks that an employee has to do.
There are tons and tons of jobs for programmers which do not require any significant software engineering. Almost any business with more than six people could likely use someone hacking together some scripts and analyses to automate blue-collar tasks. An intranet inventory sheet that's shared. A primitive CMS or CRM. Automated backups of the general ledger. Transaction database with a front end and the ability to spit out a summary for taxes. Payroll.
If you've got less than a dozen or two employees, it's likely going to be cheaper to hire someone at $40k to build and maintain a primitive, custom version of a lot of COTS business software than buying it outright. Especially if you've got some unique needs, which small businesses often do.
And even in a larger business, there's a place for engineers, and there's a place for support staff. My first job was support staff. I'm not a degreed programmer, and thus I wasn't the one working on designing and building the new business software my organization needed. Instead I helped bugfix and work around issues in the current software, at the bargain basement price of like $30k/year.
When sales and marketing crashed stuff and broke things, I cleaned it up. I reverted their mistaken transactions in the general ledger database. I ran off-schedule batch jobs to take care of their past-deadline order submissions. I handled backups and restores. Wrote an automated billing script for customer service that defaulted to by-the-minute, by-the-call, or monthly flat-fee depending on the business customer, so that CS would stop fucking up their billing every month. (That saved the organization essentially 1/4 of an accounting position.)
It was absolutely a programming McJob, and there are millions of them out there. If you think programming requires an engineering degree and is all about fancy architecture, you're missing like 95% of the programming that's done in the world. This bootcamp is essentially the first 5 months I was at my first job out of college. Pay isn't that far off either.
if AirBnb in indemnifying renters whose property gets damaged...
I assume you meant is, and that is just charming. AirBnB is an app and a website, and they take 0% liability and 0% risk. The owner and renter take on 100% and AirBnB walks away with a slice of the profit.
There have been bunches of stories about how homeowners have come back to trashed places, AirBnB won't help, and their homeowner's insurance won't cover it because they didn't have commercial renters insurance.
Like most startup/gig economy companies, you get what you pay for with AirBnB.
I'd ask Warren, though, why tractors are a special case.
I have it on good authority that she thinks someone's tractor is sexy.
But really, how else is one of the four horsemen of liberals going to pick up some of the rural, conservative vote? Medicade for all might help, but a LOT of small town farmers have gotten screwed by crap like this, and it may well resonate with them. I think it's a good idea on her part - she's trying to be the champion of the little people, and this is definitely an area where giant corporations are being very abusive.
Seems right in her wheelhouse, if a bit of a niche.
Phobos? Why not land on Europa?
Yes, it means that people will have to find new jobs in new professions when their old one goes obsolete, but then again - it has always been like that.
It has been like that, but it's not going to be like that in the future.
I don't see how you can expect people to get paid to learn a new profession when they're most likely going to be the more expensive, slower, and less reliable option for doing that job.
If this was one sector that we were talking about, you might have a point. The problem is that it's all sectors, and in any scenario I can think of, any new job sector is going to be based around automation, robots, and machine learning/AI from the get-go. Nobody is going to come up with a new industry without immediately trying to stick AI into it. Nobody is gong to make a start-up that relies heavily on unskilled labor. That's not going to get venture capital dollars, and it's not going to be cost effective.
Anything new is going to start with minimal humans doing the work. There aren't going to be new professions. At least not enough to provide jobs for everyone about to lose their jobs due to automation.
The answer they always give is that, "We can't predict them, and we've never been able to, so just trust that they will happen. Who could have predicted 100 years ago that voice actor for GPS would be a job? That web design would be a job?"
To some extent I agree. If you'd asked me even a decade ago if "Social Media Personality" could be a viable career, I would have said no. Yet hundreds or thousands (maybe more? IDK) are making millions of dollars doing that now, with an order or magnitude more making enough that they've quit their day job.
