09:37 – Barbara is back to using her regular cane. She used the walker frame on Tuesday, my four-foot cane yesterday, and declared last night that she was ready to start using her regular cane again. She took the final anticoagulant shot yesterday, and started this morning on one 325 mg aspirin daily, which she’ll continue for a month.
I see the Greeks are revolting, for what good it will do them. Most of the MSM are calling it “protests”, but throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police is a bit beyond protesting. Attempted murder, say. It seems that most Greeks are blaming the EU and IMF for their problems, and the socialist government is near collapse. No one knows what will replace it, but the Communists are pushing hard. I expect we’ll see the current rioting devolve into actual revolution if things don’t greatly improve soon. And things are likely to get much, much worse, not better. As the infection spreads and other southern-tier countries default, we can expect to see similar violence as governments teeter and then topple in Italy and Spain and Portugal and Belgium and France. Not Ireland, thank goodness, nor the northern-tier eurozone countries. Unless they’re foolish enough to commit their economies to subsidizing the southern tier.
Unfortunately, the US is on the same course, albeit probably five or ten years behind. And there’s no one to bail us out.
13:32 – Barbara went to the doctor this morning, just to get looked over and have a few tests done. Her doctor didn’t seem too concerned about her brief loss of consciousness Tuesday. He seems to think it was caused by her severe pain immediately before the event, which caused her body to be flooded with adrenaline. He’s going to keep an eye on her low hemoglobin levels, but for now he basically said to take an extra multi-vitamin tablet every day and be sure to drink plenty of fluids. He also said that she was doing extremely well in terms of knee movement and so on, especially for only two weeks after her surgery.
Here are a couple of articles that caught my attention. First, despite the Guardian’s early report that a consensus had been reached before Sunday’s upcoming crisis summit for a huge effort that would finally resolve the euro crisis, it soon became obvious that not only had no such consensus been reached, but that Germany and France were farther apart than ever. This article sums things up pretty well. Franco-German deadlock over ECB’s role in rescue fund
Then we have Who Will Bail Out the Rescuers?, which starts by talking about the inability of France to contribute to bailouts and then goes much farther afield. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the article recommends stocking up on firearms and ammunition to shoot back at rioters. And police.
15:04 – Okay, this is interesting. I’ve had Sons of Anarchy S3D1 at the top of my queue since several weeks before it released, which has been a month or two. The status has never shown anything except “very long wait”.
We’re on the two-discs-at-a-time plan, and my DVD queue is getting down to the dregs. Other than Sons of Anarchy S3, Netflix just shipped us the last disc I really care about today. Our anniversary date is next Wednesday, and I’d already put a reminder in my calendar to downgrade our account to streaming-only and wait a few months for more DVDs we wanted to become available. And then this email arrived.
Re: Arriving Later: Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1
From: Netflix
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Date: Thu Oct 20 13:43:20 2011****************************
NETFLIX – Shipping update
****************************Dear Robert,
“Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1” was not available from your local shipping center. Fortunately, it was available from a shipping center in another part of the country. It’s on its way and should arrive within 3 to 5 days.
You’ll notice we also recently sent the next available DVD from your Queue to enjoy while “Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1” makes its way to you.
Your Queue now shows this extra DVD rental. Enjoy.
-The Netflix Team
In a stroke of brilliance, the EU is now proposing to stick its collective head in the sand: they want to prohibit the ratings agencies from publicly announcing ratings for European countries.
Swiss TV carried several interviews of individual Greeks. Pretty amazing stuff. One example: a retired government bureaucrat, on full pension at age 53, and working in private industry. Obviously not hurting, but he has no understanding why anything should change. Start saving somewhere else. That was basically the view of everyone they talked to: “yes, save money, but don’t touch *my* stuff”.
Shutting down the whole country and scaring off what few tourists were left – just how this is supposed to help, what they expect? No one, least of all the protesters, seems to have a clue. Kind of like the OWS protesters: all riled up, but with a notable lack of any actual, practical ideas.
