Innovation and automation have been happening continuously for the past 250 years. Go visit a modern factory. They are already 90% automated. If you look at the slow rate of productivity growth, automation appears to be slowing down rather than accelerating, since most of the repetitive manufacturing jobs are already automated, and automating service jobs is much more difficult.
the automobile actually increased domestic employment
All previous waves of technological change increased employment. So why do you believe "This time is different"?
60,000 people, even at 10 cents an hour, is a lot of money.
Average factory wages in China are about $3/hour, not 10 cents. Since prices for many things are much lower in China, $3 buys as much as $10 in America. A Chinese factory worker can't afford a house and a car, but they can afford an apartment and a bicycle.
If robots are doing the jobs, why would you want manufacturing to come back home?
1. Lower shipping costs 2. National security 3. A major expense in manufacturing is energy. Energy prices for electricity and gas are much lower in America than in East Asia.
what to do to take care of the laborers whose jobs are being taken away by this efficiency
You simply accept this as an obvious premise, when there is little evidence that the robots are really "stealing our jobs". Past waves of technological change resulted in temporary disruption, but did not result in permanent job loses. There is little reason to believe it is happening this time either. Economies are not zero-sum, and a job lost to automation does not mean a jobless person. Robots are used where they have a comparative advantage, but, by definition, that is not all jobs.
A great company slowly being flushed down the toilet by short termist used car salesman types.
The decline of HP had little to do with short-termism, and much more to do with long-term technological change. HP did well when computers cost $5k, and printers cost $3k, and people were willing to pay a few thousand extra for top quality. Now, computers cost $500, printers cost $50, and there is little difference is quality between brands. HP's old business strategy just doesn't work anymore. You can't charge a premium when you are selling commodity goods, and you can't compete on price against Foxconn.
Overpriced fad gadgets turn out to be crap - film at 11.
They may indeed be crap, but the crappy article provides no actual information about that. First, it says it is inaccurate by an average of "up to" 20 beats per minute. "Up to" means "less than", so that statement would be true even if the deviation was zero. So why don't they just say what the average deviation is, instead of using meaningless weasel words? Then later in the article, they talk about an error of "20 or 30" beats per minute. So which is it? Less than 20, or 20 to 30? TFA was written by someone willing to twist both words and numbers to push an agenda.
The summary didn't once mention the tech giant Google and their recent unveiling of Google Home.
The summary does mention Google Home. But this Apple announcement is way more interesting than the Google Home because it will have an open API. That will make a huge difference. A voice activated API opens up a world of possibilities. Google Home offers nothing new over the Amazon Echo.
I have an Amazon Echo. I would gladly pay double for something twice as good. The Echo is nice, but it has a lot of limitations, and there is plenty of room for improvement. For instance, I can tell it to "turn off the kitchen light" and I can tell it to "set a timer for 5 minutes", but I can't tell it "in five minutes, turn off the kitchen light". Another nice feature would be to recognize individual voices of household members, so if my daughter says "play some music" it plays something she likes, and if I say "play some music" it knows I prefer Willie Nelson over Taylor Swift.
You don't have a right to live without supporting yourself, but you can still quit any particular job. If there is no other job to your liking available, you can work for yourself. My housekeeper runs her own business. She comes for about three hours once a month, and I pay her $120. That is $40/hour for a no-skill no-education job with flexible hours. If she cleans two houses a day, she can clear $60k/year. I tried to refer her to a friend, but she said she is too busy to take on new clients. I thought about explaining to her that turning down customers was bad business, and she should raise her prices instead, but then I realized that wasn't in my best interest.
6 Gbps is slightly different, like, 8 times as different.
If we are going to get pedantic, let's go all the way: The bit rate (little b) generally includes protocol overhead (framing, ECC, handshaking, etc), while the Byte rate (big B) generally refers to only actual data. So the difference is not a factor of 8, but usually around 10.
More criminals will be able to get sensitive jobs. How is this a bad thing?