The real issue is that when the jobs of the future (that we can't predict existing) suddenly do exist, our first stab at doing them won't involve humans. When we need a digital janitor for our holodeck, we're not going to slap someone in a motion capture suit, wire them up with a mic, and have them do all the tasks so we can digitize them. That's going to be constructed and automated from the start. When we invent an algae-based superfood which mimics prime rib and grows in vats, we're not going to have humans hanging it on a hook in a freezer and hacking chunks of it off. I doubt that it's going to be somebody's job to tune the fins in my hover-car.
There will definitely be tons of new things that need to be done in the future that we can't predict. However, it's really unlikely that most of those things will be done by humans.
There is an example of that in many small towns in the USA. Middle aged people of a limited skill set have lost their jobs, typically in things like clothing factories for the ladies, and the mines for men. The factories and the mines close, the mines especially become more automated. So you have people in their 50's with approximately 0 chance of being hired, between their skillset and age..... Social Security Disability pretty much filled the gap and kept them from living under bridges.
I've lived through this in a couple of states in the US now, and you're half-way there, but not all the way there.
What ultimately happens is that the small towns die, and these folks are the last people living there. In towns like these, people own their homes, often outright. They're often not much, but they generally own them. When they hit 50 and lose their jobs, their kids move to the larger towns or to the nearby city to find work. The parents stay in the little town and scrape by, using social services and doing part-time jobs, canning their vegetable garden, hunting, fishing, and bartering. To cut costs they generally forgo any maintenance on their home, and often will only buy 10+ year old vehicles and try to keep them running as long as they can.
Ultimately, with no kids staying in the town, and with no real money coming into the town, the businesses start dying off. With the businesses and houses all falling into disrepair, the town dies. The few people who still have money then have to decide if it's worth staying or giving up their house, because they won't be able to sell it. And as you noted, good luck finding a living wage elsewhere, even if you have the money to pack up and leave.
There's a reason anger and fear really works with the rural, conservative voter. Why a cultural war really resonates. For a lot of them, they're watching their world crumble around them, and they're seeing the place they call home disappearing. My family hates that I moved away to the city, but the bank closed up, the pharmacy closed up, the diner was in such bad shape that when the owner died nobody wanted to take it over....it was clear that I didn't have a future in the places my family has always called home. And when my parents are gone, probably half their town will be gone, and I won't have a reason to go back.
What scares me is that this isn't constrained to small towns - look at Detroit for an example of it on the large scale. With the migration to cities, we're setting ourselves up for a lot of Detroits. I agree that there is rather a lot of historical disruptions. I'm concerned that we're setting ourselves up for one the scale of which we've never seen before.
I'd highly recommend at least reading the summary before commenting. It might help you to not be 100% wrong.
The ONS said that, of the jobs at risk, 39% were held by people whose educational attainment level was GCSE or below...
You're barking up the wrong tree regardless.
The trend has not been to make specialized robots to do exactly what humans have been doing. The trend has been to redesign tasks so that robots can do them, or re-engineer things so that they don't need to be done.
Scrubbing toilets and tubs: Replaced by hydrophobic coatings.
Welding: No longer needed due to 3D printing
Have you ever seen one of the burger machines in action? Go check out some of the youtube videos. They're not making a robot with an arm and a spatula to replace a line cook. They're redesigning the entire line and stuffing it into a machine. A human can't take over and do part of the job, because it's not designed for that to happen. The whole thing is fundamentally different than the job it's replacing, despite producing the same end-product.
Right now they are niche demonstrators. But when the major fast food chains start mass-producing burger machines and installing them, goodbye fry cooks. A half dozen jobs will be turned into two or three, to travel around and service the machines, clean them, and restock them. Until they build a self-cleaning mechanism into them, and automate the restocking from the walk-in....
Honestly, I don't think he should be charged at all. If a business is so fucking sloppy that they can't keep track of who they owe what, they don't deserve to be in business. Because that means they're likely defrauding their employees, customers, and other organizations they actually do business with.
Showing that they don't have functional accountants is a public service that should be rewarded and not punished.
Oh....but wait....they have tax attorneys that can make sure that they don't pay taxes. So double fuck them, and let that guy go free. If they spent half as much keeping track of their money as they spend hiding from taxes this wouldn't happen. If this is how they want to allocate resources, I'm very much OK with the result.
