That's how I read it too, but how much of the increased cost of the newer vehicles is attributed to engineering costs of (a) improving fuel efficiency versus (b) all those new fancy safety features (as well as other luxury features that are all becoming "standard" in vehicles these days)... I'd argue that those new features are as much a factor, if not more so.
It seems to me that the increased fuel efficiency requirements was a necessary step to spurn innovation in fuel economy; the auto makers were complacent with the status quo. They had no real incentive to invest in improving fuel efficiency when they could instead spend that money/effort adding new flashy features to their vehicles (and/or just keep pumping out the same-ish models every year).
Whether or not we've already reached a tipping point, or if "freezing" the standard for the next few years is beneficial overall is certainly debatable, and you make some good points.
I just figure they expect to be dead by the time climate change becomes an issue for them, so they don't give a shit. Even if bad stuff starts to happen soon, they have all that money they can use to keep themselves comfortable and safe until they die.
I didn't know about that law until just a few days ago, and it seems kind of ridiculous to me. I'm all for preventing people from bringing guns on airplanes or into courthouses, but legislating that current gun technology has to comply with older technology designed to detect them seems like grasping at straws, and completely useless against a determined criminal (they're already planning to break at least one law, so why not another?). What's to prevent that person from replacing the metal part(s) with plastic or ceramic parts to bypass the metal detectors?
After moving into my house and only subscribing to internet service from Comcast, they have called me on the phone and pushed HARD to try and get me to add cable. I eventually hung up. So, apparently they do care.
I recently moved from an apartment with Fios at 75 up/down to a house without Fios available, but was able to get a Gigabit connection through Comcast for about $90 / month (just internet, no cable). Even with Adding Hulu and a few premium channels from Amazon, I'm saving a significant amount of money over what I was paying Verizon, and with a much faster connection.
Comcast has since called me up to try to up-sell me on cable, and it fairly reasonably priced (I think about $20 more per month, with Showtime included), but I love never having to change inputs on my TV (use FireTV for everything), they don't have an X1 app on FireTV (despite what the sales person insisted), and the sales person was so pushy and annoying that I eventually hung up.
Micro-transactions in games isn't inherently bad. If it's implemented the way that Fortnite (the game mentioned in this story) has done it, it seems like the best-possible business model for any game (and clearly it's working). The game is entirely free-to-play for everyone, you never have to spend a penny on the game if you don't want to (meaning there are far more players in the game -- which is essential in a PVP game), but those who are willing to shell out a little cash for some cosmetic items can do so and support the continued development of the game in the process. It's a complete win-win.
The issue is that most games don't stick to this model and allow people to purchase items that affect the game play, giving them an advantage over other players who don't spend money. And / or add gambling loot boxes so people have to spend a lot of money to get the particular item they want (if they get it at all).
The main issue is that all of this carbon has been slowly trapped in the earth over the last hundreds of millions of years, until we started releasing it at an alarming rate within the last few hundred years. That's obviously going to have a significant affect on the environment.
This is a fairly long read, but worth it. At least checkout "The Story of Energy" section.
If it (the cosmetics) pays for the game to keep running and have active development, then I don't see what the issue is. It's better than selling weapons / armor / etc that affect game-play (pay-to-win), and better than the subscription model (more players to play with / against).
The point is, you don't need the cosmetic items to play or be competitive, but it also allows the people willing and able to spend some money on cool looking stuff to support the game financially. That seems like a win-win to me.
Similar thing happened to me when I bought a car a while back. The salesman begged me to not fill out the survey if I couldn't give him a perfect 5 score for everything. I thought that was a bit dramatic at the time (about 6 years ago), but looking back I understand why.
When commercial air flight was first starting out, it was also only the rich that could afford it, but that has obviously changed. It seems reasonable that over time the same thing will happen to space flights.
If it weren't for games, I wouldn't be running Windows on my primary home computer. Unfortunately, while Linux support for games is getting better, many of the games I like to play are only Windows (and sometimes Mac as well).
But I am fortunate that I can run Linux on my work computer, since I'm doing web development and don't need any specialized programs. I do have a Windows VM I can fire up if I really need it (checking IE compatibility of the web-pages, for example), but I can't even remember the last time I've had to do that.
so I don't know why you need this stuff uploading to the "Cloud".
The only real reason I've been able to come up with for why you want to upload your home security video to "the cloud" would be to have an off-site backup so you have a way to look at the video and see who burned your house down. A reasonable solution to that would be to have it periodically encrypt the footage and upload it to some general "cloud" storage solution where only you have the key to unlock it. Why anyone would want to have a camera in their home watching them all the time being uploaded and controlled by a third-party company baffles me.
