I don't know how you can draw that conclusion. First, the data you provide is U.S. voters when you're speaking to someone who's from a different country. Second, you don't actually know how old the poster is so it's inappropriate to assume the poster is 20 when they could just as easily be 40. Third, people tend to self-segregate into groups with similar belief structures. Odds are you're going to be friends with a people who are more similar to you on average than dissimilar. That's not to say that you can't have friends with differences, just that if you're a strong Clinton/Trump supporter, most of your friends are probably the same.
Probably because most of the people clamoring for diversity today don't go much further than skin deep in terms of what they mean by diversity. I think those people are absolutely foolish though, as if what they believed (diversity of skin color or gender being important for its own sake) were true , it would essentially mean that racial and gender groups are inherently different (or else how would the results of hiring these people be any better or worse), which is something those same people try to argue against.
However, I don't think that this article is making that case at all. The central point seems to be that whatever test you think you have to determine who the best candidates are is likely to be flawed in some way as to produce a monoculture that is likely to be missing something useful in producing better solutions or outcomes regardless of endeavor.
I think some people are probably getting another wrong impression in that they believe the author is suggesting that companies hire mediocre individuals or something along those lines, but I don't get that impression either. I think it's more along the lines of making sure to hire some people with a different set of skills and tools. This is because if your hiring process filters in some biased manner, you've likely got a team that's missing some skills or tools and the people you do have are not going to magically discover or invent them on their own. Imagine a group full of people with hammers that are trying to pound in a screw when there's a better way that may not be obvious to them because no one ever showed them a screw driver. This isn't because they're not intelligent or only good with hammers, but because there's more to know in this world than anyone could possibly hope to learn in one hundred lifetimes.
I don't know if Xerox PARC really succeeded though. They seemed to have a research group that they left alone to do whatever they wanted to do, but no one in charge who actually understood what any of it was worth. As a company, they basically missed the boat on the computer revolution. They basically gave away the game to Apple and Jobs knew a good idea when he saw one and knew what needed to be done to refine it into something that he could get people to line up to buy. PARC was responsible for a lot of things as well, but often it was someone else's implementation of them that became far more successful.
Microsoft, I think suffered from problems on the opposite end of the spectrum. Gates and the higher-ups at Microsoft had some idea of where the company needed to go, but often were too heavy-handed in terms of what they demanded and there was always a desire to try to shoehorn new products into their existing products to grow their monopoly and that often stifled creativity or just outright ruined those products. Long before the iPad, Microsoft was showing off tablets and Gates was talking about how they were going to be the next big thing. However, one of the idiots in charge of the Windows division insisted that the tablet OS be the same as the desktop version of Windows, start menu and all even though it made no sense.
Yup, in Canada everyone gets all the healthcare they want for free. They just need to go out back and get some off of the healthcare tree. It's not like they pay taxes or anything like that.
Cats generally don't do things like this if you spend a little bit of time playing with them or exercising them. I once had a cat that liked to get up to all kinds of similarly mischievous deeds until I eventually figured out that it was just bored. After spending 20 minutes having it chase around a toy mouse on a string or a laser pointer, it wouldn't engage in other types of destructive behavior.
Cats don't need a lot of attention. They're more than happy to spend most of a day sleeping or lying in the sun. However, they are predators and are wired to stalk, chase prey, etc. Satisfy those behavioral needs and they're not going to go around trying to find other ways to scratch those itches. It also makes the cat a lot more friendly towards you as well.
Usually the people who end up on juries tend to be exactly the kind of people who can't get out of jury duty. I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers from both sides excluded anyone who has used Uber, let alone knows anything about them beyond that they're sort of some kind of taxi service. This is just another case that's going to drag out for weeks or months before becoming inconclusive and it doesn't matter what happens since it will be the first of many appeals.
