Climate change aside, any island that "drowns" from the centimeter-class sea level rise we're actually talking about here was an incredibly poor place to set up shop.
There's no "environmental imperative" that says you can build or live any bloody unsafe place you want without taking the environment carefully into account. Try building your home on the edge of a swamp and complaining about the alligators on your porch. Or over a massive live cave system and then complaining about sinkholes.
The environment happens. Planning is called for. And if planning won't cut it, or wasn't really part of the original settlement circumstance, then moving is called for. Not whining about the water lapping a tiny bit further up the beach. Anyone who tries to float (hah) the argument that "but the islands are drowning" is an uninformed twerp.
What a cock-up. I'm afraid your typo has come home to roost. No, the fact is, hen temperature differences are inherent in the environment. I live in Montana, and I can almost guarantee that my hens aren't at the same temperature as your hens. If you even have any hens. You're probably just another non-hen-having Internet recliner pilot / warrior. Bet you're having trouble even trying to coop with this reply, aren't you? Well, relax. I'm only egging you on. Sitting quietly by the sidelines just isn't the happy spiritual experience it was cracked up to be. So I've hatched a few replies like this one. In the hopes of incubating some laying-about to push out some remarks. Pretty hard-boiled, eh? C'mon, shell out some appreciation. That'd be pretty white of you, actually.
But at least, one day, you're be a drowned dopey cunt.
Quite aside from the hyperbolic name-calling, this is precisely the kind of nonsensical rhetoric that makes people turn from considering any case for warming.
Sea level rise, even if it is profoundly more than predicted, will "drown" no one. Because it is an extremely slow effect. You could have two broken legs, a large dog sitting on your back, and have your hands slipping in the mud when you tried to pull yourself along and you could still get away from sea level rise without any concerns of drowning. You can see it coming years, even decades, in advance, and you can step back at any time.
The ocean related problems to be concerned with are ocean environmental changes such as acidification and temperature change; the land-related problems to be looking into are temperature change and rainfall pattern change. The data is leading, fairly obviously, to effects in both areas.
Barring technical solutions (likely, frankly) or some forcing that isn't notably in play and is not accounted for, either some action will eventually have to be taken WRT greenhouse gas output, or eventually, there will in fact be serious problems. Which again, will not include drowning.
I don't think that any assertion that Apple's app store promotes "information getting to China's citizens that normally wouldn't be there" holds up under even mild scrutiny.
Apple is not an information vendor; and its app stores (OSX/MacOS, iOS) in particular are notably lacking in freedom of expression. Those stores are terrible examples of freedom of any kind, generally speaking. Quite the opposite, in fact. If I wanted something pretty much guaranteed to have been filtered for content, looks and behavior for my computer (I do have a Mac) or my devices (I have an iPad, too), Apple's app stores would be the first place I'd look. But I don't want that. At all. So I don't look in those places. At all.
I'm pretty sure every country on earth has done some 'evil'.
Yes, but that doesn't mean you have to be complicit in actively helping them do it. That is a choice.
So where do you stand wrt your own country?
In Montana, generally.;-) But if you mean, do I think the US does evil with its laws and customs? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Deeply so. On a regular and profoundly impactful basis.
What if Google left it?
That would be flat-out awesome. They do a great deal of harm in general, and as a search engine, they are the largest driving force behind mediocrity in our society that I can think of, what with their popularity- and advertising-based search engine biases. Perhaps we should try to force them them to move to North Korea. Now there's a country, that if mediocrity were the driving force, would be uplifted. In the US, it just keeps the country down. Because while we suck, we don't suck as bad as almost anywhere else in a lot of ways (medical care, sexual sanity, and minding our own business notably excepted... we really suck at those things.)
Charity flat out is insufficient to the needs. If it wasn't, we would have no homeless, no one without proper healthcare, no one going hungry, no starving stray animals, no unnecessary suffering in general. There's no truth at all underlying the various absurd claims that charity could replace government redistribution in our society at this point in time. Selfishness is rampant, and highly thought of, in the public mindset; those of us who contribute (and I do, a lot, both money and time) get our ears bent a lot hearing about the profound limits of charitable efforts imposed by lack of funding.
Certainly charity is fine — as far as it goes. But it doesn't go nearly far enough. Government taxation and subsequent redistribution is the only solution to these types of problems, and the only possible significant amplifier for fact-based, unbiased news gathering. I agree, the BBC does much better than US news. They definitely have visible cultural bias, they're not a bastion of fact-based reporting by any means, but they certainly show up most US media outlets as the pap-fests they truly are.