No, you can't. Because 140 characters (or whatever they've now raised it to.) is not in-depth. It's the exact opposite.
Yeah, it's certainly not in depth in itself, but tweets often link to articles which are in-depth
I think the character limit is one of it's greatest strengths (so it baffles me that they increased it), because it forces people to be concise and get to the damn point, rather than a wall of text that people give up reading after the second sentence (if they even bother trying to read it at all), like some people's Facebook posts.
On the other hand, being that concise can often lead to misunderstandings which can easily spiral out of control in record time.
Tesla is building EVs for the 0.01% while other manufacturers are actually building affordable EVs today.
Musk's stated goal when creating Tesla was to accelerate the auto industry's switch to electric (since autos are our biggest polluter), and that seems to be what has happened. Before Tesla, none of the auto makers were really serious about EVs and were happy with the status-quo.
Was just reading this article earlier today, and it seems to make a lot of sense. We need to A) come up with a plan to protect our satellite infrastructure and B) have MORE cooperation between the various branches of the military (and NOT another branch that will inevitably have different motivators than just supporting the others), so the Space Force is not the answer, but we need to do something.
Not sure if you're entirely serious, but I don't see that ever happening.
1. There are lots of places where society wouldn't allow you to control your phone via voice, such as waiting rooms
2. People will want to be able to do things on their phones without everyone around them hearing what they're doing.
3. If multiple people in a confined area are using their phones, things could get messy pretty quickly (at least until the technology advances enough to reliably recognize individual voices).
Well, the article mentions that up until now they were sort of stuck using existing chassis's supplied by their manufacturer in China, and at the time that made fiscal sense. But now they plan to design and build them themselves. So, my takeaway is that they'll likely being trying to address your second concern and they might end up with some pretty slick looking linux laptops.
The third party data now provides little to no benefit over the data Facebook gathers itself.
This isn't true.
For example, say you have a brand (i.e. something like Columbia, L.L. Bean, etc) which has a loyalty program, or even just a mailing list that customers opt-in to, because they like your brand. Currently, you can send your list of subscribers (in a hashed format) over to Facebook in order to target those people for ads. Facebook will take that list, compare it to it's users, and serve up ads to any Facebook users who match (and Facebook never tells you which customers matched, it just gives you an estimate of how many matched, as long as it's over a certain threshold).
... when last year's FCC said it would be 25mbps, per Wheeler's 2016 draft progress report
That's for fixed broadband, it's the mobile broadband definition that is changing (though I haven't yet been able to find out what the current mobile speed is defined as). If you look at the actual FCC document, it clearly states that the fixed broadband definition should remain the same (at 25 down / 3 up)
Actually, he's right... I had to look it up to be sure, and according to this article , and the actual FCC document it references, says that the definition for fixed broadband remains the same, and it's only the mobile broadband definition that is changing.
First, we propose to maintain the current speed benchmark of 25 Mbps
download and 3 Mbps upload (25 Mbps/3 Mbps) for fixed broadband, and we also seek comment about
other potential benchmarks.
We seek comment on whether a mobile speed benchmark of 10 Mbps/1 Mbps is
appropriate for mobile broadband services. Would a download speed benchmark higher or lower than 10
Mbps be appropriate for the purpose of assessing American consumers’ access to advanced
telecommunications capability?
Automation is one of the reasons that gerrymandering has been so effective, and generated so much controversy over the last few years. Since the party in power in these states is allowed re-draw the maps, the availability of automation has made this type of behavior easier and more effective.
What we really need if for all states to change their rules so that an independent committee is responsible for re-drawing the maps, with strict rules that the automation being used should optimize for the most balanced distribution based on the census data
I recently tried to explain the concept of UBI to my father (he's in his 70s) and his response was "sounds like socialism". I'm not sure if UBI is the solution to the impending automation revolution, because as you said we survived the industrial revolution with out it, but likely we'll have to do something.
(Ironically, my father is a retired an electrical engineer who worked for many years on automated systems)
Supermarkets will need to come up with something way better than what they have now, or pay me to do my own checkout.
They've had the idea for years, possibly decades at this point. The idea was to have every single item in the store contain an RFID tag. You walk around the store, put items in your cart, and a scanner similar to a metal detector at the exit simply reads everything in your cart on the way out and charges your credit card for it.