It is not a bad thing. Employment drastically reduces recidivism, and a criminal record is not correlated with poor performance for most jobs. Many other things are better correlated with poor job performance, such as typing in all lowercase, or using IE as your browser when you fill out the application. So employers should look at those criteria instead of wasting time on background checks.
You need to think volumetrically, where the standard is the 40 foot intermodal shipping container. You can buy 4TB 2.5" HDDs, which are about 6 cubic inches. A shipping container has 40x8x8 = 2560 ft^3 or 4423680 in^3. So it would hold 737,280 2.5" HDDs, or just shy of 3 exabytes. So the nearly 10 exabytes in TFA could fit in 3 standard intermodal containers. Or it would all fit in a medium sized house (cabling and cooling would take additional space). If you used 1TB SD cards (expensive, but available), you could cram it all into one container.
It certainly has some efficiency problems and the infrastructure hurdles.
Efficiency and infrastructure are THE ONLY THINGS THAT MATTER. So if loses on both of those, then it is just irredeemably stupid to use it.
you can then burn it in a generation plant when you need a little more electricity.
Burning the H2 in a gas turbine heat engine is about the dumbest possible way to turn it back into electricity. The whole point of using hydrogen is that it works in fuel cells.
the US didn't take food stocks to produce it. They did use feed stock corn, but that corn would never have been for human consumption in the first place.
The corn is fed to cows and pigs which are then eaten by humans. So indirectly, it is still food.
Since then, many have changed their crops to switch grass
Switchgrass stores energy as cellulose. There are a few pilot projects trying to converting cellulose to ethanol, but it is not yet happening on an industrial scale.
What's to stop people from creating their own hydrogen at home?
Common sense. Conversion of electricity to hydrogen is only about 60% efficient, so you lose 40% right off the top. Then it takes more energy to compress it. If you store it in a metal hydride, that takes more energy, plus increases the weight by an order of magnitude. There are many more problems with hydrogen, such as metal embrittlement and permeability through almost anything.
Hydrogen fuel has mainly been pushed as greenwashing, or cynical phoney environmentalism designed to delay adoption of electric cars based on actual sensible technology like lithium batteries. This was most famously done by George W. Bush, to divert research from battery powered electric cars.
Most of the bugs I've fixed were made in easy(and repetitive) code sometimes by very relaxed developers...
I wonder how many of those bugs were because they were interrupted by their manager, and given another task for an hour or a few days. Then when they can back to finish the half-written code, they no longer have the short term memory of special conditions or corner cases that need to be handled.
The whole programming process is stressful.
Is it? I have a hard time imagining a less stressful job. I sit in a $1800 ergometric chair, listening to my favorite music, while I cut and paste from Stackoverflow. Sure, there are deadlines, but any job has that, and with coding those deadlines are weekly or monthly, not hourly or by the minute like in many other jobs.
ORLY? Wasn't the FBI created to hunt communists? Freedom of expression my arse.
In the past, America persecuted and arrested people for being communists. But those laws were declared unconstitutional, and we don't do that anymore. If you want to drag up stuff from the past, Europe looks a lot worse than America, so you shouldn't go there. You should criticise America for what it is, not what it was.
In other news, this week a German citizen was threatened with arrest for reading a poem.
Slashdot Mirror
Innovation and automation have been happening continuously for the past 250 years. Go visit a modern factory. They are already 90% automated. If you look at the slow rate of productivity growth, automation appears to be slowing down rather than accelerating, since most of the repetitive manufacturing jobs are already automated, and automating service jobs is much more difficult.
the automobile actually increased domestic employment
All previous waves of technological change increased employment. So why do you believe "This time is different"?
60,000 people, even at 10 cents an hour, is a lot of money.
Average factory wages in China are about $3/hour, not 10 cents. Since prices for many things are much lower in China, $3 buys as much as $10 in America. A Chinese factory worker can't afford a house and a car, but they can afford an apartment and a bicycle.