But I don't think we're ever going to see it in the US. US news is an embedded social mores pandering corporate money-trough (PBS as well), and our government is almost entirely steered by corporate money, both directly and indirectly. If we want accurate news, we have to seek it out somewhere other than commercial news gathering operations. Some of us already do.
They had a real choice. They had, and have, a choice in almost every nation, and definitely WRT doing business in China.
If a country does evil, by law or custom, and further, makes you complicit in that evil, then you don't have to do business there (and you shouldn't, obviously.) The fact that you do means that you have decided that your own goals are more important than whatever the evil consists of. In this particular Apple's v. China v. people case, they want money a lot more than they want freedom of speech. They have laid those cards out quite plainly.
Also, speaking of Apple, they do plenty of "not in our app store" discarding / refusing various applications based on their own biases. This isn't in any way new behavior for them. The only questions really on the table are, (a) is a person aware of this? and (b) will a person tolerate it?
I've never heard of "appropriate protection" for panels that spend their life facing the sky.
Lexan - not only are my panels shielded with it, all my window panes are made of it. When we first moved into this building, a hailstorm took out all of our west-facing windows. I mean, completely, too. So I did a little research and found that Lexan was pretty much the best answer out there. Price-performance-lifetime is excellent.
If it ever shows any signs of significant decrease in transmission characteristics WRT panel efficiency, it's trivially replaced. I'm a huge fan.
That is incorrect. Medium is a publishing platform, but of the many writing efforts it carries, the ones that it pushes absolutely define it as a highly biased site in terms of what people are most likely to see. It is not in any way a level platform for its writers. Spend just a little time considering which articles they push to the front page, and you'll realize this.
There are plenty of worthy efforts that hit Medium. Very few people ever get to see them, though.
It's all about the eyeballs; because it's all about the money.
The biggest problem with news reporting is that once news is out there, it's free.
It's only a problem because we allow news gathering and dissemination to be a for-profit enterprise; everything that derives from that will be (and is) tainted by valuing money first, which in turn means that facts aren't the goal, whatever content draws the most eyeballs is the goal.
Nobody surfs the web any more looking for interesting links. Nobody types in URLs to visit a website.
Nonsense. My logs show all kinds of link-clickery on actual links to other sites (as opposed to the spammy crap generated by ad vendors.) My logs also show a majority of people arrive from other sites - not google, etc.
Google, by its very nature, aims at the mediocre. It ranks search results by "popularity", and uses multiple metrics to determine who/what is most popular. Popular means median/average. That's because they have no way to actually determine when content is most relevant, because that requires subject-matter expertise — so far, at least, that requires human skills. Not that Google can't find worthy content; it absolutely can, but you certainly can't count on it being at the top of the results unless your Google-fu is master level and you know exactly what you're looking for.
Subject-matter expertise is the precise thing that drives outlinking on a decently curated website. In my areas of expertise, when I pop a link into my serious content, I'm doing so because the linked site actually contains further expertise. Not because the thing is "popular."
That's why hand-linking, and related surfing, is capable of a much higher quality web experience. Granted some number of people don't do this and don't have the attention span to actually read anything more than a text bite, preferring to be spoon-fed with video and twitterized, pre-digested pap. But quality web sites were never about appealing to those who don't read for content. There are more high-quality sites out there than one could have any hope of consuming, even in areas of knowledge that are fairly esoteric. I know this because that's where I spend most of my web-surfing time, reading significant content written by people who know what they're talking about in areas of interest of mine that are not mainstream. In the high-value portion of the mainstream, such as politics, news, and social analysis, there are even more high-quality sites. Just because many get their content from Drudge, Huffington, or (vomit) Facebook, doesn't mean that quality content in those areas doesn't exist. It just means some people never see it.
As long as the costs to get online remain as low as they are, I don't see any of this changing, either. Costs me a trivial amount to keep my websites up and running, and to put a lot of quality information and capability out for people who share my interests.
Those with their nose buried in text- video- and sound-bite class "apps" and exclusively chasing Google searches will often think that's the entire online world, as the parent post has asserted, but that isn't the case now, it never was, and it seems entirely unlikely that it will ever be so.
Medical and insurance costs have been rising for decades. Overall, under ACA/Obamacare, they rose more slowly. There are outlier cases on both sides, and of course the ones you hear the most about are from the people who see unusually higher costs. I'm one of the other outliers; but my costs went down considerably and my access to healthcare went up. Same for my SO.