Re: lack of practical ideas,
Isn’t that because there aren’t really any? I’ve read lots of plans but none of them have inspired me to think, “yes, that’s it! That will solve our problems.” Generally the plans have me thinking, “How do we keep kicking the can far enough down the road so that I’m safely in my grave before the fallout happens.”
In other words, yes, there are plans that “fix” the economy. But at a cost that, to the average joe, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to wait and see what happens next. A bit like being in a burning building with a tornado bearing down on it. Lots of things you might do. What you probably will do is hang out in the doorway for awhile.
Maybe I missed a great plan laid out somewhere. If so, I’m all ears.
Why do you think that the USA is 10 years behind Greece ? I am hoping that the next president and congress will bring the ship back on course. That is why I am supporting Perry, he is the only adult in the room (yes, I am from Texas). Perry has the courage to say “no”. Romney will just say yes for everything anybody wants, he is just another form of Obama.
I’d sooner see any of the Republicans president than Obama, which is not to say that I think very highly of any of the Republicans other than Ron Paul and (better yet) Gary Johnson. Perry’s fundamentalist religious views and anti-science positions make me nervous, but he’d still be worlds better than Obama.
Paul, unless you’re planning on dying within the next ten years or so this is something you’re going to have to deal with.
Perhaps the plan you missed was Ron Paul’s. He wants to cut federal spending by $1 trillion the first year. Personally, I’d say we need to cut it a lot more than that, but it’s at least a start.
What no one will admit is that very high levels of unemployment are now structural and will remain so permanently. Through all the layoffs and staff cuts, productivity has continued to climb, and that trend is going to continue. Why hire union labor for a production line, when you can build that line in a RTW state and use robots? Even physicians and (sorry) college professors are facing the threat of having their jobs automated out of existence. So are attorneys and writers and others that only a few years ago were thought to be safe from automation.
We’re going though a sea change right now that’s even more significant than the industrial revolution. Eventually (and I’m not talking about in a hundred years) essentially all human labor will be replaced by automation.
What no one seems to understand is that it isn’t work that matters; it’s the output of that work. It’s used to take 5,000 laborers to produce the same amount of coal that now requires 1% of that number. Who cares? It’s the amount of coal produced that matters, not whether it takes any human effort to produce it.
Back before the industrial revolution, the normal work week probably averaged 100+ hours. Nowadays, it’s 40 hours, but there’s nothing magical about that. As the amount of human labor required to produce X amount of product declines, we’ll see the normal work week start to decline. At some point, 20 hours will start to seem normal, which means twice as many people will be needed to fill one job. Then 10 hours. Eventually, people may complain about having to work overtime after they’ve already completed their one-hour work weeks.
Same in the US. I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to who agree that Social Security in the US is headed for *big* problems, but “Don’t touch *my* stuff. I’ve paid in my whole life and I just want what’s mine.” Ditto for government pensions: “It was part of the deal for paying me less than I could make in industry. Don’t touch *my* stuff. I just want what’s mine.” (Ignore for the moment the blatant self-deception in “I could make much more in private industry.”)
I wrote on this elsewhere. A lot of people are no longer needed for productivity. A lot of them, mostly on the left-hand side of the abilities and skills curves, really have nothing to contribute that can’t be done better by a machine? So why find make-work for them?
Oh, it’s no longer just the left side of the bell curve. A few years ago I had a long phone conversation with Jerry Pournelle about this subject. Pournelle believed then and as far as I know still believes that those of IQ 85 and higher can contribute to the economy. He thinks they can be trained for manual trades, while it seems foolish to me to train people to do things that are no longer economically performable by humans.
I argued then that, from a purely economic perspective, essentially everyone left of two sigmas above the mean had a negative value to the economy. In other words, those with IQs less than 130 on average consumed more than they produced.
There are a huge number of jobs that don’t really require humans that are still done by humans as make-work, including tens of millions of jobs that few people think of that way. We have the technology right now to eliminate those jobs, and to do so economically. Why, for example, are we paying long-haul truck drivers $100,000 a year when a tractor-trailer doesn’t really need any humans on board? Jumbo jets can literally take off by themselves, fly themselves to the destination, land themselves, and roll themselves up to the arrival gate. Automating tractor-trailers to that extent would be trivially easy with today’s technology. Which of course means we also don’t need humans staffing warehouses, truck stops, or any of the other associated make-work jobs.