If robots are doing the jobs, why would you want manufacturing to come back home?
1. Lower shipping costs
2. National security
3. A major expense in manufacturing is energy. Energy prices for electricity and gas are much lower in America than in East Asia.
what to do to take care of the laborers whose jobs are being taken away by this efficiency
You simply accept this as an obvious premise, when there is little evidence that the robots are really "stealing our jobs". Past waves of technological change resulted in temporary disruption, but did not result in permanent job loses. There is little reason to believe it is happening this time either. Economies are not zero-sum, and a job lost to automation does not mean a jobless person. Robots are used where they have a comparative advantage, but, by definition, that is not all jobs.
Won't the new company have a near monopoly on incompentent consultancy?
Not at all. There is IBM, Andersen, McKinsey, etc. Incompetent consulting is a big and competitive business.
A great company slowly being flushed down the toilet by short termist used car salesman types.
The decline of HP had little to do with short-termism, and much more to do with long-term technological change. HP did well when computers cost $5k, and printers cost $3k, and people were willing to pay a few thousand extra for top quality. Now, computers cost $500, printers cost $50, and there is little difference is quality between brands. HP's old business strategy just doesn't work anymore. You can't charge a premium when you are selling commodity goods, and you can't compete on price against Foxconn.
Overpriced fad gadgets turn out to be crap - film at 11.
They may indeed be crap, but the crappy article provides no actual information about that. First, it says it is inaccurate by an average of "up to" 20 beats per minute. "Up to" means "less than", so that statement would be true even if the deviation was zero. So why don't they just say what the average deviation is, instead of using meaningless weasel words? Then later in the article, they talk about an error of "20 or 30" beats per minute. So which is it? Less than 20, or 20 to 30? TFA was written by someone willing to twist both words and numbers to push an agenda.
OTOH, Self-driving cars are known to cause traffic accidents – because they obey the speed limits, etc. very exactly.
No they don't. I have Tesla Autopilot, and it will happily drive at whatever max speed I set, even if it is well over the limit.
The summary didn't once mention the tech giant Google and their recent unveiling of Google Home.
The summary does mention Google Home. But this Apple announcement is way more interesting than the Google Home because it will have an open API. That will make a huge difference. A voice activated API opens up a world of possibilities. Google Home offers nothing new over the Amazon Echo.
It'll probably cost double what the Echo does
I have an Amazon Echo. I would gladly pay double for something twice as good. The Echo is nice, but it has a lot of limitations, and there is plenty of room for improvement. For instance, I can tell it to "turn off the kitchen light" and I can tell it to "set a timer for 5 minutes", but I can't tell it "in five minutes, turn off the kitchen light". Another nice feature would be to recognize individual voices of household members, so if my daughter says "play some music" it plays something she likes, and if I say "play some music" it knows I prefer Willie Nelson over Taylor Swift.
Yeah, go ahead and try to "quit" working
You don't have a right to live without supporting yourself, but you can still quit any particular job. If there is no other job to your liking available, you can work for yourself. My housekeeper runs her own business. She comes for about three hours once a month, and I pay her $120. That is $40/hour for a no-skill no-education job with flexible hours. If she cleans two houses a day, she can clear $60k/year. I tried to refer her to a friend, but she said she is too busy to take on new clients. I thought about explaining to her that turning down customers was bad business, and she should raise her prices instead, but then I realized that wasn't in my best interest.
6 Gbps is slightly different, like, 8 times as different.
If we are going to get pedantic, let's go all the way: The bit rate (little b) generally includes protocol overhead (framing, ECC, handshaking, etc), while the Byte rate (big B) generally refers to only actual data. So the difference is not a factor of 8, but usually around 10.
More criminals will be able to get sensitive jobs. How is this a bad thing?
It is not a bad thing. Employment drastically reduces recidivism, and a criminal record is not correlated with poor performance for most jobs. Many other things are better correlated with poor job performance, such as typing in all lowercase, or using IE as your browser when you fill out the application. So employers should look at those criteria instead of wasting time on background checks.
