Freeway driving is much, much easier than in-town roads - there's been successful autonomous freeway driving since the 90s.
When you drive on the freeway, everyone's going the same way (or at least you'd hope), the configuration of the road is well known, lines are consistent, etc. It's all the little things that need to be accounted for - opposing traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, random obstacles, and any number of other road, traffic and obstacle configurations that exist, that make consistently and safely driving elsewhere difficult for autonomous systems.
Exactly. The only thing we can keep doing is consuming more and more energy. And who wants to get that from bombing and subverting nations around the world? Not you... you're nice. Not me... I am woke. So, the only thing to do is to build nuclear power stations everywhere.
The root cause of all of this is the abysmal safety net in the US. If vitally important things like healthcare, unemployment and disability weren't tied to your employment, then there wouldn't be an issue in the first place because companies couldn't weasel their way out of paying for it by calling employees "contractors".
Until that safety net exists, it's important that people are provided with health insurance by whatever means are necessary and available. Right now, the system is set up such that health insurance is provided though employers.
Champion the safety net, but also recognize that people need healthcare right now.
States have much less power to tax than the federal government. Something as big as healthcare funding reform is very difficult to do at the state level.
The key phrase you failed to comprehend was "root cause" two posts up. That's where it was asserted that it is about healthcare. Your comment is therefore out of context.
What's happening in California is exactly what critics of the law said would happen. I don't find arguments that problems created by government can only be fixed by more government to be very persuasive.
Besides, why can't consenting adults simply agree to whatever employment relationships they want?
Because some consenting adults have a lot more power than other consenting adults, and that results in exploitation that we shouldn't abide in a moral, modern country. A huge international corporation versus an individual who will be homeless if they can't come up with a few hundred bucks for rent soon - do you think the negotiation between them would be reasonable?
In what world do some consenting adults not have more power than other consenting adults? Indeed, skills, circumstance, and capital all provide leverage. But consent, the most important factor in all this, is still necessary.
You support the effort, instead, to insert government in such a way to remove consent. Somehow things will be more fair if people have less liberty.
People don’t need do-gooders, bureaucrats, and legislators making every decision for them. Leave people alone to earn a living as they please.
One additional note - a great way for someone to come up with a few hundred bucks for rent soon is to be able to do a bit of ad-hoc contract work. But nope, that's against the law now.
I suspect that the California legislators would agree however they don't feel CA can solve that problem on it's own (due to budget, tax requirements, etc, etc). So they went with the best solution that they could realistically enact. Needless to say, working with your hands tied and blindfolded doesn't lead to great outcomes.
I think it could be within the budget, especially considering how much is currently spent by employers, which could be turned into a tax and funneled into "California health care". The bigger issues would be negotiating with medical providers, the hospital systems and multiple levels of US medical bureaucracy. Even then, for example medicare/medicaid, look how much fraud if often found around over paying / unnecessary procedures etc. In my opinion, because of how much traction and jobs exist at multiple levels of pharma to insurance to medicine in the US, I almost think it's an intractable problem, but I wish it wasn't.
California's budget per person is the 22nd highest among states so it's not like they rake in so much money versus other states. I'm guessing their abysmal property tax law forces them to get tax revenue in other more visible to everyone ways.
They're not, when you consider their very low revenue from property taxes. However, I think it's pretty likely that many people on HN don't own property.
On average, property tax rates are low but property values are very high so it's a wash. They still pull in a lot more per house than many states. Meanwhile California has the highest state income tax rate, with 13.3 percent in the top bracket. Some states have no income tax.
I think people in states like Hawaii and Connecticut might end up being taxed higher overall, but California is certainly near the top of the bunch, not the bottom.
And they are slowly covering more and more of the population with medi-cal. Presumably they want to eliminate the gig economy to make it easier to keep extending it.
Taxes are ridiculously high in California, and amongst the highest in the country. Sales and income taxes more than make up for any savings in property taxes, and now with the SALT deduction changes, it's even worse in CA.
There's just a lot of low-income people here who don't pay taxes which skews the result.
Everything in 1 and 2 are lined up for work. Anything without clear action items requires follow-up and clearly signals non-urgency so it's in 3 which is the end of the day. And a 4 is just intentionally forgotten.
If you stick that in your github.com/username/me/README.md then it's documented behaviour.
I normally just write back "hello", and know that I'll be receiving a question from them in the next 10 minutes.
I've tried ignoring it, but it's the sort of thing that sits simmering in the back of my mind. It's only one guy that does it. He's also the sort of guy who wouldn't understand what I meant if I tried to explain why I didn't want him to do it.
Can't really determine if I actually have time for something before I know what it is. And unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of just ignoring things I don't want to deal with.
You say "Hi!", I'm in the middle of wrapping up something. 8 minutes later, I have time, I say "Hello, what's up?". Unfortunately, during these 8 minutes you moved on to doing something after waiting for 30 seconds. 12 minutes later you see my reply, and say "Can I ask you something about this Foo module"". Again, during these 12 minutes I moved on to something else, blablablabla.
Had your first message been "Hi! In the Foo module, do we really need the function Bar to be public?" you would have been all set after 8 minutes.
A chat, like email, is just a tool to get shit done.
> I know that actually calling someone on the phone seems to be traumatic for anyone under 35, but hey.