I think the issue lies with Android not really having any one entity fully in charge or at least with enough power to dictate terms. Device manufacturers certainly don't mind killing updates, especially since it helps them sell new devices. The carriers also want you to buy a new device so that they can lock you into monthly contract for another two years. Google certainly would prefer that whatever phone you're using has an updated version of Android, but they're not going to make more money as a result as their profitability doesn't depend on selling devices so there's not enough financial motive for Google to really press the issue. They probably care even less because if none of the other manufacturers are selling devices that have upgrades readily available, it makes it possible for Google to carve out a tiny bit of extra business for themselves by being the ones to sell the devices that do get those speedy updates. Only a tiny percentage of Android customers really care about stuff like that, so the other manufacturers aren't going to get angry at Google or feel threatened by them selling those devices.
You're missing something important though. Ask yourself what all of those four rich people have in common and the answer is that their crimes were largely against other rich people. The aristocracy will always overlook the behavior of their peers towards the peasantry, but not the transgressions against their own. But even then the punishments are mild. No one was getting sent to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
It doesn't appear given that any of them should "win" for whatever that actually means. By definition one service is going to be the most used, unless they all tie in terms of subscriber count, but there's going to be some ranked order in terms of user base. Normally, that likely creates a virtuous cycle that allows one company to come out on top as we see fairly often once a market matures, but the content producers have no desire to see this happen.
When Apple's music store became the runaway clear success it let Apple dictate terms that the music industry was loath to accept. I don't foresee them allowing it to return to that type of situation, so if Apple gets too big, expect the content companies to try to prop up Spotify, Pandora, or some other service. Four of five major competitors means that none has sufficient power to dictate terms and that they most compete more fiercely with the other services.
Apple Music was going to be successful enough just by virtue of it being an Apple product which means a minimal customer base due to brand loyalty and platform buy-in. However, I don't think it reaches the same level of dominance that Apple saw music players and online music sales over a decade ago. The content companies will do everything in their power to prevent that from occurring ever again. Ultimately I think Apple having the strong arm leverage was beneficial to the online music industry as Apple's aims were far more consumer friendly that what the music labels wanted, but they've always hated digital music so it comes as little surprise.
May also be Apple keeping iOS design metaphors so that while it may be functionally just as good, it doesn't feel like a native Android app which makes using it a little jarring.
I have a tablet and use it more than either my phone or laptop as I find it a good compromise in terms of usability and screen real estate. Granted, I'm not doing any development work or other work on it which is what the notebook is there for, but I tend not to use my phone for anything if I have any other option available.
I think that the real problem for tablets is that there's no compelling reason to upgrade them as often as phones. The iPad Air 2 that I bought when it first came out is over 3 years old at this point and isn't showing any particular signs of aging. The browser is still plenty speedy and even if that started to suck, I can't see the Netflix app being too slow for it to be usable for that.
I could easily see that thing lasting for another 3 years and Apple may well continue offering OS updates for it over that period as well. I think tablets have their uses over other devices, but I just don't think they need to be replaced very often.
Speed running is a fairly big community and there are a lot of people streaming it on services like Twitch. Billy Mitchell made something of a career around hist record I believe, so I suppose it may be possible that other people might be able to. I don't know if it's something that can earn an average person a living if not doing it in conjunction with something else, but Games Done Quick just raised over $2 million for charity in a recent event that features speed running all manner of games over the course of a week so I think there's a lot of interest in it.
Besides all of that, is it really any different than cheating in something else like cycling or other sports? People are just naturally pissed at other people who cheat.
Yes, and when the automobile was invented it devastated carriage makers, ranchers raising horses, farriers, and all manner of other industries, but you're surely not saying that we should turn back the clock and eliminate automobiles. The world is always in flux and new innovation is always replacing something that previously existed and disrupting the economy as a result. You can look at any point in history and find examples such as telephone switchboard operators, ice cutters, chandlers, and countless others including the massive number of railway jobs that have been supplanted by the birth and growth of the aviation industry.
