If you think the earbuds are bad, some of the crap over-produced loudness wars inspired music they put through those headphones couldn't sound good even if gold-plated monster cables actually worked. Hell, Wikipedia even has a nice image of how more recent releases of old songs suffer the same problem: Waveforms for 3 releases of Black or White by Michael Jackson
Look at classic rock songs before that era to get a good idea how much its changed and how much it affects music. Here's Stairway to Heaven which I'm sure most people are familiar with. That song would be practically impossible today since whatever dick weevil would be put in charge of mastering the album would have maxed it out immediately, removing any ability for the song to build-up musically as well as lyrically.
Any song being crafted for mainstream radio play just isn't going to be as good of a listen (I'm not even talking about whether the song is good lyrically or musically) because the shit stain producers utterly rob it of expressivity in order to make it stand out more amidst all the other noise. There needs to be something like a Director's Cut for albums that give us something other than the radio mix.
You're making the mistake of thinking that we can just wave a magic wand and suddenly everyone can be a high-skill professional. It doesn't work like that and there's a percentage of every population that is less capable than the rest. If you live in a society where you just need to be able to do some low-skill work like subsistence farming in order to get by then you'll be able to get on well enough. But if you live in an advanced, industrialized society, at some point there won't be any skilled labor position you can be trained to hold.
People are not equally capable interchangeable parts. There's always going to be a percentage that aren't even capable of getting through high school unless you lower the bar so much as to make a high school diploma worthless. Trying to hold people up to impossible standards isn't going to work.
If those H1-Bs work somewhere else and take all the jobs anyway, isn't it then arguably better for Canada to import them into Canada where they can pay Canadian taxes. The notion that everyone in the U.S. or Canada is perfectly capable of any tech job if only education were better is foolhardy at best. In the past, one could always get a factory job, or if you couldn't even manage that as hired farm labor, but most of those jobs are going as we product labor saving devices capable of performing all of those low skill tasks.
At best, importing high skill labor and taxing it to keep the worst off from turning to drugs, crime, and other things that have far higher costs than taxes isn't a bad plan. The best plan would be figuring out a good way to reduce the number of people who are incapable of adding value to a society from being born into it. A good second is getting intelligent, high skill workers to drive down the cost of keeping the incapable as wards of the state. The worst is thinking that home-grown talent can fill all the jobs when it's estimated that 15%+ of high school graduates are functionally illiterate.
I'm not sure I follow how they used their dominant market position with the iPod to unfairly give themselves a competitive advantage in the phone space. Perhaps you could make some kind of stretch by looking at their DRM for music and movies, but they jettisoned DRM on music shortly after the iPhone came out and other marketplaces were selling DRM free music that you could put on your iDevice. Their market position in TV/movies was never as good as music, and with apps there're plenty of ways to get other services' content on an iPhone.
The one place Apple was punished was in eBooks where they got hit with a fine because of market collusion. I don't know how successful their book sales are, but I don't think they've come close to dethroning Amazon from their leadership position. Otherwise, the iPod didn't give Apple a market advantage with the iPhone. At best it gave them some experience working with smaller devices, building supply chains to produce millions of devices, and working with various component manufacturers that would be iPhone suppliers. Beyond that all the iPod did was help build Apple's brand, taking it from a company on the brink of death or irrelevance to that of a company making fancy consumer products.
Oh for fucks sake, quit it with this nonsense. This whole "exploitation of the majority for the minority" fits any form of government. Do you think the common man lived any better under the various feudal systems that predate the modern capitalist economies? The same holds true for all of the communist systems that were tried as well, with huge disparities between the proles and the party leadership, with the only difference being that everyone was poorer. At least in western capitalist countries there's some form of social mobility where a poor immigrant like Andrew Carnegie can become wealthy and powerful. Medieval peasants didn't go around becoming lords unless they found a sword in stone.
People are having fewer children because we're so productive and good at keeping them alive, there isn't as much incentive to spawn half a dozen or more for extra farm labor. Household productivity is likewise vastly improved to the point where women can work part or full time outside of the house without the household falling into complete disarray so most of them don't want to sit around being a baby factory either. And its a good thing as well. The world doesn't need even more people when we haven't figured out how to make sure that the ones we have are all at a reasonable baseline and not committing various atrocities towards one and other.