You need to think volumetrically, where the standard is the 40 foot intermodal shipping container. You can buy 4TB 2.5" HDDs, which are about 6 cubic inches. A shipping container has 40x8x8 = 2560 ft^3 or 4423680 in^3. So it would hold 737,280 2.5" HDDs, or just shy of 3 exabytes. So the nearly 10 exabytes in TFA could fit in 3 standard intermodal containers. Or it would all fit in a medium sized house (cabling and cooling would take additional space). If you used 1TB SD cards (expensive, but available), you could cram it all into one container.
Only 9EB?
That doesn't sound like much...
Indeed. I had an Exabyte tape drive back in the 1980s.
None of that applies to today's race to the absolute bottom in wages and working conditions.
Working in a modern warehouse is nowhere near the "absolute bottom", and claiming that it is worse than 19th century plantation slavery is idiotic.
slave-like worker conditions in warehouses
If you can legally quit, then it is not "slave-like". Slavery is not synonymous with "requires hard work".
if you can't code without the help of the internet, you are not a coder.
Whatever. I get paid for functionality, not originality.
We had the holocaust but you had the genocides of countless native nations.
What we did to the native Americans is nothing compared to what you Europeans did to the Neanderthals.
It certainly has some efficiency problems and the infrastructure hurdles.
Efficiency and infrastructure are THE ONLY THINGS THAT MATTER. So if loses on both of those, then it is just irredeemably stupid to use it.
you can then burn it in a generation plant when you need a little more electricity.
Burning the H2 in a gas turbine heat engine is about the dumbest possible way to turn it back into electricity. The whole point of using hydrogen is that it works in fuel cells.
the US didn't take food stocks to produce it. They did use feed stock corn, but that corn would never have been for human consumption in the first place.
The corn is fed to cows and pigs which are then eaten by humans. So indirectly, it is still food.
Since then, many have changed their crops to switch grass
Switchgrass stores energy as cellulose. There are a few pilot projects trying to converting cellulose to ethanol, but it is not yet happening on an industrial scale.
What's to stop people from creating their own hydrogen at home?
Common sense. Conversion of electricity to hydrogen is only about 60% efficient, so you lose 40% right off the top. Then it takes more energy to compress it. If you store it in a metal hydride, that takes more energy, plus increases the weight by an order of magnitude. There are many more problems with hydrogen, such as metal embrittlement and permeability through almost anything.
Hydrogen fuel has mainly been pushed as greenwashing, or cynical phoney environmentalism designed to delay adoption of electric cars based on actual sensible technology like lithium batteries. This was most famously done by George W. Bush, to divert research from battery powered electric cars.
Most of the bugs I've fixed were made in easy(and repetitive) code sometimes by very relaxed developers...
I wonder how many of those bugs were because they were interrupted by their manager, and given another task for an hour or a few days. Then when they can back to finish the half-written code, they no longer have the short term memory of special conditions or corner cases that need to be handled.
The whole programming process is stressful.
Is it? I have a hard time imagining a less stressful job. I sit in a $1800 ergometric chair, listening to my favorite music, while I cut and paste from Stackoverflow. Sure, there are deadlines, but any job has that, and with coding those deadlines are weekly or monthly, not hourly or by the minute like in many other jobs.
ORLY? Wasn't the FBI created to hunt communists? Freedom of expression my arse.
In the past, America persecuted and arrested people for being communists. But those laws were declared unconstitutional, and we don't do that anymore. If you want to drag up stuff from the past, Europe looks a lot worse than America, so you shouldn't go there. You should criticise America for what it is, not what it was.
In other news, this week a German citizen was threatened with arrest for reading a poem.
We're talking about hydrogen peroxide, right? Like people use to put on cuts to keep them from getting infected?
The hydrogen peroxide antiseptic in your medicine cabinet is 97% water and 3% H2O2.