Since humans can't tell the difference between honest text and sarcastic text, and nor can they reliably determine what's trolling and what's not, I highly doubt that AI will be able to.
And even if it's able to, a good percent of humans won't agree! What's the use in that then?
You've helpfully volunteered a perfect example for why both humans and AI fail at this, DickBreath, I know that AI won't get this right, and there's a good chance half the humans won't either.
I really don't understand how people are allowed to continue in their position after writing and approving headlines like these. And I don't understand how their bosses are allowed to continue in their position after not dealing with their employees' appalling inability to think critically or write functionally.
As you point out, the scooters won't share "your" location with LA, only theirs. On top of that, "your" is a very, very small number of people (scooter riders in LA) compared to all the people who will be reading that headline. How fucking hard is it to write, "LA now requires rental scooter GPS reporting to enforce permits"?
Only if you round to the nearest integer of each.
Like weather predictions of 30% chance of rain at 2 pm, did it actually rain 30% of the time?
That sort of research is done all the time. Usually it's on far more specific parts of weather models than the overall model. Weather models are ridiculously complicated, and scientists spend a lot of time on minor components of them like modeling aerosols better since they form the nuclei of clouds and thus rain, or the vertical humidity profile, or boundary layer dynamics. There are so many minor processes that make up weather that most of the research effort goes into things that 99.9% of the population never will even know even exist. In conjunction, all of these things will be what predict rain or temperature at a certain time.
However, once in awhile someone revisits the models as a whole, and you get something like this: http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~pu/...
For hurricanes in particular: http://science.sciencemag.org/...
(If you want the pop journalism coverage of that article: https://www.theatlantic.com/sc...)
Quick everyone! Fire up your old accounts and post all the porn you saved from Tumblr. Lets make sure it doesn't get lost forever.
Any TPK is a Total Fail - on the part of the DM
I 100% disagree. A TPK sometimes is what the story requires, and what it deserves. A TPK can sometimes drive the story forward in a way that bullshitting around the epic failure of a party can't do. If the PCs know that no matter what they do the DM will bail them out, they play without fear, and without consequence.
If you're seeing TPKs often, yeah, that's a total fail on the part of the DM. Once in a blue moon they can be really awesome, especially if they become part of the lore of that world. Here are a couple examples:
We were set up to be rabble-rousers under the thumb of an evil, barbaric Duke. At the start of the campaign we're given some flavor text where the Duke is being a right bastard to an old grandma, and one of the PCs decides to run up and kick him in the balls from behind. The guards grab him, we decide to save him the guards grab us, and the Duke has us beheaded right there in the street, and leaves our bodies there to rot in the gutter. Everyone is too afraid to remove them.
We make up new characters, including relatives of some of the dead ones, and now the story in every tavern is the deaths of our old characters. We became the example of how brutal he is. And now some of us have sworn vengeance. We have to slip out in the cover of darkness and retrieve a couple of rotting corpses to give them a proper burial. In the tavern where someone jokes, "Better not say that too loud, or the Duke will take your head.", "THAT WAS MY BROTHER, ASSHOLE."
The depth the story got due to that TPK and the depth that the new characters got made that adventure special. It would have been a far less interesting story if the typical trope of us being jailed, escaping, and going on with life was used. The Duke wouldn't have been as scary, and our characters wouldn't have been the very serious, very ruthless freedom fighters they turned out to be. That TPK set the tone in a way that any amount of flavor text wouldn't have. It was a punch in the guts, a very "holy shit he's serious" foundational moment for the campaign.
Another time I had a bunch of players show up for a vampire hunting mission. They were supposed to get together and make characters ahead of time, but didn't. They all came with their characters, and we had fighters, rogues, and rangers. No priests or paladins, no magic users, nobody who could cast light, heal, or make a saving throw against charm. I asked if they wanted to play another ad-hoc adventure, or make up new characters, because they were utterly unprepared to go vampire hunting. I couldn't really even dumb it down, and I couldn't run enough NPCs to even make it work for them.
