Funny how long ago that seems. Usually I don't think much about the old, literate trolls, but recently I've been thinking about them more and more. Crazy how much effort used to go into trolling - some put hours and hours into serious works of art. Knowledgeable writing, coherent thoughts, all seeking to draw you in.
Only half-way or three-quarters of the way through some giant post you'd find out that it was some fuckwit, and then you'd need to respond. Funny how good some of them were. For me, I miss the hilarity of watching people miss trolls, sometimes pointing it out and sometimes not.
Now it's just spam. Often stupid, repeated crap, with no real thought or effort put into it. Over time we've lost the trolling arts, and that's really a little depressing. Bring back the artsy-trolls, I say!
I'm pretty serious - I've got about 0 loyalty to an employer, because almost none of them have any loyalty to me. If the working conditions are good I'll happily work, but once it gets shitty I'm out. I'm a bit underpaid right now, but I'm here because everything else is pretty darn good. I'd like more pay but I don't need more pay - I'm getting enough that I'm doing quite well as it is. And I'm not willing to trade more money for the shitty work life you're describing.
If more people would ask about the working expectations in their interviews and explain what is and isn't acceptable to them, we'd have far fewer bosses like these in the world. Once I raised my standards and made them clear in interviews, my job options got much, much better.
It's not logical to point at something and say, "This is arbitrarily too expensive" while ignoring all of the other luxury purchases and waste that you're undertaking. Doubly so if the thing that's arbitrarily too expensive can actually save you money on the other things to more than offset its cost. Two big starbucks coffees every day will probably run you north of $2000 per year. But because it's $5 at a time, that rounds down to $0 for a lot of people. It's intellectually dishonest to not compare a phone and a coffee in the same units, if you're making an argument that one is an extravagant expense while the other, similar priced thing is not.
Most people don't sum up how much money they waste on shit like overpriced coffee. (Well, this guy apparently did...) They do have a vague idea how much they spend on it every day, or they can sum it up in their head pretty quickly. My point here was that if you're going to round down a $5 coffee every day to a $0 yearly expense, you need to be prepared to do that with a phone that costs the same amount.
I love my phone, but it's definitely not crucial in this day and age. I could get along without it. One guy I know in his late 20s was still rocking a semi-broken flip-phone the last time I saw him this past summer. It couldn't receive texts, but it could send them. He just left flyover country for a pretty good paying Silicon Valley job, so that may have changed, but for the past decade he did just fine, as does a very large percentage of the population now.
The author obviously hasn't met any poor people, or lived out in the country. He might as well have said, "Having off-street parking is crucial in this day and age..."
Personally? No. I'd rather spend that on my phone.:-) I'm in the $1-$2 brew-your-own camp, which gets me 3-6 mugs of very good coffee. But I walk past 3-4 coffee shops every day, and the lines are sometimes literally out the door. The cheapest you can get for a coffee in most of those places is in the low $2 range. Two of those and you're pretty much at that $5 mark. A quick google shows Starbucks has plenty of drinks in the $3-$6 range, with some coming in even higher.
Lots of people do indeed spend that much or more on coffee every day.
Well, the other reason is that $1000 seems like a lot, but it's really not. Lets suppose that you use your phone for 2 years before you get a new one. The hardware is going to cost you $1.40/day, whereas you're probably paying $2-$3/day for service, and $5-$10 per day for coffee.
For something one uses every day, an item which serves as a watch, alarm clock, entertainment hub, GPS, communication hub, camera, calculator, news source, weather report, traffic report, fitness tracker, journal, to-do list, etc., etc., etc. is well worth $1.40 every day. That's not say that one costing under $1/day can't do all those things just as well, but trying to save $0.50 per day can be done pretty easily a number of other ways. If an extra $0.50/day is a deal-breaker, you're going to save far more just switching to a pre-paid service than you will buying a cheaper phone.
The daily cost of owning a phone pales in the face of how much it can do, and how much time and energy it can save. Avoiding traffic jams and accidents, finding out if somewhere is open before driving there, keeping a list of groceries handy so you don't over-buy "just in case", etc., etc. I bet the grocery list alone pays for itself for me - it's just too easy to throw $20 worth of crap into the cart that I don't need.
$1000 seems like a lot, but if you told me 15 years ago I could have a mobile computer the size of my hand around at all times, connected to the internet, playing videos, games, taking high quality photos, and providing sat-nav, I'd have happily canceled my $1000+ computer building plans and jumped on that offer.