I have a question to pose to the parents in the audience. My wife and I are having a debate about our infant daughter (under two years old) and watching TV. Everything I’ve read (which isn’t much) leads me to believe that the last thing she should be doing is watching TV. That is that she should be looking at everything else around her and not concentrating on one thing.
Do you think that I’m overreacting?
Automation does not eliminate workers, it allows works to be more productive. All of those welding robots and painting robots you see in commercials and TV specials require skilled welders and painters to set them up and operate them. With painting for example once a trajectory is taught the parameters (flow rate, fan width, pressure, atomization, and so) need to be adjusted often several times a day as conditions change (temperature, humidity, new batches of paint).
Also all of those robots and other automated equipment require service and repair.
It does allow the same amount of goods to be made by fewer people, or for the same number of people to produce more goods.
Most operators fall on the left side of the bell curve. They need to be trained and often become very skilled. Creative and intelligent people often make poor operators, they get distracted and lose concentration.
For maintenance and service you will find a wider range of people including many that are well educated as well as being skilled.
I am somewhat biased. I am an Application Engineer for a Robotic manufacturer.
“roll themselves up to the arrival gate”
I don’t think that part has ever been true. Not that it couldn’t be programmed. If I remember correctly (gave up flying after the Army), for certified jets that can land and takeoff on autopilot, the pilot is encouraged to use it now and then and, in certain visibility conditions, are required to use it. To land, though, a human has to put in the approach plate, lower the gear and control the flaps. Similar for takeoff. Again, this could be programmed. A pilot can “read” landing conditions by visual cues to wind shear, dust devils, ice on runway, etc., that a computer can’t do right now.
My two cents as a retired chopper pilot. Any commercial pilots posting?
All people under the 130 line should be manufactured into soylent green, of course, as they are virtually useless and a burden on the rest of us geniuses.
Now let us start with those within our own families…any takers???
We can quibble about where to draw that line, but I agree with your thesis. Which brings us back to my thesis: Given that their work is not needed for national prosperity, why have them work? Give them a small apartment and enough food to get by and let them watch TV all day. If they want more, they can compete for the jobs which don’t require much ability or training or motivation; I assume there will always be some such jobs which aren’t economical to automate or which we haven’t gotten around to automating yet.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/infant-tv-guidelines/
Exactly, which means that it does eliminate workers.
I’m just repeating what I was told by a commercial airline pilot. He may have been exaggerating for effect, but it didn’t sound that way. As a matter of fact, he also said that the degree of automation on airliners was raising some concern that the pilots weren’t getting enough hands-on flying to maintain their skills.
At any rate, as you say, even if the airliner doesn’t literally pull up to the arrival gate under its own control, programming it to do so would be pretty trivial.
That’s pretty much what we have now.
I think the automation is quite capable of “rolling up to the gate” but that the airport’s other vehicles aren’t equally as automated and THAT is why they don’t do it. Too many variables to trust to a machine.
I wonder which airport Flight 1549 would have automatically chosen to land at after the bird strike? Sullenberger chose to land in the Hudson, and saved everyone on board, not to mention countless others had the jet crashed into one of the cities nearby. I wonder if current AI is up to that decision?
To: A New Parent
I am biased, of course, but did manage to raise two children to adulthood and college without major malfunctions. They watched entirely too much TV but still did a lot of things outside, played sports, went into various extracurricular activities and had lots of other interests.
Seeing them, and seeing other kids over the years, I would most emphatically declare that TV should be utterly verboten for kids under 10-12 and thereafter restricted to the plethora of educational and creative programming that is available on just a few broadcast channels, while using DVDs or the equivalent for most stuff. Even then, I would emphasize books and practical experience over the Tube.
Our kids are grown now and out and about, but at home here, besides a bunch of movies and TV serials, we also have the complete BBC Shakespeare sets, the entire James Burke “Connections” series, and a ton of stuff from National Geographic and Nature/PBS. And even most of my movies are military history, plus I have a bunch of firearms/gunsmithing instructional stuff.
