Time for an auction, sounds like! I would let them blow money on lawyers.

I'm laughing so hard at your humble brag about how effective Texan policies are at solving problems, from Houston, TX where there is only a barely built out public transportation system. I'd gladly pay $3 fares for a NYC quality public transit system here, if we had one in the first place.

You've taken the convenient opportunity to bitch about the UX field and how much smarter you are than them without giving any relevant input on the topic at hand, unless you think a paper user manual would improve the users ability to use a terrible, unreadable color combination.

Sure, in the 80's and 90's when UX was in its infancy, nobody was very good at it. After accumulating decades of use-case experience and improved technological affordances a baby can find videos they like on an android or apple tablet. I got tired of explaining over-complicated and poorly designed industrial user interfaces a long time ago and started to study up on UX myself so I don't need to rely on art school dropouts, or even worse, crotchety old programmers such as yourself, to fix it for me. If you're having struggles with UX designers, maybe you can benefit from reading a couple of books on the subject too. Both of the complaints you have are well-understood and documented in the most basic of UX books.

Consumer products today should be produced with the aid of UX experts and UX studies, so that they are intuitive enough that manuals are not required. Features that are too advanced to be understood without the assistance of a manual should never be compulsory to use, and regarded as customizations for expert users who will research themselves.

No product these days should ever require a manual - we have the tools available to make it possible to produce products intuitive enough that manuals are unnecessary. If you'd like some help learning about it yourself, I suggest you read Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" and Don Norman's books for more extensive advice. If your everyday consumer product requires a manual, you're a failure as a designer. The only exceptions to this are really, crazy advanced products, and even then a lot more could usually be done to make them easier to use.

If you want a book on Android, you can buy several, there's no shortage.

Check out the winner of this years Ignobel prize in Literature: Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products

Both of those seem like pretty poor examples. A programmer would migrate from BASIC or PASCAL to C, and then whatever else they needed if that didn't cut it. A TV repairman is an electronics technician, and they'd move into some other electronics repair, maybe even the PC repair you mentioned.

Computers were on a slow rise from the 1940's on. Even the Apple II didn't get us to 50% adaption. I think the adaptation speed of modern tech is overstated. Better examples are the stablemen who used to keep after horses being caught in the whirlwind of the Model T suddenly taking over, which was as fast or faster than any other recent technology adaption we've had. What happened to them will be similar to what happens to career drivers when the vehicles that took the place of wagons no longer need someone commanding them.

Although I'm not sure what will happen to this large unskilled labor pool, no one was sure during the Model T era either. You're arguing that this is different somehow, but I'm not seeing the differences. The large unskilled labor pool might bring us back to the days when it was way more common to have home servants. That might not seem like a good thing, but I'm not sure what's so much worse about that than being a driver or factory line worker. In Singapore most people have a live-in maid. The oversupply of cheap labor created by their relaxed worker visa laws actually works against automation despite it being one of the most modern cities in the world - I've never seen a dishwashing machine there and most people don't use their clothes dryers. There will be an economic dividing line where it's cheaper to use labor than to use machines that require expensive automation workers to repair, re-program and maintain them. It's there today, it'll be there tomorrow too. There isn't yet a visible horizon where affordable and reliable humanoid robots can replace all of us.

You're right, but some specialty shops hung around because Wal-Mart and the mall didn't ever supply huge selections of niche materials like tools, hobby aircraft, knitting supplies, etc etc etc. The internet in general is responsible for the disappearance of lots of small niche businesses, but Amazon most of all because it's a central place where you can buy everything on a scale that Wal-Mart never imagined.

43, huh?

http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/N... "Unintentional suffocation - which also includes strangulation and choking on food or other objects - killed 1,176 U.S. children in 2010."

Just search a little and find all the other ways toddlers kill themselves and others. One of my friends with kids described it as largely being comprised of keeping his kid from killing himself all the time until he got old enough to try to kill himself less often. That's what happens when anything dangerous is anywhere near a toddler for whatever small amount of time it takes for them to do the wrong thing with it - and there are LOTS of dangerous things around, with plastic bags being higher on the list than firearms.

