Re: Join a union, we'll just replace you with bots
Yeah, workers want a 5% pay-rise costing $millions. Let's spend $billions replacing them. That'll learn 'em!!
25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
Is that relatively recent or something you've been aware of for many years? I get the impression there was a push to get more freight onto the rails a few years ago, then never heard much more about it after it was pointed out much of the rail network is already near or at capacity.
"A leisurely trip to Florida, overnighting in the car as it tootles along if I don’t want to break my journey, no need to face forward, watch the traffic (and traffic jams - those will be a thing of rarity when everyone is doing it my way) and no steering wheel needed."
Except when it needs to recharge, pulls off the freeway into some scruffy little backwater Nowheresville because that's the only working, non-occupied charging point it can find, and you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of duelling banjos!!
Yes. Any car which requires a human to take over at any stage isn't autonomous. It assisted driving. A truly autonomous car won't have drivers control at all so using a hand-held mobile phone should be fine. On that note, it was interesting that thet statement didn't differentiate between a hand-held mobile phone and a hands-free phone, which ALL modern cars have the facility for. Hands-free use of a mobile phone is legal. Even m y crappy mid-range 6 year old car has bluetooth and voice control/steering wheel controls for my phone. A brand new AI car will surely have at least the same.
"And how will you find it when it parks elsewhere when it returns because the on street parking space it came from has been nicked by another vehicle?"
You press the "Come pick me up" button on your phone app of course!. Then you wait in the pouring rain for 15 minutes while your AI car "argues" with an AI car from a rival manufacturer over who has right of way down the now single lane road because of all the cars parked down each side. :-)
"You can already look at the stats for self driving vehicle incidents, since they are already driving more miles in a day than basically anyone will ever drive in a lifetime."
That's just silly. You are comparing aggregated AI driving of many, many cars with a single person. I frequently drive 300-400 miles per day. I wonder how many AI cars do that many per day tootling around town at 25mph?
Oh, and personal stats here: Last 20 or so years, ~1.2million miles driven, no accidents. There are probably many people out there, especially truck drivers, with far more miles than me and no accidents.
Yeah, and the subsidy is declining. As that disappears, and more people switch, the road tax will have to go up and per mile road charging will be introduced to replace the fuel duty losses to government income. I expect there to be no EV subsidy at all within the next few years and guarantee it will be gone by 2030 when the sale of new ICE cars will be banned. (Only 8 years away now!)
"much more so than in the UK/EU where rail is used much more extensively so there is much less long haul trucking."
Whilst I agree with your post, I'm not sure the above is true. I don't see freight trains with random containers on the flatbeds. What I tend to see are freight trains made up of one long train with identical tank or coal-like wagons in the make up. I spend most of my day on the road, and lorries make up a large part of the traffic on the roads here in the UK, many still EU registered trucks. Rail freight may possibly be a larger percentage than in the US, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a significant percentage based purely on my observations and "feeling".
We used to have a fairly decent number of "Freitliner" terminals around the country where local trucks would deliver standard shipping containers, forward them by rail, and get picked up by truck at the other end for onward local delivery. Many no longer exist, the remaining ones seem to be just trucking hubs or container storage sites now with rare or no rail head any more.
All the government chauffeurs who used to drive Ministers around will be retrained as litter pickers. There's a lot of skill in picking just the right kind of litter and putting it in the correct recycling bin.
Government Ministers, who never drive themselves, at least when on official business will, of course, be at the front of the queue for self-driving AI cars.
"installed Kodi on them to stream stuff off my FreeBSD box,"
A cheap Raspberry Pi will do that job silently and probably quite a bit cheaper in power usage terms. It'll also work with a TV tuner for live broadcasts and recording, although I've not tried that. You can also set Kodi up to use a shared database (stored on your FreeBSD server) so if you use your Kodi profile from a different device, watched and resume status will work.
"Graze. Sign up for one for a couple on months. Watch what you want to watch. Then move on to the next. It's the capitalist way: it incentivised them to create good, new content."
Until the first one blinks and stars tying customers into 12 month contracts. If one does it, and gets away with it without too much loss of subscribers, the rest will quickly follow suit. The end result will be a massive loss of consumer choice because it will simply be too expensive to subscribe to all of them.
