I'd like a strawman with a side order of false dichotomies, please? Oh, wait, no I wouldn't.

Nobody with any wit thinks that any given piece of technology is going to be well and truly flawless. Not even the technology used to land a plane. That's why we design them with multiple backups, failsafes, and alternatives. Rather than blindly trust the things we designed, we instead design so that we don't have to trust them. Even if something goes wrong, there's always another backup or alternative.

That's what this particular design fails to do. By hamstringing the last-resort failsafe (i.e. the pilots), it requires blind trust in the technology. That is simply not a sane approach.

Is there really no room for any other sort of reaction, in between blind faith and knee-jerk opposition?

From time to time, technology fails. This is a simple fact of life, and normally, the people making the technology will be the first to tell you this (the people selling the technology, not so much, which is a source of tension between the two). It doesn't take a Luddite to see that one needs to have failsafes in place. This is, in fact, what the word "failsafe" means.

It's unlikely for any company to get the "best qualified" in absolute terms, because every one of them is competing for the best qualified. But you go for the best qualified among whatever is available.

But ultimately, that's not the only factor. You need someone who will provide a decent value for what they're asking. If the best qualified person is asking well over the value of their work, then you've got to take that into consideration as well. People who you cannot afford are essentially unavailable, and so you're back to looking for the best-qualified person who is.

On the one hand, machines will never exceed human intelligence until we figure out how to model irrationality: the source of creative insight. But once we do that, there's nothing stopping them from growing into the same sorts of failings that we have.

On the other hand, maybe that will only make it more likely for them to come to these conclusions.

I think it depends a lot on your management. If you can get them to recognize your value to the company (assuming you're providing that value) and make yourself especially difficult to replace (due to skillset and work ethic, not sabotage and self-niching), you have some more leverage where you are. I've found it fairly effective to engage on the subject in a more cooperative - rather than adversarial - manner. For instance, making it about what your fair market value is versus what your pay is, rather than an issue about raises not being high enough, or that your lifestyle is exceeding your means. When you can show that your paycheck isn't reflecting your fair market value, it removes a lot of the emotion from the conversation. At that point, you have a couple of ways to deal with it: adversarial (which largely consists of holding your management hostage by threatening to leave or by getting and showing written offers for more money) and cooperative (convincing your management to find a way to get you what you're worth as quickly as possible without an overt or heavily implied threat of leaving).

Ultimately, it doesn't have to get personal and it won't if both parties can avoid making it personal. You're an asset that's worth $x in the market. If the company is paying you .75x and the company doesn't feel it's in their interests to pay you $x, you should work elsewhere. If the company does feel it's in their interests to pay you $x, they can choose to find a way to make that happen. If they don't, there's no reason to be personally offended when the asset finds and accepts a better offer.

Needless to say, it won't always work this way. Some people (on both sides of the table) are just children and will make it all very personal. If you find yourself working for children who can't have adult conversations in an adult manner, you should be seeking additional compensation to account for that and you should leave if it doesn't come. You're only a supplicant if you allow yourself to be one. That doesn't mean be a controlling jerk; it means ensuring you're a valuable asset and only working at places which recognize you as such.

You can fill your car in 5 minutes and go another 600KM. You can battery swap a Model S in 90 seconds and go another 500KM. Or you can wait 20 minutes and get a supercharge that will get you 250KM for zero cost.

Seems like the electric car not only meets your expectations, but rather exceeds them.

Try "Princess Bride"

*whoosh*

cultural illiterate.

You keeep using that word . . . I do not think it means what you think it meanz . . .

hawk

What it can do is provide an interface between NGOs and common people. NGOs typically receive much of their funding from governments and rich or wealthy benefactors. Fundraising means getting those folks into a room and convincing them to cough up some cash. Crowdfunding allows a wider audience (literally everyone on the Internet) to see the intended actions of the NGO and then choose to contribute. Rather than getting $45,000 from 100 rich people, they can get $45 from 100,000 without the immense overhead of doing so without using the Internet. That's the real difference. It isn't easier so much as it's a different way of fundraising from a different audience.

The Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign isn't going to send men with automatic weapons to break down my door and haul me to prison if I decline to provide it funding. The entity you describe will.

I'm inclined to agree. Even if one accepts his arguments, what he did is essentially a form of vigilantism, up to and including the strong risk of not ending well.

Tablets make it far easier to measure dose on over the counter medication than if supplied as powder. Thus the many brands of aspirin tablet, but it's hard to find analgesic headache powder.

hawk

Just be happy it was a zune, err, surface, rather than Disco records . . .

hawk

>Now that they've found the Atari 2600 ET cartridges
>in a New Mexico landfill, there's plenty of room for
>all the Surfaces (all variants) that Microsoft can't sell.

wait a minute: they took those *out* of the landfill, rather than covering it i concrete, or calling in an air strike???