It's certainly painful for the people who's jobs have become obsolete, but the world has not collapsed as a result of those previous upheavals and there's not a compelling reason to think that the next will be any different. Some small groups will be dissatisfied, but the majority will be better off than previously and new types of jobs will spring up that have only been made possible by the same advances in technology that have lead to loss of employment.
People get too caught up in looking at disparities in wealth (not to say that they're completely unimportant as there are some studies linking the Gini coefficient to increased rates of crime) or how a small number of people are now facing some hardship that they didn't before. Instead it's necessary to look at how conditions are changing for everyone relative to where they were before. I recently saw a homeless person with a cheap Android phone. Sure he's still homeless and life is not great, but globalization and lowering prices have made this kind of technology accessible to even the poorest members of society whereas previously it was not.
Someday the world may change and it could suck to be you or I as what we've done becomes obsolete. However, I don't think that the future generations two hundred years from now will consider themselves worse off for the progress of humanity and the improvements in the standards of living that it brings.
And consider the incredible local traffic impact if all the truck driving now going on a highways really was more than replicated on surface streets!
Also consider the number of construction jobs that will be necessary to replace old streets with ones better able to handle this or to make additional repairs do to increased utilization, or the manufacture, sale, and use of delivery vehicles that are smaller and do not damage the roads. Changes rarely happen in a vacuum and it's incredibly hard to see what the effects are going to be or the next set of problems that they will cause. A few might decide to lay down and die, but the species marches onward as it has in the face of new and changing problems since before our recorded history. There's always a new generation that's willing to charge headlong into the fray even if the previous one has been disgruntled and bitter as a result of changes.
It's hard to judge without knowing all of the details. The last bullet point in the summary states "[T]he employee behind the missile alert 'had a history of performance problems and had been "a source of concern,"' . . . [and] the employee 'has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions.'"
If that's true (and if it is there should probably be some documentation of it on record), it sounds like this guy should have been fired a long time ago. Maybe changing the protocol to prevent this kind of mistake from happening again does slow people down and result in more work, but it's pretty obvious that keeping incapable or incompetent individuals around eventually creates a substantially larger amount of work when something eventually goes wrong. It's a bit like not exercising because it takes up too much of your time in the immediate moment when in reality it's probably taking a decade or more off of your life in the long run. Only then it's too late to do much of anything about it.
It's not just cutting shipping costs in half, it's increasing the capacity for things that can be shipped. The price of shipping isn't just the physical cost of transportation due to human labor, the vehicle required to do it, etc. but also the amount that purchasers of shipping are willing to pay for those services. If I produce some good and would like to expand my markets, I can only do so if I'm willing to pay more for shipping than those who are currently utilizing those services are currently paying. Trucking companies won't take less money for me because they don't really care about my business.
However, as costs fall and capacity expands, it may now become possible for me to purchase shipping at rates I'm willing to pay which means my produced goods can now be shipped to new markets which potentially means increased revenue for me as well as an opportunity to expand production to supply new demand present in the markets I could not previously reach. Much like people always wanted more textiles, people already want more shipping, but just not at the current prices.
There is some historical precedence to suggest that they're not just making up unreasonable nonsense. You can look back to the start of the industrial revolution and how increases in productivity changed markets that were limited by human labor capacity. A good example is the textile industry where machines were able to replace unorganized individual labors. People always wanted more shirts, more socks, more dresses, but they just couldn't afford them because human labor limited supply and made these goods costly.
Suddenly you had a situation where dozens or even hundreds of these individual laborers could be replaced by a single machine. You might think that this would cause mass unemployment, but it had the opposite effect. Because the cost of cloth and clothing fell, people started buying more of it and the increased demand from consumers resulted in a need for factories the hire more laborers.
What Uber is saying is that when long-haul trucking becomes less expensive and can haul loads in shorter amounts of time because the AI drivers don't need to sleep and can drive the entire route in a single shot, that people are going to want to ship more things. If you can get fresh fruit from Mexico up to Canada in far less time and a far lower cost, then consumers will buy more of it and more of it can be shipped. That means more drivers will be needed for short-haul jobs.
