Re:Cheap labor versus automation
on
How LEDs Are Made
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
--American unions are changing their priorities. Appliance Park's union was so fractious in the '70s and '80s that the place was known as "Strike City." That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005--and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be.
--U.S. labor productivity has continued its long march upward, meaning that labor costs have become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost of finished goods. You simply can't save much money chasing wages anymore.
Your article glides over this very quickly, but it's worth discussing further. Management has essentially halted the growth of wages for decades and this has allowed all the productivity gains to accrue to business profits. The knock on effects have ripped through the economy, from skewed stock valuations to screwed workers' debt loads.
Given the choice, I think I'd rather be shot to death, than bludgeoned to death. The suffering is likely to end much, much sooner.
Contrary to popular belief, most gunshot victims will survive, thanks to trauma units and medevac flights. But... they might end up permanently paralyzed, crippled, or brain damaged.
/And the people most likely to get shot are the least likely afford the kind of extensive rehab necessary to regain function.
Analysis of an actual experiment found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before there is any conscious observation of the measurement
Haven't scientists been making progress with weak measurements of quantum states? This comes to mind
If we can create a reliable "weak" geiger counter, would that allow the particle to remain superposed?
Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'. Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out. Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., [...]
You forget that when Google launched their IPO they told everyone that Google would be spending money on stuff outside their core services, that it wasn't necessarily going to be profitable, and to deal with it if you want Google stocks.
There aren't many publicly traded companies who can basically say "I do what I want and you agreed to it." Not that it matters, since the stocks are structured so that the founders always retain voting control.
You might be right, that this is Google trying to "branch out," but it could also just be Google doing what it feels like doing and damn the costs.
And like par2, it's going to require a healthy amount of processing from your CPU
The trends to higher-performance multicore processors and parallel operations everywhere in the network and on mobile devices lends itself to an encoding scheme utilizing linear algebra and matrix equations that might not have been possible in the past.
Notice they talk about multicore processors and not some hardware decoding embedded in the networking chip. From their published paper
Abstract-- Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) provides a theoretically efficient method for coding. The drawbacks associ- ated with it are the complexity of the decoding and the overhead resulting from the encoding vector. Increasing the field size and generation size presents a fundamental trade-off between packet- based throughput and operational overhead. On the one hand, decreasing the probability of transmitting redundant packets is beneficial for throughput and, consequently, reduces transmission energy. On the other hand, the decoding complexity and amount of header overhead increase with field size and generation length, leading to higher energy consumption. Therefore, the optimal trade-off is system and topology dependent, as it depends on the cost in energy of performing coding operations versus transmitting data. We show that moderate field sizes are the correct choice when trade-offs are considered. The results show that sparse binary codes perform the best, unless the generation size is very low.
Processing power is going to be an issue in mobile devices which have the most to gain from this innovation.
Its pretty easy to tell the difference between someone selling information to a foreign government in secret, and divulging it to the public publicly.
Snowden gave the NSA documents to well known American journalists. Now imagine if he gave it (under the same terms/conditions) to journalists at Russia Today (a state sponsored newspaper) or Xinhua News Agency (China's state newspaper).
Also, you are an anti-vaxxer by choice, but a mutant by birth.
For many people, being unvaccinated is kind of like religion: it's a choice their parents made for them and there's no real motivation to do something different.
>quote>I don't know that the difference is as epistemologically different as you make out.
Reproducibility and falsifiability. Just because I don't go around reproducing every bit of science that I "believe" is true, that doesn't suddenly make my acceptance of its truth = religious beliefs.
Users that want to can install Chromium themselves, of course, and in fact Google even provides instructions on how to do it, as well as all of the source code.
There's a large gulf between "can," and "do." Of the millions of users, most do not. This is why it's relevant that Google would never bundle Chromium with anything.
And you also slyly ignored the fact that the just-announced news doesn't affect Android or Chromebook, only Windows.
I didn't slyly ignore that at all. I was rather explicit in prognosticating that "more and more "platforms"" will get fenced off.
Wait, this search engine located at youtube.com - is that not primarly used for pirating music and videos? At least that is what I use it for, almost to 99%. And youtube.com is a service run by Google.
Google gives copyright holders the option to collect any advertising revenue from infringing content. Torrentz.eu... not so much.
It would not be a subsidy. The Nuclear Waste Fund has accumulated a balance of $25 billion dollars, paid in fees over the years by nuclear plant operators.
The Nuclear Waste Fund is not going to cover 100% of the costs going forward. Any money spent out of that fund is going to be money spent by the government later.
Why? Well, as we've been finding out, just about every nuclear plant designer/builder/operator underestimated how much it would cost to shut down and re-mediate nuclear power sites.
How old does a kid have to be before they can walk to school on their own? How would it be any different in an autonomous car?
The difference is how far a kid can go in an autonomous car vs walking under their own power. Even a bike doesn't change the situation all that much, since cars are still several times faster than a child's top speed.
