russell

I have often wondered what happens when large scale technological unemployment occurs, or even the threat of it. I think we have seen the result in the 2016 Presidential election with the election of Donald Trump, probably the least qualified president since Harding. He's a psychopath, for god's sake. And his cabinet is beyond comprehension.

The possible result is an attack on all branches of the executive except the military. Replacement of Social Security and Medicare by virtually worthless vouchers, elimination of the departments of Education, Housing, and Energy. emasculation of the EPA. And on and on.

This could be as self-destructive as an armed uprising with fewer deaths (maybe).

Many of the issues are easy to fix. Remove the wage cap on Social Security taxes. Convert to health insurance to Medicare. Some of the unemployment issues can be mitigated by making the workweek 30 or 32 hours. Turning truck drivers into nurses or medical technicians takes a few years of training. Many of them are smart enough to do it. The current stumbling block is that they must have income support during the education period. Giving someone $100K to manage the transition doesnt seem like much to me.

Fundamentally increased productivity and wealth should lead to more leisure and a better standard of living for everyone. Eventually everyone should get a minimum guaranteed income so they have time to pursue their education, raise families, be artists or novelists.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome for an experiment on a guaranteed income.

Ah, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stepehson updated for the internet age. Worth reading if you havent.

I say the girl should be congratulated for her ingenuity. The amount of effort she put into tweaking the teacher's tail is commendable. The real "solution" here is for her to find a mentor who will channel her efforts into more projects that make people think as well as shock them. Sometimes this is risky for the teacher, but god knows we need more critical thinkers.

When I was 14, more than half a century ago, I got into trouble for holding opinions that the people her would consider merely progressive. One of my daughters in high school got into insulting her peer group by using a vocabulary they didnt understand. They thought she was praising them. She is now in her thirties and very well adjusted. If she had done such a thing in middle school, I would have been very amused, but her mother would have been absolutely mortified. Probably best that she didnt.

It's a history of presidential nomination conventions ffrom their appearance in the early 1800s. The takeaway is they can never get it right.

I'm not sure where you got your numbers. The 10 largest cities in the US have a population of 26M (2015 estimates, Wikipedia). Generally population estimates are given for the metropolitan area. The 10 largest have a population of 73 million. There are 53 MSAs with a population over 1M with perhaps a total population of 150M. (I was too lazy to do all the addition.) The US has a large area, but it is primarily urban.

According to the review, DeLong and Cohen have written a historical analysis of what has worked as economic engines in America's economic history. Their observation is that it is big concrete advancements like Hamilton's banking system, the railroads, and Roosevelt's trust busting. They say things went awry in the 70s and 80s when the economy turned from manufacturing to healthcare and rentier industries like finance, and the adoption of the Free Market ideology. The way back on course is for the government to back big ideas once more.

I'm not sure. The Japanese tried very hard (remember 5th generation computing?) and failed. However, the idea of the historical analysis is intriguing enough that I have ordered a copy. If I can read fast enough, I will try to report back before the topic has migrated into oblivion.

We certainly need some concrete and philosophical changes. The rentier class cannot continue to siphon of all productivity increases to stash into their private asset accounts, without bringing the world to its knees.

The Eternal September all over again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

All well and good if your kids are from a school known to the admissions department at the colleges they are applying to, otherwise the AP courses, with all their flaws, are a reasonable compromise that gets them college credit.

My kids took a different route when faced with a truly incompetent high school calculus teacher. My wife convinced the high school to allow them to take courses at the local community college for both high school and college credit. The courses were approved by the University of California so there was no issue about transfer of credits.

From your second link: >>>The junction provides access to and from the A38 (Tyburn Road), A38(M) (Aston Expressway), the A5127 (Lichfield Road/Gravelly Hill), and several unclassified local roads. It covers 30 acres (12 ha), serves 18 routes and includes 4 km (2.5 mi) of slip roads, but only 1 km (0.6 mi) of the M6 itself. Across 5 different levels, it has 559 concrete columns, reaching up to 24.4 m (80 ft). The engineers had to elevate 21.7 km (13.5 mi) of motorway to accommodate two railway lines, three canals, and two rivers.

Truly an inspiration to those of us who grew up with Erector Sets and Tinker Toys.