Eventually the AI driving is going to eliminate those short-haul driver jobs as well, but there's still going to be an increase in overall freight hauling and transportation by truck. That likely means a need for new jobs to service those vehicles as well as people to pack and unload the freight, and all manner of other little jobs that spring up along the way as well. Sure it sucks if you're a truck driver, but people in Canada want inexpensive day fresh blueberries more than they want a trucker to personally have a job.
I think it really depends on the job. There are clearly some where being left the hell alone and not bothered allows a person get much more accomplished, never mind all the time saved from the commute to work.
However, I can't imagine having something like a writers' room that works anywhere near as effectively if everyone is video conferencing in from home. Also anything that requires a lot of specialized and expensive equipment doesn't seem workable in that manner either.
However, if you could have 20% of the current work force working from home it would likely make traffic far more bearable for the other 80%.
The industrial revolution created more jobs than it destroyed. Factories were so desperate for labor that they started employing women because there weren't enough men to satisfy the demand for new laborers. The Luddites were people who were too saddled to their own past and refused to accept that the world didn't owe them a job and that everyone else was quite a bit happier and better off now that they could afford the cheaper goods brought about by industrialization.
If they do succeed it just means they'll live long enough to become the bad guys themselves. Remember back when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple and acted much the same idealistic way or Google's early mantra of "don't be evil". Not every company or its founders start out as a complete dick bags, but most of those who become wildly successful turn into them.
Yes, that's what they should eat, but if you want them to get fat a lot quicker you'd better stuff them full of corn and antibiotics. There's always going to be some grass-fed livestock though, simply because there's a lot of land that's useless for anything but grazing, but if you're interested in maximizing production capacity and minimizing cost, then it's more economical to keep livestock in barns or pens and feed them more energy dense foods.
I'm going to assume you're being incredibly sarcastic here because life is full of problems for which there is insufficient data to determine a correct answer. There are a great many that do already have good answers, but at one point there was insufficient data to answer them.
If you wanted to make this exercise more useful, I'd rephrase the question (to something that's not immediately obvious) and once they've figured out that they lack sufficient data, ask them what information they would need to produce an answer. Knowing that you have insufficient data to answer a question is one thing, but understanding what is missing and how to go about getting it is a highly valuable critical thinking exercise.
I'm curious how Seagate screwed things up so badly. They bought Samsung's HDD division some years ago and I found that Samsung produced some incredibly reliable drives (I've actually still got a few running in older machines that have been going for over a decade at this point) for that time period.
I also remember a time when Seagate was thought of as one of the more reliable brands, at least compared to some other ones (Maxtor) that had burned a lot of people I knew. I think Seagate also bought them at any earlier point though, so perhaps that's when the troubles started.
I don't think the issue is removal, but sequestration. Eventually trees or other plants die and the carbon from the dead wood or plant matter must go somewhere. On a geologic time scale it becomes coal, oil, etc. but more immediately forest fires and the like will be returning a good chunk of it back to the atmosphere. Even if we could do something like ethanol in an efficient manner to where we could replace growing crops with drilling for oil, we're still just creating a carbon churn. The real task is finding something that's economically valuable to do with all of the carbon that's been pulled out of coal and oil deposits so that there's a real incentive for people to solve this problem. Telling them the world is going to end in 30, 100, 500 years unless we get our act together doesn't seem to work at all.
I think what we should be researching is how to fabricate carbon into building materials. We've already found that things like carbon fibers are incredibly useful in several domains, and carbon nanotubes have been shown to have orders of magnitude more tensile strength than other materials we're using now. Figuring out how to synthesize those things less expensively would provide economic incentive to capture carbon and a good long-term solution for sequestering it.