Considering how much the federal government has abused the commerce clause over the years, I'd rather they not look at it that way. Some lawyer could probably argue that yohttps://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/06/29/2235208/tom-wheeler-defends-title-ii-rules-accuses-pai-of-helping-monopolists#u scratching your ass while reading this comment affects commerce, which places it in the purview of federal regulation.
It's hard to have a free market, when in most jurisdictions the local government sells monopoly rights for service to a single cable provider. I'd agree with removing net neutrality restrictions if there is no ability for local governments to restrict access to the market. Government granted monopolies (e.g. utilities) have always faced regulation, and the cable companies expecting to have their cake and eat it too is silly.
You still might want a robot going around and scanning shelves just to locate items that are out of place. People spot something that they'd prefer to have and swap it with another item in the cart instead of taking the first back to where it actually belongs, or a parent removes something that little Johnny decided to sneak into the cart and has no idea where it belongs. There's also inventory shrinkage through theft that isn't going to be accounted for at the register as you point out, but that's not going to occur frequently enough to be a problem, but the same result through entirely legitimate means if you have a popular product fly off the shelves, but customers have other items to purchase and haven't reached the check-out line yet. If you have limited shelf-space, it might be good to know as soon as possible that stock is out or quickly approaching that point.
At some point, the robots will be good enough to do the restocking anyways so you might as well program them to scan for other items that are going to need restocking while they're en-route to a particular aisle or returning.
To be fair, I suspect that if you did this (i.e. conducted an experiment that polled random people on the street about such topics) you'd find that the overwhelming majority could answer perfectly fine. If however, you're running an entertainment program or a news show (which is kind of an entertainment program now-a-days anyhow) you probably toss out all of the correct results and only show the clips from the people who get it wrong or act like complete duffusses for the camera. If you only actively highlight the stupidest people you can find, of course things seem worse than they are.
I'm not terribly worried about poor schooling as IQ scores have been trending upwards over the past century since we started measuring intelligence. People will succeed and figure things out despite shortcomings in the educational system, just like people largely manage to overcome shitty or sub-optimal parenting and turn out to be decent. People tend to look back at the old days through a rose colored lens and focus on the good without looking at the bad. Somewhat recently I was talking with a relation of mine who recounted his years in high school and how much of a joke it was as one of the teachers was a drunk and taught them next to nothing and another would pass anyone on an athletic team no matter how poorly they did.
If today's world seems so horrible it's only because we have access to news media from all around the world. I can spend all day reading about bad things happening from half way around the world, whereas 30 years ago that was practically impossible even for government intelligence agencies. Once again, if you only put the worst on display, it leads one to make incorrect assumptions. Things in general are getting so much better, maybe not as quickly as everyone would like, but the trend line is moving in a positive direction overall.
It's probably less expensive to move a sensor that listens for gunshots than an entire police precinct. It also doesn't really matter where you locate the precinct either since the police can take their cars and patrol wherever they're most needed. You'd want to have your precincts located in such a way that it makes it easy and efficient for police to deploy anywhere in the city, otherwise if you locate them nearest the worst neighborhoods you'll probably not have a very even distribution as bad neighborhoods tend to be clustered.
Smart criminals do, at least insofar as it doesn't curtail their criminal enterprise. If you're an intelligent criminal and making good money, you'll avoid drawing police attention to yourself as much as possible. Stupid criminals won't, which just makes them easier to catch.
No one is saying there shouldn't be consequences for a person's actions, just that the government should leave as much of that to the free exercise of individuals as possible. Causing injury through ones actions (speech or otherwise) can be handled in civil courts reasonably well in most cases without the government needing to make specific or narrowly defined speech illegal. The best weapon against speech with which you disagree is always free speech of your own. When deciding whether or not government should have particular powers, it's typically best to imagine the people you'd least like to be in charge being in control of that government.
A fridge capable of doing that would need to be pretty smart. It would have to be able to track contents going and and out of it and know what the hell it is, which means it needs a scanner that can read bar codes (no matter how the object is situated) or scan RFID tags on the items, but really it would need some visual recognition since just because it sees a milk carton in the fridge doesn't mean that it's not almost empty.
