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With the current president probably not as his Secretary of State is an Oil Baron that is famous for not wanting to get solar power.
Considering all the things that are happening its incredible how many people are ignorant to te climate problems that could be averted just by simply switching how we get energy.
If I remember correctly from Global Warming project, at least half of the USA's power grid is supplied by coal and other fossil fuels. Because of this it is why if we just replaced coal production with solar production not only would we have excess power, we would need less plants to maintain energy, and allow for people to take other jobs.
The whole thing is complicated. If I remember correctly coal is also heavily subsidised (everywhere in the world) because it's a simple technology that can be adjusted to ones needs and the fact that solar is cheaper than coal now also includes these coal subsidies. The cost for solar is still falling faster than coal can compete with. My guess is that in a year or two coal won't be able to compete no matter how much it gets propped up and no matter if Trump manages so eliminate solar subsidies. But one shouldn't forget that solar also has negative sides as its production (actually making the panels) is not as clean as it's end-product (sun -> magic -> energy).
Manufacturing is dead in the US essentially. People want something to sustain themselves akin to a job. Which means we need lesser skilled work.
That's not completely correct. If I (again) remember correctly manufacturing may not have increased drastically but it also didn't fall due to outsourcing (you can think of that as extra production that was more viable in other countries) and a lot of automation and efficiency gains happened so that whatever does get manufactured is more profitable and needs fewer actual humans. Manufacturing itself is healthy and as robots get cheaper, it gets easier (and cheaper) to automate stuff, and each year there's new stuff that can be automated that was previously impossible (that could mean new factories in first world countries instead of oversees). China started shipping some jobs to other even cheaper countries and now they started automating too as it became financially viable (them outsourcing work wasn't viable for long, like the last half decade or so). Manufacturing jobs everywhere are in danger — or rather when somebody builds a new factory they will just end up hiring very few humans to do all the work and factories could soon look like data centres where a really tiny maintenance crew oversees huge warehouses of robots doing all the work.
I work for Caterpillar as a machinist, and we use robots on several operations, including my wash tank. While it is indeed nifty how much you can do with robots and CNC, there is also a lot that they can't do, and they will always have to be supervised for errors. We have a robot that does dimension certifications on our parts, and one of the programs became corrupted, reporting parts that were grossly out of dimensional tolerances. Upon going in and manually cycling each measurement, the parts were well within process parameters, which are tighter than engineering parameters as to keep anything from being too close to the +/- and closer to center. Now, if measuring parts can foul up that bad, what about precision machining? Our parts are measured in microns, .001 mm for those keeping track. Any of those operations are monitored by an operator, and checked on a regular basis. On the assembly side of the shop, there are even fewer robots, and on those robots, a human is needed to load the parts for the robot to install. Picturing that, for every robot that has to install a panel/manifold/turbo/whatever (IF you were to automate that part of the process), you'd have to have either a robot to load the parts in a tray for that robot, or a human to do so. Asimov's vision isn't coming true any time soon. THAT is the reality that the pro-automation people aren't seeing. Also, how well are they doing with driverless vehicles? Number of failures so far? Not even talking crashes, just failures. Picture a failure in a populated area. Yeah, we are nowhere near that level of automation, nor do I believe we will be in the lifetime of anyone on this board.
And for all you well-versed energy followers on here: is hydroelectric as efficient as solar?
Not quite. When it is generated at the same place as consumption (ie on the roof of a consumer's house) it becomes cost competitive, but still not the cheapest source in pure dollar terms. Thing is, this method doesn't work for all power, for instance an aluminium plant would need to purchase a vast amount of nearby land to supply it's operations.
And then there's an issue of using it - most solar power isn't created when it is used. Right now most of this power is sold back in to the grid, which defeats the purpose of generating it at the household. Instead the power is put in to the grid, at which point the cost per kw is not great.
All that will change with battery. Right now the Tesla wall and other similar products are cost prohibitive, but prices will come down, and if they drop half as rapidly as solar has then they solar will rapidly become the dominant source of household power.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2016/12/19 07:17:33
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
Just Tony wrote: Any of those operations are monitored by an operator, and checked on a regular basis.
Note the key point: monitored by an operator. Instead of having a person (or even a team of people) doing the work and a person supervising you have a machine doing it while a person supervises a group of machines. Even though you haven't 100% automated the factory that's still a significant cut in the number of jobs, and those jobs aren't coming back. The new reality is that you're going to have a small number of skilled workers to supervise the machines, and a small number of engineers to design the products and the machines to make them. The unskilled labor is irreversibly declining and will eventually reach zero.
Picturing that, for every robot that has to install a panel/manifold/turbo/whatever (IF you were to automate that part of the process), you'd have to have either a robot to load the parts in a tray for that robot, or a human to do so.
