Comment Re:Zoning laws are tyranny (Score 1) 611
http://rationalitate.blogspot....
Seems like Houston has minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes, so no.
http://rationalitate.blogspot....
Seems like Houston has minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes, so no.
In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.
San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.
All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.
What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.
Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.
Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.
We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.
The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.
It has apparently never occurred to publishers to band together and fund the creation of a system for buying content at dirt cheap prices using something like ACH transfers to keep the transaction costs low. How about a one-click purchase model where you pay $0.50/article or $3 for all content published that day?
It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.
The usual rules on this have to do with consecutive days worked. Six days in a row -> 1.5x pay. Seven or more days in a row -> 2x pay.
There was a time when most US employees got that.
This hit the special effects industry about 20 years ago. Artists were ruled as not being exempt employees. The companines (at least the ones I knew about) reclassified them as hourly but based their new salary on dividing the old weekly one by 55 hours, not 40.
Do you get overtime pay?
I would not be surprised if you get that too. You may be right about us being chumps.
Huh? I have never encountered a programmer who was not an exempt employee.
The Hawking radiation is very very tiny, and I am pretty certain is impossible to see. Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the black hole size.
And double time on Sundays.
Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.
Mod parent up.
"HTTPS Everywhere" is security theater. Most stuff doesn't need to be encrypted. Worse, as the parent post points out, it causes the creation of security holes. This weakens security for the few things that need to be encrypted.
We don't need "value added services" in the middle of the network. Not for secure content, anyway. Perhaps some content should be signed, but not encrypted, so it can be cached, but not modified. Cloudflare, which decrypts everything that goes through it, is a huge security hole.
it appears that humans are worse drain than the radiation
Um, no DUH! That does not mean the radiation is harmless, or even that it is less harmful than the worst predictions. Human settlements are pretty lethal to the reproduction of large animals like that.
Personally I think the scare of radiation is way overblown, but when you say stupid things like this I realize that there are just as uninformed people on both sides of this issue.
Same story was on Hacker News last week. From the same guy.
This is what work looks like with computers in charge. This is Amazon's new warehouse in Tracy, CA. The computers run the robots and do the planning and scheduling. The robots move the shelf units around/ The humans take things out of one container and put them in another, taking orders from the computers.
The bin picking will probably be automated soon. Bezos has a company developing robots for that.
As for repairing the robots, that's not a big deal. There are about a thousand mobile Kiva robots in that warehouse, sharing the work, and they're all interchangeable. Kiva, which makes and services the robots, has only a few hundred employees.
Retail is 12% of US employment. That number is shrinking.
Don't panic.