Doing that is going to be incredibly complex and requires solving a lot of problems that are the focus of current AI research. Right now I expect that the best a smart fridge is capable of is telling me how cold it is (or allowing me to change that) and whether or not there's ice ready in the freezer. Maybe it could do some fancy stuff like having temperature zones so part of the fridge can be kept cooler than another part, but having a fridge that knows what's in it and can automatically add stuff to a shopping list is going to take a while to achieve.
Even if had perfected its vehicles, this seems like a misguided effort. I would imagine that anyone who has a Tesla already has a smartphone that either contains their own music or access to a streaming service. I can't imagine a world in which this adds more value to Tesla's products than it consumes in hours spent developing the service or even negotiating it. Build a nice hub that makes it easy for people to plug in their own devices or services to and there's no need to worry about building your own service. I'd rather have a better cup holder in my vehicle than yet another music streaming service.
This is just dripping with FUD. Several big players in the server market have already announced they'll be shipping products with AMD's CPUs. If you couldn't find any server CPUs from AMD in the recent past its because they didn't bother making any after a point because their Bulldozer architecture was so much of a failure that they left that part of the market. Just look at the Wikipedia article that lists their server chips and notice that the pretty much stopped after 2012 outside of a few ARM or Jaguar-based parts that were for micro-servers.
Also, the last time AMD put a dent into Intel, Intel started fighting back in a large number of ways that were later found to be illegal. Celebrate and relax, indeed.
The idea only works if you assume all individuals are equally capable, which isn't true. What happens is that labor-saving techniques or machines replace the least skilled workers who were doing 40 hours of work. Some of them can be transitioned to do 40 hours of some other type of work, but others will not be.
Over time what we end up with is a society where some percentage of the population is doing ~40 hours of work per week (and a small few doing even more than that because that's just how they're wired mentally) and the other percentage is doing nothing (or very close to it) because they're incapable of being more productive at some task than a machine.
This is going to be an especially big problem and right now neither of the major parties have a good solution because the political right tends to believe that anyone who can't find work is too lazy and needs to get a job (without recognizing that there are no jobs of which they are capable) and the political left tends to believe that all people are equally capable and that with sufficient training a person who's borderline mentally retarded (or a step above that) can eventually become a neurosurgeon.
Bertrand Russell has a good piece covering this very problem that he wrote almost 100 years ago called In Praise of Idleness. He lays out the argument that if people had more leisure time (as may possible by industrialization) they could devote it to scientific pursuits or towards producing culture. Unfortunately he made the mistake of assuming that everyone was like Bertrand Russell and would kill for extra time to engage in satisfying their own curiosity about the world. In reality a big chunk of those people would just sit on the couch and watch TV with their added time, because they're not mentally capable of advancing our understanding of the universe or creating anything society would deem as artistically worthwhile.
I suppose the good news is that in such a future it becomes reasonably inexpensive to provide for someone who does nothing, because industrialization will drive costs down as production increases. However, the bad news is there isn't a lot of incentive to devote resources to people who can't contribute to society either. Hopefully we take a path that reduces or limits the number of people in that position without inflicting a lot of human suffering to get there. Everything I know about humanity tells me that probably won't be the case.
If your smart-toaster is incapable of functioning without booting and connecting to the internet, it is poorly designed. Any smart device that isn't a good device first is going to be a failure no matter how many bells and whistles it has on top of it. About the only nice feature I can think of for a smart toaster would be to remind me the evening before to pre-load some bread into it so that it can start toasting it at a set time in the morning, or if its really smart after it knows that I'll want my toast to be ready in a few minutes (say after it knows I've showered and brushed my teeth) from the present moment.
But I should always be able to just slap some bread in it and push the lever down no matter if its done booting or isn't on the network. A toaster that can't make toast is useless regardless of whether it's a so-called smart device or not.
The original iPhone didn't have support for third party apps, and whether or not Apple would have liked to have them in the initial release or not was irrelevant as they couldn't do it, so Jobs had to sell everyone on why apps were bad and web apps were so great, just like he told people that people didn't want videos on their iDevices before releasing a video iPod the next year. Jobs did that with a lot of features over the years.
Self-checkout is the wrong solution to an important problem. The cart should be intelligent and know what you've put in it such that it's performing all of the checkout as you go along so that when you leave it already knows what you owe and can automatically make the transaction. At most you need someone who can make a quick spot check for people on the way out, but if you're going to put cameras in stores you can have people doing loss prevention remotely and just tip off the gatekeeper if they need to stop someone. And unless I'm picking out produce or cuts of meat, I wouldn't mind if I could punch in my order and just pick up my fully (or partially full) cart.
