In my experience "genius" and "brilliance" tend to necessarily involve the ability to monomanically focus on things in a way which, socially speaking, is 'self centered'. We socialize that tendency out of most people, and particularly out of women.
"Working remotely is now widespread, and will only become moreso once telepresence robots become ubiquitous."
Telecommuting (much discussed on slashdot over the past decade) is fairly common, but still hardly 'widepread' - only 2.6% of the U.S. employee workforce 'considers the home their primary workplace', and the single largest group of telecommuters are federal employees (3.3%), ahead of private for-profit sector workers (2.6%) (http://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics). And even among those (like myself) who would say my home is my primary workplace (I live about 3 hours drive from my employer) still need to go in to the office once a month or so. Which might work in some parts of Europe, but for most fo the world is unreasonably complicated and expensive. And I suspect the vast vast majority of those of us who telecommute or work remotely are still doing so within national boundaries.
"Translation services, both for written and spoken language are approaching sci-fi-level capabilities."
Bullshit. Well, so far anyway. The linked slashdot story contained a bunch of comments from people saying the skype translation was just about good enough for scheduling another meeting time, but you couldn't use it to do actual work.
"The rise of cryptocurrencies is providing a method for people worldwide to move away from national currencies."
Right up until you need to buy groceries or pay rent.
Of course, all these things will change. Machine translation will definitely get better. Telepresence might get beyond novelty and/or uncanny valley and genuinely make 'going for a beer with the boss' on another continent work. And my landlord might even start accepting bitcoin. But with the possible exception of machine translation, the rest of it will remain the province of fairly well off people for a long time. Well off people like Peter Diamandis.
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint".
(Hesiod, 8th century BC)
Oh, I'm not a libertarian
I think the precise details of how easy small claims is to use varies from state to state. I've only had experience with it in California (and only once at that), and in CA the court doesn't give multiple opportunities to appear unless the defendant files paperwork each time giving a documented (and reasonable) reason they can't appear. And neither party is allowed to bring a lawyer with them. But yes, working out how to collect is up to you, and how easy that is varies wildly depending on the situation. Landlords tend to be easy to collect from because, by definition, they have fixed assets. Uber drivers, maybe not so much.
We need a Megan's Law equivalent for people who refuse to be vaccinated. Sure, you can refuse to vaccinate yourself or your child because your skyfairy says so, or for any other reason you like, but you have to be registered like a sex offender and banned from living or going within a thousand feet of any school.
Yes, but it happens less often when 'government regulations' prevent people with known histories of raping and assaulting people from driving taxis.
Whereas you seem to be arguing that the inconvenience of running a background check on someone before letting them drive a taxi is so onerous that it's worth letting known rapists drive taxis just to avoid the burden on the taxi industry of 'all that government red tape'.
"if I take it to small claims court
In which case you automatically win.
"and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway"
In which case the court will help you garnish their wages, order their bank to pay you from any funds they have in the bank, suspend their professional license and/or drivers license until they pay you, and a range of other things that will make their life a complete misery (http://www.courts.ca.gov/1179.htm).
But yeah, it does take time. But laying all this out to them in a demand-for-payment letter so they see that you know how the system works and are willing to grind through those steps is usually sufficient to get people to stop bluffing and pay you if you're clearly in the right.
"It's unlikely that a high school student would come away with any other conclusion than the police are a fearful group to be avoided at all costs," says Eugene O'Donnell, a former police officer and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
That's probably because the police *are* a fearful group to be avoided at all costs..
"3. Personalization and customization."
Scan a barcode on the dash with your phone as soon as you get in; your phone syncs with the car & the car changes all the radio station presets change according to the preference file your phone sent it. Ditto climate control preferences, seat position, throttle responsiveness, basically anything that can be controlled electronically.
The other three points I more or less agree with you on though.
Nah, the early trolls just got bored and left. Making those who stayed seem erudite and witty by comparison
Dealing with non-metric units isn't that daunting for people raised on metric either - I grew up in Australia and moved to the US in my 30s. I'm a scientist, so in my day-to-day worklife nothing changed at all. The conversions needed for daily shopping are rudimentary (a pound of fish is half a kilo of fish) and you quickly stop needing to even make the conversion. Inches for woodworking are sometimes actually an improvement (12 inches is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12, which makes for a lot of easy mental arithmetic when dividing a length of wood into halves, third, quarters etc; 10 cm is only divisible by 1, 2, 5, and 10). Miles per hour is just a number on a sign which needs to be related to the same number on your speedometer - there's no need to convert at all. Temperature took longer to adjust to - it's really a matter of recalibrating your sense of which number matches to which relative feeling, and that took 4 or 5 years. The only thing I still struggle with is wrench sizes - quick, which is bigger, a 5/8 wrench or a 3/4 wrench? Quick, which is bigger, a 10mm wrench or a 12mm wrench? I just tried a 5/8 wrench on a bolt and it was slightly too small - quick, what's the next size up to try? etc.
Finally, an easy way to cancel a comcast subscription!
"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns. "
For the purposes of reducing accidents and facilitating things like lane changes, there's no reason for the location to be transmitted more broadly than a few hundred metres around the transmitting vehicle, nor for either the transmitting vehicle or receiving vehicles to store that location for more than 10 minutes or so. I'm not too worried about the impact on privacy if that were the case. And I'm expecting car manufacturers to go with the cheapest possible solution which meets regulation, so they certainly have no interest in installing the kind of equipment needed to broadcast location beyond 100m or so, and lost of interest in resisting regulation which goes beyond that.
Well, I just wasted about an hour rummaging through California's law relating to waste water from industrial processes, as well as law relating to drinking water, and in that time could not find anything which either supports or refutes the parent poster's assertion that waste water from semiconductor plants must be cleaner than tap water (links to the law and regulations below). Nor could I find any support for the parent poster's claim just randomly googling around (I figured if it were true there'd be multiple references to it).
I agree with you that if wastewater from industrial processes is held to higher standards than tap water, then that's ridiculous. However given it's such an extrodinary claim, I'd also suggest that the burden of proof lies with those making it - here's the law; knock yourselves out.
CA law and regulation relating to drinking water: http://www.cdph.ca.gov/certlic...
CA law and regulation relating to waste water: http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/...
All code relating to water in CA: http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/...
"Why would the rest of the world care? If Californians eliminate themselves as a competitor through insane regulation, other countries benefit."
Well, another way to look at it is Californians have calculated the real cost. Sure, you get a couple of hundred FAB plant jobs, and a dribble of corporate and payroll tax out of it, but FABs are notoriously hard on worker health and on the surrounding environment. So the state ends up paying big dollars down the track to clean up the toxic mess left behind (and remember the only thing prop 65 bans is businesses dumping known carcinogens *into the drinking water supply* - under this law you can still dump carcinogenic waste wherever else you want), and pays again for healthcare costs for workers and their families (or we all pay it through increased insurance premiums if the state doesn't end up paying for it with our taxes).
About the only reason you'd want a FAB plant in your state that wasn't willing or able to comply with California's environmental laws is if you want to be able to boast about how you 'created more jobs' in the leadup to the next election, and didn't give a shit what the real cost to the state would be over the next 30 years.
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky
