From the 2017 Amazon review it appears that all of the URLs in the text are now bad, after one year. Not sure how severely that impacts the value of the book but the reviewer only gave it two stars. So that "four star" average rating should be taken with a grain of salt. I certainly would not buy it new, you can get it for a little more than half the (allegedly) discounted Amazon new price.
As the Trading Economics link given below shows, if you apply the 4 quarter sliding average to smooth out the natural quarterly oscillations growth remained around 2% ever since it crossed that level at the beginning of 2010. The average once got close to 4%, but never touched 1%.
He may have to conclude that the Air Force must be abolished forthwith, as only an Army and a Navy are specified in the Constitution. If we are strict originalists clearly any power not granted in the Constitution does not exist. Creating an Air Force must require a Constitutional amendment.
Can I buy a Juicero on eBay for $50 (shipping included) yet? There are probably things I need to crush, now I'll be set. (Yeah I know I'll have to Arduino the controller.) Yes, I see people trying to recoup their losses by offering their ill-advised purchase for $180 (and up) starting bids on eBay.
According to "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez, Facebook only has 2.5B+ people to convert into users. User growth stalls out after that as the few billion people who aren't users live in areas too remote for Internet access. Facebook will have to find new ways to grow that doesn't rely on adding new users in the future.
Or (actually "and") they could take it upon themselves to push Internet out to those remaining billions. Something like this.
If you read the Wired article you will see that this mapping project is part of this 'universal Internet' access plan. And you will also see that 'universal access' means just having an Internet connection. It is not a net-neutral ISP connection. It is a "Facebook selected set of services" connection. They get on because Facebook says "yes". If there is any money to made now, or in the future, it will be Facebook's.
According to Zuckerberg this is the epitome of "net neutrality" since the most discriminatory thing is not to have Internet, that, and the fact that he is permitting a few hundred other services on the connection compensates for the fact that he has complete control over that connection.
Self-driving trucks on long haul routes are really only a temporary step. Moving freight to rail is tremendously cheaper long term and if the rail network is going back to what it was in the 50s access and speed will be on par if not better than trucks...
Self-driving trucks - on the road 24/7, no driver, cost-optimized speed - are going to be much cheaper than human driven trucks. So how is rail going to make a big comeback when its competitor - trucking - is getting cheaper?
The fact that this move to "tremendously cheaper long term" rail is not already underway suggests that you are leaving important things out of the picture.
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
No, mostly people have not been claiming it would "destroy our civilization tomorrow" (a hyperbolic strawman) but they were correct in describing actual observed negative effects on a the people whose jobs were automated away.
This happened on a massive scale in Britain between 1770 and 1810, when about 20% of all jobs in Britain (related to cotton spinning and weaving, flax and wool production and processing) were eliminated. Eventually the rising economic productivity created enough new jobs for full employment - about 1845, 75 years after the massive job losses began. At one point 15% of the entire British population was "on the dole" as paupers or locked up in "poor houses" (prisons for people who had committed no crimes). Those Dickensian slums were real and they lasted for decades. The First Industrial Revolution brought about a petty crime explosion when people had no way to earn a living took to stealing, which led to a huge boom in prison building, and when the prisons building couldn't keep up the prisoners overflowed into "hulks" - ancient ship hulls waiting for scrapping - and when those overflowed they were packed off to Australia (only petty criminals were sent there).
Yes a massive calamity for a large chunk of the British population did arrive, and was thoroughly documented. It took three working generations for the economy to self-correct.
The First Industrial Revolution was a genuine surprise, and Georgian and Regency Britain can perhaps be excused for handling it badly. The Cybernetic Revolution we can see coming, and we have no excuse for handling it badly.
Canadian and U.S. Money, like all fiat currencies, can be instantly devalued simply by the gov't choosing to print more at any time. It IS NOT a guaranteed store of stable value.
Now what would a "guaranteed store of stable value" be?
Who pays out the guarantee?
Not precious metals that had real price collapses between 1915-1933, 1941-1972, 1975-1978, 1981-2010 (with several smaller peaks and collapses since then), we are still down sharply since 2012. Nothing stable about this.
The dollar on the other hand declines in value (if you are foolish enough to hold "paper") at a usually predictable rate and gradual rate (no inflation jump in the last 100 years is remotely like the price fluctuations of metals) and allow you to offset inflation with Federal bond purchases. U.S. Federal bonds have never been defaulted on, even interest payments have only been delayed (for a short time, a technical default) a couple of times. So far.