If you re-phrase this, "Why would anyone want to spend $1000 on a computer?", I bet we all could come up with really good reasons. Even if it changes to, "Why would anyone want to spend $1000 on ANOTHER computer?", I bet we all could still come up with some good reasons. These aren't flip-phones we're talking about here. Integrated computer and monitor which replace a solid dozen previous tools and items. Why is that not worth spending $1000 on? I think we've collectively forgotten how utterly amazing technology has gotten.
OTOH if there is no computer system, and you and ONLY YOU are personally responsible for tracking your and that other ship's position and course to make sure you don't collide, then you're going to have 100% of your attention devoted to that task.
Did you miss the part about 100 hour work-weeks? If you're relying on people to be very sharp for a job, that's not how you accomplish that. I very much doubt that most people can focus 100% attention for half that much time, and probably even less than that.
Attention is a commodity with finite resource. Brains need to rest. I'd bet that this factor alone was a major cause of these incidents. If they do what you're suggesting and don't significantly adjust the workload, that's just adding fuel to the fire. Asking people to do a more cognitively difficult task when they're overworked, stressed, and sleep-deprived definitely isn't a solution.
I know, right? Who doesn't cut and paste the master code into the IDE and then start deleting and renaming parts of it, and moving stuff around? Far easier than this thinking and planning stuff.
Well said. I have a credit union with an extremely friendly debit card fraud process, which returns disputed money immediately. Our debit card is tied to an automatically funded "monthly expenses" account, which limits exposure to the rest of our money. From a budgetary standpoint, this is far superior to just running up a credit card bill every month. It's easy to keep an eye on a balance working it's way down towards 0, far harder to keep an eye on a balance working up to the abstract limit you set for the month. Big ticket items get their own budget, and get paid for on the credit cards.
Like you, I've got stores that give a discount for cash or debit, and one store that is only cash or debit, building that discount into their entire store. Hard to turn that down!
Get a better financial institution? My Credit Union immediately loans me any disputed amount on my debit card. If it's determined that it's fraudulent, the money stays in my account. If it turns out that I was wrong, I have to give it back. That makes using a debit card far less risky. Tied to a "monthly expenses" account, which we automatically fund the first of every month, we've got a limited amount of funds exposed at any time, with the assurances of credit-card like fraud disputes. From a budgetary standpoint, I find this far easier than using a credit card.
Fear politics, fake victims, and a media willing to blow everything out of proportion for the sake of fearful eyeballs. Fear politics on both sides - Obama's going to take your guns, the Republicans are destroying the middle class, murdering immigrants are going to take your jobs, climate change is going to kill us all, killer storms, terrorists, crumbling infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.
To varying degrees, all of these things have grains of truth to them. But what we lack is a press that has the balls to actually quantify how true these things are, and how impactful they will be to the average person. We've actually got the opposite - a willingness by the media to blow these things out of proportion, or minimize them depending on which agenda they are supporting. And even when they are fairly neutral, the media can't help but put on a show to try to get more eyeballs, distracting from the actual factual issues.
With no way for the average citizen to understand how important or true any of these things are, politicians can make any claims about them that they want to. And "their" media will likely support those claims. Can a reasonably intelligent person dig down into these things and come to the general truth? Maybe. If they have the time, training, understanding of implicit bias, ability to question their own beliefs, etc. Which means that not a lot of people can and do get to a greater truth about the world. Instead they latch on to what resonates with them and they parrot it back. It's echo chambers all the way down now, because there is no money in rational truths.
Well, smoking some weed and making brownies is far different than getting high on PCP and attacking people with a sword. To make this not an essay, I did take a shortcut. Not all drugs are benign - some are pretty fucking horrible. I guess I should have taken a moment to say, "weed is ok, but bath salts and black tar heroin are bad".
We even have trouble teaching everybody to read and write.
Thank you for succinctly summarizing why this is different than all of the other major technological revolutions. We're quickly moving from jobs that require warm bodies to ones that require high level thinking skills. Not everybody can make that transition. Most everyone can do a passable job at basic menial tasks. They can pick crops, shovel dirt, do assembly work, mine, haul things around, clean, organize, sort, etc. A far slimmer portion of the population can become experts at something which requires abstract knowledge. Far fewer can understand complex systems and debug them. Not many can be analysts of any sort, automators, process designers, etc.
