One of the realities is that the current designs are not much stronger than the human body.
That is because there is no reason to do so. If you are carrying a human pilot, there is no point in designing the airframe to turn fast enough to kill him. But if there is no pilot, the design criteria are different. For instance, a SAM can generally turn much faster than a plane.
The problem is that what you are predicting is the exact opposite of what is actually happening. If robots were really stealing all the jobs, productivity (output/human-labor) would be soaring. But productivity is stagnating. The robots took most of the manufacturing jobs a generation ago, and now most people work in service jobs that are proving difficult to automate.
AI and robots may indeed steal all our jobs someday, but there is very little evidence that is actually happening today.
Probably because it's Fri night, and the woman wants to watch a chick flick, and instead of driving to the store you buy it on iTunes.
But why not stream it instead for a fraction of the price? Or do you actually watch the same chick flick more than once?
I haven't bought a movie since my daughter turned six. At five or younger they really like to watch the same movie over and over. I guess they feel secure already knowing exactly what is going to happen next. She must have watched "Barbie Rapunzel" at least a hundred times.
I imagine there will be a uber-like doll-sharing service that crops up real soon now.
I think those already exist. The Realdolls have removable vaginas, so you can have your own "private part" and share the main doll. The vaginal inserts only cost about $150.
In general, doing things that are less stupid than the things we did before would be an improvement.
But the less stupid things are in addition to the more stupid things, not a replacement. Each project should be evaluated on its own merits, not on a relative scale of stupidity.
So what exactly IS a good way to make a living if you're a 60+ paralegal who lost her job just before retirement?
You are falling for the Broken Window Fallacy: If the police stop vandals from breaking windows, they are "destroying jobs" for the glaziers that would make the replacement windows. Of course, that is nonsense, because if people don't have to replace their windows, they will spend the money on something else, such as shoes for their children, generating jobs for shoe makers. So instead of replacing a window for no net gain, their kids have new shoes, hence they are better off. The important lesson here, is despite popular belief to the contrary, POINTLESS MAKE WORK JOBS ARE NOT "GOOD" FOR THE ECONOMY.
Paralegals are in a job that is ripe for automation, and many of them are indeed losing their jobs. But as people spend less on legal services, they have more money for other things. One thing that is growing rapidly is spending on experiences and adventures. So the answer to your question is that the 60+ paralegal should open a cave diving adventure tour company in Belize.
royalty, billionaires, politicians, Hollywood celebrities
Realdolls start at $5500. You don't need to be royalty or a billionaire to afford one. Even for a man of modest means, a Realdoll is going to be cheaper than a real GF.
The subsidies needed to make clean energies (wind, solar, geothermal) affordable are just a small amount compared to the subsidies of the other technologies (nuclear is heavily subsidized) plus the hidden costs of these "dirty" ways to generate electricity.
So you think we should do something stupid because we are already doing other things that are even stupider?
Light is a measure of electrification, not poverty.
They are pretty much the same thing. Access to electricity is a huge boost to quality of life. Clean water and vaccinations are the only other things that even come close. When Medicines sans Frontiers builds a clinic in Africa, they first install the generator needed to run the clinic. In some cases, they installed the generator, but never built the clinic. Those villages had improved health outcomes almost as good as the villages with the clinics. Electricity gives people light without soot from candles or smoke from cookstoves. It gives them access to information via radio, TV, and phones. Refrigerated food means less waste and better nutrition. Children study longer. Farmers have access to crop prices. People stop gathering firewood and dung, freeing up time for productive activities, and eliminating a source of deforestation and erosion.
A taxi from San Jose to San Francisco can cost $100+, and take 90 minutes or more during rush hour. Put eight of those people in a helicopter, which can do the trip in 15 minutes straight across the Bay, and that is $3000/hour of flight time. Seems like a no-brainer to me. I might occasionally use a service like that, on a busy day with especially bad traffic.
we are talking about cities where walking and cycling are typically realistic options.
Are you an American? Have you ever been to San Jose? Or Los Angeles?