The situation is far from perfect. The ACA either needs tweaks, or we need to transition to a socially responsible form of single payer, which means straight-up tax-based medical care. What we don't need is a return to pre-existing condition death and suffering consequences, and under/non-cared-for poor people.
But if robots become sapient, sentient, and conscious, won't they make demands on their employers? Won't they question why they toil continuously?
The existence of sapient, sentient, conscious machine intelligence does not in any way imply that machines without those characteristics will not be employed in manufacturing. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most jobs do not require any of the above. They simply require knowledge and the ability to apply it in a basically rote manner.
Any "disposing" gets done, they're likely to run square into the "there are more of the disposables than there are of us" problem. At which point, there won't be any of them.
i was unclear and over-brief on the matter due to hand-waving on my part. I didn't mean they were blind and deaf to its failure in the sense that they advertise as its intent; I meant they were blind and deaf to the damage it causes, and I meant that in an "intentionally blind and deaf" sense. They actually count on the fact that its a problem that can never be solved, as that puts it into the class of a money-and-vote pump that will never run dry. Because yes, they are evil, disgusting people. You're exactly correct.
First all of all those "other than battery replacement" costs are a huge part the system
Depends on the system size and if, in fact, you're actually using batteries, and what batteries you're using. There are entirely battery-free systems that are grid-tied, for instance. There are UC-based systems. For larger systems, other storage methods are used, and some of them are like UCs in that they have no particular recurring costs either.
second anywhere you actually have a period of winter you have hail damage
Yeah, no. First of all (and what tells me you have no idea what you're talking about), hail is not a winter problem. Hail is a warm-weather problem. Secondly, in a hail-prone area, you use appropriate protection with the panels. It hailed all over my panels last year, big hail, too, and there's not a scratch on any of them.
You should go back and read the post you replied to. I specifically described that storage is an associated and recurring cost with battery-driven solar plants.
Also, solar does not require batteries. That's just the most common way to do it. For instance, the solar system in my radio trailer is 100% ultracap based. No recurring costs of any kind in the power systems. Right now, a home system requires a lot of space for such a thing, and new ultracaps are still pretty expensive (I haunt Ebay for used ones, though, and they aren't so costly.) But those curves are changing in increasingly favorable ways.
On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.
You're doing it wrong. And "cloudy" is not the same as "solar plant produces too little energy"
If you own a house, your system can cover your house for quite some time. And should. Weeks is not an unreasonable design goal, particularly with an energy-efficient home. Also, solar still produces energy when overcast; just not as much. The linked video shows a 75 watt panel generating about 6-7 watts on a 100% overcast day, which is about 10% of the panel's rated rated power. You can be frugal (and on a temporary basis, extremely frugal) with your power use. You can construct an energy efficient environment (even in an older home.) You can insulate (and if you're trying to save money, you should. One of the best money-saving investments you can make. Trade some space for a constant reduction in expenses. And noise. And increase in comfort and temperature stability. Sheets of insulation are very inexpensive, particularly when compared to heating and cooling costs. Read up on, and pay careful attention to, condensation and moisture barrier issues when building internal secondary insulating layers.)
If you live in other than a home you own, then you get what they give you. Sorry about that. You might want to consider trying to GTFO of there.
A comprehensive home solar plant will pay for itself within a reasonable number of years by eliminating the gas / coal / electric bill entirely, and from there on out, it won't incur any regular costs other than storage (battery) replacement until it dies, which could take decades. And if ultracaps reach sufficient price/performance, even the recurring storage costs will dry up. Including those for pre-existing systems.
You let us know when gas power presents these kinds of cost advantages. No one will be holding their breath.
Not one use for humans in your world is there? This robots - are they goung to consume all this awesome stuff they make?
My expectation is, after a lot of pain, we'll move off of the toxic idea that one only deserves to have self-respect if one performs some kind of drudgework, and that one only deserves respect from without if one performs some kind of drudgework, to a mindset where one deserves respect because one is a socially reasonable human being and pursues one's own interests in some healthy fashion (IOW, with some degree of pleasure, while offering no harm to others.)
"Money for stuff" is an adequate model when there is a too-limited amount of stuff and everyone must produce or we all fall down. When there isn't a too-limited amount of stuff, and one does not have to produce to keep society going, it doesn't make very much sense for the majority to have to do drudgework.
There will need to be some measure of consumption, and some way to meter it out. But it won't be based on work. Or so I imagine.
