Yes, automated groupthink is a wonderful idea. Doubleplusgood!

Simple solution: Get a USB power brick and tape it to the back of your phone.

A replaceable battery costs more upfront and is incompatible with thinness. Most people get a new phone long before the battery dies.

Yes, but the point isn't that she is "better off", just that she is no worse off. Mike, on the other hand, is getting filthy rich.

Yes, of course. In real life, automation has a much bigger comparative advantage in manufacturing than in services. So the natural path of developed economies is for most people to move from manufacturing to services.

Because the game has not changed. Think of it this way:
Before: one pie is worth one basket
After: ten pies are worth ten baskets
A pie is still worth as much as a basket either way.
So Annie can trade her pie for one of Bill's baskets, or one of Mike's baskets.

Many countries have automated, at different times and at different paces. It has always resulted in disruption, because automation has comparative advantages, and people take time to shift to where they are relatively more productive. But it has also always resulted in higher wages and better living standards. There is no reason to believe that "this time is different". The argument that "this time is different because everything will be automated" doesn't hold up.

138K = -211F

The key threshold is 77K. Above that, and you can cool with liquid nitrogen. A liter of liquid N2 costs less than a liter of milk. A liter of liquid helium costs about a hundred times as much.

Contract manufacturers are not "rentiers".

You should read up on Comparative Advantage. Here is a simple example: Annie makes apple pies. Bill makes baskets. Each day Annie makes two pies, and Bill makes two baskets. Then they trade one pie for one basket, so they each have one of each. Then Mike, a manufacturer comes along. He can make ten pies as cheaply as Annie makes one. So Bill trades a basket to Mike for ten pies. So is Annie unemployed? Of course not. She switches to making baskets. The result is that now, each day, both Bill and Annie get one basket and ten pies. They are both better off.

Ah! But then Mike starts manufacturing baskets too! At a tenth the cost that Bill can make them. Now Bill and Annie will both be unemployed, right? Wrong. A pie is still worth one basket. So Annie can go back to making two pies a day, and trade one for a pie, and Bill can make two baskets a day and trade one for a pie. They are no worse off then at the beginning.

So automation may cause short term unemployment, as workers retrain, but it should not cause long term unemployment. If automation is comparatively better than humans at some tasks (as it certainly will be), people will be better off. If it improves productivity evenly, then people will be no worse off. This is not just theory, but also corresponds to reality. Economies with rising productivity do NOT have mass unemployment and poverty. Productivity improvements result in rising living standards. In fact, they are the ONLY thing that can raise living standards.

What is happening at Foxconn is a predictable result of China's economy maturing. The service sector is expanding. Manufacturing will also expand, but manufacturing employment will fall. Internal demand will rise, and exports will be less important. This is the same thing that happened a generation ago in developed countries.

No, you would be going through the processor on the HDD, that is running the supposedly compromised firmware. There would be nothing to stop it from lying to you about updating itself. Firmware malware would most likely be implemented as a stub that checks for a special key like "NSA_1234", and otherwise jumps to the "real" firmware, so there would be no way to test for its presence without knowing the key. They only way to be sure, would be to write directly to the flash via the JTAG port.

Moving the HDD to a different computer would make no difference, since the firmware is in the drive.

Actually, reviewing U6 and discouraged workers, we are at record levels of unemployment. Close to 25% of the working age population isn't working. They are going on disability early, retiring early- but many 16 to 54 year olds who worked in the past are not finding employment. I know several people in this category.

It is much rougher for 30 year olds than it was when I was 30. Some retrain and then the job they were training for is swamped by so many applicants that wages are supressed.

I was hoping retiring boomers would take up the slack but I read 80% of them have no under $20,000 savings and will not be able to voluntarily retire. Plus boomers in good slots are simply continuing to work and have no intention of retiring and letting those slots open up to younger people. By the time this group dies or retires at 77 to 82- the generation behind them is nearly at retirement age- never having had the good earnings years the generation before them had.

Advances in AI will make it possible to replace large swaths of 'smart' and 'creative' jobs by 2050. And they won't even consider that to be "real" AI by them. Whenever we get a real AI, it will be a massive paradigm shift. Robotics already have superhuman performance when "plugged" in . So an easily clonable AI combined with super human bodies obsolete humans overnight.

I'm confused. The chart you linked shows.

LED consumes less electricity.
LED lasts much longer (so less physical waste)
LED has a total cost of ownership lower than CFL. (About $110led* vs $126cfl vs $496inc)

Also
LED doesn't have mercury (and I know most CFL bulbs are not disposed of properly)...

75 watts are past the sweet spot now (tho you can get good ones for $19).
60 and 65 watts are $9 to $12 now.

Personally, I like 65 watts-- friendlier on my aging eyes. 900 lumens vs 850 lumens makes a big difference.

Really- I hate CFL. Even the 3500K ones. Even 65w ones. The rated life isn't what they say it is. CFLs may be rated for 10,000 hours but by the time I hit 6000 hours, the lumen output drops visibly. I'm replacing LED with CFLs as much as possible. So far.. I have never replaced an LED yet due to failure.

*with a 26.50 bulb addressing error you point out.

Great... for the half of the population at iq 100 and above. What about the average to below average 3.5 billion people?
They supposed to just roll over and die?

One of the links was to a company where robots are already constructing robots.

Robot development jobs are under 1:1000 of the jobs replaced.

Robot repair also needs under 1% of the workers.

If robots were not cheaper than humans, businesses wouldn't replace humans with robots.

Going forward- it's pretty much leadership as you point out (under 1/1000 of the employees) or creative jobs. But-- they automate everything except the creative part and lay off 140 employees while retaining 20. They also use the code phrase "focus the humans on the 'best parts of their jobs'" and "cost savings" (i.e. staff reduction). There are a million security guards in the country.

Projected results from the new robotic security guards in the pipeline are 95%. They can patrol, video, raise alerts, - even detain suspects- as well as a human being.

If we don't figure out how to transition effectively, you are going to see large scale civil unrest.

Unemployed humans. And significantly depressed demand for goods.

Just last week I had a strong disagreement with someone who said robots were not ready to effectively replace humans. He's spoken to industry people personally and they told him robots were not ready yet.

And he ignored the numerous examples I linked him where robots are already replacing humans-- and damn fast too.

This could be about half a million skilled employees who were making $5000 or less- yet robots are replacing them because the robots are less expensive. How can a 1st world employee hope to compete?

Not as long as John Oliver is on the job keeping them honest. Hard to believe he's accomplished so much so far with only 15 minutes a week dedicated to examining one issue in depth.

That is unlikely. There is rarely a ground swell of support for anti-monopoly actions, such as NN and this ban on bans, because the public is not aware of how much they are harmed by rigged markets. But once the monopoly is broken, people will be much more opposed to reinstating it.

There should be an investigation into why Oracle was ever tendered the contract in the first place. It couldn't have been on merit. I have never met, or heard of, anyone who outsourced to Oracle and was pleased with the result. They have the worst reputation in the business. I trust Microsoft more than I trust Oracle.