No antenna that you could fit into something the size of a cherry is likely to be decent.
There are plenty of wifi dongles that are smaller than a cherry, and most of them work reasonably well. For many applications, smallness and cheapness are way more important than extreme range.
I'd be surprised if a kernel with a full driver stack would even fit by itself into 16 MB of flash....
You can easily boot basic Linux from 16MB. You just need to skinny it down by deleting all the modules and drivers that you don't need.
Iran has christians, especially among the Armenian minority in the Northwest. They tend to be urbanized, and disproportionately likely to travel and trade internationally.
The government, or a commercial "last mile" provider, wires the area, then leases it out.
No. The main expense is the trenching. The cost of the cable is trivial by comparison. A better solution is to trench once and install a 6" conduit between the street and the house. Then this conduit belongs to the homeowner, who can give anyone permission to run cable through it. A corporation or government should not own the conduit, just like they should not own my driveway.
The conduits along the streets should be at least 12" in diameter, and should be owned by the local government. Any bonded company should be able to run cable for a fixed publicly posted fee.
I feel sorry for kids today, not knowing what a REAL tomato is actually supposed to taste like
Nice rant, except there are no GMO tomatoes currently being sold anywhere. The tomatoes in the supermarket are bland because they are picked early, and then artificially ripened with ethylene. It has nothing to do with GMO.
If everyone started driving electrics, and even half of them needed to charge all day, there would be many stranded employees.
1. No EVs need to charge "all day". 2. We aren't going to wake up one day with 100% EVs and no change to our infrastructure. The change will happen over a decade or more.
To be fair, smartphone makers could put more emphasis on making the phones last longer as opposed to developing more models.
Customers want their phones to be thin and inexpensive. Almost nobody is going to buy an expensive, rugged phone. Likewise it is silly to say that customers "want" phones that are "easy to repair". The real question is how much they are willing to pay for that. Answer: almost nothing.
We don't have rugged repairable phones because those phones failed in the marketplace and are no longer available.
GMO's allow for the use of more pesticides, a necessity in monoculture farming but not a boon for the environment.
Actually, GMO crops such as BT corn use less pesticides. "Roundup-Ready" crops allow the use of milder herbicides, since they can be sprayed when weeds are growing, rather than harsher chemicals that can kill seeds. RR crops also encourage "no-till" farming that can greatly reduce erosion and water pollution.
I have yet to ever see a charging station in my city anywhere.
Maybe you don't understand what you are looking for. Charging stations don't look like gas stations. They look like parking meters. It is easy to walk past one without noticing it.
Maybe, but that minority is growing. My employer provides several charging stations. There are also charging stations at my local Walmart, and Costco. The airport and train stations have them. They are fairly common at nicer hotels.
We have a bit of a chicken and egg problem though, don't we?
No, actually we don't. Charging stations are already common enough that charging on the road is not generally a problem.
Not all junctions have the lights next to the stop line. Some aren't even close.
There are about 3 million traffic lights in America. If you store 10 bytes of data on each, that will add $0.001 to the cost of the car. The data already exists, because human driven Teslas transmit position and speed data. So the computer driven car stops about a meter back from the mean position that humans used.
a lot of the crosswalk signs in the U.S. do have a countdown timer
Those are tiny, and only visible within about 50 meters of the intersection. Many countries have much bigger timers located above the lane next to the traffic light. They are visible from about 300 meters, so you can know when to brake, and when not to. You end up with fewer t-bone accidents, fewer rear-endings, and smoother traffic flow.
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One of the realities is that the current designs are not much stronger than the human body.
That is because there is no reason to do so. If you are carrying a human pilot, there is no point in designing the airframe to turn fast enough to kill him. But if there is no pilot, the design criteria are different. For instance, a SAM can generally turn much faster than a plane.
The problem is that what you are predicting is the exact opposite of what is actually happening. If robots were really stealing all the jobs, productivity (output/human-labor) would be soaring. But productivity is stagnating. The robots took most of the manufacturing jobs a generation ago, and now most people work in service jobs that are proving difficult to automate.