Or you redesign the factory so that one machine leads directly into the next. Obviously if you're talking about a factory from the 1950s that is still in operation there will be limits to how much you can automate it, but what happens when someone builds a new factory with modern technology? That inefficiency in design no longer exists, and you can remove even more jobs.
Also, how well are they doing with driverless vehicles? Number of failures so far? Not even talking crashes, just failures. Picture a failure in a populated area.
This is not really a good way to look at it. The question is not whether driverless vehicles are 100% perfect, it's whether they're better than human drivers. And human drivers crash, make mistakes, drive drunk and kill people, etc. Driverless vehicles can have a significant failure rate and still be so much better than the alternative that there is no longer any justification for allowing humans to drive.
And for all you well-versed energy followers on here: is hydroelectric as efficient as solar?
Efficiency isn't really the answer you're looking for, since they aren't trying to turn the same resource into electricity. In terms of effectiveness in solving our energy needs hydroelectric is amazing. It's clean, priced within plausible limits, capable of large-scale production, and will run at 100% capacity forever once the dam is constructed. Where solar has issues with consistency (and therefore requires you to build some other kind of energy source to cover the low periods) hydroelectric is straightforward: build a dam, consider that region's energy needs dealt with.
The problem with hydroelectric is that there are a limited number of potential dam sites available and transmission line losses (true of electricity in general) make it inefficient to supply energy to areas far from the dam site. So, while it's very good where it is possible, hydroelectric can only provide power for some regions of the country.
There is no such thing as a hobby without politics. "Leave politics at the door" is itself a political statement, an endorsement of the status quo and an attempt to silence dissenting voices.
Not quite. When it is generated at the same place as consumption (ie on the roof of a consumer's house) it becomes cost competitive, but still not the cheapest source in pure dollar terms. Thing is, this method doesn't work for all power, for instance an aluminium plant would need to purchase a vast amount of nearby land to supply it's operations.
And then there's an issue of using it - most solar power isn't created when it is used. Right now most of this power is sold back in to the grid, which defeats the purpose of generating it at the household. Instead the power is put in to the grid, at which point the cost per kw is not great.
All that will change with battery. Right now the Tesla wall and other similar products are cost prohibitive, but prices will come down, and if they drop half as rapidly as solar has then they solar will rapidly become the dominant source of household power.
Fusion power would also be great if you can manage to get enough energy out of the reaction to make it a viable power generation method. The fuel needed to run the generator is incredibly plentiful on Earth.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: Aside from a few highly skilled technicians and engineers to maintain these robots, 99% of those jobs will go.
Driverless cars + Uber app = more job losses. That's the future.
We all know this on Dakka, but sadly, very few people in the USA or the UK or the West, are even thinking about this. Big questions are waiting down the road, and tough answers and decisions will be needed. Alas, our political leaders are clueless on this...
Will we need a citizens' income? If nobody has a job, what will that mean for society? If robots make stuff, how can people buy it if they have no money?
And so on and so on...
That's half the story. Thing is, we've had efficiency improvements destroying jobs for centuries. The beginning of the industrial revolution saw communal and small plot farming replaced by much larger, much more efficient farms that required much less labour. But those farm workers displaced by enclosure moved to the cities to work in the new factories and workhouses. This was because the limiting factor on our economy has always been labour.
However now the limiting factor on our economy increasingly is natural resources. Now it appears that there simply aren't new industries for displaced labour to move in to. New economic activity is focused on internet businesses, and while they have created a lot of revenue and a lot of wealth, there aren't many jobs there.
It is possible that this issue will resolve itself, that we will find new forms of economic activity. Afterall, in the wake of the Great Depression people were convinced of this issue, even greats like Keynes were concerned about the issue, which at the time was called 'secular stagnation'. But new forms of employment were found as new forms of employment were found in new consumable products.
So we don't know yet. Maybe there's some unseen form of economic activity that will create hundreds of new millions jobs.
If not though, then a long, ugly transition to some kind of living wage is probably inevitable.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Breotan wrote: But he did flip them and you can't flip them back to justify your point because that'd mean you're not arguing reality.
Your comment only makes sense if people were talking about who won the election. No-one is debating that, Trump won.
What is being commented on is Trump's idiotic claim that he won in an EV landslide. For starters, that claim sidesteps how many states were on razor thing margins, as LordofHats pointed out. Recognising that means Trump's argument becomes "look I won all the close states by a razor thin margin, therefore mandate" which is idiotic.
But even once you go past that, there's the plain reality that in terms of EV wins, Trump's was one of the closer ones. Only 10 have been closer, 53 had bigger margins. So Trump's EV victory was in the smallest 20%, making his "historic EV win" utter fantasy.