It's the getting from here to there that I'm worried about. Jobs are going to go away fast. And here in the US, where I am, congress moves slowly, sometimes not moving at all, even when it is obvious they need to (for instance, they've been pursuing the complete failure of a drug war for decades now, and they're still too blind, deaf and self-centered to understand it's a pointless exercise from the POV of accomplishing anything worthwhile, while also harming the maximum possible number of people, far, far more than drugs themselves ever posed a threat to.)
But the people keep electing millionaires to congress. That's right. The average net worth of a congresscritter is over one million dollars. So any change in the right direction will meet some resistance. I leave it to you to imagine how much.
Except that in the near future, the robots may more adaptable than the humans.
And faster. And less expensive over time. And more reliable. And more consistent. And not need health insurance. And not need breaks because they, or their SO, is pregnant, or little Johnny has the sniffles. And can work 24-hour, 7-day shifts instead of 8 hour, 5-day shifts. And during which shifts, they won't need breaks. Or holidays. Or time off for funerals, Comic-con, taking Fido to the vet, or little Susie's parent-teacher conference. They won't sue because they were sexually harassed. If grandpa robot dies, they won't give a shit. They won't get tired. They won't get bored. They won't do work below their capabilities because they don't like the boss. They won't get hired away after they've been trained (or programmed, in the early stages) so new employee costs will plummet. The HR department will have nothing to do with these things. And so on.
Anyone who thinks AI is "just another lateral economic shift" has no idea what's going to be smacking them in the face. With a steel toed-boot. It isn't about human creativity. It's about all the other human things, the ones no one really wants to talk about in the open. The ones the robots will most definitely not bring to the workplace.
And that is all with just the type of systems we can make today. When real AI arrives — sapient, sentient, and conscious — the ground will shift yet again, and no one has any clue at all about the directions those shifts will take, or how profound they will be.
Technology is old news in 5 years and almost useless in 10 years.
Let's assert this is uniformly true.
So let's say we reduce the patent term to 2.5 years so it's not old news. After 2.5 years, you can do whatever you like with any invention.
This, in turn, means that the time the creator has to recoup their inventing costs is 2.5 years; no longer. Because after that, a competitor will enter the market having spent nothing to get where the creator spent all that money.
This will considerably reduce the amount that can be spent on new inventions without losing one's shirt; and that, in turn, will severely retard the advance of the very technologies you are so eager to get for free.
But there's more, and if anything, it's worse. Here 'tis: While no consumer is very likely to wait 20 years to get their hands on something, two to three years? That's not unthinkable at all. I kept my last phone five years. I've kept my computer eight years. So what happens here is that the market for the initial product, at the higher price that has to pay for the development costs, over the shorter period of time, will shrink, because the consumers will be thinking "if I just wait a couple years, this will be much less expensive." And not because initial high prices have defrayed the development costs; no, this is because for the me-too manufacturers, there are no development costs. So what you end up with is even less recovery of development costs.
While I'm with you in that development is hard, and in tech, it's fast, the problem is it is expensive, and if you want the money spent to do the development in a capitalist economy, then something like the patent system has to be in place.
If you think we can somehow transition the US from capitalism to... something that sees that all development efforts are fully funded and everyone gets to benefit... well, let's just say I don't see it anywhere on the horizon and leave it at that.
...all you have to do is weaken patents. They do not help innovation and are mainly used to keep unwanted competition from entering into lucrative markets.
At least part of the problem is that the reason those markets are lucrative is because of patents.
If I spend X billion dollars developing Y, I need to be able to (at least) make X billion dollars back.
You, on the other hand, with Y in hand because of weak patents, and no need to have spent X billion dollars to get there, will be selling Y under the price that I can afford to, because you didn't spend X on developing it. So I go out of business. Which means next time you need methodologies, you won't be getting them from me. Because you killed me by entering the market without paying the same costs I did.
These problems are very serious when you're talking about very expensive development and/or manufacturing. They affect drug companies, chip manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers, etc. Some types of development and/or manufacturing require big costs to bootstrap, and no, bottom line, it's not reasonable to allow the next-in-line operation to bypass those costs at the early entry entity's expense.
Patents have a limited term, either 14 or 20 years, depending on the type; this sets fairly discrete bounds on what you can, and can't, do. Unlike copyrights, patent law hasn't (yet) fallen off the edge of the earth into the blatantly unreasonable.
In the US, this all stems from article I, section 8, clause 8, of the constitution (emphasis mine):
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Any attempt to define AI as not requiring intelligence is not only wrong, but pitifully wrong.