AI and robots may indeed steal all our jobs someday, but there is very little evidence that is actually happening today.
Probably because it's Fri night, and the woman wants to watch a chick flick, and instead of driving to the store you buy it on iTunes.
But why not stream it instead for a fraction of the price? Or do you actually watch the same chick flick more than once?
I haven't bought a movie since my daughter turned six. At five or younger they really like to watch the same movie over and over. I guess they feel secure already knowing exactly what is going to happen next. She must have watched "Barbie Rapunzel" at least a hundred times.
The evil of Google is like a candle flickering in the darkness.
The evil of Oracle is like the midday sun.
I imagine there will be a uber-like doll-sharing service that crops up real soon now.
I think those already exist. The Realdolls have removable vaginas, so you can have your own "private part" and share the main doll. The vaginal inserts only cost about $150.
In general, doing things that are less stupid than the things we did before would be an improvement.
But the less stupid things are in addition to the more stupid things, not a replacement. Each project should be evaluated on its own merits, not on a relative scale of stupidity.
How many caves are there in Belize?
Belize has the Great Blue Hole. There are many other smaller caves/holes/wrecks/etc.
And how many cave-diving operations will the market in Belize support?
When I was there, there was a waiting list, so there is room for more.
And, how sure are we that Belize will allow American ex-pats to come in and compete with their own citizens?
If you come in and start a company, you are creating jobs, not taking them. Besides, Belize let John McAfee in, so I don't think they are picky.
So what exactly IS a good way to make a living if you're a 60+ paralegal who lost her job just before retirement?
You are falling for the Broken Window Fallacy: If the police stop vandals from breaking windows, they are "destroying jobs" for the glaziers that would make the replacement windows. Of course, that is nonsense, because if people don't have to replace their windows, they will spend the money on something else, such as shoes for their children, generating jobs for shoe makers. So instead of replacing a window for no net gain, their kids have new shoes, hence they are better off. The important lesson here, is despite popular belief to the contrary, POINTLESS MAKE WORK JOBS ARE NOT "GOOD" FOR THE ECONOMY.
Paralegals are in a job that is ripe for automation, and many of them are indeed losing their jobs. But as people spend less on legal services, they have more money for other things. One thing that is growing rapidly is spending on experiences and adventures. So the answer to your question is that the 60+ paralegal should open a cave diving adventure tour company in Belize.
Are there really that many losers with an extra 10 grand running around who are willing to buy these things?
$10K for a fake GF is cheap compared to the cost of a real one.
royalty, billionaires, politicians, Hollywood celebrities
Realdolls start at $5500. You don't need to be royalty or a billionaire to afford one. Even for a man of modest means, a Realdoll is going to be cheaper than a real GF.
The subsidies needed to make clean energies (wind, solar, geothermal) affordable are just a small amount compared to the subsidies of the other technologies (nuclear is heavily subsidized) plus the hidden costs of these "dirty" ways to generate electricity.
So you think we should do something stupid because we are already doing other things that are even stupider?
Light is a measure of electrification, not poverty.
They are pretty much the same thing. Access to electricity is a huge boost to quality of life. Clean water and vaccinations are the only other things that even come close. When Medicines sans Frontiers builds a clinic in Africa, they first install the generator needed to run the clinic. In some cases, they installed the generator, but never built the clinic. Those villages had improved health outcomes almost as good as the villages with the clinics. Electricity gives people light without soot from candles or smoke from cookstoves. It gives them access to information via radio, TV, and phones. Refrigerated food means less waste and better nutrition. Children study longer. Farmers have access to crop prices. People stop gathering firewood and dung, freeing up time for productive activities, and eliminating a source of deforestation and erosion.
same cost and as sustainably as ground transport
A taxi from San Jose to San Francisco can cost $100+, and take 90 minutes or more during rush hour. Put eight of those people in a helicopter, which can do the trip in 15 minutes straight across the Bay, and that is $3000/hour of flight time. Seems like a no-brainer to me. I might occasionally use a service like that, on a busy day with especially bad traffic.
we are talking about cities where walking and cycling are typically realistic options.
