Until the tools get better, yes. Slavery would likely have ended by now even without the Civil War because of the cotton picker. The same thing is happening to the remaining agricultural jobs now, thanks to AI.

Strawberry picking robots are already good enough to do the job, just with a ridiculously high up-front cost (like $300k each, which is probably well over a hundred years worth of labor costs, and possibly several hundred). The next generation are going to be more like $12k, which is more like 20 years of labor costs, assuming $4 per hour sub-minimum wage, 40 hours a week, and 4 weeks of picking in a year, and more like 5 years at U.S. minimum wage.

But that's not the whole story. The latest generation are also faster than people, and can work 24x7, so you can use less than a third as many. So now you're at more like a year or two for break-even.

Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if all the screaming from California about lack of farm labor isn't just a cover story, all while quietly letting the Trump administration reduce the immigrant farm labor because they won't be needed in the future. It makes the left look good to their base by paying lip service to defending them while making the right look good to their base by terrorizing them and scaring them out of the country. And it wouldn't surprise me if some of the farm tech companies building these picking machines aren't actively lobbying for it. I mean, maybe that's happening a few years too soon, but we're not talking about decades before that labor no longer provides any real benefit; we're getting very close to that point.

See that's the opposite of what we actually need to do. Realistically, the average person gets maybe five or six usable hours in a day, so right now, work gets five of those blocks and we get two. With that scheme, work gets six of those blocks and we get one.

A better plan is four five-hour work days. One extra usable day for ourselves, plus working hours tailored to knowledge workers' actual ability to focus rather than longer hours in which productivity rapidly goes towards zero or even negative.

Spend half as much time working, and everyone will be healthier. More daylight hours to be outside and get exercise. More time to spend with friends and family and de-stress. And so on.

Honestly, I'd rather Apple:

• Enable full support for macOS on iPad
• Make a detachable trackpad/keyboard combination
• Make it so that you can detach and reattach it in a position that leaves the keyboard inactive and underneath the iPad

But yeah, a hinge that can let you A. open it flat and B. spin the display around and close the laptop so that it looks and acts like a thick tablet would also work.

But the biggest thing I'd like is for Apple to get Back-to-my-Mac working. I do not want to store my data in the Cloud, but I do want access to it — terabytes of it — far more than I could ever realistically hope to store in iCloud. (Translation: No, I will not pay you $1200 per year for Cloud storage, and even that wouldn't really be enough. Yikes.)

What you're missing is that some of the mapping services have maps that are horribly wrong, and also that people store coordinates badly.

Case in point, I live in a mobile home park that's almost big enough to be its own zip code. If your entry system lets me put in the space number *and* uses Google Maps as the back end, you can find my home that way. But as far as I know, no other mapping company has the per-unit data that would be required to find my house by its house number. That's simply a level of data gathering that nobody else even attempts as far as I can tell. Apple Maps has zero site number data for my neighborhood or any other nearby neighborhood, and they're the next-most-capable competitor in that area.

So if you are using some other service, you'll have to find it by the house number and the street name. Unfortunately, the house numbers are not in order. They added more sites at some point, and did not renumber the old sites, so there are low numbers that jump to higher numbers and then jump back down to lower numbers. So if I have to give a site number plus the street name (e.g. Apple Maps), you might be within a couple of blocks.

But to make matters worse, the road is a private road, which means that it isn't in the list of county-maintained streets. So if your database doesn't have those streets at all, it will end up substituting the nearest roads with the same name, which are in Sacramento, or it will assume that it is a misspelling of some other street in a nearby town. So you could end up 10 miles off or 120 miles off.

So you use Google's API to do geocoding to verify that you can deliver there. Then instead of sending the coordinates, you foolishly hand off the street address to the delivery service that uses some other service, and smoke starts coming out of your machinery.

Or you round the coordinates too much like Uber used to do, and all of the streets are off by a hundred feet, putting my pickup point supposedly on a different street.

You get the idea.

Eventually, yes, but you forgot a bunch of steps:

• Hide the information in a tiny little link at the very bottom of the terms and conditions that nobody reads.
• Cap the speed and/or amount of data in a way that makes the service completely unusable for 99% of real-world customers.
• Impose income limits that make the service unavailable for nearly everyone who wants to apply.
• Require such a complex application process that nobody who needs the program can figure out how to use it.

Then, after about three years, they show the government that nobody wanted $20 Internet service, and ask permission to stop providing it. And the CPUC, being an industry lapdog, quickly agrees to whatever Verizon asks for. And *then* they stop providing it.

It probably helps to use a ridesharing platform that doesn't use multiple map providers. If all your map data is from one source, you don't have these problems. It's when you start to mix multiple map providers that things go horribly and irreparably wrong, because the workarounds for one platform don't work on a different platform. Given that we're talking about Waymo, I assume Google Maps is used for everything, so I wouldn't expect those issues to occur. But no way to know without trying it at your specific location.