If there's no reason to interact with an employee, why include it just for the sake of including it? I want a knowledgeable person to be there if something goes wrong, but if I can get in and out of the store quickly without having to talk to another soul, I don't care, especially if I can avoid standing in any kind of line entirely. If Amazon is looking to drive down the cost of goods, then the cost of the human labor is going to become a larger and larger piece of their total cost and the only way to cut prices further without sacrificing on product quality is to find ways of cutting labor. If you feel terribly bad for some people who won't have jobs, feel free to hire their labor for some productive use that you envision.
That's actually not very good. Some estimates have median 2-bedroom rent in SF over $50,000 annually. There's a general consensus that you shouldn't spend more than 25%-30% of your income on rent, and on an $80,000 salary that means no more than about $2,000 per month which means a tiny studio apartment in the least expensive parts of town.
$80,000 may seem like a small fortune, but you seriously need to account for how damned expensive San Francisco is as a city. You're going to be much better off only making $50,000 somewhere in the mid-west but spending $10,000 to rent a much larger apartment.
Negative for the government entities perhaps, but as a citizen I'd find it quite refreshing to have the governments dirty laundry aired. I don't know if that requires cyber espionage from other countries as Snowden showed that this can be done internally as well, but governments that can get away with working from the shadows tend to become tyrannical beasts. Even the threat of eventual discovery may be enough to keep some evil at bay.
I think the more realistic explanation is that it was ignored because it means the U.S. would have to knock-off (or obfuscate behind a third party for purposes of deniability, because lets face it we're not going to stop doing it) a lot of the stuff it's doing. Everyone likes to think that they're the good guys, but the U.S. has a long history of interfering in foreign countries so it's laughable to suggest that not carrying out our own operations. But as you point out, there isn't much point in a meaningless treaty when both sides know that both they and the other side won't actually uphold it.
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This sounds more like a cordless phone than a mobile, unless you never move more than a few dozen feet.
A cordless phone that didn't need to be put on a charger would be a pretty good convenience. Of course who the hell has a landline anymore these days.
If you think the earbuds are bad, some of the crap over-produced loudness wars inspired music they put through those headphones couldn't sound good even if gold-plated monster cables actually worked. Hell, Wikipedia even has a nice image of how more recent releases of old songs suffer the same problem: Waveforms for 3 releases of Black or White by Michael Jackson
Look at classic rock songs before that era to get a good idea how much its changed and how much it affects music. Here's Stairway to Heaven which I'm sure most people are familiar with. That song would be practically impossible today since whatever dick weevil would be put in charge of mastering the album would have maxed it out immediately, removing any ability for the song to build-up musically as well as lyrically.
Any song being crafted for mainstream radio play just isn't going to be as good of a listen (I'm not even talking about whether the song is good lyrically or musically) because the shit stain producers utterly rob it of expressivity in order to make it stand out more amidst all the other noise. There needs to be something like a Director's Cut for albums that give us something other than the radio mix.
You're making the mistake of thinking that we can just wave a magic wand and suddenly everyone can be a high-skill professional. It doesn't work like that and there's a percentage of every population that is less capable than the rest. If you live in a society where you just need to be able to do some low-skill work like subsistence farming in order to get by then you'll be able to get on well enough. But if you live in an advanced, industrialized society, at some point there won't be any skilled labor position you can be trained to hold.
People are not equally capable interchangeable parts. There's always going to be a percentage that aren't even capable of getting through high school unless you lower the bar so much as to make a high school diploma worthless. Trying to hold people up to impossible standards isn't going to work.
If those H1-Bs work somewhere else and take all the jobs anyway, isn't it then arguably better for Canada to import them into Canada where they can pay Canadian taxes. The notion that everyone in the U.S. or Canada is perfectly capable of any tech job if only education were better is foolhardy at best. In the past, one could always get a factory job, or if you couldn't even manage that as hired farm labor, but most of those jobs are going as we product labor saving devices capable of performing all of those low skill tasks.