I don't use it, but I still have a Facebook account. I've found that it actually is a reasonably slick Rolodex only I don't need to maintain the information. Occasionally I find it convenient when I want to look up a distant relative or an old classmate's contact information and call them up. The rest of it is, as you say, a bunch of time-wasting nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that fake news is fake news?
I don't know how you can draw that conclusion. First, the data you provide is U.S. voters when you're speaking to someone who's from a different country. Second, you don't actually know how old the poster is so it's inappropriate to assume the poster is 20 when they could just as easily be 40. Third, people tend to self-segregate into groups with similar belief structures. Odds are you're going to be friends with a people who are more similar to you on average than dissimilar. That's not to say that you can't have friends with differences, just that if you're a strong Clinton/Trump supporter, most of your friends are probably the same.
Probably because most of the people clamoring for diversity today don't go much further than skin deep in terms of what they mean by diversity. I think those people are absolutely foolish though, as if what they believed (diversity of skin color or gender being important for its own sake) were true , it would essentially mean that racial and gender groups are inherently different (or else how would the results of hiring these people be any better or worse), which is something those same people try to argue against.
However, I don't think that this article is making that case at all. The central point seems to be that whatever test you think you have to determine who the best candidates are is likely to be flawed in some way as to produce a monoculture that is likely to be missing something useful in producing better solutions or outcomes regardless of endeavor.
I think some people are probably getting another wrong impression in that they believe the author is suggesting that companies hire mediocre individuals or something along those lines, but I don't get that impression either. I think it's more along the lines of making sure to hire some people with a different set of skills and tools. This is because if your hiring process filters in some biased manner, you've likely got a team that's missing some skills or tools and the people you do have are not going to magically discover or invent them on their own. Imagine a group full of people with hammers that are trying to pound in a screw when there's a better way that may not be obvious to them because no one ever showed them a screw driver. This isn't because they're not intelligent or only good with hammers, but because there's more to know in this world than anyone could possibly hope to learn in one hundred lifetimes.
I don't know if Xerox PARC really succeeded though. They seemed to have a research group that they left alone to do whatever they wanted to do, but no one in charge who actually understood what any of it was worth. As a company, they basically missed the boat on the computer revolution. They basically gave away the game to Apple and Jobs knew a good idea when he saw one and knew what needed to be done to refine it into something that he could get people to line up to buy. PARC was responsible for a lot of things as well, but often it was someone else's implementation of them that became far more successful.
Microsoft, I think suffered from problems on the opposite end of the spectrum. Gates and the higher-ups at Microsoft had some idea of where the company needed to go, but often were too heavy-handed in terms of what they demanded and there was always a desire to try to shoehorn new products into their existing products to grow their monopoly and that often stifled creativity or just outright ruined those products. Long before the iPad, Microsoft was showing off tablets and Gates was talking about how they were going to be the next big thing. However, one of the idiots in charge of the Windows division insisted that the tablet OS be the same as the desktop version of Windows, start menu and all even though it made no sense.
Yup, in Canada everyone gets all the healthcare they want for free. They just need to go out back and get some off of the healthcare tree. It's not like they pay taxes or anything like that.
Cats generally don't do things like this if you spend a little bit of time playing with them or exercising them. I once had a cat that liked to get up to all kinds of similarly mischievous deeds until I eventually figured out that it was just bored. After spending 20 minutes having it chase around a toy mouse on a string or a laser pointer, it wouldn't engage in other types of destructive behavior.
Cats don't need a lot of attention. They're more than happy to spend most of a day sleeping or lying in the sun. However, they are predators and are wired to stalk, chase prey, etc. Satisfy those behavioral needs and they're not going to go around trying to find other ways to scratch those itches. It also makes the cat a lot more friendly towards you as well.
Usually the people who end up on juries tend to be exactly the kind of people who can't get out of jury duty. I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers from both sides excluded anyone who has used Uber, let alone knows anything about them beyond that they're sort of some kind of taxi service. This is just another case that's going to drag out for weeks or months before becoming inconclusive and it doesn't matter what happens since it will be the first of many appeals.