We have no AI (yet), because we have not been able to create an intelligence (thus far.)
But if you want to roll with some definition that makes you think your toaster is intelligent, or a go game solver is intelligent, or a facial recognition program is intelligent, that's pure music to the ears of those who want to market such items to the world.
The only problem you're really going to face is, you won't know what to call those things any longer after AI actually comes about.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Climate change aside, any island that "drowns" from the centimeter-class sea level rise we're actually talking about here was an incredibly poor place to set up shop.
There's no "environmental imperative" that says you can build or live any bloody unsafe place you want without taking the environment carefully into account. Try building your home on the edge of a swamp and complaining about the alligators on your porch. Or over a massive live cave system and then complaining about sinkholes.
The environment happens. Planning is called for. And if planning won't cut it, or wasn't really part of the original settlement circumstance, then moving is called for. Not whining about the water lapping a tiny bit further up the beach. Anyone who tries to float (hah) the argument that "but the islands are drowning" is an uninformed twerp.
What a cock-up. I'm afraid your typo has come home to roost. No, the fact is, hen temperature differences are inherent in the environment. I live in Montana, and I can almost guarantee that my hens aren't at the same temperature as your hens. If you even have any hens. You're probably just another non-hen-having Internet recliner pilot / warrior. Bet you're having trouble even trying to coop with this reply, aren't you? Well, relax. I'm only egging you on. Sitting quietly by the sidelines just isn't the happy spiritual experience it was cracked up to be. So I've hatched a few replies like this one. In the hopes of incubating some laying-about to push out some remarks. Pretty hard-boiled, eh? C'mon, shell out some appreciation. That'd be pretty white of you, actually.
Quite aside from the hyperbolic name-calling, this is precisely the kind of nonsensical rhetoric that makes people turn from considering any case for warming.
Sea level rise, even if it is profoundly more than predicted, will "drown" no one. Because it is an extremely slow effect. You could have two broken legs, a large dog sitting on your back, and have your hands slipping in the mud when you tried to pull yourself along and you could still get away from sea level rise without any concerns of drowning. You can see it coming years, even decades, in advance, and you can step back at any time.
The ocean related problems to be concerned with are ocean environmental changes such as acidification and temperature change; the land-related problems to be looking into are temperature change and rainfall pattern change. The data is leading, fairly obviously, to effects in both areas.
Barring technical solutions (likely, frankly) or some forcing that isn't notably in play and is not accounted for, either some action will eventually have to be taken WRT greenhouse gas output, or eventually, there will in fact be serious problems. Which again, will not include drowning.
I don't think that any assertion that Apple's app store promotes "information getting to China's citizens that normally wouldn't be there" holds up under even mild scrutiny.
Apple is not an information vendor; and its app stores (OSX/MacOS, iOS) in particular are notably lacking in freedom of expression. Those stores are terrible examples of freedom of any kind, generally speaking. Quite the opposite, in fact. If I wanted something pretty much guaranteed to have been filtered for content, looks and behavior for my computer (I do have a Mac) or my devices (I have an iPad, too), Apple's app stores would be the first place I'd look. But I don't want that. At all. So I don't look in those places. At all.
Yes, but that doesn't mean you have to be complicit in actively helping them do it. That is a choice.
In Montana, generally. ;-) But if you mean, do I think the US does evil with its laws and customs? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Deeply so. On a regular and profoundly impactful basis.
That would be flat-out awesome. They do a great deal of harm in general, and as a search engine, they are the largest driving force behind mediocrity in our society that I can think of, what with their popularity- and advertising-based search engine biases. Perhaps we should try to force them them to move to North Korea. Now there's a country, that if mediocrity were the driving force, would be uplifted. In the US, it just keeps the country down. Because while we suck, we don't suck as bad as almost anywhere else in a lot of ways (medical care, sexual sanity, and minding our own business notably excepted... we really suck at those things.)
Charity flat out is insufficient to the needs. If it wasn't, we would have no homeless, no one without proper healthcare, no one going hungry, no starving stray animals, no unnecessary suffering in general. There's no truth at all underlying the various absurd claims that charity could replace government redistribution in our society at this point in time. Selfishness is rampant, and highly thought of, in the public mindset; those of us who contribute (and I do, a lot, both money and time) get our ears bent a lot hearing about the profound limits of charitable efforts imposed by lack of funding.
Certainly charity is fine — as far as it goes. But it doesn't go nearly far enough. Government taxation and subsequent redistribution is the only solution to these types of problems, and the only possible significant amplifier for fact-based, unbiased news gathering. I agree, the BBC does much better than US news. They definitely have visible cultural bias, they're not a bastion of fact-based reporting by any means, but they certainly show up most US media outlets as the pap-fests they truly are.
