my platform as presidential candidate - what's yours?
POSTED BY: rue
UPDATED: Monday, June 3, 2024 14:50
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Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
In the late 90s, I was the first of my friends to have a cell phone. It was $60 bucks a month for 250 minutes (no nights, no weekends, no text, no data). Fast forward to 2019 and millions of people have "free" Obama phones. Both the phones themselves and the monthly line and internet charges.
I'd argue that nobody needs a cell phone, simply based off the fact that we made it so long without them. I'd also get a lot of arguments about that too.
Just sayin'.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
LOL! I too had a cell phone (from work), actually a Blackberry, in the early 90's. It was cool having it …. for about a day. Then I felt like, who the hell needs to be getting all these stupid e-mails all day on my frikkin' phone, and worse, who the hell WANTS to be on call any time of the day or night. What a pain in the ass! Years later the I-Phone came out, and ever since then its been a worldwide obsession to possess the latest and greatest phone. Honestly, I don't get it, the whole stupid and obnoxious thing.
I look around every day at all these face-in-their phone zombies, and I'm like …
Yeah. I had a smart phone for about a month that I bought used from a co-workers mom. I didn't like it at all and went back to the flip phone for about a year before getting rid of it altogether. I was never hooked on the smart phone thing, but being without a cell phone for the first time in around 15 years had me suffering from withdrawals for a while.
I'm not saying that you're lying, but that you're mistaken. I don't think you had a blackberry doing emails in the early 90's. It was more likely the early to mid 2000's. :)
I had my first cell phone in 1998 and it was a huge device with nothing but a small green and black screen for the numbers and it resembled more of a cordless phone than what we think of cell phones today.
And EVERYBODY wanted to use it. Overage charges were ridiculous back then, and I only got 250 minutes per month with no nights and weekends. Payphones were still all over the place and I'd tell them to go use one.
I love not having one now. My level of focus is so much higher than most of the people around me because I'm not constantly tethered to the hive mind.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Sorry for the interruption.
Continuing...
Quote:Ho, boy.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
JO, SIX ... The reason why there won't be droids for everyone is because the economics doesn't work.
You both are prime examples of why that is so: Low skilled repetitive labor is the first to be automated. So, what does that do to low-skilled labor? (Truck unloaders, Amazon shippers, McDonald's hamburger flippers)? They'll be automated out of jobs.
Tell me - COULD you afford a droid on no job?
Of course not.
Extend that thinking to everyone who could be automated out of a job (which is basically everyone) and then tell me: How can everyone who is automated out of a job afford their own droid? I think you have a "George Jetson" view of modern/future life. In reality, I think it's going to be much tougher for everyone, assuming that most of us even survive.
Around 1890, the Director of the Patent Office wrote the President a letter, explaining that the Patenet Office was a waste of time, it had o use, everything that could be invented by Man was already invented. This before automobiles, electric lamps, flying machines, computers, etc.
At one point, it was hoped that computers could be reduced to the size of a backpack, although they would still be very heavy to carry.
In Star Trek, such Sci-Fi inventions included portable flip-cover Communicators (now called flip phones), and Medical scanners the size of a thumb (now called MRI scanners, the last obstacle was the superconductors and battery sources - years ago).
In the early 1970's, one Billy Gates proclaimed that somebody would need to be a moron to ever need more than 1 MB to complete any programming of a computer.
By 2000, the average car had more miles of circuitry in it than the first Space Mission that landed on The Moon.
For over a decade now, people get their pocket computer for free, or for a penny.
And the most critical component of these computers? Glass. Yes, that's right, glass. Otherwise they just throw it away - but if the glass breaks, thousands of $ can be spent to repair the glass. A complete failure of Engineering.
And now, folk CANNOT LIVE without their handheld computer. Homeless, check. no car? Check - everybody on the bus has their cellphone.
Flying cars exist now, several models if I recall.
Ever heard of Roomba?
Self-mowing lawn mowers?
Alexa?
The first cell-phones were, what? 1984? That was only 35 years ago.