First off, this is needlessly hostile and ageist. Please stop it. I am over 35 and we do not need to keep on with this "well if you're young you are too stupid to understand the One True Ways of doing things." Age discrimination is unfair regardless of direction.
> Chat--all the expressiveness of text with the interruptiveness of a phone call.
For me, chat is far less intrusive than a phone call yet still has the back-and-forth that doesn't easily happen with an e-mail. If you send me a chat message, that's more than just "hi," I can look at it and formulate a brief reply and we can keep going back and forth as needed. We may also migrate the conversation to voice (and video!) or we may drop to a rate more like e-mail.
Either way, I do not need a ringing phone 15 times per day any more than I need 300 e-mails or daily chats that start with "hi" and nothing more.
What industry do you work in, exactly? I think it would be a very odd thing if I were to ask my co-workers for their phone numbers. They'd probably ask why I needed it, and I'd say "so that I can call you if there's a problem". They'd say "why don't we just use Google Meet, like we do for everything else? Is there something wrong with your mic? I don't understand."
> They'd say "why don't we just use Google Meet, like we do for everything else? Is there something wrong with your mic? I don't understand."
Okay, that's the first real, valid argument I've seen against a phone call. I had no idea that these services had penetrated so far that they are normalized.
However, not all of us operate in "developer-only" land. People external to the company (at least, prior to Covid) would have phones but almost certainly not a "conferencing app". So, giving out your number would be a fairly normal thing to do in the course of business so giving it to colleagues would not be considered unusual--at least in the US.
If something's broken or if someone needs some info/action to be unblocked, I want a notification. I'm less likely to check email for something time sensitive, but I sure as hell don't want 20 phone calls a day.
I think you might be missing the point that the back-and-forth is actually terrible for work communication, considering that workdays are quite limited.
Nuclear is one of the few technologies that has a negative learning curve. As we improve designs, it seems to get more expensive rather than less.
There was a brief window in the 1970s where US nuclear construction projects were finishing on time. But the utility industry had planned for waaaaay too much new capacity. So when all the construction projects with poor execution, that struggled to complete and therefore came in way over budget, finally came online in the early 80s, they were financial disasters in a scale that nearly bankrupted several utilities.
Since then, utilities lost their appetite. And there's basically no way for us to replace the 400 or so reactors in the world that eMate nearing end of life.
However, I'm not sure we will need nuclear. With how cheap wind and solar are getting, far faster than anybody anticipated, we have finally found the technologies that may some day provide energy "too cheap to meter." However, like nuclear they are not dispatchable (except for some designs in France), so if we want to power a grid we either need to overbuild capacity by quite a bit, or use energy storage. There's a cost trade off for the two that depends on how cheap storage gets, and how cheap extra capacity is, and how cheap transmission is from an area with different weather that day. (For example, one can imagine building 2x of panel capacity over the amount of inverter capacity on a solar install, so that even on cloudy days you can chug along at near full energy output... it all depends on the cost trade offs.)
And as fast an solar is getting cheap, far beyond expectations, so is lithium ion storage. And there are many chemistries with high specific energies (and thus unsuitable for vehicles), that we are just now dipping our toes into.
Nuclear would be a nice tool to have, if it was competitive with other technologies, but it's going to be decades before it can prove itself and establish a positive track record for deployment. Utilities have been burned too many times by financial dumpster fires.
Until there exists 100% clean options for the entire pipeline of resource extraction, transport, assembly, distribution, etc., there will still be fossil fuel involvement in 'clean energy generation'. Can't really make clean energy cleanly unless we have clean energy to make it in the first place.
Resource extraction / recycling is a whole other issue of course.
We have that technology for decades - for example, Tu-155 flew on hydrogen in 1988 - and we gradually replace existing usage with more and more clean options. Don't worry - we won't turn off pollutions overnight, but will gradually drive them to zero. And then to net negative values, restoring some losses in the environment.
I saw that very car at that very mall, and the screens were all surrounded by people eagerly entering their info. Don't people get enough spam calls and emails to realize why?
They just blame it on their phone company and the like. I know a few people that knowingly hand out info at conventions yet will blame everything but. Might have to do with the marketing companies waiting long enough and people quickly forgetting about them entering their info. So when the spam calls hit they just think of whatever company they know for sure has it.
Side note: it’s almost impossible to book anything in Orlando without getting spamming with timeshare calls months later. I’m amazed it’s even legal.
This is why the GDPR and similar things are good; you can sign up, but they have to delete your data if you ask them for it. It makes schemes like this a lot less er, 'final', so to speak.
However, this only works if GDPR ends up being enforced, which doesn’t look too great so far considering how many sites violate the regulation with non-compliant forced consent screens.
No. Otherwise, the marketers wouldn't waste their time.
People don't think past their nose.
Similarly to the concept of demanding adequate gov't representation, digital security has been made to seem impossible by large media conglomerates who benefit from all the tracking of advertising networks, etc.
It's never just 'one spam email'. You end up on a list, the list will end up being sold many times over, also to other list creators and in the end you will get 100's if not 1000's of messages, probably you will still be receiving messages long after you're dead.
When you drive on the freeway, everyone's going the same way (or at least you'd hope), the configuration of the road is well known, lines are consistent, etc. It's all the little things that need to be accounted for - opposing traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, random obstacles, and any number of other road, traffic and obstacle configurations that exist, that make consistently and safely driving elsewhere difficult for autonomous systems.