I'm having a hard time believing it's perfectly legal to update one set of registry keys, while being illegal to update another. If they're so special and secret, they shouldn't be something you can update.
Since Microsoft offers paid updates for WinXP (at least for corporate customers), it's not very hard to argue that the registry hack (at least for corporate customers) would qualify as theft of service.
For non-corporate users, Microsoft could argue "unauthorized access," but I can't see them taking the trouble to sue random home users.
This story is about European standards which are a bit wacky, but I know they get spot-checked in the US. Hyundai paid out a huge settlement for (apparently honestly) screwing up the testing.
The issue isn't the testing, it's the testing standards. The standards don't require a car in showroom condition, there's lots of wiggle room for the manufacturers to gimmick the test.
PS I'm a Democrat, not trusting the FED (which is a rational position if you know its history)
And what history is that?
The Federal Reserve Banking System was created in response to a string of banking panics, culminating in the panic of 1907. The Fed literally replaced a group of really rich dudes who had thrown money into (aka "bailed out) the banking system to keep it afloat.
Apparently someone at DICE forgot to put a check in the mail Is anyone else seeing this?
slashdot.org uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate expired on 5/23/2014 6:49 PM. The current time is 5/25/2014 5:13 PM. (Error code: sec_error_expired_certificate)
97 percent of farms in the US are family owned and operated. 2.2 million of them.
[Citation Needed] Your link just goes to an agricultural interest organization that doesn't cite anything.
I found another random agricultural interest group that claims 60% of family farms are "hobby" farms that don't contribute meaningfully to the market. But you know what, it doesn't cite its sources either (PDF), beyond "USDA"
Either way, my understanding is that family farms are increasingly shifting towards contract farming, which effectively makes the "family" aspect a meaningless distinction.
Slashdot Mirror
--American unions are changing their priorities. Appliance Park's union was so fractious in the '70s and '80s that the place was known as "Strike City." That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005--and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be.
--U.S. labor productivity has continued its long march upward, meaning that labor costs have become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost of finished goods. You simply can't save much money chasing wages anymore.
Your article glides over this very quickly, but it's worth discussing further.
Management has essentially halted the growth of wages for decades and this has allowed all the productivity gains to accrue to business profits.
The knock on effects have ripped through the economy, from skewed stock valuations to screwed workers' debt loads.
http://tcf.org/assets/images/blog_images/20120814-graph-of-the-day-does-productivity-growth-still-benefit-the-american-worker.png
You can find other graphs that break down the wage growth by percentile (20th, 50th, 95th) and it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
Given the choice, I think I'd rather be shot to death, than bludgeoned to death. The suffering is likely to end much, much sooner.
Contrary to popular belief, most gunshot victims will survive, thanks to trauma units and medevac flights.
But... they might end up permanently paralyzed, crippled, or brain damaged.
/And the people most likely to get shot are the least likely afford the kind of extensive rehab necessary to regain function.
Analysis of an actual experiment found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before there is any conscious observation of the measurement
Haven't scientists been making progress with weak measurements of quantum states?
This comes to mind
If we can create a reliable "weak" geiger counter, would that allow the particle to remain superposed?
If you want it to be highly available then you have to pay for a data center to house it and probably another one for DR.
AWS US East (Virginia) keeps going down and taking parts of the internet with it.
Far too many *large* AWS customers aren't setting up any redundancy.
Vine and Instagram both got zapped in the last US East outage.
Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.
Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., [...]
You forget that when Google launched their IPO
they told everyone that Google would be spending money on stuff outside their core services,
that it wasn't necessarily going to be profitable, and to deal with it if you want Google stocks.
There aren't many publicly traded companies who can basically say "I do what I want and you agreed to it."
Not that it matters, since the stocks are structured so that the founders always retain voting control.
You might be right, that this is Google trying to "branch out," but it could also just be Google doing what it feels like doing and damn the costs.
And like par2, it's going to require a healthy amount of processing from your CPU
The trends to higher-performance multicore processors and parallel operations everywhere in the network and on mobile devices lends itself to an encoding scheme utilizing linear algebra and matrix equations that might not have been possible in the past.
Notice they talk about multicore processors and not some hardware decoding embedded in the networking chip.
From their published paper
Abstract-- Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) provides
a theoretically efficient method for coding. The drawbacks associ-
ated with it are the complexity of the decoding and the overhead
resulting from the encoding vector. Increasing the field size and
generation size presents a fundamental trade-off between packet-
based throughput and operational overhead. On the one hand,
decreasing the probability of transmitting redundant packets is
beneficial for throughput and, consequently, reduces transmission
energy. On the other hand, the decoding complexity and amount
of header overhead increase with field size and generation
length, leading to higher energy consumption. Therefore, the
optimal trade-off is system and topology dependent, as it depends
on the cost in energy of performing coding operations versus
transmitting data. We show that moderate field sizes are the
correct choice when trade-offs are considered. The results show
that sparse binary codes perform the best, unless the generation
size is very low.