If we can't teach you to read, what task can you do that a robot can't do better?
I completely agree, and this argument was what swayed me away from UBI as a potential solution. "Poor but stable and bored" is a terrible place for a large segment of the population to be. While some will use that stability to try to improve themselves, a good deal will go looking for entertainment and diversion, ranging from playing video games to gambling, to petty crime, drug use and other unsavory activities.
People are happy whey they are valued, and giving them money to shut up and go away doesn't give them value. While a former fan, I now see UBI as a major problem in this area. I think instead we're going to need a couple levels of make-work programs, where extra skills/hard work can get you extra pay, and the lowest level is at least subsistence level. We're going to have to specifically shun automation and robots and pay people to do menial jobs, because there aren't going to be jobs for them otherwise. And unless we radically overhaul our culture, jobs are going to continue to be how we assign value to people.
A second flaw in his argument is that in the past, we've automated things that required low IQ labor and simple, repetitive tasks, while creating new jobs that required those same (lack-of) skill-sets. We're now at the point in time where any conceivable new job sector which might involve humans doing repetitive tasks will start with robots, not humans. Any conceivable new job sector that involves a lot of busy work and simple decision making will start with machine learning in place, not humans.
If everyone was IQ 130+, we might be OK. But they're not. There are a lot of people of moderate intelligence with some skills that are actively being replaced by automation. And any replacement job we could think up for them will start with automation, because it's cheaper to build that system in the first place than retrofit it on a human-driven process.
When robots and machine learning can do any job you're qualified to do better and faster, what do you do? It's not like blacksmiths who could transition to machine shop and garage workers in a generation or two. It's not like agriculture workers who could transition to assembly line work in a generation or two. When any conceivable job you could ever do can be done better by a robot, what do you do?
Yeah, anytime an organization says, "Not enough employees", they leave off, "at the low wages and in the circumstances we're dictating". Want more employees? Up the pay and train them. Stop making them work in really shitty conditions. The US has plenty of people not working or in dead end jobs wanting more. Invest in them instead of investing in India.
I'm super curious about this, because I can't wrap my mind around how it's even possible. He worked for McDonald's. Corporate. And then founded his own business.
By 1976, Chuck was serving as a director of product development for the entire corporation......When two planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001, he was 57 and running his own McDonald’s franchise in Columbia, Pennsylvania......Chuck retired from McDonald’s in 2002.....In 2007 she moved in with him, and they started their own company, Carolina Adventure Tours.
So 15+ years working corporate for McDonald's, franchise owner, retired after 40 years with McDonald's, started a new business, and then only had $250k in savings? What happened to all his money? McDonald's corporate doesn't have a good 401k or pension? How can you possibly be director of product development for McDonald's for 15+ years and not have serious money in the bank? How can you own a franchise and not retire with a giant pile of cash? Was his new business just a black hole for all his money? But even then, how could he not have a solid retirement income lined up? Did he liquidate all that for his business? Did he blow it all on his house?
He moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and bought a two-bedroom cottage with a hot tub on the 10th green of a golf course in a gated community.
Looking at homes there, right now most are under $250k. A handful are between $500k and $1m, and only a few are over $1m. Even if he bought one of the most expensive ones, how could he not afford that after 15 years in McDonald's corporate? How could he not afford that after owning a McDonald's franchise? I can't wrap my mind around this.
I jumped to a Dell Precision running Ubuntu from my 2012 MBP and I'm pretty happy with it. It's got some quirks, but so far nothing as bad as some of the idiocy that OSX was tormenting me with. (If I wasn't signed into iCloud, e.g., it would randomly pop up a notice every few hours telling me it couldn't connect, even though I had no services using iCloud and everything possible to disable related to it disabled.) I got ballpark twice the hardware of a similar priced MBP, along with an actual nVidia video card, which I do appreciate.
Won't necessarily work for everyone, but I'm finding it a fine replacement for the old MBP line which seems to have died out shortly after 2010.
Sadly, that's bullshit, in more than one way. Do you really understand how much money Gates and those like him have? The number of people who have been lucky enough to be able to repeatedly compound on successes without major setbacks to the extent of Gates can be counted in the single digits. If we extend that more broadly, the top 400 wealthiest families in the US have more net worth than the sum of 50% of the population. For 99.999% of the population, you just can't compound your way to that sort of wealth. (And mathematically, that's actually too low.) At best, with no setbacks, you might make it in the top half of the middle class. At best.