At best, importing high skill labor and taxing it to keep the worst off from turning to drugs, crime, and other things that have far higher costs than taxes isn't a bad plan. The best plan would be figuring out a good way to reduce the number of people who are incapable of adding value to a society from being born into it. A good second is getting intelligent, high skill workers to drive down the cost of keeping the incapable as wards of the state. The worst is thinking that home-grown talent can fill all the jobs when it's estimated that 15%+ of high school graduates are functionally illiterate.
I'm not sure I follow how they used their dominant market position with the iPod to unfairly give themselves a competitive advantage in the phone space. Perhaps you could make some kind of stretch by looking at their DRM for music and movies, but they jettisoned DRM on music shortly after the iPhone came out and other marketplaces were selling DRM free music that you could put on your iDevice. Their market position in TV/movies was never as good as music, and with apps there're plenty of ways to get other services' content on an iPhone.
The one place Apple was punished was in eBooks where they got hit with a fine because of market collusion. I don't know how successful their book sales are, but I don't think they've come close to dethroning Amazon from their leadership position. Otherwise, the iPod didn't give Apple a market advantage with the iPhone. At best it gave them some experience working with smaller devices, building supply chains to produce millions of devices, and working with various component manufacturers that would be iPhone suppliers. Beyond that all the iPod did was help build Apple's brand, taking it from a company on the brink of death or irrelevance to that of a company making fancy consumer products.
Oh for fucks sake, quit it with this nonsense. This whole "exploitation of the majority for the minority" fits any form of government. Do you think the common man lived any better under the various feudal systems that predate the modern capitalist economies? The same holds true for all of the communist systems that were tried as well, with huge disparities between the proles and the party leadership, with the only difference being that everyone was poorer. At least in western capitalist countries there's some form of social mobility where a poor immigrant like Andrew Carnegie can become wealthy and powerful. Medieval peasants didn't go around becoming lords unless they found a sword in stone.
People are having fewer children because we're so productive and good at keeping them alive, there isn't as much incentive to spawn half a dozen or more for extra farm labor. Household productivity is likewise vastly improved to the point where women can work part or full time outside of the house without the household falling into complete disarray so most of them don't want to sit around being a baby factory either. And its a good thing as well. The world doesn't need even more people when we haven't figured out how to make sure that the ones we have are all at a reasonable baseline and not committing various atrocities towards one and other.
In the long run it hardly matters as both will be gone in ~15 years once self-driving vehicles become ubiquitous.
Considering how much the federal government has abused the commerce clause over the years, I'd rather they not look at it that way. Some lawyer could probably argue that yohttps://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/06/29/2235208/tom-wheeler-defends-title-ii-rules-accuses-pai-of-helping-monopolists#u scratching your ass while reading this comment affects commerce, which places it in the purview of federal regulation.
It's hard to have a free market, when in most jurisdictions the local government sells monopoly rights for service to a single cable provider. I'd agree with removing net neutrality restrictions if there is no ability for local governments to restrict access to the market. Government granted monopolies (e.g. utilities) have always faced regulation, and the cable companies expecting to have their cake and eat it too is silly.
It makes sense to me. Where else are they going to get minesweeper?
You still might want a robot going around and scanning shelves just to locate items that are out of place. People spot something that they'd prefer to have and swap it with another item in the cart instead of taking the first back to where it actually belongs, or a parent removes something that little Johnny decided to sneak into the cart and has no idea where it belongs. There's also inventory shrinkage through theft that isn't going to be accounted for at the register as you point out, but that's not going to occur frequently enough to be a problem, but the same result through entirely legitimate means if you have a popular product fly off the shelves, but customers have other items to purchase and haven't reached the check-out line yet. If you have limited shelf-space, it might be good to know as soon as possible that stock is out or quickly approaching that point.
At some point, the robots will be good enough to do the restocking anyways so you might as well program them to scan for other items that are going to need restocking while they're en-route to a particular aisle or returning.
To be fair, I suspect that if you did this (i.e. conducted an experiment that polled random people on the street about such topics) you'd find that the overwhelming majority could answer perfectly fine. If however, you're running an entertainment program or a news show (which is kind of an entertainment program now-a-days anyhow) you probably toss out all of the correct results and only show the clips from the people who get it wrong or act like complete duffusses for the camera. If you only actively highlight the stupidest people you can find, of course things seem worse than they are.