Processing power is going to be an issue in mobile devices which have the most to gain from this innovation.
This isn't exactly a new principle he's proposing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
It's even been talked about on /. before
Its pretty easy to tell the difference between someone selling information to a foreign government in secret, and divulging it to the public publicly.
Snowden gave the NSA documents to well known American journalists.
Now imagine if he gave it (under the same terms/conditions) to journalists at Russia Today (a state sponsored newspaper) or Xinhua News Agency (China's state newspaper).
The difference gets a little fuzzier, doesn't it?
Also, you are an anti-vaxxer by choice, but a mutant by birth.
For many people, being unvaccinated is kind of like religion: it's a choice their parents made for them and there's no real motivation to do something different.
Never underestimate the power of inertia.
How about Comcast has to offer the low cost internet plan to any of their customers that wants it.
>quote>I don't know that the difference is as epistemologically different as you make out.
Reproducibility and falsifiability.
Just because I don't go around reproducing every bit of science that I "believe" is true,
that doesn't suddenly make my acceptance of its truth = religious beliefs.
Users that want to can install Chromium themselves, of course, and in fact Google even provides instructions on how to do it, as well as all of the source code.
There's a large gulf between "can," and "do." Of the millions of users, most do not.
This is why it's relevant that Google would never bundle Chromium with anything.
And you also slyly ignored the fact that the just-announced news doesn't affect Android or Chromebook, only Windows.
I didn't slyly ignore that at all.
I was rather explicit in prognosticating that "more and more "platforms"" will get fenced off.
Chromium is open source so if you don't like it, fork you own copy and get whatever useless toolbars that install without permission that you want.
You let me know when Chromium gets bundled with Android cell phones or Chromebook laptops.
It's only going to get worse as more and more "platforms" get tied to some company curated web store.
No thanks!
Greenwald's Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/05/26/greenwalds_finale_naming_victims_of_surveillance_122747.html
The source article is paywalled
Wait, this search engine located at youtube.com - is that not primarly used for pirating music and videos? At least that is what I use it for, almost to 99%. And youtube.com is a service run by Google.
Google gives copyright holders the option to collect any advertising revenue from infringing content.
Torrentz.eu... not so much.
It would not be a subsidy. The Nuclear Waste Fund has accumulated a balance of $25 billion dollars, paid in fees over the years by nuclear plant operators.
The Nuclear Waste Fund is not going to cover 100% of the costs going forward.
Any money spent out of that fund is going to be money spent by the government later.
Why? Well, as we've been finding out, just about every nuclear plant designer/builder/operator underestimated how much it would cost to shut down and re-mediate nuclear power sites.
How old does a kid have to be before they can walk to school on their own? How would it be any different in an autonomous car?
The difference is how far a kid can go in an autonomous car vs walking under their own power.
Even a bike doesn't change the situation all that much, since cars are still several times faster than a child's top speed.
I've seen a new outbreak where my AV didn't catch it, but 1/4th of the scanners at VirusTotal did.
I've also seen 1/4th of the scanners at VirusTotal claim known good binaries = generic malware because of the packer used to build the exe.
I'm having a hard time believing it's perfectly legal to update one set of registry keys, while being illegal to update another. If they're so special and secret, they shouldn't be something you can update.
Since Microsoft offers paid updates for WinXP (at least for corporate customers),
it's not very hard to argue that the registry hack (at least for corporate customers) would qualify as theft of service.
For non-corporate users, Microsoft could argue "unauthorized access," but I can't see them taking the trouble to sue random home users.
This story is about European standards which are a bit wacky, but I know they get spot-checked in the US. Hyundai paid out a huge settlement for (apparently honestly) screwing up the testing.
The issue isn't the testing, it's the testing standards.
The standards don't require a car in showroom condition, there's lots of wiggle room for the manufacturers to gimmick the test.
PS I'm a Democrat, not trusting the FED (which is a rational position if you know its history)
And what history is that?
The Federal Reserve Banking System was created in response to a string of banking panics, culminating in the panic of 1907.
The Fed literally replaced a group of really rich dudes who had thrown money into (aka "bailed out) the banking system to keep it afloat.
Apparently someone at DICE forgot to put a check in the mail
Is anyone else seeing this?
slashdot.org uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate expired on 5/23/2014 6:49 PM.
The current time is 5/25/2014 5:13 PM.
(Error code: sec_error_expired_certificate)
Then China wouldn't have any dollars to roll into Treasury Bonds and we'd collapse.
Globalization is a bitch.
97 percent of farms in the US are family owned and operated. 2.2 million of them.
[Citation Needed]
Your link just goes to an agricultural interest organization that doesn't cite anything.
I found another random agricultural interest group that claims 60% of family farms are "hobby" farms that don't contribute meaningfully to the market.
But you know what, it doesn't cite its sources either (PDF), beyond "USDA"
Either way, my understanding is that family farms are increasingly shifting towards contract farming, which effectively makes the "family" aspect a meaningless distinction.