I'm not entirely sure why they haven't implemented this yet, but I suspect it's related to the logistics of tagging everything with an RFID (they'd likely want to have that done by the manufacturer) and the reliably of the system (it probably doesn't work as accurately as they would like, yet)
Slashdot Mirror
That's how I read it too, but how much of the increased cost of the newer vehicles is attributed to engineering costs of (a) improving fuel efficiency versus (b) all those new fancy safety features (as well as other luxury features that are all becoming "standard" in vehicles these days)... I'd argue that those new features are as much a factor, if not more so.
It seems to me that the increased fuel efficiency requirements was a necessary step to spurn innovation in fuel economy; the auto makers were complacent with the status quo. They had no real incentive to invest in improving fuel efficiency when they could instead spend that money/effort adding new flashy features to their vehicles (and/or just keep pumping out the same-ish models every year).
Whether or not we've already reached a tipping point, or if "freezing" the standard for the next few years is beneficial overall is certainly debatable, and you make some good points.
I just figure they expect to be dead by the time climate change becomes an issue for them, so they don't give a shit. Even if bad stuff starts to happen soon, they have all that money they can use to keep themselves comfortable and safe until they die.
I didn't know about that law until just a few days ago, and it seems kind of ridiculous to me. I'm all for preventing people from bringing guns on airplanes or into courthouses, but legislating that current gun technology has to comply with older technology designed to detect them seems like grasping at straws, and completely useless against a determined criminal (they're already planning to break at least one law, so why not another?). What's to prevent that person from replacing the metal part(s) with plastic or ceramic parts to bypass the metal detectors?
After moving into my house and only subscribing to internet service from Comcast, they have called me on the phone and pushed HARD to try and get me to add cable. I eventually hung up. So, apparently they do care.
I recently moved from an apartment with Fios at 75 up/down to a house without Fios available, but was able to get a Gigabit connection through Comcast for about $90 / month (just internet, no cable). Even with Adding Hulu and a few premium channels from Amazon, I'm saving a significant amount of money over what I was paying Verizon, and with a much faster connection.
Comcast has since called me up to try to up-sell me on cable, and it fairly reasonably priced (I think about $20 more per month, with Showtime included), but I love never having to change inputs on my TV (use FireTV for everything), they don't have an X1 app on FireTV (despite what the sales person insisted), and the sales person was so pushy and annoying that I eventually hung up.
Micro-transactions in games isn't inherently bad. If it's implemented the way that Fortnite (the game mentioned in this story) has done it, it seems like the best-possible business model for any game (and clearly it's working). The game is entirely free-to-play for everyone, you never have to spend a penny on the game if you don't want to (meaning there are far more players in the game -- which is essential in a PVP game), but those who are willing to shell out a little cash for some cosmetic items can do so and support the continued development of the game in the process. It's a complete win-win.
The issue is that most games don't stick to this model and allow people to purchase items that affect the game play, giving them an advantage over other players who don't spend money. And / or add gambling loot boxes so people have to spend a lot of money to get the particular item they want (if they get it at all).
The main issue is that all of this carbon has been slowly trapped in the earth over the last hundreds of millions of years, until we started releasing it at an alarming rate within the last few hundred years. That's obviously going to have a significant affect on the environment.
This is a fairly long read, but worth it. At least checkout "The Story of Energy" section.
If it (the cosmetics) pays for the game to keep running and have active development, then I don't see what the issue is. It's better than selling weapons / armor / etc that affect game-play (pay-to-win), and better than the subscription model (more players to play with / against).
The point is, you don't need the cosmetic items to play or be competitive, but it also allows the people willing and able to spend some money on cool looking stuff to support the game financially. That seems like a win-win to me.
Similar thing happened to me when I bought a car a while back. The salesman begged me to not fill out the survey if I couldn't give him a perfect 5 score for everything. I thought that was a bit dramatic at the time (about 6 years ago), but looking back I understand why.
When commercial air flight was first starting out, it was also only the rich that could afford it, but that has obviously changed. It seems reasonable that over time the same thing will happen to space flights.
Huh? Who gives a shit about gaming?
Looks like about 1.2 Billion people
If it weren't for games, I wouldn't be running Windows on my primary home computer. Unfortunately, while Linux support for games is getting better, many of the games I like to play are only Windows (and sometimes Mac as well).
But I am fortunate that I can run Linux on my work computer, since I'm doing web development and don't need any specialized programs. I do have a Windows VM I can fire up if I really need it (checking IE compatibility of the web-pages, for example), but I can't even remember the last time I've had to do that.
so I don't know why you need this stuff uploading to the "Cloud".
The only real reason I've been able to come up with for why you want to upload your home security video to "the cloud" would be to have an off-site backup so you have a way to look at the video and see who burned your house down. A reasonable solution to that would be to have it periodically encrypt the footage and upload it to some general "cloud" storage solution where only you have the key to unlock it. Why anyone would want to have a camera in their home watching them all the time being uploaded and controlled by a third-party company baffles me.