I'm not terribly worried about poor schooling as IQ scores have been trending upwards over the past century since we started measuring intelligence. People will succeed and figure things out despite shortcomings in the educational system, just like people largely manage to overcome shitty or sub-optimal parenting and turn out to be decent. People tend to look back at the old days through a rose colored lens and focus on the good without looking at the bad. Somewhat recently I was talking with a relation of mine who recounted his years in high school and how much of a joke it was as one of the teachers was a drunk and taught them next to nothing and another would pass anyone on an athletic team no matter how poorly they did.
If today's world seems so horrible it's only because we have access to news media from all around the world. I can spend all day reading about bad things happening from half way around the world, whereas 30 years ago that was practically impossible even for government intelligence agencies. Once again, if you only put the worst on display, it leads one to make incorrect assumptions. Things in general are getting so much better, maybe not as quickly as everyone would like, but the trend line is moving in a positive direction overall.
It's probably less expensive to move a sensor that listens for gunshots than an entire police precinct. It also doesn't really matter where you locate the precinct either since the police can take their cars and patrol wherever they're most needed. You'd want to have your precincts located in such a way that it makes it easy and efficient for police to deploy anywhere in the city, otherwise if you locate them nearest the worst neighborhoods you'll probably not have a very even distribution as bad neighborhoods tend to be clustered.
Smart criminals do, at least insofar as it doesn't curtail their criminal enterprise. If you're an intelligent criminal and making good money, you'll avoid drawing police attention to yourself as much as possible. Stupid criminals won't, which just makes them easier to catch.
No one is saying there shouldn't be consequences for a person's actions, just that the government should leave as much of that to the free exercise of individuals as possible. Causing injury through ones actions (speech or otherwise) can be handled in civil courts reasonably well in most cases without the government needing to make specific or narrowly defined speech illegal. The best weapon against speech with which you disagree is always free speech of your own. When deciding whether or not government should have particular powers, it's typically best to imagine the people you'd least like to be in charge being in control of that government.
A fridge capable of doing that would need to be pretty smart. It would have to be able to track contents going and and out of it and know what the hell it is, which means it needs a scanner that can read bar codes (no matter how the object is situated) or scan RFID tags on the items, but really it would need some visual recognition since just because it sees a milk carton in the fridge doesn't mean that it's not almost empty.
Doing that is going to be incredibly complex and requires solving a lot of problems that are the focus of current AI research. Right now I expect that the best a smart fridge is capable of is telling me how cold it is (or allowing me to change that) and whether or not there's ice ready in the freezer. Maybe it could do some fancy stuff like having temperature zones so part of the fridge can be kept cooler than another part, but having a fridge that knows what's in it and can automatically add stuff to a shopping list is going to take a while to achieve.
Even if had perfected its vehicles, this seems like a misguided effort. I would imagine that anyone who has a Tesla already has a smartphone that either contains their own music or access to a streaming service. I can't imagine a world in which this adds more value to Tesla's products than it consumes in hours spent developing the service or even negotiating it. Build a nice hub that makes it easy for people to plug in their own devices or services to and there's no need to worry about building your own service. I'd rather have a better cup holder in my vehicle than yet another music streaming service.
This is just dripping with FUD. Several big players in the server market have already announced they'll be shipping products with AMD's CPUs. If you couldn't find any server CPUs from AMD in the recent past its because they didn't bother making any after a point because their Bulldozer architecture was so much of a failure that they left that part of the market. Just look at the Wikipedia article that lists their server chips and notice that the pretty much stopped after 2012 outside of a few ARM or Jaguar-based parts that were for micro-servers.
Also, the last time AMD put a dent into Intel, Intel started fighting back in a large number of ways that were later found to be illegal. Celebrate and relax, indeed.
The idea only works if you assume all individuals are equally capable, which isn't true. What happens is that labor-saving techniques or machines replace the least skilled workers who were doing 40 hours of work. Some of them can be transitioned to do 40 hours of some other type of work, but others will not be.
Over time what we end up with is a society where some percentage of the population is doing ~40 hours of work per week (and a small few doing even more than that because that's just how they're wired mentally) and the other percentage is doing nothing (or very close to it) because they're incapable of being more productive at some task than a machine.
This is going to be an especially big problem and right now neither of the major parties have a good solution because the political right tends to believe that anyone who can't find work is too lazy and needs to get a job (without recognizing that there are no jobs of which they are capable) and the political left tends to believe that all people are equally capable and that with sufficient training a person who's borderline mentally retarded (or a step above that) can eventually become a neurosurgeon.
