Productivity doesn't mean more production, it means more production PER HOUR WORKED. Layoffs don't decrease productivity, they increase it, since companies tend to terminate their least productive workers.
If temporary weight loss counts as a "success", then here is an even simpler "diet": Go sit in a sauna for an hour.
Losing weight is easy. Keeping it off is hard. Sure, you found a novel formula for weight loss that nobody ever thought of before (i.e.: eating less), but that only helps with the easy part.
agricultural machinery started replacing workers on the farms and whole families starved
Nonsense. This is not what happened. Agricultural automation lead to higher productivity, and higher living standards. The people left for urban jobs because that was a better life than the rural poverty they left behind.
The people that starved then, and are starving now, are in the places that FAILED to automate.
Your entire argument is based on the premise that people already have everything they need, and there is no demand for either more, or better quality, goods and services.
That doesn't stop the fact that if AI creates a new design that makes the chairs easier to make and they can be made twice as fast. I can still get rid of an employee.
So if your employees' productivity doubles, and they become twice as profitable to employ, your response would be to fire them?
Is the issuer worthy of trust regarding the exchange of these coins with oil at some undetermined time in the future?
Yes. Venezuela is trustworthy, and for good reason. They have huge overseas assets. They own Citgo, a refinery in the US. They own their own tankers, since many other shippers avoid shipping Venezuelan oil because of sanctions. These overseas assets can be seized in a debt default, which would shut off Venezuela's lifeline of oil revenue.
They may let their own people starve, but they will not default on international debt. If you bought Venezuela's dollar denominated bonds a year ago, you would now have a fantastic ROI.
About 10,000 people died in the Rwandan Civil War, so you are off by a factor of about a thousand.
About 800,000 died in the genocide that preceded the war, but even that is a tiny fraction of the death toll in the Congolese Civil War... in which Rwanda was a major participant.
You can afford to spend a lot of time structuring your databases...
The extrapolated cost of this 30TB drive is less than the burdened monthly cost of a single engineer. Furthermore, if disk I/O is your bottleneck, then moving your DB from HDD to SDD is likely to give you far more speedup than fiddling with your schema.
It will take that long, just to get past the regulations after the technology is proven.
That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just means it won't happen in America. Just like in biotech, America's overregulation means technological leadership will occur elsewhere.
TFA presents ZERO evidence that the use of child labor has increased. Here is a complete list of the facts in TFA:
1. The price of cobalt has gone up.
That's it.
All the rest is handwaving and conjecture. Sure, if the price has gone up, the incentive to mine has also gone up, which means more labor may be needed, which means more kids may be working in mines. But that is conjecture, not evidence, and not reporting any actual facts.
Congo is sliding back into civil war. The last war there killed more than 4 million people, and was the world's deadliest conflict since WW2. Nearly all the casualties were civilians.
In the last few weeks, fighting has flared up along the eastern border with Uganda and Rwanda. Thousands have died. The world has ignored it.
Yet suddenly the media starts pretending to give a crap about the Congolese because they can put "Apple" and "Tesla" in the headline.
so two companies that you think may be competing against each other may actually have the same parent company.
... or the same shareholders. Many, many corporate board members come from investment companies, such as Fidelity, Vanguard, KKR, Blackstone, etc. If Fidelity owns 5% of UPS and 5% of Fedex, the last thing they want is a price war that will drive down the profits of both companies. Since they have seats on both boards, they can ecourange implicit collusion by arguing for "price stability".
It's so cute when someone thinks private industry will pass on cost savings to consumers.
If they are in a competitive industry, they have no choice. If they don't pass on the savings, their competitors will. For instance, when grocery stores can cut costs, they pass nearly all savings along as lower prices. Tech companies are protected from competition by IP laws, so they pass on far less. You can only buy an iPhone from Apple.
when gas was ~$4/gallon and both FedEx and UPS raised their rates claiming it was because of higher fuel costs? When gas fell to ~$2/gallon, did you see them lower their rates?
This is an example of "implicit collusion". That is what you get with a duopoly. More market participants make that much harder.
Is this some new self-parking car where everyone's supposed to get out of the car and, presumably, then standing around to watch in awe while the car parks itself after pushing a "Park" button on the key fob?
Yes. Driverless self-parking already exists in some cars. It works exactly as you describe, except you can use a smartphone or smartwatch rather than a key fob. Self-park will be standard in a few years.
The rear cameras are still optional features on a lot of new cars.
Not in America. They have been mandatory in all new cars manufactured and sold in America since January 1st, 2018. If cameraless cars were manufactured before Jan 1st, dealers have up to May 1st to clear their inventory. After that, you will no longer be able to legally buy a new car without a backup camera.