I think another huge contributor to a drop in manufacturing is the oil bust earlier this year. Maybe around a hundred thousand have been laid off now because of that and budgets cut across the board. The sheer amount of steel and labor involved in the last several years of shale booms is mind-boggling. Those areas still don't have good pipeline infrastructure, so oil is often trucked away and surplus gas burned off. It's visible from space and shows up better than nearby metropolitan areas. Look at these images of the Bakken and Eagle Ford Shales.

Meanwhile, all of the tech equipment purchasing supporting those activities has come to a grinding halt.

I leave mine in the aquarium, safely out of reach from the kids.

Me too! http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/...

On the other hand, why would you bury the charcoal? There's lots of demand for it. Then we can stop doing whatever we're doing for charcoal now, which is obviously less efficient since we're not capturing the gases, and probably aren't using direct solar thermal.

Right now I believe most is made from waste wood from lumber factories. They do a low-oxygen burn in charcoal sheds. It doesn't seem efficient, but it is more efficient than turning perfectly good lumber straight to charcoal.

I just got a message from the present. This will never be allowed because I will definitely put a monitoring device in my vehicle showing where all of the cops are as soon as the data is publicly available.

And.. innovative?? Innovation? Involving fossil fuels? The only trade secrets they are likely protecting is the toxicity and environmental impact of fracking.

You don't know what you're talking about. There are a lot of trade secrets in fracking. There are trade secrets in the instruments that monitor and improve drilling. There are a lot of trade secrets developed to improve production efficiency. There's a lot of essentially "public" knowledge too, but even that is hard to come by, so internal training materials can be extremely valuable to capture that knowledge that is typically only accrued with experience or being an insider at a reputable company. Just because fossil fuels have been down there a long time doesn't mean there is no innovation involved in getting them, otherwise we (the USA) wouldn't have just passed up Saudi Arabia as the worlds biggest energy producer. American fracturing companies dominate the world market for fracturing.

China has a problem trying to exploit its shale reserves. They aren't as flat and even as those in the USA. So they may be looking for ways to make similar improvements exploiting their own shale reserves by looking at how we fracture reserves in states that do have some geological variance in their shale reserves, like Pennsylvania and Colorado. Chinese companies are making often pitiful attempts to compete in the international market with sub-par technology. It won't always be pitiful though, I think. They're obviously trying to improve and the only thing holding them back is the trade secrets.

FTA:

Whatever. I made mine with a $350 micro milling machine from Harbor Freight. The template kit to mill & drill the other 20% of the incomplete lower receiver was about the same cost as the 80% complete lower receiver. So all of the parts & tooling in sum total less than $550. Plus I use the mill for other things and the template has resale value. Also FTA:

I think that they meant to quote him as saying it is POSSIBLE. An order of magnitude is a gross overstatement, given that this was the 3d milling version of trace paper.

Indeed.

Maybe you're the one who sucks at business if you're not dragging all of these people from the south to fill the easily obtained positions. Sheesh, air your ego out a little. I don't weld, but I work in oilfield services. The guys who do pipeline work have to be top-notch. They weld round pipe, which is harder than straight-line welding in most applications, and it has to pass x-ray inspections as a flawless seam, or else they'll be grinding and re-welding or eventually be out of a job. They also have to provide their own equipment and off-road vehicle. The trucks are unmistakeable, they're usually heavy duty frame trucks with a custom-welded bed for their giant arc weld kit, generator and associated materials. Most of them probably do come from the south, just not Alabama, where there isn't a strong oil industry. A friend of mine makes ~$100k after expenses and spends a great deal of time away from home. That would be the other reason for the high compensation. If dropping $60k on equipment and going to the land that god forgot to work in all weather conditions for half of your year sounds better than making half the money, more power to you.. but as you can see from the numbers, most people don't feel like it's that good of a deal. There's the risk that you've spent your life savings on equipment only to find out that you're not good enough to cut mustard.

I don't use it for anyone else and no one else I know uses it. It is a handy app, but with Facebook acquiring it now I'm seeking alternatives. I used to use fb messenger but uninstalled it because I'm sick of being tracked and sold.