But again, our books vastly, vastly outnumber the TV stuff and movies.
Definitely no TV for young children, period.
Thanks for confirming my suspicion. I am of the belief that young children shouldn’t watch TV. They should be playing with toys and interacting with the world around them.
Agreed, 200%. And best of luck to you and yours. This is a hard, tough world to be raising children, many blessings upon you.
I write engineering software for a living. Of our code, 10% is for the actual calculations. The other 90% is for the exceptions.
“I wonder which airport Flight 1549 would have automatically chosen to land at after the bird strike? Sullenberger chose to land in the Hudson, and saved everyone on board, not to mention countless others had the jet crashed into one of the cities nearby. I wonder if current AI is up to that decision?”
Airline pilot Patrick Smith, who writes the “Ask the Pilot” column for Salon online and has written a book on modern airline pilot stuff and flying says no. Something like that would take a Sully to handle properly.
Thank you, OFD, for sharpening my point. It does take a Sully to pull that off. I’m not that confident that ALL human pilots are equal to the task. I think it still takes a Sully.
I am confident that “Otto” would have chosen one or the other airport, to less than desirable results. HAL, of course, would have rejected all human attempts at help and would have shut down all life support.
There was a little thank-you party for him and the rest of that flight’s crew not long after the incident, and I was digging the t-shirts one of the passengers had made up: “SULLY IS MY CO-PILOT” Yeah, there it is.
I haven’t flown in a commercial aircraft myself now since ’94 and not much interest in doing so.
Having worked in TV for a career, I do not recommend TV for anyone–child or adult.
First, we have known from studies since the late ‘60’s (some that I was involved with) that TV cannot teach (interactive computer is best at that). One of the studies from that era showed that having a live TA read the notes of a distinguished professor, produced significantly better results from students than videotaping the professor delivering the lecture himself, via TV–no matter how dynamic the professor was. So hardly anyone–regardless of age–is learning much from television. It is a grossly inferior medium for learning.
Second, very young children learn best in group activities–like singing songs, repeating the ABC’s, or listening to stories read by an adult. (That is exactly what goes on in German Kindergartens–which nearly all children there attend as daycare from about age 6 months through to regular school classes. I was very impressed.)
Our kids were never told there was anything worth watching on TV when they were very young, and we only watched movies together with them. Thus they had practically zero interest in TV. Once they started school, there was a program or two they insisted on watching because of peer pressure, but they spent most of their time playing outside or with friends. Even as adults, now, the only TV they watch is movies.
The 5 grandkids in Germany watch only movies, too. There has been no television in the house, because an expensive license is necessary to have one (unlike in the US). It is a long story, but because our apartment was connected directly to the rest of the family’s house, the government licensing agency insisted we must pay for 2 families–even though Jeri and I had no television set at all in our apartment. So every TV in the house was disposed of–take that TVamt! Movies were watched on a nice big computer screen.
I have not followed literature on kids and TV since we moved to Germany in 2001 (which marked the end of my fulltime work in the television industry per se, although I continue to work in the video field), but up until that time, studies being done overwhelmingly indicated–just as the Wired article points out–watching TV probably delays mental development, and may even impair the abilities for later life learning.
They do not explain it, but the gist of many studies is that TV actually encourages the brain to disengage and perform no useful thought processes. People seem to get addicted to that state and prefer it to actually exercising the brain. And that appears to account for the sleep difficulties mentioned in the Wired article. That disengaged state provides neither good rest nor a good workout.
Now here is the capper. Very young kids put in front of a TV will not at first pay attention to it. Only if it is pushed as the preferred attention alternative by parents, will they get hooked on it. But once hooked, it relieves parents of having to babysit–a much too attractive alternative.
My suggestion is to rotate the toys young kids have available to them. Hide a bunch for a couple months, then rotate. Attention span for young children is short, but it can be stretched with training. Get kids used to playing by themselves for longer periods of time, then shift their activity when they become restless. Occasionally play kids’ music or story CD’s as part of their mix. Mom or Dad can eventually get 30 or 40 minutes of stuff done while the kid plays, then when they get whiney, change the picture altogether by taking them outside and playing with them for a while. You don’t have to give kids 100% of your attention, but you do have to train them to ask for less of it.