The cost benefit of the backup cameras, in reduced injuries, fender-bender repairs, and less congestion in parking lots, far outweighs the cost of the cameras and displays (~ $200 / car), so this is a sensible requirement.
Your foam idea would require a spaceship to rendezvous with each object. Fuel consumption would be uneconomical. A ground based laser would be way cheaper.
The Czechs lived to regret it, but they did vote for communism. At the time, they feared a resurgent Germany far more than they feared the Russians, and they had clear memories of how Britain and France had betrayed them in 1938. Many saw a communist government as the best way to ensure their future protection by the Red Army.
you can mine Monero of about 1 dollar per day on an average quad-core CPU
Let's do some math!
I have a quad core i7. All four cores running flat out consume about 150W for the entire system. I pay about 12 cents per kWhr. But Coin-Hive maxes out at 40% of CPU.
So the cost in electricity per day would be (150 w / (1000 w/kw)) * 24 hr/day * $0.12/kWhr * 0.4 = $0.17 / day
Let's assume that JavaScript has 50% inefficiency factor compared to native code.
The CoinHive server (Slate in this case) would earn $1/day * 0.4 * 0.5 = $0.20 / day.
So I pay 17 cents to the electric company, and Slate gets 20 cents worth of Monero. This assumes the miner is running for 24 hours, which is unrealistic. More likely it would be for just a few minutes. If the page is open for five minutes, I would pay $0.0006 to the electric company, and Slate would get $0.0007.
Slashdot Mirror
Productivity doesn't mean more production, it means more production PER HOUR WORKED. Layoffs don't decrease productivity, they increase it, since companies tend to terminate their least productive workers.
Knowing how to tighten a three-jaw chuck is increasingly unimportant.
Sorry to quibble, but tightening a 3-jaw chuck is trivial. It is a 4-jaw chuck that requires skill to tighten and balance with an asymmetrical part.
The diet succeeded.
If temporary weight loss counts as a "success", then here is an even simpler "diet": Go sit in a sauna for an hour.
Losing weight is easy. Keeping it off is hard. Sure, you found a novel formula for weight loss that nobody ever thought of before (i.e.: eating less), but that only helps with the easy part.
Easiest diet is this: expend more than you take in.
That is the easiest to understand, not the easiest to do.
I fell off the diet while in grad school and gained it back and more.
If it was so easy, why did you fail?
agricultural machinery started replacing workers on the farms and whole families starved
Nonsense. This is not what happened. Agricultural automation lead to higher productivity, and higher living standards. The people left for urban jobs because that was a better life than the rural poverty they left behind.
The people that starved then, and are starving now, are in the places that FAILED to automate.
The pace of the transition is intimidating.
No it isn't. This is a myth. The pace of replacement of human labor with automation is not accelerating, it is slowing down.
Your entire argument is based on the premise that people already have everything they need, and there is no demand for either more, or better quality, goods and services.
That doesn't stop the fact that if AI creates a new design that makes the chairs easier to make and they can be made twice as fast. I can still get rid of an employee.
So if your employees' productivity doubles, and they become twice as profitable to employ, your response would be to fire them?
Is the issuer worthy of trust regarding the exchange of these coins with oil at some undetermined time in the future?
Yes. Venezuela is trustworthy, and for good reason. They have huge overseas assets. They own Citgo, a refinery in the US. They own their own tankers, since many other shippers avoid shipping Venezuelan oil because of sanctions. These overseas assets can be seized in a debt default, which would shut off Venezuela's lifeline of oil revenue.
They may let their own people starve, but they will not default on international debt. If you bought Venezuela's dollar denominated bonds a year ago, you would now have a fantastic ROI.
Here is an article that explains it better than I did.
I don't want to voluntarily "bug" my house
Do you have a cellphone? If so, then worrying about Alexa monitoring you is silly. A cellphone has far greater capability to track and eavesdrop.
Thought Rwanda was 6mil.
About 10,000 people died in the Rwandan Civil War, so you are off by a factor of about a thousand.
About 800,000 died in the genocide that preceded the war, but even that is a tiny fraction of the death toll in the Congolese Civil War ... in which Rwanda was a major participant.
You can afford to spend a lot of time structuring your databases ...
The extrapolated cost of this 30TB drive is less than the burdened monthly cost of a single engineer. Furthermore, if disk I/O is your bottleneck, then moving your DB from HDD to SDD is likely to give you far more speedup than fiddling with your schema.
It will take that long, just to get past the regulations after the technology is proven.
That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just means it won't happen in America. Just like in biotech, America's overregulation means technological leadership will occur elsewhere.
It is sad to see someone shot, but it is silly to portray the incident as something that is Uber's fault.
