321–329 of 329 posts
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why do you keep saying white privilege when you keep meaning black disadvantage? clearly this is not the same thing.
Are you actually serious? Why do you think black people are so disadvantaged? Who wins out in society then? White people.
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I saw that Redwood City robot. In it's current state, it's just for show. There was a guy trailing it with a joystick control.
I've seen it running around without anybody visibly controlling it. They have these things running in a few other cities.
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>And I find it at least questionable that parenting has gotten markedly less supportive in the past few decades. Look at the trends of the past few decades: divorce; single parent; and dual income households. There is in fact remarkedly less two parent, supported by single income households, meaning it's a rareity for a child to simply have a parent at home when they return from school to fix them a healthy snack, as…
US divorce rate is lower than it's been for 40 years.
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For plumbers, electricians and a few other trades you can become a journeyman apprentice in the US, and after a few years you can earn high 5 digits to low 6 digits with healthcare usually. That being said, its a mature industry and not highly regarded in the US as it is a "blue collar" job. Stigmatizing & devaluing an honest days work is ridiculous to me, but that is what our society has done to these jobs.
On a related note, here's a blog post with suggestions of jobs a person can do without a degree: Part I, http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/07/25/50-jobs-over-50000... and part II, which includes some more "manual labor" type jobs: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/08/05/50-jobs-over-50000... Many require some sort of apprenticeship. The post is on the Mr. Money Mustache website, which is site dedicated to helping…
I worry about this for my oldest son. He has dyspraxia and apraxia. In practice that means he has difficulty with memory (at 15 he still doesn't know his multiplication tables) and putting things in order (such as speaking - you have to put phonemes, words, sentences together in order to speak). But, he doesn't look like he has a disability and he doesn't speak much so people don't readily realize he doesn't talk lik…
My son is a lot younger than yours with a different set of struggles (currently he's just preschool age) but he also appears to be completely normal to people who haven't spent a lot of time with him. He especially struggles with sensory processing and fine motor related tasks. We haven't got a firm diagnosis yet but hope to find out more from behavioral testing (neurological testing hasn't been able to give us any g…
I worry about this for my oldest son. He has dyspraxia and apraxia. In practice that means he has difficulty with memory (at 15 he still doesn't know his multiplication tables) and putting things in order (such as speaking - you have to put phonemes, words, sentences together in order to speak). But, he doesn't look like he has a disability and he doesn't speak much so people don't readily realize he doesn't talk lik…
My grandfather was dyslexic and in his 92 years, he never could learn to read. He started his own garbage disposal business and became wealthy from it, eventually getting contracts with several significant municipalities in the Northwest before he sold it off. He surrounded himself with intelligent, well-educated people who would read the contracts to him and advise him (primarily his sons and wives, but also trusted…
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Interestingly, capital holders are complaining all the time as well. There are very few places to put money now with a decent return. Savings accounts pay roughly 0%. Bonds are at inflation, or sometimes less. The S&P 500's P/E is at 25, which is historically very high, implies a rate of return of about 4%, and makes the risk of a correction significant. Real estate is inefficient; property prices are so high that th…
The "capital holders" are crying crocodile tears. Oh my god, my millions are only making a 4% return! The horror! My heart bleeds for those downtrodden folks, really it does. Tons of people make 0% return because they live paycheck to paycheck, are deep in debt, and have no savings and no investments. Almost half of Americans own no stock (either directly or indirectly through retirement funds, etc.) [1] and therefor…
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I can understand, abstractly, why the scenarios you describe might be appealing, but my actual emotional reaction is horror. Complicated systems fail in complicated ways, and the last thing I want in my home is anything that requires a long, fiddly, debugging process after it abruptly stops working for no apparent reason, as all automated gadgets periodically do. Debugging is most of what I do for a living! I don't w…
I wonder if people reacted the same way to the last wave of home appliances - the dishwashers, laundry machines, blenders, food processors, vacuum cleaners, and other machines that must've seemed like horrifying abominations to people used to doing those chores by hand.
One aspect which feels like a significant difference to me is the centralization of control into cloud services. It's great that my washing machine performs the various steps in its job without human supervision. It would be rather less great if the washing machine needed to phone home and get permission from its manufacturer before it started. An IoT washing machine would have to offer a hell of a lot more convenience before it would make up for that kind of a disadvantage... but IoT devices as they exist today are basically just normal devices with extra remote control bolted on. That doesn't buy much, especially not when the remote control remains under the control of the manufacturer.
If there were an internet-connected washing machine where the novel automation remained entirely under the end-user's control, that would be a different story; but as things stand today, if someone is trying to sell me an internet-connected washing machine, it's because they are not content to merely sell me a piece of hardware: they are trying to leverage that sale into some novel ongoing revenue stream. Well, I don't want to sign up for them to have an ongoing revenue stream, and I especially don't want them to retain control over the device they have putatively sold me. So, unless this new automation is, let's say, doubling the convenience the device offers, it's a net loss and I don't want it.
That brings out the other difference I see between the IoT and previous generations of household automation projects: we are already well out along the curve of diminishing returns when it comes to household chores. There are already lots of automatic devices I don't bother with because they don't offer enough value to justify the space they take up. Sure, I have a refrigerator, laundry machines, and vacuum cleaner; but I don't have a food processor or an automatic coffee maker (I use a kettle and a french press). I used to have a roomba, but it wasn't worth the bother, so I clean the kitchen floor with an ordinary broom. Nor do I have an electric can opener, as my grandparents did, nor an electric towel warming rack, nor a motorized shaver, nor any of dozens of other "labor saving devices" as they used to be called, because they don't actually save enough labor to make them worth the cost of storing and maintaining them.
In the case of a hypothetical IoT laundry machine, for example, there's little that further automation and remote control features could accomplish to save more time, because I still have to load the machine by hand and deal with all the sorting and folding and putting away afterward. Perhaps an IoT washing machine could, let's say, send a ping to my phone when the laundry is done. Well... that optimizes a part of the process that is already cheap, so it isn't worth much. I still have to go downstairs and do all the work after I get the ping, and there's nothing that any amount of Internet connectivity can do to help with that. In order to actually be significantly more helpful than today's machines, a future laundry machine would need to have some kind of robot hands coupled with machine vision, so it could sort and fold. That would be a true innovation, something valuable enough to be worth putting up with the increased fragility and novel failure modes - but there's no reason such a device would need Internet connectivity or a subscription to a cloud service.