Caterpillar creates 2,700 square metre Pac-Man gameboard

Do enough stunts, and one or two of them get preserved just by sheer chance.

This one almost certainly won't stay there. None of them will. But whatever gets preserved will be some crazy stuff that future people have no chance of understanding.

(But well, nobody should be surprised that our civilization can align things with the true North... So, nobody probably will.)

It's hard to tell the precise location, but this area seems to be where it was actually done: https://goo.gl/maps/njSa71qU6w8CrP9BA. It's already a giant dirt field on the satellite imagery; there wasn't even any fields plowed up for it.

That soundbite is a study in how to turn something cool uncool.

> When everything is moved offshore to lower costs, what will we do all day?

Provide a more productive and practical purpose for these people's labour during their blip time on this planet to something?

Those "something's" are practically infinite. People have developed (or been sold) this weird conception that there is only a small finite amount of work available, and therefore we must limit things like the total workforce numbers or other such nonsense.

When any (usually group) of people can come up with an idea, generate thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of value, then really the supply of "what to do" is hardly finite. Most of our limitations on these are self-created through well meaning legislation or through power systems like monopolies, which we have systems to break. But hardly all of them are limited by these two factors.

With simple B2B software alone theres millions of automations/automations just waiting to be productized and profitizied. Consumer-wise we haven't reached anyway near the potential of smartphones, IOT, and desktops in every home.

This idea that there is a finite amount of jobs and there will be nothing left for the guy who figured out how to drive sophisticated machines or run teams/logistics of such people is such a weird unreal fantasy to me. I don't really get it.

Our problem is more of what are the older people going to do and we've come up with quite a few solutions already (UBI) but beyond that these transitions take a lot of time. A lot more than they ever should. And a lot longer than the doomsayers ever predict.

Plus we are a long long way from robots completely replacing labour jobs and things like being an electrician which can be a highly valuable and rewarding career (not everyone has to be a millionaire but middle class life in anywhere country is enviable by almost anyone not in a western country).

I'm so tired of these negative predictions than never seem to work out in reality. In reality we have failure of current systems (in one giant form in America prematurely shipping it all overseas is one). Not failures of the actual technological development.

But regardless you can't stop this constant progress anyway. It's going to happen. IMO our short time on earth is far better spent on fixing the failures of the past that are realized today (criminal sentencing reform, drug laws, the utter failures of political systems maybe due to voting or other factors like how policy is formed, etc, etc) than worrying about the future.

Where is the line between your right to repair and Caterpillar's rights to the intellectual property embedded in the various controllers on board the equipment?

When does this become an issue when you and Caterpillar have regulatory obligations for the operations of that equipment with regard to emissions, OSHA, MSHA, etc... ?

I am sincerely interested in understanding the reasonable expectations between anything we purchase (hardware, equipment, cars) and the IP we license that provides the functionality we expect from those devices.

If the license were to say up front, before purchasing, "You are purchasing this hardware and receiving a license to use the embedded IP in perpetuity. If you screw around with the IP, all functions will stop working as expected and YOU personally take responsibility for the hardware from that point forward."

Would that address your concerns about, "Right to Repair?"

It's a start, because it clearly articulates the relationship between you and the the hardware you purchased, however, I suspect you also want more information so that you can take any reasonable maintenance actions necessary for the life of that hardware without relying on the manufacturer

But that is speculation on my part

I want a clearer understanding of where you would draw the lines and what you really want from a modern, culturally significant, "right to repair" policy.