Teamsters, IIRC, were originally the trucking and haulage union and the name grew out of people driving teams of horses pulling wagons. Teamster was a job title.
In the UK, we have Unite, Prospect, Equity, Unison and quite a few smaller Unions with one word, non-descriptive names. There's even one called Voices Of The World. Not sure what they do, but I don't think it's about singing.
"using a TPM-aware full-disk encryption solution capable of making disk data inaccessible if the UEFI Secure Boot configuration changes."
When working on some customer laptops, if I make changes to the BIOS config, eg disable Secure Boot so I run external diagnostics, Bitlocker has a hissy fit and requires a recovery key entry instead of just the PIN Number[*}. Of course, I put the config back to the original settings after I'm done, and Bitlocker is happy again. So I'm wondering if changes made to the UEFI settings will also trigger Bitlocker. I would assume other disk encryption will be equally paranoid about hardware or firmware config changes.
"Seriously, it's like posting your nude pictures publicly and expecting that pervs shouldn't be able to see them, only good-looking, educated and wealthy bachelors please! It's either terminally naive or extremely disingenuous:"
On the other hand, collecting every face you can find on the web and then using them as the basis of a facial recognition database isn't on. According to most commentards here anyway, whenever ClearView gets mentioned.
It's not just about scraping publicly accessible data, it's about doing it on an industrial scale and what it's then used for that counts. However, drawing a line which must not be crossed will be an immensely difficult task.
"I wouldn't be surprised if 95% of calls are like this."
I think I read somewhere that at best, 2% of cold calls result in any positive outcome. Positive outcome doesn't necessarily mean a sale and this relates to legit calls only, no using of TPS/Do Not Call numbers.
I was think along different lines based on the same quoted part of the article. *IF* it works, which is doubtful, not only will it help separate the best salespeople from the rest, it'll help separate the good products from the bad if the bullshitting salesperson can be called out on his/her AI emotional analysts. After all, there's no reason why the customer won't have their own AI software at their end too. :-)
Which raises an interesting point. How would that section of the article have read if the author had wrote it from the point of view of the potential customer using it to separate the wheat from the chaff?
"When someone with a big pulpit starts making overtures directly to shareholders, there's a reasonable chance that a significant number of them will go for it despite its being underpriced. When that happens, the 40% or whatever who wanted to hold out - are screwed. They have no recourse but to go along with it, whether they like it or not."
You just described how Governments and Presidents are elected
"When that "someone" has a reality distortion field of Musk's calibre, the risk is much higher."
Trump (A card game reference :-)
Nah, the BOFH said they can do a serial port based firmware flash that takes hours to do because it usually fails 4 times out of 5 and is slower anyway, rather than the quicker network port based flash because now it's borked the port based flash is no longer an option.
RTFA, as they sometimes say around these here parts :-)
"2. Who says taxes are due in India? She is a UK resident, she is tax resident in the UK, and her status is "non-domiciled" - that doesn't mean she's an Indian tax resident. "Non-domiciled" is just a way of reducing a UK tax bill with a flimsy excuse, basically a hangover from the British empire that is still alive today."
Clearly you've not been reading or listening to the news recently or you'd know that being "non-dom" doesn't mean you don't pay taxes at all. You have to declare *where* you are domiciled for tax purposes. That makes it harder to avoid the taxes where you *are* domiciled. I don't agree with it, but I have bothered to listen to the reports of who the law works currently. And FWIW, Labour have been bleating about this for many, many years, but never did anything about it when they were in power for 13 years.
"On the one hand, Musk could start Mutter and fail to get enough users to make it viable."
I'm not sure the build fast, fail fast, learn, rebuild model works in this case :-)
Although to be fair, I'd much rather see a Twitter crash'n'burn rather than a Falcon or Starship.
"A manky, rusty old trampoline is probably better than most of the kit the Russians have now "
Isn't one of the US launch systems wondering where their next engines are coming from now thay can't buy from Russia? I'm all for beating on Russia, especially right now, but lets not forget they still have stuff.