California is quite peculiar. California has 482 municipalities. Whether they call themselves cities or towns is local preference, although fewer than two dozen call themselves towns. The largest municipality is Los Angeles with 3.7 million people. The smallest is Vernon with 112 people. I live in the unincorporated town of Cambria with a population of about 6000. We are about 20 miles from the nearest city, but we have no local government at all. The closest we have to a government is the community services district which runs the water district, the sewerage treatment plant and the fire department.

Cambria is in San Luisbo County which has an area of 3600 square miles and a population of over a quarter million but only 5 cities. California has a law that makes in almost impossible for a new city to incorporate. The new city must reimburse the county for any lost tax revenues caused by incorporation. If your GPS reports a city some distance away, it probably reporting the county seat of an unincorporated area.

Hah! The army is the only service not getting one, unless there is a helicopter variant in there somewhere.

Indeed. There was a paper done in the 70s or 80s that found that operating system size doubled with each new feature. Picture going from single tasking to multitasking or to virtual memory. Sorry, I cant dredge up the reference.

The lack of interlocks really surprised me, although the name said so. The CDC 6600 had them two decades earlier. We always carefully scheduled our instructions flows, but it was nice to know that the hardware would catch our goofs.

Historical nit: I always considered the CDC 6600 to be the first commercial RISC machine, although given its strange architecture, I can see that others might disagree. It had multiple floating point and integer processors. An assembly programmer had to be aware of them all. I would not write two FP divides in a row because the second would stall waiting for the first to finish. I could write two consecutive FP multiplies, because there were two FP multipliers. Instruction timings were always a consideration in selecting registers, because you wouldnt want to try using a register that was the target of another instruction until that instruction had completed. Fortunately there were interlocks so that you would get the register contents expected rather than some undefined intermediate state. You always had two or three parallel instruction flows going to take ad vantage of as many of the 10 or so processors available.

Other aspects of the architecture were truly strange. There were no load or store instructions. They were a side effect of setting an address register. I was the lead developer for two of the PL/I compilers for the 6600. Much fun. For those interested in strange architectures, I recommend the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600.

The Koutnik links to this article, which inspired his essay. http://thecodist.com/article/my-biggest-regret-as-a-programm....

It was very painful to read, because I made exactly the same decision. I was VP/chief developer at a company that withered on the vine after a 10 year roller coaster ride at a software company that I had co-founded. I had two paths: I could have looked for a VP/Director job or I could have continued on as a Developer/Consultant. The money was pretty much the same, so I took the consultant route. The money was pretty much the same and programming was more fun.

All went reasonably well until September 2008. I had just finished a very satisfying consulting gig, but I walked out into a very changed world. The day after was the banking crash. Even earlier a divorce had taken me to the cleaners. But far worse, small interesting companies had no use for older, still up-to-date, still competent developers. I found myself going from Finder to Implementer. Agile development, which had seemed like a boon, turned into a tool to lock everyone into two week death marches controlled by upper management. Technical decisions where made by people who didnt have a clue.

Just as in the linked article, a woman working for me in the 80s took the management route and was a VP in a major SV software company a few years later. Now she is quite well off. Good for her; we are good friends.

Moral? If you are a software developer, dont get old. (I'm still doing it because I like it.)

Nah, the aliens are bound to have tons of post-doc archaeologists looking for faculty positions.

From the RFS entry on Surinam, position 22: "“public expression of hatred” towards the government is punishable by up to seven years in prison under a draconian defamation law. The controversial Dési Bouterse, who became president again in 2010 in an election, has managed to be amnestied for the 1982 murders of 15 political opponents including five journalists."

RFS on Jamaica at 10: " The very occasional physical attacks on journalists must be offset against this, but no serious act of violence or threat to media freedom has been reported since February 2009, a month that saw two cases of abuse of authority by the Kingston police."

Or even Ireland at 9: "... defamation lawsuits are common. Finally, interviewing police sources has been virtually impossible since the Garda Siochana Act of 2005, which bans police officers from talking to journalists without prior authorization."

Not a little biased are we? Amnesty for murdering journalists isnt my idea of freedom of the press, nor are defamation law suits, or a prohibition against interviewing the police.

Wow! FDR at the bottom, below Buchanan, Harding, Fillmore, Pierce, and GW Bush. I shudder to think what your political views are.