Agreed. They have not become wary.
As a developer I am wary of closed platforms ... but I build apps there anyway because, as Willie Sutton once said, "Thats where the money is."
I am happy to develop for open platforms instead if you agree to pay my mortgage while we wait for them to become popular.
TFA presents ZERO evidence that the use of child labor has increased. Here is a complete list of the facts in TFA:
1. The price of cobalt has gone up.
That's it.
All the rest is handwaving and conjecture. Sure, if the price has gone up, the incentive to mine has also gone up, which means more labor may be needed, which means more kids may be working in mines. But that is conjecture, not evidence, and not reporting any actual facts.
... put wind turbines on the top of ever Appalachian hill ...
Really? EVERY hill? Or is it actually 0.001% of the hills, and you are just rounding up to 100%?
Congo is sliding back into civil war. The last war there killed more than 4 million people, and was the world's deadliest conflict since WW2. Nearly all the casualties were civilians.
In the last few weeks, fighting has flared up along the eastern border with Uganda and Rwanda. Thousands have died. The world has ignored it.
Yet suddenly the media starts pretending to give a crap about the Congolese because they can put "Apple" and "Tesla" in the headline.
so two companies that you think may be competing against each other may actually have the same parent company.
... or the same shareholders. Many, many corporate board members come from investment companies, such as Fidelity, Vanguard, KKR, Blackstone, etc. If Fidelity owns 5% of UPS and 5% of Fedex, the last thing they want is a price war that will drive down the profits of both companies. Since they have seats on both boards, they can ecourange implicit collusion by arguing for "price stability".
It's so cute when someone thinks private industry will pass on cost savings to consumers.
If they are in a competitive industry, they have no choice. If they don't pass on the savings, their competitors will. For instance, when grocery stores can cut costs, they pass nearly all savings along as lower prices. Tech companies are protected from competition by IP laws, so they pass on far less. You can only buy an iPhone from Apple.
when gas was ~$4/gallon and both FedEx and UPS raised their rates claiming it was because of higher fuel costs? When gas fell to ~$2/gallon, did you see them lower their rates?
This is an example of "implicit collusion". That is what you get with a duopoly. More market participants make that much harder.
Is this some new self-parking car where everyone's supposed to get out of the car and, presumably, then standing around to watch in awe while the car parks itself after pushing a "Park" button on the key fob?
Yes. Driverless self-parking already exists in some cars. It works exactly as you describe, except you can use a smartphone or smartwatch rather than a key fob. Self-park will be standard in a few years.
The rear cameras are still optional features on a lot of new cars.
Not in America. They have been mandatory in all new cars manufactured and sold in America since January 1st, 2018. If cameraless cars were manufactured before Jan 1st, dealers have up to May 1st to clear their inventory. After that, you will no longer be able to legally buy a new car without a backup camera.
The cost benefit of the backup cameras, in reduced injuries, fender-bender repairs, and less congestion in parking lots, far outweighs the cost of the cameras and displays (~ $200 / car), so this is a sensible requirement.
NASA has used aerogel to capture micrometeorites.
Your foam idea would require a spaceship to rendezvous with each object. Fuel consumption would be uneconomical. A ground based laser would be way cheaper.
Disagree? Then prove it: How many communist revolutions were democratically elected?
In 1946, the communist party won a plurality in Czechoslovakia, in an election that was generally considered fair.
The Czechs lived to regret it, but they did vote for communism. At the time, they feared a resurgent Germany far more than they feared the Russians, and they had clear memories of how Britain and France had betrayed them in 1938. Many saw a communist government as the best way to ensure their future protection by the Red Army.
This terrible policy will undoubtedly accelerate their decline into bankruptcy.
How will the loss of non-subscribing ad-blocking readers, who otherwise generate no revenue, accelerate their bankruptcy?
you can mine Monero of about 1 dollar per day on an average quad-core CPU
Let's do some math!
I have a quad core i7. All four cores running flat out consume about 150W for the entire system. I pay about 12 cents per kWhr. But Coin-Hive maxes out at 40% of CPU.
So the cost in electricity per day would be (150 w / (1000 w/kw)) * 24 hr/day * $0.12/kWhr * 0.4 = $0.17 / day
Let's assume that JavaScript has 50% inefficiency factor compared to native code.
The CoinHive server (Slate in this case) would earn $1/day * 0.4 * 0.5 = $0.20 / day.
So I pay 17 cents to the electric company, and Slate gets 20 cents worth of Monero. This assumes the miner is running for 24 hours, which is unrealistic. More likely it would be for just a few minutes. If the page is open for five minutes, I would pay $0.0006 to the electric company, and Slate would get $0.0007.