Comment Re:Walmart is Inexpensive (Score 1) 106
As we developed machine ability faster than we trained people for new job openings, people found out they were not the buggy whip manufacturer, they were the horse.
Comment Re: obvious response (Score 1) 1023
With full time (40 hour) employees at $7.50 an hour, the robot would have to cover 90 hours a week (out of a total availability of 168 hours) to be a better investment in the first year alone with a cost of $35k. That's 2 full time employee shifts and 10 hours. At a 24 hour McDs, if the robot is doing 1 station all day, that covers 3 shifts. You're getting the work of that third employee at a 1/4 minimum wage, or all 3 for less than $4 an hour. The second year, those employees have to compete with whatever a maintenance contract is for that machine, which is definitely going to be less than $35k. There is no way to make those 3 employee's competitive with that robot at today's wages. It's not the $15 wage pushing this. It's going to happen either way. For every one of these robots, that's 3 people competing for other jobs, driving those wages down. Eventually when you expect a livable wage at what you do, you'll be the unreasonable one.
Comment Re: It's not entirely a lie (Score 1) 397
You mean this College?
http://cla.umn.edu/academics-e...
(note those are only the majors in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota)
But, as someone who does not suffer from Autism, I understand what you are trying to say. You mean "arts/humanities" but are saying "Liberal Arts." And you are correct, not everywhere uses the term "Liberal Arts" to include their physics program.
"Liberal Arts" isn't a political term. It's the idea that to be a free thinker you need an exposure to a broad training. English majors having to take math and science, physicists needing to take life sciences and art, and cs majors needing to take physics.
Comment Re:It's not entirely a lie (Score 1) 397
"Liberal Arts" actually include hard sciences, and is a rather broad grouping which equates to "not tech/vocational school." I think you mean to hate on the Humanities, and enrollment in these majors are actually in decline.
Comment Re:What are the commons? (Score 1) 258
You obviously are not the owner of the technology referred to above, Mr. Anonymous. If technology is doing all the work, could you be said to have earned any of the resulting wealth? Though I guess as an American (or American-ish), you sure as hell will fight to convince us you deserve it. Of course, it's all a Luddite conspiracy and people will have so much work to do (and it will be more fulfilling and lest drudgery) they won't have time to argue about redistributing wealth produced by non-person entities.
Submission + - A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation (quantamagazine.org)
An anonymous reader writes: At first glance, the big news coming out of this summer’s conference on the theory of computing appeared to be something of a letdown. For more than 40 years, researchers had been trying to find a better way to compare two arbitrary strings of characters, such as the long strings of chemical letters within DNA molecules. The most widely used algorithm is slow and not all that clever: It proceeds step-by-step down the two lists, comparing values at each step. If a better method to calculate this “edit distance” could be found, researchers would be able to quickly compare full genomes or large data sets, and computer scientists would have a powerful new tool with which they could attempt to solve additional problems in the field.
Yet in a paper presented at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forth a mathematical proof that the current best algorithm was “optimal” — in other words, that finding a more efficient way to compute edit distance was mathematically impossible. The Boston Globe celebrated the hometown researchers’ achievement with a headline that read “For 40 Years, Computer Scientists Looked for a Solution That Doesn’t Exist.”
But researchers aren’t quite ready to record the time of death. One significant loophole remains. The impossibility result is only true if another, famously unproven statement called the strong exponential time hypothesis (SETH) is also true. Most computational complexity researchers assume that this is the case — including Piotr Indyk and Artrs Bakurs of MIT, who published the edit-distance finding — but SETH’s validity is still an open question. This makes the article about the edit-distance problem seem like a mathematical version of the legendary report of Mark Twain’s death: greatly exaggerated.
Yet in a paper presented at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forth a mathematical proof that the current best algorithm was “optimal” — in other words, that finding a more efficient way to compute edit distance was mathematically impossible. The Boston Globe celebrated the hometown researchers’ achievement with a headline that read “For 40 Years, Computer Scientists Looked for a Solution That Doesn’t Exist.”
But researchers aren’t quite ready to record the time of death. One significant loophole remains. The impossibility result is only true if another, famously unproven statement called the strong exponential time hypothesis (SETH) is also true. Most computational complexity researchers assume that this is the case — including Piotr Indyk and Artrs Bakurs of MIT, who published the edit-distance finding — but SETH’s validity is still an open question. This makes the article about the edit-distance problem seem like a mathematical version of the legendary report of Mark Twain’s death: greatly exaggerated.
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The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be correct. -- William of Occam