No. They were serious. Their characters had volunteered for this mission, and they were going to go on it. Some noble willing to face death, some cocky thinking they were invincible. They played those characters, knowing full well in real life that they were likely utterly fucked. And the vampire had a pile of fun, and the night ended early as expected.
They made up new characters for the next session, this time an actual balanced party with a chance, and went "to see what happened to the last party". And surprise, I attacked them with their former characters, now vampire spawn, using their tactics, skills, and equipment. It was brutal. Easily three times harder than the mission was supposed to be, but it made sense. And it too could have been a TPK, but they managed to survive. If it had been, they wouldn't have complained. Because that TPK the first time was the logical outcome, and the turning of the first party on them was as well.
After they took out the vampire they brought back the story of what happened to the first party. That became a cautionary tale in the community, and future rumors of vampires were dealt with by a specialty vampire-hunting force.
TPKs can be done well, and add to the story. The real challenge is in realizing when that's the case, and not doing it for any other reason than that's what the story really deserves.
But too often the rules could get in the way of a good time - witness all the tropes about rules lawyers. By simplifying the rules, they shifted emphasis back to the storytelling, instead of the minutiae of the rules.
I was 100% against 5e as yet another money grab after 4e, and ignored it for a few years. Finally played one evening when I was visiting some old friends, and was instantly sold because of this.
It helped I had people who I knew well and who knew me well and I could ask, "what's the basic stuff I need to know?" They told me, tossed me a character, and I just ran with it. Didn't read the PHB, didn't worry about the rules because it was the D&D I knew and loved, just with most of the bookkeeping removed.
"I want to jump off the roof and motherfucking assassin's creed that guy in the back."
"That's going to be a really high difficulty bit of acrobatics."
"Sure, but don't I have advantage since I have the high ground and the element of surprise?"
"DC 21. Go for it."
And we're done. Roll two dice, take the bigger number, add one number, and we have the answer. Previously it would be rolling a die, adding a skill, figuring out if a height bonus applied, a stealth bonus, a size bonus, what if I have bless, but he's got a displacer cloak so it's -6 and....shit I'm a drow and I get a -2 to everything in daylight....
Now if there's at least one advantage and one disadvantage, they all cancel out, so once you find one of each, you're done. No reason to keep doing bookkeeping, just role the damn die and get on with life.
I can't believe how many hours we used to sit around doing bookkeeping to play this game. Outside of the actual game we'd be going through everything to try to figure out how to maximize our math, reading up on what stacks with what, and what doesn't stack. Coming up with tricks to mess up the enemy's math tricks.
Now it's so much more about the story, and we never worry about "can I do that within the bounds of the rules?" A good DM and the answer is almost always yes. Pick an appropriate skill, figure out if there's advantage or disadvantage, handwave a DC, and lets do it!
The last couple of groups I've played with would sit down and talk through why that hole existed, and come to consensus on it, then move on.
"If it was a dead-end alley, how could he have escaped from the guards?"
"He must have given them a sign they recognized."
"Ok, but who is so powerful that the guards wouldn't risk arresting them?"
"Sounds like the Merchant Guild, or maybe a member of the Royal family."
"Why not both?"
"Ok, so why the hell would he be there in the first place?"
"Guess we'll just have to find out."
As a GM, I'm rarely vested in the minor details. I spend most of my time framing the large picture, hammering out bigger structural pieces that serve as the foundation of the story. What are the rules of the kingdom, and who enforces them? Who is the kingdom at war with, who do they trade with, what's the political 101. Then I work with (and largely let) the PCs to fill in all these interesting details, which make the story what it is.
So now we've got a member of the Royal family slinking around in the shadows, and the guards won't touch him. Sounds to me like that's a plan by the king's second son to kill off his father and brother and take the throne.
Did I plan on this? Nope. All I had was a guy escaping from incompetent guards as a bit of flavor text, and the PCs created a story of Royal shenanigans based off that. Then I took that and put an evil twist on it, and now the PCs are going to find the town in lock-down as the king tries to find the traitors who killed the crown prince and almost killed him. That's going to impact trade with the neighbors, and that's going to upset the local economy, and now pubs are running out of ale and people are getting angry at the king, and there's a black market springing up to get goods into the city and the PCs are getting caught up all of this crap.