The problem for most people, and I will lump myself in here, is that getting rich, if you're not already rich, involves massive sacrifice and/or massive risk.
I'm solidly upper-middle class, but to get rich I'd have to take a gamble which could very realistically knock me out of this comfortable life. I'd have to give up my leisure time and expensive hobbies/habits because I'd need to be busting my ass.
I'm sure some people will say, "Then you don't have what it takes to get rich.", but that ignores the survivorship bias and all the people who took a risk and failed. I fully understand that the best path to being really rich is to start my own business. I also recognize that it would mean taking substantial financial risk, being unable to support my family for some period of time, and that the first couple of businesses someone starts generally tend to fail. I recognize that I'll have to learn to fail early and fail often. The big question is whether or not that's sustainable for long enough for me to find success. If it's not, then I've wasted all my savings, several years of solidly good income, and delayed retirement by even more for absolutely nothing.
And that's best-worst-case. I could also have gone so far into debt that I simply can never retire. I could be sued by a business partner and need to have my wages garnished when I go back to middle-class work. I could have worked myself into a heart attack or a stroke. Skipped health insurance because it was too costly and had an accident or illness.
If you start rich, like Gates did, you don't have to worry about that risk. For most people, that's not their lot in life, and it makes it really, really hard to chase real wealth. You can chase general financial security with far less risk, and for most people, that's the most logical thing to do.
As an example how this is useful, back when I was in college we had an old Vax network with green terminals. Being a cleaver asshole, I wrote a login screen emulator, which ran from my logged-in account. It captured the login and password, popped up an "incorrect password" notice, and then logged me out, terminating the login emulator. The victim would have a slighter longer than normal delay as they got dumped back to the login prompt, but the network was dodgy enough that it wasn't totally out of the ordinary.
Not many knew how to break a program that was running on the screen, so it wasn't likely that someone would be able to close the fake login program and be sitting there in my logged in account. If you had to execute something like CTRL+ALT+DEL to log in, that prank totally wouldn't have worked. Not saying I couldn't have found a way to do it, but it would have been much, much harder. With most terminals sitting at a login screen, it was pretty trivial to emulate that login with minimal risk of being noticed.
And for the record, I used this to make nefarious edits to people's finger data, subtly most of the time. Back in the stone age before social networks, we figured out who was on campus by fingering them. Had a whole ecosystem of profiles stored in there, from humorous to tragic. Most of the same drama as the current social networks, just plaintext and requiring terminal commands to access. I'd go in and do things like put subtle references to goats throughout someone's profile, or slip in things about "my son is also.." to make it seem like mom wrote it. Good times, good times.
Got family there, and they went out of communication around 4am. Pictures coming out from their city show some massive destruction, which looks pretty widespread across the island. It's going to take a long time for them to recover from this.
San Juan still didn't have power in parts due to Irma when this one hit. I wonder how long it's going to take to restore power after this. Months, at least.
I doubt that there's a solution for this problem other than plugging buses directly into nuclear power plants or some shit like that. Pretty sure we don't have the technology to accommodate large power draws at this point in history. I mean, they might need to wire up more than a 120V drop to get the job done! That's crazy talk! No way we could run power lines that could handle that. We'll have to stick with petroleum which requires no infrastructure to support it.
You don't need 400miles of range off a single fillup, you just need enough to get home where the majority of EV charging takes place.
Yeah, but how could you possibly know how much charge it will take to get you home? What if you get stuck in a traffic jam and run out of juice!/s>
It really is incredible how the EV discussion is going. It's "the god of the gaps" all over again. Every hole that gets plugged regarding how EVs won't work someone does some mental gymnastics to envision a new, more niche scenario where EVs wouldn't be as practicable as ICEs.
There are two reasons I currently don't have an EV: 1) I'm paying down the mortgage by driving a 13 year old Toyota, with probably another 100k of life left in it, easily. 2) I live in a condo with underground parking, and I'd need to get association permission to hire an electrician to wire a drop from my meter across the ceiling and down to my parking spot. Even with #2 I'm considering an EV sometime soon, because I think I can get away with free charging during work hours and not charging at home.
