Posting anonymously removes your credibility as an expert in the field unless your post contains internal evidence justifying this. Yours didn't.

Most jobs don't require all that much intelligence. Many jobs have (and are being) intentionally redesigned to deskill them. This allows wages to be cut, as it's easier to replace the employees.

Much of this is political decision, but they are political decisions enabled by advancing technologies, including AI. A scanner that can recognize the price of an item whatever orientation it is presented with that item in is more intelligent than one that can't. This is true even if part of the intelligence resides in the design of the system (bar codes).

Automated warehouses wouldn't be being built if they weren't cheaper to operate than manned warehouses. They are being built. Therefore the jobs that they would have provided had they not been automated have been removed from the system. This requires approaches that in even the 1990's would have been called AI, but which aren't called that any more.

This is still the leading edge. Google's automated car isn't up to city streets, but it can remove a lot of jobs without having that kind of general capacity. And it will be (is being) improved. Still, even at its current state of development it is quite capable of being extremely useful in many situations. And in those situations it will be removing jobs because if it didn't, it wouldn't be used. It will only be used where it cuts costs, which means removing enough jobs that it pays for not hiring the drivers.

The question then becomes "What new jobs are created by the removal of the existing jobs?" And the answer appears to be "only a few, and those highly skilled". The last time this kind of thing happened nearly an entire generation of horses got turned into dog and cat food. This time it's not horses being put out of work.

I live in a port city and see lots of ships, but I'm not sure this baby could even enter the harbour here.

It's far bigger than what the Panama Canal can handle (maximum 290 meters long), as well as the Saint Lawrence Seaway (225 meters). The Panama Canal was designed for the largest ships of the day, RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic.

...laura

Replacing economists with tossing dice would be a significant improvement: academic research shows the more qualified an economist, the less accurate his predictions!

I leave it to the reader to suggest what to do with politicians (I expect nuking from high orbit to be the most popular suggestion)

Leaving aside the fact that economists are a hopeless case, at least here in the UK, we have massive problems with our jobs market - huge numbers of people are working insanely long hours for peanuts, while others are working shorter hours for peanuts, and a minute number of people are decently paid, and a few make millions.

On top of this is the widely reported problem of "shortage of skilled workers" caused by a combination of agism and lack of willingness to pay them to do the job, not an actual shortage of skilled workers.

For example, today's news is that we are importing medical staff from Portugal, because the local people cannot survive on the wages, and the Portuguese cannot imagine how high living costs are here (especially housing and travel).

The jobs market is in need of some serious fixing.

Also the "Little Wonder" fuse blower - a NO switch shorting the mains supply through the fuse "under test". My grandfather claimed he worked for a company that sold them - but he also claimed loads of things too!

I am not too sure about that: I had a colleague who worked for a firm that used to manufacture tunnel monodes - a kind of single terminal tunnel diode. The tunnel diode is noted for having negative resistance. the resistance of a tunnel monode is the square root of -1!

They were extremely useful for one particular application, and indeed the best available solution in 1963, but the 60's intervened, and I don't actually remember what the application was (LSD was legal then) - I vaguely recall I was working on a time machine when I first heard about tunnel monodes. That was shortly before the project to show the Ike and Tina Turner show in your own home.

Sounds like a reasonably accurate translation to me (but I dont work there).

Well, I don't commute anymore, but my post was in reply to someone who was replying to someone talking about freeways.

FWIW, I consider busy city streets too dangerous to ride a bicycle on, but I notice that many people disagree with me. I've never used a moped, so I don't know about it's drawbacks, but back when I used to bicycle I once ended up in the street in traffic because the gears stripped. Not a pleasant sensation, even if that time I was only hurt by the pavement. Right about then I decided that bicycles are too dangerous in city traffic...and it's gotten a lot worse since then. (This decade my knees wouldn't let me ride a bike anyway, but...)

I used to have a whole box of 1N000 smoke-emitting-diodes.

They are easily recognised by the colour code "three black bands on a black background".

They are normally used to supply the "magic smoke" required by electronic systems to operate at full power, but I believe there are other uses.

I had a data sheet for a Motorola WOM as well - I believe from about the same date.

I prefer to document mine in "Foreign" thank you.

As a BT Customer, I can assure you that it stands for "Bloody Terrible", and the buyout is only feasible because the telecomms regulator is as toothless as a wet cabbage.

My friends who use it, assure me that EE stands for "Extremely Expensive".

Great idea! Now we all only need to agree on which language to standardize on. I'm sure that worldwide discussion will be calm, focused and productive. Please post the results here in the thread once it's been decided.

I suggest Swedish. It's just about equally well known by almost everybody in the world, so nobody is starting out with an unfair advantage. I get a lifetime gig teaching Swedish to everybody. And you get umlauts! Win-win.

Oh, and by "suggest" I of course mean "absolutely demand or I will refuse any part of this scheme".

Mopeds aren't allowed on the freeways. I believe you need to have 110 (some measure) cylinder size before you're allowed on the freeway. You need a motorcycle (though not a large one). And at 2 mph it should be pretty safe, even in bad weather.

Ashby is no freeway. A proper comparison would be 880, but that goes through business districts. Which might be the correct answer, though even businesses don't seem to like to be next to freeway ramps. Still, the Berkeley 4th street businesses seem to be doing well.

No. Public transportation needs a high population density to be cheap. It can be quite effective even at reasonably low population densities, but it becomes considerably more expensive, especially if you want it to be frequent enough to be convenient. In the US being dependent on public transit is often inconvenient because it's never there when you want it, especially at night or in foul weather.

OTOH, a dedicated bus lane on the freeway (or bus and car with 3 or more people) can considerably speed traffic IF there are enough buses. And that means the buses need to collect and distribute the passengers. Which means wide coverage handled fairly efficiently. This is never done because of severe cost cutting, which causes the transit to be so inconvenient that nobody chooses to use it if they can choose something else. Which raises the cost. Whoops!

Another problem is that efficiency designers have designed buses that are hideously uncomfortable. This is done in the name of cost reduction, getting more people onto each bus, and ease in cleaning. The result is that anyone who has any choice rides something else. Curiously, as people have gotten taller, the leg space/seat has been reduced. Any guesses as to why people dislike public transit? A few years ago when my legs were stronger I would often prefer to stand rather than to sit.