One other thing. I hold the belief that riding in the car is about the same thing as watching TV. It encourages a disengaged state that is similar to watching TV. Limit car time for kids as much as TV time.
Gmail has changed its methods in dealing with spam. I cannot find out anything about what they have done, but there is FAR less mail in my spam folder, and most of the mail in there is now real mail and not spam.
Since I POP email from Outlook, that means I need to frequently go to Gmail online and look at my spam folder to see what they have tossed in there. Today, there were 13 real messages from the last 2 days alone.
Previously, there were mountains of spam but hardly any real email–maybe one every month or two. So, whatever they have done is now functioning much worse than their previous methods. Unfortunately, telling it that certain mail is not spam, does not prevent subsequent mail from that source from being put into the spam folder again.
I suppose I should switch to IMAP, where I can see the spam folder without using the Web interface, but I have 3 different email accounts I need to track, and the lack of instructions these days makes it unclear whether I can track more than one account with IMAP in Outlook 2003.
This is a real PITA. In fact, Google is becoming a real PITA. They have killed enough good services I have tried to use, so that now I hesitate to use any new thing they come up with.
Pournelle had a good piece by a guy at Google who publicly complained about Bezos’ insistence about 7 or 8 years ago, that every division of the firm communicate only with API’s. Everyone hated that at the time, but it has built interoperability that is currently giving Amazon a leg up on everything they do. In last week’s program, Leo Laporte’s group said that is what is holding Google back. They create a useful platform, it doesn’t go anywhere fast enough for them, so they withdraw it. Had there been API’s for the platform, they would never have had to kill it, because everybody in the organization could build other useful things on it.
Email is mighty important to everyone’s life, and Google would do well not to screw with their interfaces and the backend to it–like they are now doing with spam.
“A bit like being in a burning building with a tornado bearing down on it. Lots of things you might do. What you probably will do is hang out in the doorway for awhile.”
I love it! The perfect analogy. The system is about to crash down around our ears, but the price to pay for leaving the current system is frightening…
Unfortunately, though, I fear our host is all too right. The barn is burning, and the current system *will* come crashing down. From what I know of our ages on this forum, we are all likely to be around when it happens.
There are plans around that would make the crash milder when it comes (like Ron Paul’s), but any of these require more courage than we, collectively, seem able to muster.
– – – – –
On the related topic brought up by our host, I disagree that the entire left side of the bell curve is useless. There are many, many jobs that cannot sensibly be automated. Plumbers, painters, and electricians come immediately to mind: these are perfectly suitable careers for people with average IQs, plus or minus a standard deviation, and probably unsuitable for those below or above that range.
The same for service personnel. Sure, we could probably create robots to deliver food to your table, but people appreciate personal service. Companies have attempted to automate their telephone reception – raise your hand if you appreciate those companies that let you talk to a human! These are useful positions, and certainly do not require above-average intelligence.
Thanks, Chuck. I hadn’t checked my gmail accounts’ spam folders in ages because the false positives had been so low. Bah.
But we need only so many electricians and plumbers. If you need your house rewired, would you rather have it done by an electrician with an IQ of 85 or 130? Smart people are always going to be better at the kinds of jobs you mention, both in terms of doing the jobs themselves and running the business. If there are a limited number of jobs available, the smart people are going to disproportionately take those jobs.
Incidentally, I suspect you’d find that the average electrician or plumber or auto mechanic nowadays is considerably above mean IQ.
A lot of trades jobs are going away, too. There is a degree of prefabrication of buildings, modular construction; and there are also more highly integrated components being produced and used. It’s like that in auto mechanics too – less craft, less skilled trades, more plain module-swapping as dictated by magic black boxes. The jobs aren’t being altogether eliminated, but they are being reduced, and the degree of skill required is also being reduced.
For the dystopian endpoint of robots replacing humans, Marshall Brain–he of “How Stuff Works” wrote a short story, “Manna”,
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