And note that this will change over time, but your rails can't change over time. This is the peril of rail for intracity transit.

Rails make a lot of sense in ultra-dense areas (think Manhattan, *maybe* downtown SF, but not any of the rest of the Bay Area, etc.), because the roads can't handle even a fraction of the passenger volume.

Rails also make sense for long-distance travel. If you're traveling for several hours, you probably don't want to drive that, so it is worth the inconvenience of not having a car at the other end. Also, if the trains are fast enough for their average speed to exceed the average speed of a car, then after two or three hours, you've probably broken even with the extra travel time required to get to and from those fixed endpoints.

But for the most part, rail *doesn't* make a lot of sense, because they're too much slower than air travel for long distances, and they're too much slower than cars for short distances. If you really want rail to work, we need 250 MPH (minimum) bullet trains from city to city so that they are competitive with airplanes. And provide ample parking at the termini.

Twice per hour makes a transit system borderline useless unless you are traveling for multiple hours. Your average latency is half of that, so that means on average you will waste 15 minutes waiting for every train. That means to break even, even before factoring in the extra time to get to/from the station, you need to save a whopping 15 minutes by using the train. And if you have even one connection, that makes your median latency thirty minutes. When you're wasting half an hour just waiting for the train to arrive, you're not only uncompetitive with driving; you're starting to be uncompetitive with bicycling.

Successful transit systems run avery 3 to 5 minutes during rush hour, and no more than about once every ten minutes late at night or on weekends. If you can't keep trains running at that frequency, you aren't dense enough to need a transit system, and you probably will regret putting one in. You'll end up repeatedly reducing the frequency to keep the trains at high enough occupancy to be worth doing, and then you'll be confused when ridership drops because nobody wants to wait that long for a train, and eventually you'll end up with a massively subsidized waste of taxpayer dollars like VTA.

Yup. We're well past the point where the resulting economies of scale benefit the consumer. In late-stage capitalism, economies of scale benefit the corporation and only the corporation.

Full or at typical capacity? Lots of bus routes around here average a low single-digit number of passengers for much of the route. Even single-passenger cars compare favorably to that. Assuming a diesel bus at an average of 3 MPG, you need a minimum of 15 passengers on average to break even with driving single-passenger hybrids. And that's not factoring in how much dirtier a gallon of diesel fuel is compared with a gallon of gasoline.

Office wall Plinko with push pins.

I kind of automatically assume that any company that can successfully replace a third of their workforce with AI is not doing anything meaningful. I mean, a company that does nothing but write crappy rehashed product reviews could pull it off, or a company that has no plans to innovate or grow could maybe do it by laying off all the sales/advertising people, but otherwise, it seems like a stretch.

So the question, then, is whether this company is genuinely circling the drain with nothing to lose or just has leadership who have no idea what any of their employees actually do.

Ostensibly, yes, I could. I could even use an ancient Mac Mini with a built-in FireWire port to do that. But at some point, the level of hackiness becomes high enough that you're spending all your time dealing with things not working, and that's almost worse than it not working at all. :-)

M1 Max MacBook Pro. The setup involves a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter chained to a Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 adapter, which in turn is chained to a FireWire 800 to 400 adapter, which is then connected by a cable to the device. It's dongles all the way down.

Getting Thunderbolt ports isn't the problem; Apple's Thunderbolt-to-FireWire hardware does that, too. Without FireWire device family support in the kernel, FireWire hardware can't be used, period.

I depend on FireWire audio interfaces, so everything from Tahoe on is dead to me for the foreseeable future.

My problem is that I don't do audio recording often enough to justify spending the thousands of dollars it would cost to buy all new hardware, but I do it often enough that I can't upgrade my operating system and lose the capability. It's that really annoying middle ground that Apple really doesn't support well, though to be fair, I've gotten thirteen years out of it after Apple stopped shipping built-in FireWire ports, so I guess that's not too horrible. :-)

I tried getting off of FireWire a long time ago, precisely because I suspected that this would eventually happen. But to keep costs down, my plan was to buy a MOTU LP32 ADAT-to-AVB bridge so that I could keep using 16 inputs from my existing interfaces and supplement that with a MOTU Stage-B16. The problem is, the LP32 has been on permanent back-order for about two years now, with no sign of things improving.

I'm also a late adopter after lots of bad experiences, so I just downloaded Sequoia so that at least I won't be stuck on Sonoma forever. I'm hoping that by the time they stop shipping security updates for Sequoia, either MOTU will have the LP32 available again, someone will have figured out a way to get IOFireWireFamily to build and run on later OSes, or I will have found some other low-cost solution for a large number of inputs. Not holding my breath, though, on any of the above.