You think it's conjecture that governments can use nationalism to cover over unpopular domestic policies? Seriously?
I thought you were the poster boy for controlling federal government and talking about how politicians are bad. And now you're denying its most common form?
and you should feel bad for defending Krugman.
Why? Because the great orange one has designated him the latest target of his twitter whinging?
5) Clinton campaign fethed up big by missing out the WI/MI/PA trifecta.
6) HRC was such an amazingly bad candidate.
She missed WI/MI/PA because Republicans turned out in those states and voted for Trump. Clinton ran a mediocre campaign, which meant she lost 900k votes compared to Obama 4 years ago, but none of that would have mattered if 63m Republicans hadn't decided to vote for the idiot with a long history of business corruption who bragged about molesting women.
Seriously, people win when lots of people turn up to vote for them. If you want to ask who caused Trump to get elected, look straight at the 63m who voted for him. Anything else is nonsense.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/19 07:13:10
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
sebster wrote: Your comment only makes sense if people were talking about who won the election. No-one is debating that, Trump won.
What is being commented on is Trump's idiotic claim that he won in an EV landslide. For starters, that claim sidesteps how many states were on razor thing margins, as LordofHats pointed out. Recognising that means Trump's argument becomes "look I won all the close states by a razor thin margin, therefore mandate" which is idiotic.
But even once you go past that, there's the plain reality that in terms of EV wins, Trump's was one of the closer ones. Only 10 have been closer, 53 had bigger margins. So Trump's EV victory was in the smallest 20%, making his "historic EV win" utter fantasy.
In fairness, Trump's statements and ludicrous fantasy are all too often one and the same.
People actually think solar is feasible in all states and or areas in the world? How special. With the number of dark/overcast days states like montana have, especially during the winter you would freeze to death. No thanks. As far as the comment of solar being cheaper than fossil fuels, I would really like to see the data on that. From a source that is neutral please. Or at least as close to it as possible. Having to wait 20 years for maybe a return on that investment really isn't a very good option. Particularly in a state like mine with quite a bit of extreme weather. You WILL be replacing those panels every two years at the most.
Twinkle, Twinkle little star.
I ran over your Wave Serpents with my car.
NorseSig wrote: People actually think solar is feasible in all states and or areas in the world? How special.
No-one said solar was feasible in all states and areas of the world. What is special here is you making up arguments to have with yourself.
Your comment on the long payback of solar is interesting, because it's missed many factors regarding solar. The first is solar is the tech where that payback is decreasing year on year. The second, and probably biggest point, is that new solar facilities can be scaled to any level with little change in efficiency. Unlike coal or nuclear you can have solar generation working for just a single house, or a single light pole. This means new solar projects can be commissioned, put in place and generating power with a few days. In contrast new coal or nuclear projects can spend years in design, then years more in construction. The delay between first committing the funds and first generating power can be a decade. In the past this was less of an issue, but with the uncertainty in the current energy market the idea of committing a billion or more with that length of time before payoff makes the project very unappealing. In contrast, solar might cost more per kw, but you can do it in a bunch of small projects, and start producing a return within days, making it a much safer investment.
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
NorseSig wrote: People actually think solar is feasible in all states and or areas in the world? How special. With the number of dark/overcast days states like montana have, especially during the winter you would freeze to death. No thanks. As far as the comment of solar being cheaper than fossil fuels, I would really like to see the data on that. From a source that is neutral please. Or at least as close to it as possible. Having to wait 20 years for maybe a return on that investment really isn't a very good option. Particularly in a state like mine with quite a bit of extreme weather. You WILL be replacing those panels every two years at the most.
Given how fossil fuels are renewed, we can't rely on them forever and are going to have to find a replacement source of energy. It's just a fact of how oil is created - it takes long enough that we're using it up way faster than it's being replenished, and the increase in the cost of oil is due in large part to having to go for more and more difficult to extract sources of the stuff.
I don't claim to know when we'll run out, but eventually we will. Long before then though, the price of oil will have reached a high enough cost that other forms of energy will be cheaper, so it won't be a sudden rush.
Not sure the crowd seemed to know how to take it either.
..It's actually spookily close to being a Mr Garrison speech...
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/19 11:07:57
The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,
Under the cruel austerity of Michigan governor Rick Snyder -- whose policies led to the mass-poisonings of children in Flint -- any claims for unemployment insurance were vigorously investigated, with the state operating on the assumption that any worker who claimed a benefit was probably committing fraud.
For years, Michigan workers have disputed thousands and thousands of accusations of insurance fraud -- accusations generated by opaque, unauditable software -- facing the loss of benefits and fines of $100,000, and spending fortunes appealing the accusations in court, this money being deducted from their federal and state tax-refunds. Many of the falsely accused were forced into bankruptcy.