But I don't think we're ever going to see it in the US. US news is an embedded social mores pandering corporate money-trough (PBS as well), and our government is almost entirely steered by corporate money, both directly and indirectly. If we want accurate news, we have to seek it out somewhere other than commercial news gathering operations. Some of us already do.
They had a real choice. They had, and have, a choice in almost every nation, and definitely WRT doing business in China.
If a country does evil, by law or custom, and further, makes you complicit in that evil, then you don't have to do business there (and you shouldn't, obviously.) The fact that you do means that you have decided that your own goals are more important than whatever the evil consists of. In this particular Apple's v. China v. people case, they want money a lot more than they want freedom of speech. They have laid those cards out quite plainly.
Also, speaking of Apple, they do plenty of "not in our app store" discarding / refusing various applications based on their own biases. This isn't in any way new behavior for them. The only questions really on the table are, (a) is a person aware of this? and (b) will a person tolerate it?
Lexan - not only are my panels shielded with it, all my window panes are made of it. When we first moved into this building, a hailstorm took out all of our west-facing windows. I mean, completely, too. So I did a little research and found that Lexan was pretty much the best answer out there. Price-performance-lifetime is excellent.
If it ever shows any signs of significant decrease in transmission characteristics WRT panel efficiency, it's trivially replaced. I'm a huge fan.
That is incorrect. Medium is a publishing platform, but of the many writing efforts it carries, the ones that it pushes absolutely define it as a highly biased site in terms of what people are most likely to see. It is not in any way a level platform for its writers. Spend just a little time considering which articles they push to the front page, and you'll realize this.
There are plenty of worthy efforts that hit Medium. Very few people ever get to see them, though.
It's all about the eyeballs; because it's all about the money.
It's only a problem because we allow news gathering and dissemination to be a for-profit enterprise; everything that derives from that will be (and is) tainted by valuing money first, which in turn means that facts aren't the goal, whatever content draws the most eyeballs is the goal.
Nonsense. My logs show all kinds of link-clickery on actual links to other sites (as opposed to the spammy crap generated by ad vendors.) My logs also show a majority of people arrive from other sites - not google, etc.
Google, by its very nature, aims at the mediocre. It ranks search results by "popularity", and uses multiple metrics to determine who/what is most popular. Popular means median/average. That's because they have no way to actually determine when content is most relevant, because that requires subject-matter expertise — so far, at least, that requires human skills. Not that Google can't find worthy content; it absolutely can, but you certainly can't count on it being at the top of the results unless your Google-fu is master level and you know exactly what you're looking for.
Subject-matter expertise is the precise thing that drives outlinking on a decently curated website. In my areas of expertise, when I pop a link into my serious content, I'm doing so because the linked site actually contains further expertise. Not because the thing is "popular."
That's why hand-linking, and related surfing, is capable of a much higher quality web experience. Granted some number of people don't do this and don't have the attention span to actually read anything more than a text bite, preferring to be spoon-fed with video and twitterized, pre-digested pap. But quality web sites were never about appealing to those who don't read for content. There are more high-quality sites out there than one could have any hope of consuming, even in areas of knowledge that are fairly esoteric. I know this because that's where I spend most of my web-surfing time, reading significant content written by people who know what they're talking about in areas of interest of mine that are not mainstream. In the high-value portion of the mainstream, such as politics, news, and social analysis, there are even more high-quality sites. Just because many get their content from Drudge, Huffington, or (vomit) Facebook, doesn't mean that quality content in those areas doesn't exist. It just means some people never see it.
As long as the costs to get online remain as low as they are, I don't see any of this changing, either. Costs me a trivial amount to keep my websites up and running, and to put a lot of quality information and capability out for people who share my interests.
Those with their nose buried in text- video- and sound-bite class "apps" and exclusively chasing Google searches will often think that's the entire online world, as the parent post has asserted, but that isn't the case now, it never was, and it seems entirely unlikely that it will ever be so.
Medical and insurance costs have been rising for decades. Overall, under ACA/Obamacare, they rose more slowly. There are outlier cases on both sides, and of course the ones you hear the most about are from the people who see unusually higher costs. I'm one of the other outliers; but my costs went down considerably and my access to healthcare went up. Same for my SO.