People without jobs, without homes or residence, without money, absolutely must spend as much as needed to have the latest phone, the best games - and they are still homeless, foodless, vehicleless. And this is not in huge cities ony, this is in small towns as well.
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Sigh.
I thought we were going to skip this discussion?
I think, JSF, that there's a vast gulf between invention and widespread adoption.
We've had rockets that can take people to the moon and bring them back, but ... how many people have actually BEEN there?
When things are miniaturized they can come into widespread use... big bulky mainframes become smartphones and are widely adopted.
But when things are large, and require a lot of power, they don't get so widely used.
BTW ... how many people do YOU know who own a roomba? Do YOU own one? I don't know of any ... and I worked with very young tech saavy ppl.
Invention will keep happening, but you're conflating invention and widespread adoption.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm not saying that you're lying, but that you're mistaken. I don't think you had a blackberry doing emails in the early 90's. It was more likely the early to mid 2000's....I think you're right. My memory ain't what it used to be. When you're retired you lose track of time, and the past gets a tad blurry.
I love not having one now. My level of focus is so much higher than most of the people around me because I'm not constantly tethered to the hive mind....you're a rebel. The mold was broken when you came along
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Quote:MRIs used to be big bulky machines requiring lots of power. Now they are smaller than a C-Cell battery, now that Battery technology and superconductor metal technology has caught up.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Sigh.
I thought we were going to skip this discussion?
I think, JSF, that there's a vast gulf between invention and widespread adoption.
We've had rockets that can take people to the moon and bring them back, but ... how many people have actually BEEN there?
When things are miniaturized they can come into widespread use... big bulky mainframes become smartphones and are widely adopted.
Quote:I am amazed that you know nobody who owns a roomba. I thought all of the hip 'tards had one. Local company making the mowers can't make them fast enough - lots of assemblers needed. Everybody seems to have a Segway, there are fleets of them on the street. I've seen on the internet that cats use roombas as a segway. Hoverboards are now around, using electricity instead of air.
But when things are large, and require a lot of power, they don't get so widely used.
BTW ... how many people do YOU know who own a roomba? Do YOU own one? I don't know of any ... and I worked with very young tech saavy ppl.
Quote:You ask who can afford something.
Invention will keep happening, but you're conflating invention and widespread adoption.
Who do you know who cannot afford a cellphone?
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Siggy, youre implying a seksesful (DAMIT!!!! Forgot the name for peeps hoo want teknolojy to stop advansing!) movement.
Do you think the Republicanz mite pik it up az a campane issue in 2024 or 8 or wenevr jobz start getting filled by droidz?
Do you think there will be no garaj tinkererz slapping to gether there own Jarvis butlerz?
Never any big companyz seeing the oportunity for a money maker wen AI gets really cheap to crank out droidz to do any chorez peepl want dun?
Even wile sivilization and the envirement begin to crumble, tek will keep getting cheaper and better, making droidz az pervasiv az carz.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Even wile sivilization and the envirement begin to crumble, tek will keep getting cheaper and better, making droidz az pervasiv az carz.
Quote:
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/04/global-car-motorcycle-a
nd-bike-ownership-in-1-infographic/390777/
When it comes to cars, Italy tops the list: 89 percent of Italian survey respondents reported owning one. America trailed closely behind with 88 percent. In general, developed countries showed a high rate of car ownership. In Europe, for example, the median national share of car owners was 79 percent.
Developed Asian countries like South Korea and Japan also reported high car ownership (83 percent and 81 percent respectively). But in other South and Southeast Asian countries, the proportion of car owners was incredibly low. In Bangladesh, for example, only 2 percent reported having a car.
Quote:Jo, I think you can answer the reason WHY technologies aren't universally adopted if you can answer WHY only 15% of the global population owns any type of vehicle (though the numbers for individual car ownership are lower since this count include busses, trucks, etc).
https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-own-a-car-in-the-world-compared-
to-the-number-of-people-that-live-on-this-Earth A very very rough average for the world would be 150 per thousand people (cars, trucks, busses etc)
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Automobiles are a really bad apples to oranges comparison.