I think the issue lies with Android not really having any one entity fully in charge or at least with enough power to dictate terms. Device manufacturers certainly don't mind killing updates, especially since it helps them sell new devices. The carriers also want you to buy a new device so that they can lock you into monthly contract for another two years. Google certainly would prefer that whatever phone you're using has an updated version of Android, but they're not going to make more money as a result as their profitability doesn't depend on selling devices so there's not enough financial motive for Google to really press the issue. They probably care even less because if none of the other manufacturers are selling devices that have upgrades readily available, it makes it possible for Google to carve out a tiny bit of extra business for themselves by being the ones to sell the devices that do get those speedy updates. Only a tiny percentage of Android customers really care about stuff like that, so the other manufacturers aren't going to get angry at Google or feel threatened by them selling those devices.
You're missing something important though. Ask yourself what all of those four rich people have in common and the answer is that their crimes were largely against other rich people. The aristocracy will always overlook the behavior of their peers towards the peasantry, but not the transgressions against their own. But even then the punishments are mild. No one was getting sent to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
It doesn't appear given that any of them should "win" for whatever that actually means. By definition one service is going to be the most used, unless they all tie in terms of subscriber count, but there's going to be some ranked order in terms of user base. Normally, that likely creates a virtuous cycle that allows one company to come out on top as we see fairly often once a market matures, but the content producers have no desire to see this happen.
When Apple's music store became the runaway clear success it let Apple dictate terms that the music industry was loath to accept. I don't foresee them allowing it to return to that type of situation, so if Apple gets too big, expect the content companies to try to prop up Spotify, Pandora, or some other service. Four of five major competitors means that none has sufficient power to dictate terms and that they most compete more fiercely with the other services.
Apple Music was going to be successful enough just by virtue of it being an Apple product which means a minimal customer base due to brand loyalty and platform buy-in. However, I don't think it reaches the same level of dominance that Apple saw music players and online music sales over a decade ago. The content companies will do everything in their power to prevent that from occurring ever again. Ultimately I think Apple having the strong arm leverage was beneficial to the online music industry as Apple's aims were far more consumer friendly that what the music labels wanted, but they've always hated digital music so it comes as little surprise.
May also be Apple keeping iOS design metaphors so that while it may be functionally just as good, it doesn't feel like a native Android app which makes using it a little jarring.
I have a tablet and use it more than either my phone or laptop as I find it a good compromise in terms of usability and screen real estate. Granted, I'm not doing any development work or other work on it which is what the notebook is there for, but I tend not to use my phone for anything if I have any other option available.
I think that the real problem for tablets is that there's no compelling reason to upgrade them as often as phones. The iPad Air 2 that I bought when it first came out is over 3 years old at this point and isn't showing any particular signs of aging. The browser is still plenty speedy and even if that started to suck, I can't see the Netflix app being too slow for it to be usable for that.
I could easily see that thing lasting for another 3 years and Apple may well continue offering OS updates for it over that period as well. I think tablets have their uses over other devices, but I just don't think they need to be replaced very often.
Speed running is a fairly big community and there are a lot of people streaming it on services like Twitch. Billy Mitchell made something of a career around hist record I believe, so I suppose it may be possible that other people might be able to. I don't know if it's something that can earn an average person a living if not doing it in conjunction with something else, but Games Done Quick just raised over $2 million for charity in a recent event that features speed running all manner of games over the course of a week so I think there's a lot of interest in it.
Besides all of that, is it really any different than cheating in something else like cycling or other sports? People are just naturally pissed at other people who cheat.
It's certainly painful for the people who's jobs have become obsolete, but the world has not collapsed as a result of those previous upheavals and there's not a compelling reason to think that the next will be any different. Some small groups will be dissatisfied, but the majority will be better off than previously and new types of jobs will spring up that have only been made possible by the same advances in technology that have lead to loss of employment.