The situation is far from perfect. The ACA either needs tweaks, or we need to transition to a socially responsible form of single payer, which means straight-up tax-based medical care. What we don't need is a return to pre-existing condition death and suffering consequences, and under/non-cared-for poor people.
The existence of sapient, sentient, conscious machine intelligence does not in any way imply that machines without those characteristics will not be employed in manufacturing. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most jobs do not require any of the above. They simply require knowledge and the ability to apply it in a basically rote manner.
Any "disposing" gets done, they're likely to run square into the "there are more of the disposables than there are of us" problem. At which point, there won't be any of them.
i was unclear and over-brief on the matter due to hand-waving on my part. I didn't mean they were blind and deaf to its failure in the sense that they advertise as its intent; I meant they were blind and deaf to the damage it causes, and I meant that in an "intentionally blind and deaf" sense. They actually count on the fact that its a problem that can never be solved, as that puts it into the class of a money-and-vote pump that will never run dry. Because yes, they are evil, disgusting people. You're exactly correct.
Depends on the system size and if, in fact, you're actually using batteries, and what batteries you're using. There are entirely battery-free systems that are grid-tied, for instance. There are UC-based systems. For larger systems, other storage methods are used, and some of them are like UCs in that they have no particular recurring costs either.
Yeah, no. First of all (and what tells me you have no idea what you're talking about), hail is not a winter problem. Hail is a warm-weather problem. Secondly, in a hail-prone area, you use appropriate protection with the panels. It hailed all over my panels last year, big hail, too, and there's not a scratch on any of them.
You should go back and read the post you replied to. I specifically described that storage is an associated and recurring cost with battery-driven solar plants.
Also, solar does not require batteries. That's just the most common way to do it. For instance, the solar system in my radio trailer is 100% ultracap based. No recurring costs of any kind in the power systems. Right now, a home system requires a lot of space for such a thing, and new ultracaps are still pretty expensive (I haunt Ebay for used ones, though, and they aren't so costly.) But those curves are changing in increasingly favorable ways.
You're doing it wrong. And "cloudy" is not the same as "solar plant produces too little energy"
If you own a house, your system can cover your house for quite some time. And should. Weeks is not an unreasonable design goal, particularly with an energy-efficient home. Also, solar still produces energy when overcast; just not as much. The linked video shows a 75 watt panel generating about 6-7 watts on a 100% overcast day, which is about 10% of the panel's rated rated power. You can be frugal (and on a temporary basis, extremely frugal) with your power use. You can construct an energy efficient environment (even in an older home.) You can insulate (and if you're trying to save money, you should. One of the best money-saving investments you can make. Trade some space for a constant reduction in expenses. And noise. And increase in comfort and temperature stability. Sheets of insulation are very inexpensive, particularly when compared to heating and cooling costs. Read up on, and pay careful attention to, condensation and moisture barrier issues when building internal secondary insulating layers.)
If you live in other than a home you own, then you get what they give you. Sorry about that. You might want to consider trying to GTFO of there.
A comprehensive home solar plant will pay for itself within a reasonable number of years by eliminating the gas / coal / electric bill entirely, and from there on out, it won't incur any regular costs other than storage (battery) replacement until it dies, which could take decades. And if ultracaps reach sufficient price/performance, even the recurring storage costs will dry up. Including those for pre-existing systems.
You let us know when gas power presents these kinds of cost advantages. No one will be holding their breath.
Which they will do as soon as you take their development treasure and run away with it.
My expectation is, after a lot of pain, we'll move off of the toxic idea that one only deserves to have self-respect if one performs some kind of drudgework, and that one only deserves respect from without if one performs some kind of drudgework, to a mindset where one deserves respect because one is a socially reasonable human being and pursues one's own interests in some healthy fashion (IOW, with some degree of pleasure, while offering no harm to others.)
"Money for stuff" is an adequate model when there is a too-limited amount of stuff and everyone must produce or we all fall down. When there isn't a too-limited amount of stuff, and one does not have to produce to keep society going, it doesn't make very much sense for the majority to have to do drudgework.
There will need to be some measure of consumption, and some way to meter it out. But it won't be based on work. Or so I imagine.
It's the getting from here to there that I'm worried about. Jobs are going to go away fast. And here in the US, where I am, congress moves slowly, sometimes not moving at all, even when it is obvious they need to (for instance, they've been pursuing the complete failure of a drug war for decades now, and they're still too blind, deaf and self-centered to understand it's a pointless exercise from the POV of accomplishing anything worthwhile, while also harming the maximum possible number of people, far, far more than drugs themselves ever posed a threat to.)