–
Michigan's automated fraud-accusation system operated without human oversight, automatically cutting off workers without their cases being reviewed by human beings.
This week, the Michigan unemployment insurance agency released its own audit into the system, and found that 93% of its fraud accusations were false, accounting for more than 20,000 actions against innocent Michigan workers over the two years from 2013-2015.
A further 30,000 fraud accusations from the same period have yet to be audited.
The millions of dollars in fines generated by the false accusations were accumulated into a fund that the state's Republican legislature has just appropriated to balance the state's budget. The system was instituted under Governor Snyder. It is called "MIDAS."
The system, known as the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (Midas), caused an immediate spike in claims of fraud when it was implemented in October 2013 under the state’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, at a cost of $47m. In the runup to a scathing report on the system issued last year by Michigan’s auditor general, the UIA began requiring employees to review the fraud determinations before they were issued. The fraud accusations can carry an emotional burden for claimants. “These accusations [have] a pretty big burden on people,” Grifka said. While he said the new findings were validating and his own case had been resolved, he called for state accountability. “There’s no recourse from the state on what they’re doing to people’s lives. That’s my biggest problem with all of this.”
93% incorrect is quite something.
Also :
you guys really dislike Flint/Michigan right ?
The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,
It lends some credence to the theory that Trump was simply an expert at playing to a crowd and didn't mean anything he said during the campaign.
If true, it makes him a very masterful manipulator.
A masterful manipulator would never tell in front of the manipulated that he played them good. Even more while he's not technically in office, remember.
I'm pretty sure that what he said wasn't checked by anybody from his consultant team. He said it like he writes on twitter. Impulsively.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/19 11:08:25
It lends some credence to the theory that Trump was simply an expert at playing to a crowd and didn't mean anything he said during the campaign.
If true, it makes him a very masterful manipulator.
A masterful manipulator would never tell in front of the manipulated that he played them good. Even more while he's not technically in office, remember.
I'm pretty sure that what he said wasn't checked by anybody from his consultant team. He said it like he writes on twitter. Impulsively.
He's the President-Elect, and the Electoral College have cast their votes.
Can anything be done to stop him from becoming President at this point?
It lends some credence to the theory that Trump was simply an expert at playing to a crowd and didn't mean anything he said during the campaign.
If true, it makes him a very masterful manipulator.
A masterful manipulator would never tell in front of the manipulated that he played them good. Even more while he's not technically in office, remember.
I'm pretty sure that what he said wasn't checked by anybody from his consultant team. He said it like he writes on twitter. Impulsively.
He's the President-Elect, and the Electoral College have cast their votes.
Can anything be done to stop him from becoming President at this point?
Short of another Revolution or another Civil War, Trump is here to stay.
I think Trump will be a bad president, but the USA has had bad presidents before and survives one way or another, most of the time.
It's the ordinary people I feel sorry for. During the election, I read a lot of articles about rural and small town America and these people are struggling.
In Virginia, poor people who struggle for healthcare, turn up to this charity hospital that turns up for a few days every year (lots of tents and stuff)
It's strange and sad to see citizens in the richest country in the world reduced to that, and even sadder to see them voting for a system that keeps them in such a bad state. Such is life...
"Our crops will wither, our children will die piteous
deaths and the sun will be swept from the sky. But is it true?" - Tom Kirby, CEO, Games Workshop Ltd
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: Aside from a few highly skilled technicians and engineers to maintain these robots, 99% of those jobs will go.
Driverless cars + Uber app = more job losses. That's the future.
We all know this on Dakka, but sadly, very few people in the USA or the UK or the West, are even thinking about this. Big questions are waiting down the road, and tough answers and decisions will be needed. Alas, our political leaders are clueless on this...
Will we need a citizens' income? If nobody has a job, what will that mean for society? If robots make stuff, how can people buy it if they have no money?
And so on and so on...
That's half the story. Thing is, we've had efficiency improvements destroying jobs for centuries. The beginning of the industrial revolution saw communal and small plot farming replaced by much larger, much more efficient farms that required much less labour. But those farm workers displaced by enclosure moved to the cities to work in the new factories and workhouses. This was because the limiting factor on our economy has always been labour.
However now the limiting factor on our economy increasingly is natural resources. Now it appears that there simply aren't new industries for displaced labour to move in to. New economic activity is focused on internet businesses, and while they have created a lot of revenue and a lot of wealth, there aren't many jobs there.
It is possible that this issue will resolve itself, that we will find new forms of economic activity. Afterall, in the wake of the Great Depression people were convinced of this issue, even greats like Keynes were concerned about the issue, which at the time was called 'secular stagnation'. But new forms of employment were found as new forms of employment were found in new consumable products.
So we don't know yet. Maybe there's some unseen form of economic activity that will create hundreds of new millions jobs.