To answer my rhetorical question above, it is the U.S. Government.
Hard money cults do not trump actual data. (No I used that word in an ordinary sense, he does not own the word).
The key issue people have had with the subscription service we call "cable TV" is their (former) monopoly status. But some of the issues is a feature of subscription services in general, which need to price their services according to usage by some sort of "average" viewer utilization, with low users subsidizing heavy users. There is no getting around this.
Umm.. do you realize what the lifespan for beef cattle, sheep for mutton, pigs and chickens for meat actually are? They are respectively: 18 months, 1-6 months, six months, and five to seven weeks. Every animal slaughtered for meat less than two years old, usually much less.
In the event the lab meat starts reducing live animal meat sales farmers will simply breed fewer animals. There is not ever going to be a huge number of surplus farm animals.
Not only that, but I have a sneaking suspicion that vegans may refuse to eat it...
Because all "vegans" do the same thing?
There is a continuum of self-imposed dietary restrictions with (literally) countless variations on the definition of the restrictions and the reasons for them. For some people who do not eat meat because they don't want to be responsible for killing mammals (or all higher animals, or land animals, or....) to feed them, lab grown meat will be fine. For others anything "artificial" is off limits (for some idiosyncratic definition of "artificial") and will not. There are lots of other reasons for eating it and not eating it.
Indeed. I have found a pair of cats are far more effective than traps or poisons in keeping rodents out. The poisons do kill the rodents, but then you have decaying rodents in your walls or ceiling, and it is a risk for children (and dogs). They keep out of the house entirely with cats present.
Slashdot Mirror
From the 2017 Amazon review it appears that all of the URLs in the text are now bad, after one year. Not sure how severely that impacts the value of the book but the reviewer only gave it two stars. So that "four star" average rating should be taken with a grain of salt. I certainly would not buy it new, you can get it for a little more than half the (allegedly) discounted Amazon new price.
As the Trading Economics link given below shows, if you apply the 4 quarter sliding average to smooth out the natural quarterly oscillations growth remained around 2% ever since it crossed that level at the beginning of 2010. The average once got close to 4%, but never touched 1%.
He may have to conclude that the Air Force must be abolished forthwith, as only an Army and a Navy are specified in the Constitution. If we are strict originalists clearly any power not granted in the Constitution does not exist. Creating an Air Force must require a Constitutional amendment.
That and a whole bunch of water on both sides, and no competition in the entire Western Hemisphere.
True. This is on often over-looked phenomenon.
Bingo!
Poe's Law and a little innumeracy among (supposed) nerds, my friend.
The sarcasm tag is often not optional.
Can I buy a Juicero on eBay for $50 (shipping included) yet? There are probably things I need to crush, now I'll be set. (Yeah I know I'll have to Arduino the controller.) Yes, I see people trying to recoup their losses by offering their ill-advised purchase for $180 (and up) starting bids on eBay.
But this guy has the right idea selling a "Juicero 2.0", a hand cranked roller press, which he says (no doubt truthfully) is twice as fast as a Juicero, and costs only $150.
Something like this.
According to "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez, Facebook only has 2.5B+ people to convert into users. User growth stalls out after that as the few billion people who aren't users live in areas too remote for Internet access. Facebook will have to find new ways to grow that doesn't rely on adding new users in the future.
Or (actually "and") they could take it upon themselves to push Internet out to those remaining billions. Something like this.
If you read the Wired article you will see that this mapping project is part of this 'universal Internet' access plan. And you will also see that 'universal access' means just having an Internet connection. It is not a net-neutral ISP connection. It is a "Facebook selected set of services" connection. They get on because Facebook says "yes". If there is any money to made now, or in the future, it will be Facebook's.
According to Zuckerberg this is the epitome of "net neutrality" since the most discriminatory thing is not to have Internet, that, and the fact that he is permitting a few hundred other services on the connection compensates for the fact that he has complete control over that connection.
Good move with the last line. It was essential to void being "Poe'd".
Self-driving trucks on long haul routes are really only a temporary step. Moving freight to rail is tremendously cheaper long term and if the rail network is going back to what it was in the 50s access and speed will be on par if not better than trucks...
Self-driving trucks - on the road 24/7, no driver, cost-optimized speed - are going to be much cheaper than human driven trucks. So how is rail going to make a big comeback when its competitor - trucking - is getting cheaper?