All because they took some flavor text about incompetent guards and built their own story on it, and I had structural components in place already I could consider reacting based on what they were proposing.
Your experience largely mirrors my own. The one difference is that I was in a new place with new friends who had never played D&D when 4th came out, so I grabbed it and ran with it for a few years. It's a decent edition for teaching someone what D&D is if they've not grown up with it, due to how simple it is. It is definitely NOT a good D&D system. But it doesn't require players to be knowledgeable or good, nor the DM to be particularly skillful.
I swore off 5e, because of how bad 4e was. It just looked like they were adding more cars to the money train. It wasn't until I played 5e for an evening with some longtime gaming friends that I realized how damn good it really is. The catch is that I think you need a good DM to unlock all of the best parts of 5e because that flexibility requires a deft hand, and can get someone into trouble if they don't know what they're doing.
In addition to what people have noted about the visibility of the game in mass media, people like Vin Diesel, Dwane Johnson, Tim Duncan, and Curt Schilling are breaking the stereotype of who plays RPGs. They make it a lot harder to ridicule people playing the game, and a lot easier for people to consider poking their head into what they previously thought was solely the realm of nerddom.
And while I think a lot of people will consider this heresy, 4th and 5th edition (and pathfinder, to an extent) made it a lot easier for new people to get into the game. 4th with MMO balance and unkillable low level characters, and 5th in the hands of a good DM with the ability to just get out of the way and let people play.
The first few editions were hard, broken, and cumbersome. 3rd exploded with so many add-ons that nobody could keep track of all the prestige classes and new classes, and it allowed the creation of some amazingly overpowered characters. It just became a quagmire of shit, where the only way to have a functional game was to decide ahead of time what select add-ons the group would allow. That's just daunting for a new player.
I took a group of brand new players and got a 4th campaign up and running with no issues. It was not a hard learning curve. I didn't like it, but it was a hell of a lot more accessible than 3.5 was for them. I resisted 5th for a long time assuming it was just another money grab, but finally guested in a game with some of my old gaming friends, and was instantly taken with it. Brought that back and convinced my group to jump from 4th to 5th, and everyone both made the change with ease, and really, really appreciated how good this edition is. I shudder to think about trying to teach someone how to play 1st or 2nd edition at this point. They were really really bad. I have super fond memories, but man, I can't imagine how much better it would have been to start with a more modern version.
The economics are hard to wrap our heads around, for sure. I honestly don't know how they will work out. But one thing that seems missing is that people near the bottom of the poverty rung spend most of their money. Giving them more means they will just spend more. And the more they spend, the more goods and services they need, and the more jobs those things require.
The economy runs on monetary velocity, not absolute used. One dude buying a $1b island doesn't fire the economy like 500m people spending $2 on something. UBI means more people buying more stuff, and needing more people to provide that stuff. All that means more sales and income taxes, which helps fund UBI.
All the "UBI experiments" have been limited in funds and scope, and don't look at the broader economic impacts of people with more free cash to spend. We're not going to really have an answer of how well UBI works until it's fully implemented for the first time. That's a terrifying proposition, but one I really hope some country is brave enough to try in the near future. It's the answer to whether we get a star-trek no-scarcity future, or if we continue to fund the rich on the suffering of the poor.
Imagine if everyone had PV on their roofs to supply a net of 100% of their needs (including businesses). The power company would be left with utility lines to maintain, and they would have to buy power at night to provide power when the sun goes down (or pay for fuel if they own the plants).
What power company? If everyone has the ability to generate 100% of their energy needs, there is no need for a power company.
So where does that sequence break down? With EV charging, it's not practical to store enough power to charge your cars overnight, so the grid is still needed.
You are rather confused, aren't you? Either people have enough PV to supply 100% of their needs, or they don't. If they do, they don't need a power company. If they don't, they need one. At some point, it's quite possible that so few people need one that they stop existing.