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Funny how long ago that seems. Usually I don't think much about the old, literate trolls, but recently I've been thinking about them more and more. Crazy how much effort used to go into trolling - some put hours and hours into serious works of art. Knowledgeable writing, coherent thoughts, all seeking to draw you in.
Only half-way or three-quarters of the way through some giant post you'd find out that it was some fuckwit, and then you'd need to respond. Funny how good some of them were. For me, I miss the hilarity of watching people miss trolls, sometimes pointing it out and sometimes not.
Now it's just spam. Often stupid, repeated crap, with no real thought or effort put into it. Over time we've lost the trolling arts, and that's really a little depressing. Bring back the artsy-trolls, I say!
So why do you work there?
I'm pretty serious - I've got about 0 loyalty to an employer, because almost none of them have any loyalty to me. If the working conditions are good I'll happily work, but once it gets shitty I'm out. I'm a bit underpaid right now, but I'm here because everything else is pretty darn good. I'd like more pay but I don't need more pay - I'm getting enough that I'm doing quite well as it is. And I'm not willing to trade more money for the shitty work life you're describing.
If more people would ask about the working expectations in their interviews and explain what is and isn't acceptable to them, we'd have far fewer bosses like these in the world. Once I raised my standards and made them clear in interviews, my job options got much, much better.
If you hold it right you can get the point too.
It's not logical to point at something and say, "This is arbitrarily too expensive" while ignoring all of the other luxury purchases and waste that you're undertaking. Doubly so if the thing that's arbitrarily too expensive can actually save you money on the other things to more than offset its cost. Two big starbucks coffees every day will probably run you north of $2000 per year. But because it's $5 at a time, that rounds down to $0 for a lot of people. It's intellectually dishonest to not compare a phone and a coffee in the same units, if you're making an argument that one is an extravagant expense while the other, similar priced thing is not.
Most people don't sum up how much money they waste on shit like overpriced coffee. (Well, this guy apparently did...) They do have a vague idea how much they spend on it every day, or they can sum it up in their head pretty quickly. My point here was that if you're going to round down a $5 coffee every day to a $0 yearly expense, you need to be prepared to do that with a phone that costs the same amount.
I love my phone, but it's definitely not crucial in this day and age. I could get along without it. One guy I know in his late 20s was still rocking a semi-broken flip-phone the last time I saw him this past summer. It couldn't receive texts, but it could send them. He just left flyover country for a pretty good paying Silicon Valley job, so that may have changed, but for the past decade he did just fine, as does a very large percentage of the population now.
The author obviously hasn't met any poor people, or lived out in the country. He might as well have said, "Having off-street parking is crucial in this day and age..."
Personally? No. I'd rather spend that on my phone. :-) I'm in the $1-$2 brew-your-own camp, which gets me 3-6 mugs of very good coffee. But I walk past 3-4 coffee shops every day, and the lines are sometimes literally out the door. The cheapest you can get for a coffee in most of those places is in the low $2 range. Two of those and you're pretty much at that $5 mark. A quick google shows Starbucks has plenty of drinks in the $3-$6 range, with some coming in even higher.
Lots of people do indeed spend that much or more on coffee every day.
Well, the other reason is that $1000 seems like a lot, but it's really not. Lets suppose that you use your phone for 2 years before you get a new one. The hardware is going to cost you $1.40/day, whereas you're probably paying $2-$3/day for service, and $5-$10 per day for coffee.
For something one uses every day, an item which serves as a watch, alarm clock, entertainment hub, GPS, communication hub, camera, calculator, news source, weather report, traffic report, fitness tracker, journal, to-do list, etc., etc., etc. is well worth $1.40 every day. That's not say that one costing under $1/day can't do all those things just as well, but trying to save $0.50 per day can be done pretty easily a number of other ways. If an extra $0.50/day is a deal-breaker, you're going to save far more just switching to a pre-paid service than you will buying a cheaper phone.
The daily cost of owning a phone pales in the face of how much it can do, and how much time and energy it can save. Avoiding traffic jams and accidents, finding out if somewhere is open before driving there, keeping a list of groceries handy so you don't over-buy "just in case", etc., etc. I bet the grocery list alone pays for itself for me - it's just too easy to throw $20 worth of crap into the cart that I don't need.
$1000 seems like a lot, but if you told me 15 years ago I could have a mobile computer the size of my hand around at all times, connected to the internet, playing videos, games, taking high quality photos, and providing sat-nav, I'd have happily canceled my $1000+ computer building plans and jumped on that offer.