If not though, then a long, ugly transition to some kind of living wage is probably inevitable.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Breotan wrote: But he did flip them and you can't flip them back to justify your point because that'd mean you're not arguing reality.
Your comment only makes sense if people were talking about who won the election. No-one is debating that, Trump won.
What is being commented on is Trump's idiotic claim that he won in an EV landslide. For starters, that claim sidesteps how many states were on razor thing margins, as LordofHats pointed out. Recognising that means Trump's argument becomes "look I won all the close states by a razor thin margin, therefore mandate" which is idiotic.
But even once you go past that, there's the plain reality that in terms of EV wins, Trump's was one of the closer ones. Only 10 have been closer, 53 had bigger margins. So Trump's EV victory was in the smallest 20%, making his "historic EV win" utter fantasy.
You think it's conjecture that governments can use nationalism to cover over unpopular domestic policies? Seriously?
I thought you were the poster boy for controlling federal government and talking about how politicians are bad. And now you're denying its most common form?
and you should feel bad for defending Krugman.
Why? Because the great orange one has designated him the latest target of his twitter whinging?
5) Clinton campaign fethed up big by missing out the WI/MI/PA trifecta.
6) HRC was such an amazingly bad candidate.
She missed WI/MI/PA because Republicans turned out in those states and voted for Trump. Clinton ran a mediocre campaign, which meant she lost 900k votes compared to Obama 4 years ago, but none of that would have mattered if 63m Republicans hadn't decided to vote for the idiot with a long history of business corruption who bragged about molesting women.
Seriously, people win when lots of people turn up to vote for them. If you want to ask who caused Trump to get elected, look straight at the 63m who voted for him. Anything else is nonsense.
Just my own viewpoint mind, but I think there are 2 things that can help out in the future:
1) A basic income for everybody, and people use their spare time doing volunteer work, cultural productions, vegetable growing etc etc I think that could work
2) Space exploration and colonization. If we get the tech, then there's a whole galaxy out there for growth and people to settle on Mars or Planet X or whatever. As a bonus, when we encounter the Klingons, our defence industry will get a boost, thus creating new jobs
But year, colonizing Mars or the Moon could be a potential growth area.
"Our crops will wither, our children will die piteous
deaths and the sun will be swept from the sky. But is it true?" - Tom Kirby, CEO, Games Workshop Ltd
Just Tony wrote: Any of those operations are monitored by an operator, and checked on a regular basis.
Note the key point: monitored by an operator. Instead of having a person (or even a team of people) doing the work and a person supervising you have a machine doing it while a person supervises a group of machines. Even though you haven't 100% automated the factory that's still a significant cut in the number of jobs, and those jobs aren't coming back. The new reality is that you're going to have a small number of skilled workers to supervise the machines, and a small number of engineers to design the products and the machines to make them. The unskilled labor is irreversibly declining and will eventually reach zero.
Funny, I'd say at least 65-80% of our robot jobs did NOT replace a person, simply made that person's job easier. When I ran the machine that manufactured the bearing caps for the engine, there was a robot that took the caps and loaded them onto a tray to go to installation, where a robot was there to install them to the block. The same robot didn't install the bolts, those had to be put in by an operator. The robot torqued them, but it took an entire replacement fixture on the end of the robot to do so. THAT person was the only one working that cell when the caps had to be loaded and torqued by hand as well. My machine was also hand load back in the day. Tubs for international shipment are also loaded in a way that the robot CANNOT do without damaging the product. MUST be done by a human, the same human that must be there for that machine to operate. I realize there are instances where a robot will replace the person completely, but it's not absolute in any way, shape, or form.
Picturing that, for every robot that has to install a panel/manifold/turbo/whatever (IF you were to automate that part of the process), you'd have to have either a robot to load the parts in a tray for that robot, or a human to do so.
Or you redesign the factory so that one machine leads directly into the next. Obviously if you're talking about a factory from the 1950s that is still in operation there will be limits to how much you can automate it, but what happens when someone builds a new factory with modern technology? That inefficiency in design no longer exists, and you can remove even more jobs.
Line flow is line flow regardless of who does the work. An actual production line is pretty modular by nature, allowing for different versions of products or sometimes even completely different products to be produced. In instances like that, you would have to have a system set up that keys the robot to switch job patterns to accommodate, but it is pretty much plug and play. The issue is that the person who was standing there doing X job will now move up to a different job while one of the other workers gets the enviable task of making sure the right bar code/whatever that keys the robot is there and in the right place, OR they get to manually switch the robot. So I don't see that being a thing unless it's an ergonomically difficult job or there is such debris/cast off to make it patently less safe than other jobs.
Also, how well are they doing with driverless vehicles? Number of failures so far? Not even talking crashes, just failures. Picture a failure in a populated area.