Right now... now... there are about 42 million food-insecure people in the US. That's roughly 1/7th of the population. And the financial imbalance is extreme. It's pretty clear that the current model does not serve the country at large very well.
But the people keep electing millionaires to congress. That's right. The average net worth of a congresscritter is over one million dollars. So any change in the right direction will meet some resistance. I leave it to you to imagine how much.
And faster. And less expensive over time. And more reliable. And more consistent. And not need health insurance. And not need breaks because they, or their SO, is pregnant, or little Johnny has the sniffles. And can work 24-hour, 7-day shifts instead of 8 hour, 5-day shifts. And during which shifts, they won't need breaks. Or holidays. Or time off for funerals, Comic-con, taking Fido to the vet, or little Susie's parent-teacher conference. They won't sue because they were sexually harassed. If grandpa robot dies, they won't give a shit. They won't get tired. They won't get bored. They won't do work below their capabilities because they don't like the boss. They won't get hired away after they've been trained (or programmed, in the early stages) so new employee costs will plummet. The HR department will have nothing to do with these things. And so on.
Anyone who thinks AI is "just another lateral economic shift" has no idea what's going to be smacking them in the face. With a steel toed-boot. It isn't about human creativity. It's about all the other human things, the ones no one really wants to talk about in the open. The ones the robots will most definitely not bring to the workplace.
And that is all with just the type of systems we can make today. When real AI arrives — sapient, sentient, and conscious — the ground will shift yet again, and no one has any clue at all about the directions those shifts will take, or how profound they will be.
Let's assert this is uniformly true.
So let's say we reduce the patent term to 2.5 years so it's not old news. After 2.5 years, you can do whatever you like with any invention.
This, in turn, means that the time the creator has to recoup their inventing costs is 2.5 years; no longer. Because after that, a competitor will enter the market having spent nothing to get where the creator spent all that money.
This will considerably reduce the amount that can be spent on new inventions without losing one's shirt; and that, in turn, will severely retard the advance of the very technologies you are so eager to get for free.
But there's more, and if anything, it's worse. Here 'tis: While no consumer is very likely to wait 20 years to get their hands on something, two to three years? That's not unthinkable at all. I kept my last phone five years. I've kept my computer eight years. So what happens here is that the market for the initial product, at the higher price that has to pay for the development costs, over the shorter period of time, will shrink, because the consumers will be thinking "if I just wait a couple years, this will be much less expensive." And not because initial high prices have defrayed the development costs; no, this is because for the me-too manufacturers, there are no development costs. So what you end up with is even less recovery of development costs.
While I'm with you in that development is hard, and in tech, it's fast, the problem is it is expensive, and if you want the money spent to do the development in a capitalist economy, then something like the patent system has to be in place.
If you think we can somehow transition the US from capitalism to... something that sees that all development efforts are fully funded and everyone gets to benefit... well, let's just say I don't see it anywhere on the horizon and leave it at that.
At least part of the problem is that the reason those markets are lucrative is because of patents.
If I spend X billion dollars developing Y, I need to be able to (at least) make X billion dollars back.
You, on the other hand, with Y in hand because of weak patents, and no need to have spent X billion dollars to get there, will be selling Y under the price that I can afford to, because you didn't spend X on developing it. So I go out of business. Which means next time you need methodologies, you won't be getting them from me. Because you killed me by entering the market without paying the same costs I did.
These problems are very serious when you're talking about very expensive development and/or manufacturing. They affect drug companies, chip manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers, etc. Some types of development and/or manufacturing require big costs to bootstrap, and no, bottom line, it's not reasonable to allow the next-in-line operation to bypass those costs at the early entry entity's expense.
Patents have a limited term, either 14 or 20 years, depending on the type; this sets fairly discrete bounds on what you can, and can't, do. Unlike copyrights, patent law hasn't (yet) fallen off the edge of the earth into the blatantly unreasonable.
In the US, this all stems from article I, section 8, clause 8, of the constitution (emphasis mine):
A = Artificial. I = Intelligence.
That's what AI means. SF has no bearing on it.
Any attempt to define AI as not requiring intelligence is not only wrong, but pitifully wrong.
We have no AI (yet), because we have not been able to create an intelligence (thus far.)
But if you want to roll with some definition that makes you think your toaster is intelligent, or a go game solver is intelligent, or a facial recognition program is intelligent, that's pure music to the ears of those who want to market such items to the world.
The only problem you're really going to face is, you won't know what to call those things any longer after AI actually comes about. :)