Bertrand Russell has a good piece covering this very problem that he wrote almost 100 years ago called In Praise of Idleness. He lays out the argument that if people had more leisure time (as may possible by industrialization) they could devote it to scientific pursuits or towards producing culture. Unfortunately he made the mistake of assuming that everyone was like Bertrand Russell and would kill for extra time to engage in satisfying their own curiosity about the world. In reality a big chunk of those people would just sit on the couch and watch TV with their added time, because they're not mentally capable of advancing our understanding of the universe or creating anything society would deem as artistically worthwhile.
I suppose the good news is that in such a future it becomes reasonably inexpensive to provide for someone who does nothing, because industrialization will drive costs down as production increases. However, the bad news is there isn't a lot of incentive to devote resources to people who can't contribute to society either. Hopefully we take a path that reduces or limits the number of people in that position without inflicting a lot of human suffering to get there. Everything I know about humanity tells me that probably won't be the case.
If your smart-toaster is incapable of functioning without booting and connecting to the internet, it is poorly designed. Any smart device that isn't a good device first is going to be a failure no matter how many bells and whistles it has on top of it. About the only nice feature I can think of for a smart toaster would be to remind me the evening before to pre-load some bread into it so that it can start toasting it at a set time in the morning, or if its really smart after it knows that I'll want my toast to be ready in a few minutes (say after it knows I've showered and brushed my teeth) from the present moment.
But I should always be able to just slap some bread in it and push the lever down no matter if its done booting or isn't on the network. A toaster that can't make toast is useless regardless of whether it's a so-called smart device or not.
The original iPhone didn't have support for third party apps, and whether or not Apple would have liked to have them in the initial release or not was irrelevant as they couldn't do it, so Jobs had to sell everyone on why apps were bad and web apps were so great, just like he told people that people didn't want videos on their iDevices before releasing a video iPod the next year. Jobs did that with a lot of features over the years.
Self-checkout is the wrong solution to an important problem. The cart should be intelligent and know what you've put in it such that it's performing all of the checkout as you go along so that when you leave it already knows what you owe and can automatically make the transaction. At most you need someone who can make a quick spot check for people on the way out, but if you're going to put cameras in stores you can have people doing loss prevention remotely and just tip off the gatekeeper if they need to stop someone. And unless I'm picking out produce or cuts of meat, I wouldn't mind if I could punch in my order and just pick up my fully (or partially full) cart.
If there's no reason to interact with an employee, why include it just for the sake of including it? I want a knowledgeable person to be there if something goes wrong, but if I can get in and out of the store quickly without having to talk to another soul, I don't care, especially if I can avoid standing in any kind of line entirely. If Amazon is looking to drive down the cost of goods, then the cost of the human labor is going to become a larger and larger piece of their total cost and the only way to cut prices further without sacrificing on product quality is to find ways of cutting labor. If you feel terribly bad for some people who won't have jobs, feel free to hire their labor for some productive use that you envision.
That's actually not very good. Some estimates have median 2-bedroom rent in SF over $50,000 annually. There's a general consensus that you shouldn't spend more than 25%-30% of your income on rent, and on an $80,000 salary that means no more than about $2,000 per month which means a tiny studio apartment in the least expensive parts of town.
$80,000 may seem like a small fortune, but you seriously need to account for how damned expensive San Francisco is as a city. You're going to be much better off only making $50,000 somewhere in the mid-west but spending $10,000 to rent a much larger apartment.
Negative for the government entities perhaps, but as a citizen I'd find it quite refreshing to have the governments dirty laundry aired. I don't know if that requires cyber espionage from other countries as Snowden showed that this can be done internally as well, but governments that can get away with working from the shadows tend to become tyrannical beasts. Even the threat of eventual discovery may be enough to keep some evil at bay.
I think the more realistic explanation is that it was ignored because it means the U.S. would have to knock-off (or obfuscate behind a third party for purposes of deniability, because lets face it we're not going to stop doing it) a lot of the stuff it's doing. Everyone likes to think that they're the good guys, but the U.S. has a long history of interfering in foreign countries so it's laughable to suggest that not carrying out our own operations. But as you point out, there isn't much point in a meaningless treaty when both sides know that both they and the other side won't actually uphold it.