People get too caught up in looking at disparities in wealth (not to say that they're completely unimportant as there are some studies linking the Gini coefficient to increased rates of crime) or how a small number of people are now facing some hardship that they didn't before. Instead it's necessary to look at how conditions are changing for everyone relative to where they were before. I recently saw a homeless person with a cheap Android phone. Sure he's still homeless and life is not great, but globalization and lowering prices have made this kind of technology accessible to even the poorest members of society whereas previously it was not.
Someday the world may change and it could suck to be you or I as what we've done becomes obsolete. However, I don't think that the future generations two hundred years from now will consider themselves worse off for the progress of humanity and the improvements in the standards of living that it brings.
And consider the incredible local traffic impact if all the truck driving now going on a highways really was more than replicated on surface streets!
Also consider the number of construction jobs that will be necessary to replace old streets with ones better able to handle this or to make additional repairs do to increased utilization, or the manufacture, sale, and use of delivery vehicles that are smaller and do not damage the roads. Changes rarely happen in a vacuum and it's incredibly hard to see what the effects are going to be or the next set of problems that they will cause. A few might decide to lay down and die, but the species marches onward as it has in the face of new and changing problems since before our recorded history. There's always a new generation that's willing to charge headlong into the fray even if the previous one has been disgruntled and bitter as a result of changes.
It's hard to judge without knowing all of the details. The last bullet point in the summary states "[T]he employee behind the missile alert 'had a history of performance problems and had been "a source of concern,"' . . . [and] the employee 'has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions.'"
If that's true (and if it is there should probably be some documentation of it on record), it sounds like this guy should have been fired a long time ago. Maybe changing the protocol to prevent this kind of mistake from happening again does slow people down and result in more work, but it's pretty obvious that keeping incapable or incompetent individuals around eventually creates a substantially larger amount of work when something eventually goes wrong. It's a bit like not exercising because it takes up too much of your time in the immediate moment when in reality it's probably taking a decade or more off of your life in the long run. Only then it's too late to do much of anything about it.
It's not just cutting shipping costs in half, it's increasing the capacity for things that can be shipped. The price of shipping isn't just the physical cost of transportation due to human labor, the vehicle required to do it, etc. but also the amount that purchasers of shipping are willing to pay for those services. If I produce some good and would like to expand my markets, I can only do so if I'm willing to pay more for shipping than those who are currently utilizing those services are currently paying. Trucking companies won't take less money for me because they don't really care about my business.
However, as costs fall and capacity expands, it may now become possible for me to purchase shipping at rates I'm willing to pay which means my produced goods can now be shipped to new markets which potentially means increased revenue for me as well as an opportunity to expand production to supply new demand present in the markets I could not previously reach. Much like people always wanted more textiles, people already want more shipping, but just not at the current prices.
There is some historical precedence to suggest that they're not just making up unreasonable nonsense. You can look back to the start of the industrial revolution and how increases in productivity changed markets that were limited by human labor capacity. A good example is the textile industry where machines were able to replace unorganized individual labors. People always wanted more shirts, more socks, more dresses, but they just couldn't afford them because human labor limited supply and made these goods costly.
Suddenly you had a situation where dozens or even hundreds of these individual laborers could be replaced by a single machine. You might think that this would cause mass unemployment, but it had the opposite effect. Because the cost of cloth and clothing fell, people started buying more of it and the increased demand from consumers resulted in a need for factories the hire more laborers.
What Uber is saying is that when long-haul trucking becomes less expensive and can haul loads in shorter amounts of time because the AI drivers don't need to sleep and can drive the entire route in a single shot, that people are going to want to ship more things. If you can get fresh fruit from Mexico up to Canada in far less time and a far lower cost, then consumers will buy more of it and more of it can be shipped. That means more drivers will be needed for short-haul jobs.