If you re-phrase this, "Why would anyone want to spend $1000 on a computer?", I bet we all could come up with really good reasons. Even if it changes to, "Why would anyone want to spend $1000 on ANOTHER computer?", I bet we all could still come up with some good reasons. These aren't flip-phones we're talking about here. Integrated computer and monitor which replace a solid dozen previous tools and items. Why is that not worth spending $1000 on? I think we've collectively forgotten how utterly amazing technology has gotten.
OTOH if there is no computer system, and you and ONLY YOU are personally responsible for tracking your and that other ship's position and course to make sure you don't collide, then you're going to have 100% of your attention devoted to that task.
Did you miss the part about 100 hour work-weeks? If you're relying on people to be very sharp for a job, that's not how you accomplish that. I very much doubt that most people can focus 100% attention for half that much time, and probably even less than that.
Attention is a commodity with finite resource. Brains need to rest. I'd bet that this factor alone was a major cause of these incidents. If they do what you're suggesting and don't significantly adjust the workload, that's just adding fuel to the fire. Asking people to do a more cognitively difficult task when they're overworked, stressed, and sleep-deprived definitely isn't a solution.
I know, right? Who doesn't cut and paste the master code into the IDE and then start deleting and renaming parts of it, and moving stuff around? Far easier than this thinking and planning stuff.
Well said. I have a credit union with an extremely friendly debit card fraud process, which returns disputed money immediately. Our debit card is tied to an automatically funded "monthly expenses" account, which limits exposure to the rest of our money. From a budgetary standpoint, this is far superior to just running up a credit card bill every month. It's easy to keep an eye on a balance working it's way down towards 0, far harder to keep an eye on a balance working up to the abstract limit you set for the month. Big ticket items get their own budget, and get paid for on the credit cards.
Like you, I've got stores that give a discount for cash or debit, and one store that is only cash or debit, building that discount into their entire store. Hard to turn that down!
Get a better financial institution? My Credit Union immediately loans me any disputed amount on my debit card. If it's determined that it's fraudulent, the money stays in my account. If it turns out that I was wrong, I have to give it back. That makes using a debit card far less risky. Tied to a "monthly expenses" account, which we automatically fund the first of every month, we've got a limited amount of funds exposed at any time, with the assurances of credit-card like fraud disputes. From a budgetary standpoint, I find this far easier than using a credit card.
Fear politics, fake victims, and a media willing to blow everything out of proportion for the sake of fearful eyeballs. Fear politics on both sides - Obama's going to take your guns, the Republicans are destroying the middle class, murdering immigrants are going to take your jobs, climate change is going to kill us all, killer storms, terrorists, crumbling infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.
To varying degrees, all of these things have grains of truth to them. But what we lack is a press that has the balls to actually quantify how true these things are, and how impactful they will be to the average person. We've actually got the opposite - a willingness by the media to blow these things out of proportion, or minimize them depending on which agenda they are supporting. And even when they are fairly neutral, the media can't help but put on a show to try to get more eyeballs, distracting from the actual factual issues.
With no way for the average citizen to understand how important or true any of these things are, politicians can make any claims about them that they want to. And "their" media will likely support those claims. Can a reasonably intelligent person dig down into these things and come to the general truth? Maybe. If they have the time, training, understanding of implicit bias, ability to question their own beliefs, etc. Which means that not a lot of people can and do get to a greater truth about the world. Instead they latch on to what resonates with them and they parrot it back. It's echo chambers all the way down now, because there is no money in rational truths.
Well, smoking some weed and making brownies is far different than getting high on PCP and attacking people with a sword. To make this not an essay, I did take a shortcut. Not all drugs are benign - some are pretty fucking horrible. I guess I should have taken a moment to say, "weed is ok, but bath salts and black tar heroin are bad".
We even have trouble teaching everybody to read and write.
Thank you for succinctly summarizing why this is different than all of the other major technological revolutions. We're quickly moving from jobs that require warm bodies to ones that require high level thinking skills. Not everybody can make that transition. Most everyone can do a passable job at basic menial tasks. They can pick crops, shovel dirt, do assembly work, mine, haul things around, clean, organize, sort, etc. A far slimmer portion of the population can become experts at something which requires abstract knowledge. Far fewer can understand complex systems and debug them. Not many can be analysts of any sort, automators, process designers, etc.