No, you can't. Because 140 characters (or whatever they've now raised it to.) is not in-depth. It's the exact opposite.
Yeah, it's certainly not in depth in itself, but tweets often link to articles which are in-depth
I think the character limit is one of it's greatest strengths (so it baffles me that they increased it), because it forces people to be concise and get to the damn point, rather than a wall of text that people give up reading after the second sentence (if they even bother trying to read it at all), like some people's Facebook posts.
On the other hand, being that concise can often lead to misunderstandings which can easily spiral out of control in record time.
Mars-a-lago
That had me in stitches, well played.
Tesla is building EVs for the 0.01% while other manufacturers are actually building affordable EVs today.
Musk's stated goal when creating Tesla was to accelerate the auto industry's switch to electric (since autos are our biggest polluter), and that seems to be what has happened. Before Tesla, none of the auto makers were really serious about EVs and were happy with the status-quo.
Was just reading this article earlier today, and it seems to make a lot of sense. We need to A) come up with a plan to protect our satellite infrastructure and B) have MORE cooperation between the various branches of the military (and NOT another branch that will inevitably have different motivators than just supporting the others), so the Space Force is not the answer, but we need to do something.
Not sure if you're entirely serious, but I don't see that ever happening.
1. There are lots of places where society wouldn't allow you to control your phone via voice, such as waiting rooms
2. People will want to be able to do things on their phones without everyone around them hearing what they're doing.
3. If multiple people in a confined area are using their phones, things could get messy pretty quickly (at least until the technology advances enough to reliably recognize individual voices).
Well, the article mentions that up until now they were sort of stuck using existing chassis's supplied by their manufacturer in China, and at the time that made fiscal sense. But now they plan to design and build them themselves. So, my takeaway is that they'll likely being trying to address your second concern and they might end up with some pretty slick looking linux laptops.
The third party data now provides little to no benefit over the data Facebook gathers itself.
This isn't true.
For example, say you have a brand (i.e. something like Columbia, L.L. Bean, etc) which has a loyalty program, or even just a mailing list that customers opt-in to, because they like your brand. Currently, you can send your list of subscribers (in a hashed format) over to Facebook in order to target those people for ads. Facebook will take that list, compare it to it's users, and serve up ads to any Facebook users who match (and Facebook never tells you which customers matched, it just gives you an estimate of how many matched, as long as it's over a certain threshold).
This is a huge blow to legitimate marketers.
... when last year's FCC said it would be 25mbps, per Wheeler's 2016 draft progress report
That's for fixed broadband, it's the mobile broadband definition that is changing (though I haven't yet been able to find out what the current mobile speed is defined as). If you look at the actual FCC document, it clearly states that the fixed broadband definition should remain the same (at 25 down / 3 up)
First, we propose to maintain the current speed benchmark of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload (25 Mbps/3 Mbps) for fixed broadband, and we also seek comment about other potential benchmarks.
We seek comment on whether a mobile speed benchmark of 10 Mbps/1 Mbps is appropriate for mobile broadband services. Would a download speed benchmark higher or lower than 10 Mbps be appropriate for the purpose of assessing American consumers’ access to advanced telecommunications capability?
How is this not automated?
Automation is one of the reasons that gerrymandering has been so effective, and generated so much controversy over the last few years. Since the party in power in these states is allowed re-draw the maps, the availability of automation has made this type of behavior easier and more effective.
What we really need if for all states to change their rules so that an independent committee is responsible for re-drawing the maps, with strict rules that the automation being used should optimize for the most balanced distribution based on the census data
I recently tried to explain the concept of UBI to my father (he's in his 70s) and his response was "sounds like socialism". I'm not sure if UBI is the solution to the impending automation revolution, because as you said we survived the industrial revolution with out it, but likely we'll have to do something.
(Ironically, my father is a retired an electrical engineer who worked for many years on automated systems)
Supermarkets will need to come up with something way better than what they have now, or pay me to do my own checkout.
They've had the idea for years, possibly decades at this point. The idea was to have every single item in the store contain an RFID tag. You walk around the store, put items in your cart, and a scanner similar to a metal detector at the exit simply reads everything in your cart on the way out and charges your credit card for it.
I'm not entirely sure why they haven't implemented this yet, but I suspect it's related to the logistics of tagging everything with an RFID (they'd likely want to have that done by the manufacturer) and the reliably of the system (it probably doesn't work as accurately as they would like, yet)