Are you an American? Have you ever been to San Jose? Or Los Angeles?
No antenna that you could fit into something the size of a cherry is likely to be decent.
There are plenty of wifi dongles that are smaller than a cherry, and most of them work reasonably well. For many applications, smallness and cheapness are way more important than extreme range.
I'd be surprised if a kernel with a full driver stack would even fit by itself into 16 MB of flash....
You can easily boot basic Linux from 16MB. You just need to skinny it down by deleting all the modules and drivers that you don't need.
I don't think they were christian
Iran has christians, especially among the Armenian minority in the Northwest. They tend to be urbanized, and disproportionately likely to travel and trade internationally.
The government, or a commercial "last mile" provider, wires the area, then leases it out.
No. The main expense is the trenching. The cost of the cable is trivial by comparison. A better solution is to trench once and install a 6" conduit between the street and the house. Then this conduit belongs to the homeowner, who can give anyone permission to run cable through it. A corporation or government should not own the conduit, just like they should not own my driveway.
The conduits along the streets should be at least 12" in diameter, and should be owned by the local government. Any bonded company should be able to run cable for a fixed publicly posted fee.
I feel sorry for kids today, not knowing what a REAL tomato is actually supposed to taste like
Nice rant, except there are no GMO tomatoes currently being sold anywhere. The tomatoes in the supermarket are bland because they are picked early, and then artificially ripened with ethylene. It has nothing to do with GMO.
If everyone started driving electrics, and even half of them needed to charge all day, there would be many stranded employees.
1. No EVs need to charge "all day".
2. We aren't going to wake up one day with 100% EVs and no change to our infrastructure. The change will happen over a decade or more.
RR Soy is what everyone wants now.
RR-soy went off patent in 2011. You can grow all you want, save the seed, etc. RR-canola is still patented until 2022.
To be fair, smartphone makers could put more emphasis on making the phones last longer as opposed to developing more models.
Customers want their phones to be thin and inexpensive. Almost nobody is going to buy an expensive, rugged phone. Likewise it is silly to say that customers "want" phones that are "easy to repair". The real question is how much they are willing to pay for that. Answer: almost nothing.
We don't have rugged repairable phones because those phones failed in the marketplace and are no longer available.
GMO's allow for the use of more pesticides, a necessity in monoculture farming but not a boon for the environment.
Actually, GMO crops such as BT corn use less pesticides. "Roundup-Ready" crops allow the use of milder herbicides, since they can be sprayed when weeds are growing, rather than harsher chemicals that can kill seeds. RR crops also encourage "no-till" farming that can greatly reduce erosion and water pollution.
I have yet to ever see a charging station in my city anywhere.
Maybe you don't understand what you are looking for. Charging stations don't look like gas stations. They look like parking meters. It is easy to walk past one without noticing it.
I suspect that you are in a very small minority.
Maybe, but that minority is growing. My employer provides several charging stations. There are also charging stations at my local Walmart, and Costco. The airport and train stations have them. They are fairly common at nicer hotels.
We have a bit of a chicken and egg problem though, don't we?
No, actually we don't. Charging stations are already common enough that charging on the road is not generally a problem.
Not all junctions have the lights next to the stop line. Some aren't even close.
There are about 3 million traffic lights in America. If you store 10 bytes of data on each, that will add $0.001 to the cost of the car. The data already exists, because human driven Teslas transmit position and speed data. So the computer driven car stops about a meter back from the mean position that humans used.
a lot of the crosswalk signs in the U.S. do have a countdown timer
Those are tiny, and only visible within about 50 meters of the intersection. Many countries have much bigger timers located above the lane next to the traffic light. They are visible from about 300 meters, so you can know when to brake, and when not to. You end up with fewer t-bone accidents, fewer rear-endings, and smoother traffic flow.