If we can't teach you to read, what task can you do that a robot can't do better?
I completely agree, and this argument was what swayed me away from UBI as a potential solution. "Poor but stable and bored" is a terrible place for a large segment of the population to be. While some will use that stability to try to improve themselves, a good deal will go looking for entertainment and diversion, ranging from playing video games to gambling, to petty crime, drug use and other unsavory activities.
People are happy whey they are valued, and giving them money to shut up and go away doesn't give them value. While a former fan, I now see UBI as a major problem in this area. I think instead we're going to need a couple levels of make-work programs, where extra skills/hard work can get you extra pay, and the lowest level is at least subsistence level. We're going to have to specifically shun automation and robots and pay people to do menial jobs, because there aren't going to be jobs for them otherwise. And unless we radically overhaul our culture, jobs are going to continue to be how we assign value to people.
A second flaw in his argument is that in the past, we've automated things that required low IQ labor and simple, repetitive tasks, while creating new jobs that required those same (lack-of) skill-sets. We're now at the point in time where any conceivable new job sector which might involve humans doing repetitive tasks will start with robots, not humans. Any conceivable new job sector that involves a lot of busy work and simple decision making will start with machine learning in place, not humans.
If everyone was IQ 130+, we might be OK. But they're not. There are a lot of people of moderate intelligence with some skills that are actively being replaced by automation. And any replacement job we could think up for them will start with automation, because it's cheaper to build that system in the first place than retrofit it on a human-driven process.
When robots and machine learning can do any job you're qualified to do better and faster, what do you do? It's not like blacksmiths who could transition to machine shop and garage workers in a generation or two. It's not like agriculture workers who could transition to assembly line work in a generation or two. When any conceivable job you could ever do can be done better by a robot, what do you do?
Yeah, anytime an organization says, "Not enough employees", they leave off, "at the low wages and in the circumstances we're dictating". Want more employees? Up the pay and train them. Stop making them work in really shitty conditions. The US has plenty of people not working or in dead end jobs wanting more. Invest in them instead of investing in India.
I'm super curious about this, because I can't wrap my mind around how it's even possible. He worked for McDonald's. Corporate. And then founded his own business.
By 1976, Chuck was serving as a director of product development for the entire corporation......When two planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001, he was 57 and running his own McDonald’s franchise in Columbia, Pennsylvania......Chuck retired from McDonald’s in 2002.....In 2007 she moved in with him, and they started their own company, Carolina Adventure Tours.
So 15+ years working corporate for McDonald's, franchise owner, retired after 40 years with McDonald's, started a new business, and then only had $250k in savings? What happened to all his money? McDonald's corporate doesn't have a good 401k or pension? How can you possibly be director of product development for McDonald's for 15+ years and not have serious money in the bank? How can you own a franchise and not retire with a giant pile of cash? Was his new business just a black hole for all his money? But even then, how could he not have a solid retirement income lined up? Did he liquidate all that for his business? Did he blow it all on his house?
He moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and bought a two-bedroom cottage with a hot tub on the 10th green of a golf course in a gated community.
Looking at homes there, right now most are under $250k. A handful are between $500k and $1m, and only a few are over $1m. Even if he bought one of the most expensive ones, how could he not afford that after 15 years in McDonald's corporate? How could he not afford that after owning a McDonald's franchise? I can't wrap my mind around this.
Oh - I forgot to mention: my Dell came with ports.
I jumped to a Dell Precision running Ubuntu from my 2012 MBP and I'm pretty happy with it. It's got some quirks, but so far nothing as bad as some of the idiocy that OSX was tormenting me with. (If I wasn't signed into iCloud, e.g., it would randomly pop up a notice every few hours telling me it couldn't connect, even though I had no services using iCloud and everything possible to disable related to it disabled.) I got ballpark twice the hardware of a similar priced MBP, along with an actual nVidia video card, which I do appreciate.
Won't necessarily work for everyone, but I'm finding it a fine replacement for the old MBP line which seems to have died out shortly after 2010.
Sadly, that's bullshit, in more than one way. Do you really understand how much money Gates and those like him have? The number of people who have been lucky enough to be able to repeatedly compound on successes without major setbacks to the extent of Gates can be counted in the single digits. If we extend that more broadly, the top 400 wealthiest families in the US have more net worth than the sum of 50% of the population. For 99.999% of the population, you just can't compound your way to that sort of wealth. (And mathematically, that's actually too low.) At best, with no setbacks, you might make it in the top half of the middle class. At best.