This is not really a good way to look at it. The question is not whether driverless vehicles are 100% perfect, it's whether they're better than human drivers. And human drivers crash, make mistakes, drive drunk and kill people, etc. Driverless vehicles can have a significant failure rate and still be so much better than the alternative that there is no longer any justification for allowing humans to drive.
Here's the difference: a robot at our plant started dropping connecting rods too early, so in the midst of travel. Because the problem occurred within the programming and execution of programming, the robot didn't stop dropping rods until the operator of that section of the line shut it down after being alerted by the sound of metal on metal where none exists. If a robot screws up, it doesn't go "Oh, gak! Better stop screwing up and tell the supervisor there was an issue", it goes "10111010010010100010100101001001" and continues to happily screw up. I can't see where a malfunctioning driverless car wouldn't be the same. OR you wind up with a random person sitting in the car to make sure the robot car doesn't screw up or can fix it when it does, which sort of defeats the purpose of driverless cars. Unless you put all cars on rails, which I like the idea of, but causes several MORE problems in the process.
And for all you well-versed energy followers on here: is hydroelectric as efficient as solar?
Efficiency isn't really the answer you're looking for, since they aren't trying to turn the same resource into electricity. In terms of effectiveness in solving our energy needs hydroelectric is amazing. It's clean, priced within plausible limits, capable of large-scale production, and will run at 100% capacity forever once the dam is constructed. Where solar has issues with consistency (and therefore requires you to build some other kind of energy source to cover the low periods) hydroelectric is straightforward: build a dam, consider that region's energy needs dealt with.
The problem with hydroelectric is that there are a limited number of potential dam sites available and transmission line losses (true of electricity in general) make it inefficient to supply energy to areas far from the dam site. So, while it's very good where it is possible, hydroelectric can only provide power for some regions of the country.
The problem is dam locations? Here's a quick solution: simple water wheel turbines on fast flowing tributaries like rivers. Just a few of these along the Mississippi River could provide clean, cheap power to areas around the river. Granted that doesn't help every OTHER tributary in the nation, but it does tons to move away from fossil fuel reliability for electricity. Most people are looking for some magic bullet that will solve the fossil fuel crisis and be the sole renewable source of energy, but I think there should be interlocking green resources. THAT is the only way it could work to topple fossil fuels. Have nuke plants in the flatter, less earthquake prone dust bowl states, hydroelectric in areas that have the tributaries to make it feasible, and supplement with wind farms and solar panels. That's about the best you can do without some sort of perpetual motion dynamo, and we're so far away from that it isn't even a consideration.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: 2) Space exploration and colonization. If we get the tech, then there's a whole galaxy out there for growth and people to settle on Mars or Planet X or whatever. As a bonus, when we encounter the Klingons, our defence industry will get a boost, thus creating new jobs
But year, colonizing Mars or the Moon could be a potential growth area.
Or we could just expand into the large portions of Canada that are generally unpopulated.
Also, given how rare civilizations like humans' are, I wouldn't expect to encounter technologically-advanced alien races within my lifetime. They apparently solved the Drake Equation and our closest neighbours likely originated 25,000 lightyears away. Or the Great Filter might be a thing and we'll never get the chance.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: 2) Space exploration and colonization. If we get the tech, then there's a whole galaxy out there for growth and people to settle on Mars or Planet X or whatever. As a bonus, when we encounter the Klingons, our defence industry will get a boost, thus creating new jobs
But year, colonizing Mars or the Moon could be a potential growth area.
Or we could just expand into the large portions of Canada that are generally unpopulated.
Also, given how rare civilizations like humans' are, I wouldn't expect to encounter technologically-advanced alien races within my lifetime. They apparently solved the Drake Equation and our closest neighbours likely originated 25,000 lightyears away. Or the Great Filter might be a thing and we'll never get the chance.
True, but I'm heading for Mars, with Dakka or without Dakka. And if Total Recall and Babylon 5 are anything to go by, we'll see a Mars resistance group spring up soon after
On a serious note, the mineral wealth of the Moon plus colonixation of Mars are definite growth areas, if we can agree.
Knowing humanity, it'll be the Cold War in Space and US Space Marines storming the beaches of Europa or something against the Chinese Star Dragons.
"Our crops will wither, our children will die piteous
deaths and the sun will be swept from the sky. But is it true?" - Tom Kirby, CEO, Games Workshop Ltd
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: True, but I'm heading for Mars, with Dakka or without Dakka. And if Total Recall and Babylon 5 are anything to go by, we'll see a Mars resistance group spring up soon after
On a serious note, the mineral wealth of the Moon plus colonixation of Mars are definite growth areas, if we can agree.