Over the last 20 years my electricity bills have been going down, and not only am I not cutting anything out of my life, I keep moving into bigger and bigger places and I have more electronics. 10 years ago I was in a 900 sq ft apartment. Now I'm in a 2400 sq ft house. My electric bill is lower now than it was back then. The next furnace and AC I purchase will be far more efficient than the current ones. The next appliances I buy will be more efficient. Next TV, next computer, etc.
Currently, the average household energy expenditure in the US is about 900 kWh per month. I'm at half that, in a bigass house, with no real skimping on anything. Efficiency is half the battle when we're talking about going to renewables.
Teslas can come equipped with a 100 kWh battery, which gets you 330 miles. The average person in the US drives about 13,500 miles every year. That's 41 charge cycles, or 4100 kWh every year, which is 341 kWh every month. That plus my current electricity usage doesn't rise to the level of what the average household is currently using.
Lets say you have 2 electric cars, and my current electricity usage. That hits about 1200 kWh per month. Living in the upper midwest, it looks like I'd need a 13,140W solar system. Given a standard 320W panel, that's about 41 panels. Most homes top out at about 20 panels for rooftop solar, so that's going to require some creativity or a neighborhood solar park for the other half of the panels.
But we're close even with current technology! That I could run my house and two electric cars on twice the available roof-top solar is fucking crazy!
All it's going to take is another decade or two of solar PV innovations combined with more efficient everything, and I'm really not going to need to be tied to the grid. Nobody will really be. And I'm in the cold north, and not somewhere particularly good for solar! Everywhere south of here is going to get there far quicker.
Today it's not quite doable. But we are tantalizingly close to being able to be self-sufficient in terms of energy use.
It looks crazy because of four reasons:
1) You didn't grow up with it, and it's really unfamiliar to you.
2) More than likely, you've seen a bit of the middle, but not the fundamentals necessary to get there.
3) What you think is being taught is likely not what's being taught.
4) The teacher teaching it didn't grow up with it either, and may not be all that good at teaching it.
To the third point, where we learned one thing by rote learning, kids now are instead learning several methodological skills that accomplish the same thing, but which can later extend into higher order math. Rote learning doesn't provide that foundation. We look at them and say, "Why the hell are they making multiplication so fucking difficult?" In reality, they're not teaching multiplication, at least not the way we learned it. Entwined in what they're teaching are some linear algebra concepts and some matrix math.
Instead of doing rote memorization of times tables, they're teaching the process to multiply any numbers together. What's really confusing is that they're doing this at the point in school where we all just memorized the times tables up to maybe 12x12. If you don't understand that what they're teaching is fundamentally different than what you were taught, yeah, it looks crazy if you're expecting those kids to be memorizing what 8 * 6 is. That's not what they're doing.
"Why not just teach multiplication?" It's a valid question, but that presumes how we were taught multiplication is the best way. We really learned most of our math by brute forcing it all on rote memory. As that's our muscle memory, it seems to us that that's the easiest path forward. When we got to linear algebra and some of the higher order math, for a lot of us it was the same "new concepts, smash until understand" process that we learned in our earlier math classes. The idea with this new way of teaching math is to dispatch with all of that, and instead build in methods and processes from the beginning that can be leveraged in later math classes.
Fundamentally, it's pretty damn sound. Unfortunately, we're living in the first generation of a new way to do mathematics, and dealing with that sometimes rocky transition.
To the last point, I think that the next generation of math teachers will likely do a much better job teaching it, because they grew up with it. But it's a chicken and egg problem - kids can't learn a new way to do math if the teachers don't teach it, and the teachers can't teach it until they learn it. Unfortunately a whole lot of teachers haven't really learned it yet, in part because of the same cogitative dissonance we experience when looking at it. It's going to be a generation or two until math teachers are good at it, and unfortunately we're the ones that are suffering through it in the mean time.
Why do you show up in every EV article and bitch and whine about EVs because you you're dirt poor and live on a mountain in Canada and they won't work for you at the present time?
Seriously dude, get over yourself. If an EV doesn't fit your lifestyle stop bitching about them and get on with life.