This article seemed rather inane to me, complaining about Cook's standing up for privacy and Zuckerberg's anti-Trump speech or his new foundation, while ignoring the $900 million that the Koch brothers are pouring into down-ticket campaigns or hundreds of millions more from Sheldon Adelson. Somehow the emphasis on political influence got misplaced.

The tyrant in question was Cylon of Athens who staged a failed coup in 632 BCE leaving him only a would be tyrant.

Simple kits for testing both water and painted surfaces go for $10 and up at Home Depot. The less expensive ones have two tests. You should test at least a couple of fixtures because older fixtures often contain lead. Getting a positive may mean that you need only replace that fixture. Testing the paint isnt a bad idea either. If you get a positive then you need to have the water tested by a lab. It isnt very expensive to get a kit and mail a sample back to the lab. Your city or county water department should be able to help you find a reliable lab.

I am not an expert in the area, but I did serve on the board of a small mutual water company in the hills above Silicon Valley. We were required to do daily tests for things like coliform bacteria and monthly tests for other possible contaminates. Every few years we handed out lead testing kits to a few households on the various branches of the system to make sure lead wasnt leaching into the water. All of our samples had to be tested at county approved labs. A county inspector also took samples during the year. The testing for larger water systems were even stricter.

When it comes to mind boggling longevity, nothing can compare to the B-52. The first prototype flew in 1952 and the last one was built in 1962 and the final plane is still in active service. There is an upgrade program that plans to keep them flying until 2044. The planes will be more than 80 years old by then.

Ordinarily I would agree with itbeho and advise you to move on with minimum fuss. However, given that you are paying the hosting bills, you probably have the right and obligation to shut the thing down gracefully, perhaps with a month's warning to the users. It does seem reasonable to answer any emails saying that you have not been contracted to provide support. I think it is best no to mention that you havent been paid. It is probably wise to contact a lawyer, because I am certainly not one.

I think the degree of fault tolerance depends on the age of the reader. My first computers used discrete transistors. My high school English teacher was a strict grammarian. I paid close attention because I was dating her daughter, also a strict grammarian. To this day the misuse of "to" for "too" will bring my brain to a full stop. I am moderately adapted to the confusion of "fewer" vs "less". (It's countable vs uncountable.) And I even use "they" as a gender neutral third person singular, but you should never do it in formal writing.

I read an article sometime in the past year that maintained that all the prissy rules were imposed on a perfectly good language by self-imposed arbiters of the language. Sorry, I cant locate it at the moment.

$165 for a passport plus card is a pretty steep price just to fly domestically, not to mention additional fees if you need to travel on short notice. In CA a State identity card is $28, or $8 if you are poor, or $0 if elderly.

The first paragraph reminds me that when I was in my 30s several decades ago, Rick James, several friends, and I decided that we were going to found an old programmers home reminiscent of the old sailors homes of a century ago. I envisioned a Victorian house with a roofed wraparound porch and an ample supply of rocking chairs. I have the house with a wraparound deck. All the rest of the crew have retired to comfortable houses with significant others, but I am still writing code, for pay, every day.

I have fond memories of the 1401, although I never programmed one. In the mid 60s I worked for the Harvard Computer Center. We had a 1401 whose sole job was a tape to print server for the 7094. It had attached a 1403 printer, a screaming behemoth (literally) that could print 600 lines per minute. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1403.html compares the sound of a 1403 to a jet plane, an old jet, mind you, now one of those whisper quite modern ones. There are stories of people writing music to be played on a 1403, maybe even true. Another feature was the 1301 disk drive, the size of two refrigerators, with an astounding 28 megabytes of storage,whirling away at 1800 rpm. For a mere $2000 a month you could have your own.

Computers tha one person can carry are for wimps.

Another piece of bullshit that I am running into with alarming frequency when I click on search results that leads to a local newspaper like the Des Moines Register is that it pops up with a request for a subscription. If I cancel the request, the story appears but with the text replaced by white rectangles. That's just rude. I'm from out of town, for god's sake, I just want to read one story. The New York Times or the San Jose Mercury are more respectful. They give you 10 stories a month.

I bought it on your recommendation. It had better be good, otherwise I will come back to haunt you.

Add to that the adjustable font sizes. I suppose I could have one set of glasses for computer work and another set for reading, but the adjustable font works just fine for me. And it sure is easier to lie in bed with a Kindle than a thousand page novel. I do wish it were easier to flip back and forth a few pages.