Knowing humanity, it'll be the Cold War in Space and US Space Marines storming the beaches of Europa or something against the Chinese Star Dragons.
There are actually treaties about the militarization of space.
Probably has something to do with the fact that space is a vacuum literally thousands of miles away from any sort of rescue craft that is not already present in the battle.
Having a war in space is a stupid idea in general.
Mining the Moon though... I wonder how much of it you could remove without destabilizing Earth enough to render the planet lifeless through environmental effects.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/19 14:22:59
thekingofkings wrote: You are still even if politically different, culturally the same or near enough. Even your manor of speech is similar (or a lot closer to say how we are)
No we aren't at all the same. I have much more in common with people in other southern college towns than my fellow NC residents in the rural west, and the people in the rural west have much more in common with other rural residents a few miles over the border in Tennessee than they have with those of us in liberal college towns.
not calling you a liar, but I find that hard to believe, when seeing Boulder people (we call it the "peoples republic of boulder") and folks from Colorado Springs, they talk the same, eat the same, have a lot of the same traditions, though they are as opposite ideologically as you can be,.
Dude, do you even live in the Springs? There's a pretty big divide here. Generally, you're either city-folk liberals who talk, eat, and vote one way, or you're farm country good old boy conservatives who talk, eat, and vote another way. There's a massive political divide here in the Springs. Just look at the last election.
Under the cruel austerity of Michigan governor Rick Snyder -- whose policies led to the mass-poisonings of children in Flint -- any claims for unemployment insurance were vigorously investigated, with the state operating on the assumption that any worker who claimed a benefit was probably committing fraud.
For years, Michigan workers have disputed thousands and thousands of accusations of insurance fraud -- accusations generated by opaque, unauditable software -- facing the loss of benefits and fines of $100,000, and spending fortunes appealing the accusations in court, this money being deducted from their federal and state tax-refunds. Many of the falsely accused were forced into bankruptcy.
–
Michigan's automated fraud-accusation system operated without human oversight, automatically cutting off workers without their cases being reviewed by human beings.
This week, the Michigan unemployment insurance agency released its own audit into the system, and found that 93% of its fraud accusations were false, accounting for more than 20,000 actions against innocent Michigan workers over the two years from 2013-2015.
A further 30,000 fraud accusations from the same period have yet to be audited.
The millions of dollars in fines generated by the false accusations were accumulated into a fund that the state's Republican legislature has just appropriated to balance the state's budget. The system was instituted under Governor Snyder. It is called "MIDAS."
The system, known as the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (Midas), caused an immediate spike in claims of fraud when it was implemented in October 2013 under the state’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, at a cost of $47m. In the runup to a scathing report on the system issued last year by Michigan’s auditor general, the UIA began requiring employees to review the fraud determinations before they were issued. The fraud accusations can carry an emotional burden for claimants. “These accusations [have] a pretty big burden on people,” Grifka said. While he said the new findings were validating and his own case had been resolved, he called for state accountability. “There’s no recourse from the state on what they’re doing to people’s lives. That’s my biggest problem with all of this.”
93% incorrect is quite something.
Also :
you guys really dislike Flint/Michigan right ?
Jesus. Way to go, Michigan
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/19 14:34:24
Just Tony wrote: Any of those operations are monitored by an operator, and checked on a regular basis.
Note the key point: monitored by an operator. Instead of having a person (or even a team of people) doing the work and a person supervising you have a machine doing it while a person supervises a group of machines. Even though you haven't 100% automated the factory that's still a significant cut in the number of jobs, and those jobs aren't coming back. The new reality is that you're going to have a small number of skilled workers to supervise the machines, and a small number of engineers to design the products and the machines to make them. The unskilled labor is irreversibly declining and will eventually reach zero.
Funny, I'd say at least 65-80% of our robot jobs did NOT replace a person, simply made that person's job easier. When I ran the machine that manufactured the bearing caps for the engine, there was a robot that took the caps and loaded them onto a tray to go to installation, where a robot was there to install them to the block. The same robot didn't install the bolts, those had to be put in by an operator. The robot torqued them, but it took an entire replacement fixture on the end of the robot to do so. THAT person was the only one working that cell when the caps had to be loaded and torqued by hand as well. My machine was also hand load back in the day. Tubs for international shipment are also loaded in a way that the robot CANNOT do without damaging the product. MUST be done by a human, the same human that must be there for that machine to operate. I realize there are instances where a robot will replace the person completely, but it's not absolute in any way, shape, or form.
Picturing that, for every robot that has to install a panel/manifold/turbo/whatever (IF you were to automate that part of the process), you'd have to have either a robot to load the parts in a tray for that robot, or a human to do so.