The problem for most people, and I will lump myself in here, is that getting rich, if you're not already rich, involves massive sacrifice and/or massive risk.
I'm solidly upper-middle class, but to get rich I'd have to take a gamble which could very realistically knock me out of this comfortable life. I'd have to give up my leisure time and expensive hobbies/habits because I'd need to be busting my ass.
I'm sure some people will say, "Then you don't have what it takes to get rich.", but that ignores the survivorship bias and all the people who took a risk and failed. I fully understand that the best path to being really rich is to start my own business. I also recognize that it would mean taking substantial financial risk, being unable to support my family for some period of time, and that the first couple of businesses someone starts generally tend to fail. I recognize that I'll have to learn to fail early and fail often. The big question is whether or not that's sustainable for long enough for me to find success. If it's not, then I've wasted all my savings, several years of solidly good income, and delayed retirement by even more for absolutely nothing.
And that's best-worst-case. I could also have gone so far into debt that I simply can never retire. I could be sued by a business partner and need to have my wages garnished when I go back to middle-class work. I could have worked myself into a heart attack or a stroke. Skipped health insurance because it was too costly and had an accident or illness.
If you start rich, like Gates did, you don't have to worry about that risk. For most people, that's not their lot in life, and it makes it really, really hard to chase real wealth. You can chase general financial security with far less risk, and for most people, that's the most logical thing to do.
As an example how this is useful, back when I was in college we had an old Vax network with green terminals. Being a cleaver asshole, I wrote a login screen emulator, which ran from my logged-in account. It captured the login and password, popped up an "incorrect password" notice, and then logged me out, terminating the login emulator. The victim would have a slighter longer than normal delay as they got dumped back to the login prompt, but the network was dodgy enough that it wasn't totally out of the ordinary.
Not many knew how to break a program that was running on the screen, so it wasn't likely that someone would be able to close the fake login program and be sitting there in my logged in account. If you had to execute something like CTRL+ALT+DEL to log in, that prank totally wouldn't have worked. Not saying I couldn't have found a way to do it, but it would have been much, much harder. With most terminals sitting at a login screen, it was pretty trivial to emulate that login with minimal risk of being noticed.
And for the record, I used this to make nefarious edits to people's finger data, subtly most of the time. Back in the stone age before social networks, we figured out who was on campus by fingering them. Had a whole ecosystem of profiles stored in there, from humorous to tragic. Most of the same drama as the current social networks, just plaintext and requiring terminal commands to access. I'd go in and do things like put subtle references to goats throughout someone's profile, or slip in things about "my son is also.." to make it seem like mom wrote it. Good times, good times.
Got family there, and they went out of communication around 4am. Pictures coming out from their city show some massive destruction, which looks pretty widespread across the island. It's going to take a long time for them to recover from this.
San Juan still didn't have power in parts due to Irma when this one hit. I wonder how long it's going to take to restore power after this. Months, at least.
I doubt that there's a solution for this problem other than plugging buses directly into nuclear power plants or some shit like that. Pretty sure we don't have the technology to accommodate large power draws at this point in history. I mean, they might need to wire up more than a 120V drop to get the job done! That's crazy talk! No way we could run power lines that could handle that. We'll have to stick with petroleum which requires no infrastructure to support it.
You don't need 400miles of range off a single fillup, you just need enough to get home where the majority of EV charging takes place.
Yeah, but how could you possibly know how much charge it will take to get you home? What if you get stuck in a traffic jam and run out of juice! /s>
It really is incredible how the EV discussion is going. It's "the god of the gaps" all over again. Every hole that gets plugged regarding how EVs won't work someone does some mental gymnastics to envision a new, more niche scenario where EVs wouldn't be as practicable as ICEs.
There are two reasons I currently don't have an EV: 1) I'm paying down the mortgage by driving a 13 year old Toyota, with probably another 100k of life left in it, easily. 2) I live in a condo with underground parking, and I'd need to get association permission to hire an electrician to wire a drop from my meter across the ceiling and down to my parking spot. Even with #2 I'm considering an EV sometime soon, because I think I can get away with free charging during work hours and not charging at home.