And besides, you would need to throw out every area that hasn't even bothered creating roads for them to travel on yet in 2019 to even attempt to begin to make it close to an equal comparison.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Well, it was JO that continued the comparison
Automobiles are a really bad apples to oranges comparison.- SIX
Quote:If you want to talk about "market penetration" of droidz you need only to look at cars ...
Even wile sivilization and the envirement begin to crumble, tek will keep getting cheaper and better, making droidz az pervasiv az carz.
Quote:That's my point. SOME technologies ... small, low-power... those that don't need a lot of individual infrastructure *eg homes with KW of continuous power ... can be readily implemented. But if you're looking at big, power-hungry, expensive, energy-intensive technology - rocketships to the moon, for example, their implementation in the consumer world will be vanishingly small.
And besides, you would need to throw out every area that hasn't even bothered creating roads for them to travel on yet in 2019 to even attempt to begin to make it close to an equal comparison.
And that goes for "flying cars" too.
*****
But the adoption of automation in the consumer world wasn't JO's original premise.
JO was posting about automated PRODUCTION. As I understand it, what JO was posting was that we would all be automated out of a job some day, and the only problem would be how to get "money" to people so they could access these good produced by automation.
Well, first of all, there's a logical flaw in that reasoning. If everything ... and I mean everything is automated, you've just eliminated the utility of money.
What do you "pay" a robot with? Industrial robots can't accept "money", it has no meaning or value to them. They need electricity, lubrication, repair parts etc in order to function, "money" is not an inducement. Only humans will accept something so abstract and useless as "money" in return for their time. So not only can't the average person pay a robot "money" for goods, the ELITE can't use money either because they can't pay robots either. The elite can only buy PEOPLE with money. So if the elite are still using money, then they must be buying people. And if they're buying people, I guess not EVERYTHING is entirely automated, right?
*****
But on a more practical level, automation is driven by capitalism. You don't have that same drive in non-capitalist systems...
My manager was a strange kinda guy, a devout Xtian and landlord among other things. As part of his church mission, he would take three weeks vacation every other or every third year and go to mainland China to spread the word. Yes, they saw Shanghai and Beijing, had fancy formal dinners with lower-level Party officials, but mostly they would go to the hinterlands, where development was still an ongoing process and flush toilets a rarity.
He would come back with interesting stories, and one of them really stuck with me. He met with some American businessmen who had set up production in China, and the way they got access to Chinese labor and the Chinese market was as follows:
A Party official would ask the businessman "How many people do you need to run this factory?"
If the answer was "Three hundred" the Party official would say "You're going to hire 1000."
It didn't matter whether some of the jobs involved clipping individual blades of grass with toenail clippers, 1000 people got jobs.
He also told me of a story of how a major freeway was repaired: He said that where we would get a backhoe and cement truck and roller, Chinese workers with pickaxes and shovels and wheelbarrows literally swarmed the worksite and finished the job in a half day.
WHY does the Chinese government do this?
It's because they're extremely sensitive to unemployment; and they will do anything to keep people employed. They don't want another Tienanmen Square and so THEY run their economy on an entirely different basis: Not
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So, given that automation is a choice and not an inevitability (Please see the above 2 stories about China) ... what do you choose? Because I can see where automation has eliminated an awful lot of drudgery .. like carding and spinning thread and weaving cloth. It's made chip and hard-drive production possible by being immune to toxic gases and able to assemble very precisely and repeatedly. Certain very large projects, like multi-story skyscrapers, can only happen with mechanization. Mechanization and automation have allowed us to harness steam power, diesel power, and then electric power, to produce more goods with less human energy. It's made us wealthier because it's given us access to a cornucopia of goods. HOWEVER, like anything else there's always too much of a good thing. So I think we don't NEED to automate "everything" and should feel free to pick and choose which jobs should be automated and which shouldn't, and to decide on something other than maximum profit for the elite.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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