Or you redesign the factory so that one machine leads directly into the next. Obviously if you're talking about a factory from the 1950s that is still in operation there will be limits to how much you can automate it, but what happens when someone builds a new factory with modern technology? That inefficiency in design no longer exists, and you can remove even more jobs.
Line flow is line flow regardless of who does the work. An actual production line is pretty modular by nature, allowing for different versions of products or sometimes even completely different products to be produced. In instances like that, you would have to have a system set up that keys the robot to switch job patterns to accommodate, but it is pretty much plug and play. The issue is that the person who was standing there doing X job will now move up to a different job while one of the other workers gets the enviable task of making sure the right bar code/whatever that keys the robot is there and in the right place, OR they get to manually switch the robot. So I don't see that being a thing unless it's an ergonomically difficult job or there is such debris/cast off to make it patently less safe than other jobs.
Also, how well are they doing with driverless vehicles? Number of failures so far? Not even talking crashes, just failures. Picture a failure in a populated area.
This is not really a good way to look at it. The question is not whether driverless vehicles are 100% perfect, it's whether they're better than human drivers. And human drivers crash, make mistakes, drive drunk and kill people, etc. Driverless vehicles can have a significant failure rate and still be so much better than the alternative that there is no longer any justification for allowing humans to drive.
Here's the difference: a robot at our plant started dropping connecting rods too early, so in the midst of travel. Because the problem occurred within the programming and execution of programming, the robot didn't stop dropping rods until the operator of that section of the line shut it down after being alerted by the sound of metal on metal where none exists. If a robot screws up, it doesn't go "Oh, gak! Better stop screwing up and tell the supervisor there was an issue", it goes "10111010010010100010100101001001" and continues to happily screw up. I can't see where a malfunctioning driverless car wouldn't be the same. OR you wind up with a random person sitting in the car to make sure the robot car doesn't screw up or can fix it when it does, which sort of defeats the purpose of driverless cars. Unless you put all cars on rails, which I like the idea of, but causes several MORE problems in the process.
And for all you well-versed energy followers on here: is hydroelectric as efficient as solar?
Efficiency isn't really the answer you're looking for, since they aren't trying to turn the same resource into electricity. In terms of effectiveness in solving our energy needs hydroelectric is amazing. It's clean, priced within plausible limits, capable of large-scale production, and will run at 100% capacity forever once the dam is constructed. Where solar has issues with consistency (and therefore requires you to build some other kind of energy source to cover the low periods) hydroelectric is straightforward: build a dam, consider that region's energy needs dealt with.
The problem with hydroelectric is that there are a limited number of potential dam sites available and transmission line losses (true of electricity in general) make it inefficient to supply energy to areas far from the dam site. So, while it's very good where it is possible, hydroelectric can only provide power for some regions of the country.
The problem is dam locations? Here's a quick solution: simple water wheel turbines on fast flowing tributaries like rivers. Just a few of these along the Mississippi River could provide clean, cheap power to areas around the river. Granted that doesn't help every OTHER tributary in the nation, but it does tons to move away from fossil fuel reliability for electricity. Most people are looking for some magic bullet that will solve the fossil fuel crisis and be the sole renewable source of energy, but I think there should be interlocking green resources. THAT is the only way it could work to topple fossil fuels. Have nuke plants in the flatter, less earthquake prone dust bowl states, hydroelectric in areas that have the tributaries to make it feasible, and supplement with wind farms and solar panels. That's about the best you can do without some sort of perpetual motion dynamo, and we're so far away from that it isn't even a consideration.
As someone who does LEAN and 6Sigma for a living, you don't even need automation to replace workers. You just need process improvement so you no longer need a worker or a robot.
I hate to tell you this, but as you reduce waste and become more efficient you need fewer people to do the work. That is where most of the "efficiency" gains come from, but we just hide it with technical terminology.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/19 14:49:26
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Co'tor Shas wrote: The moon is 734,767,309,000,000,000 metric tons, so I don't think that would be a major concern.
We're talking about mining the moon for serious gains.
Eventually it's gonna run low enough to cause serious problems, yes?
I'm thinking long-term here.
Pouncey is right. Just ask the Klingons!
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
Pouncey wrote: Now that you mention it, why did the moon Praxis collapsing on itself due to overmining cause an explosion large enough to reach Federation space?
And why was the Klingon resource economy so dependent on one particular moon that its loss doomed their entire civilization?
Because most science fiction writers don't understand how science works?
Pouncey wrote: Now that you mention it, why did the moon Praxis collapsing on itself due to overmining cause an explosion large enough to reach Federation space?
And why was the Klingon resource economy so dependent on one particular moon that its loss doomed their entire civilization?
Because most science fiction writers don't understand how science works?
Correct.
That's why I loved Baen sci-fi. One of their rules was that sci-fi actually be based on real science and/or philosophy.
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