Eventually the AI driving is going to eliminate those short-haul driver jobs as well, but there's still going to be an increase in overall freight hauling and transportation by truck. That likely means a need for new jobs to service those vehicles as well as people to pack and unload the freight, and all manner of other little jobs that spring up along the way as well. Sure it sucks if you're a truck driver, but people in Canada want inexpensive day fresh blueberries more than they want a trucker to personally have a job.
I think it really depends on the job. There are clearly some where being left the hell alone and not bothered allows a person get much more accomplished, never mind all the time saved from the commute to work.
However, I can't imagine having something like a writers' room that works anywhere near as effectively if everyone is video conferencing in from home. Also anything that requires a lot of specialized and expensive equipment doesn't seem workable in that manner either.
However, if you could have 20% of the current work force working from home it would likely make traffic far more bearable for the other 80%.
The industrial revolution created more jobs than it destroyed. Factories were so desperate for labor that they started employing women because there weren't enough men to satisfy the demand for new laborers. The Luddites were people who were too saddled to their own past and refused to accept that the world didn't owe them a job and that everyone else was quite a bit happier and better off now that they could afford the cheaper goods brought about by industrialization.
If they do succeed it just means they'll live long enough to become the bad guys themselves. Remember back when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple and acted much the same idealistic way or Google's early mantra of "don't be evil". Not every company or its founders start out as a complete dick bags, but most of those who become wildly successful turn into them.
Yes, that's what they should eat, but if you want them to get fat a lot quicker you'd better stuff them full of corn and antibiotics. There's always going to be some grass-fed livestock though, simply because there's a lot of land that's useless for anything but grazing, but if you're interested in maximizing production capacity and minimizing cost, then it's more economical to keep livestock in barns or pens and feed them more energy dense foods.
I'm going to assume you're being incredibly sarcastic here because life is full of problems for which there is insufficient data to determine a correct answer. There are a great many that do already have good answers, but at one point there was insufficient data to answer them.
If you wanted to make this exercise more useful, I'd rephrase the question (to something that's not immediately obvious) and once they've figured out that they lack sufficient data, ask them what information they would need to produce an answer. Knowing that you have insufficient data to answer a question is one thing, but understanding what is missing and how to go about getting it is a highly valuable critical thinking exercise.
I'm curious how Seagate screwed things up so badly. They bought Samsung's HDD division some years ago and I found that Samsung produced some incredibly reliable drives (I've actually still got a few running in older machines that have been going for over a decade at this point) for that time period.
I also remember a time when Seagate was thought of as one of the more reliable brands, at least compared to some other ones (Maxtor) that had burned a lot of people I knew. I think Seagate also bought them at any earlier point though, so perhaps that's when the troubles started.
I don't think the issue is removal, but sequestration. Eventually trees or other plants die and the carbon from the dead wood or plant matter must go somewhere. On a geologic time scale it becomes coal, oil, etc. but more immediately forest fires and the like will be returning a good chunk of it back to the atmosphere. Even if we could do something like ethanol in an efficient manner to where we could replace growing crops with drilling for oil, we're still just creating a carbon churn. The real task is finding something that's economically valuable to do with all of the carbon that's been pulled out of coal and oil deposits so that there's a real incentive for people to solve this problem. Telling them the world is going to end in 30, 100, 500 years unless we get our act together doesn't seem to work at all.
I think what we should be researching is how to fabricate carbon into building materials. We've already found that things like carbon fibers are incredibly useful in several domains, and carbon nanotubes have been shown to have orders of magnitude more tensile strength than other materials we're using now. Figuring out how to synthesize those things less expensively would provide economic incentive to capture carbon and a good long-term solution for sequestering it.
I don't use it, but I still have a Facebook account. I've found that it actually is a reasonably slick Rolodex only I don't need to maintain the information. Occasionally I find it convenient when I want to look up a distant relative or an old classmate's contact information and call them up. The rest of it is, as you say, a bunch of time-wasting nonsense.