The fact that this move to "tremendously cheaper long term" rail is not already underway suggests that you are leaving important things out of the picture.
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
No, mostly people have not been claiming it would "destroy our civilization tomorrow" (a hyperbolic strawman) but they were correct in describing actual observed negative effects on a the people whose jobs were automated away.
This happened on a massive scale in Britain between 1770 and 1810, when about 20% of all jobs in Britain (related to cotton spinning and weaving, flax and wool production and processing) were eliminated. Eventually the rising economic productivity created enough new jobs for full employment - about 1845, 75 years after the massive job losses began. At one point 15% of the entire British population was "on the dole" as paupers or locked up in "poor houses" (prisons for people who had committed no crimes). Those Dickensian slums were real and they lasted for decades. The First Industrial Revolution brought about a petty crime explosion when people had no way to earn a living took to stealing, which led to a huge boom in prison building, and when the prisons building couldn't keep up the prisoners overflowed into "hulks" - ancient ship hulls waiting for scrapping - and when those overflowed they were packed off to Australia (only petty criminals were sent there).
Yes a massive calamity for a large chunk of the British population did arrive, and was thoroughly documented. It took three working generations for the economy to self-correct.
The First Industrial Revolution was a genuine surprise, and Georgian and Regency Britain can perhaps be excused for handling it badly. The Cybernetic Revolution we can see coming, and we have no excuse for handling it badly.
Of course you can get the actual published version using SciHub and its DOI: 10.1038/nature23644
Probably only an automated tool that is built on knowledge of stylometry to eradicate signatures would work.
Hey! Someone should get to work on this! (But maybe do it secretly and release it anonymously to minimize blow-back risks.
I'm betting much less effort will be required for person number two. The research is done.
And once the technique is demonstrated improvements will be made.
Come on someone, mod this funny!
Canadian and U.S. Money, like all fiat currencies, can be instantly devalued simply by the gov't choosing to print more at any time. It IS NOT a guaranteed store of stable value.
Now what would a "guaranteed store of stable value" be?
Who pays out the guarantee?
Not precious metals that had real price collapses between 1915-1933, 1941-1972, 1975-1978, 1981-2010 (with several smaller peaks and collapses since then), we are still down sharply since 2012. Nothing stable about this.
The dollar on the other hand declines in value (if you are foolish enough to hold "paper") at a usually predictable rate and gradual rate (no inflation jump in the last 100 years is remotely like the price fluctuations of metals) and allow you to offset inflation with Federal bond purchases. U.S. Federal bonds have never been defaulted on, even interest payments have only been delayed (for a short time, a technical default) a couple of times. So far.
To answer my rhetorical question above, it is the U.S. Government.
Hard money cults do not trump actual data. (No I used that word in an ordinary sense, he does not own the word).
Indeed.
The key issue people have had with the subscription service we call "cable TV" is their (former) monopoly status. But some of the issues is a feature of subscription services in general, which need to price their services according to usage by some sort of "average" viewer utilization, with low users subsidizing heavy users. There is no getting around this.
Homer murmur... mmmmm... synthetic cheetah meat....
Umm.. do you realize what the lifespan for beef cattle, sheep for mutton, pigs and chickens for meat actually are? They are respectively: 18 months, 1-6 months, six months, and five to seven weeks. Every animal slaughtered for meat less than two years old, usually much less.
In the event the lab meat starts reducing live animal meat sales farmers will simply breed fewer animals. There is not ever going to be a huge number of surplus farm animals.
Not only that, but I have a sneaking suspicion that vegans may refuse to eat it...
Because all "vegans" do the same thing?
There is a continuum of self-imposed dietary restrictions with (literally) countless variations on the definition of the restrictions and the reasons for them. For some people who do not eat meat because they don't want to be responsible for killing mammals (or all higher animals, or land animals, or....) to feed them, lab grown meat will be fine. For others anything "artificial" is off limits (for some idiosyncratic definition of "artificial") and will not. There are lots of other reasons for eating it and not eating it.
This is different from what happens to them now, how?
Indeed. I have found a pair of cats are far more effective than traps or poisons in keeping rodents out. The poisons do kill the rodents, but then you have decaying rodents in your walls or ceiling, and it is a risk for children (and dogs). They keep out of the house entirely with cats present.
Mod this guy up!