Or buy a semi-autonomous truck that can be used in convoy mode - one driver in the lead, two trucks behind following. Once it gets to a city they all get drivers to navigate to the depot. This is already a feature of the Tesla Semi.
An excellent book that you can pick up, read a few random pages and walk away feeling you've learn't something. Always informative as to where ingredients come from and what happens when heated, kneaded, beaten, stirred, etc.
In New Zealand and Australia Indian and Chinese workers are essentially seen as replaceable due to the huge numbers of them migrating to both countries (those countries make up the #1 and #2 sources of migrants respectively).
The whole point of the migration schemes are to get workers for cheap and to put downwards pressure on wages. A very high skill level is not really required, and big companies will just throw bodies at jobs and rotate out anyone who can't make the cut.
The IT contracting shops there are called 'body shops' for this very reason.
There many Indian Australian and Asian Australian developers, but there are also has many Indian and Chinese citizens working in Australia, employed by large contracting firms like TCS, on contacts under _Indian_ labor laws, with worse entitlements and in more vulnerable negotiating positions than their Australia co-workers. Some of these people are very highly skilled, they also get rotated out as they are useful for establishing teams with new clients. I work with many people who who have asked me, and others, to help lobby on there behalf to stay in their jobs, because they have been told by their contracting company that they will be moved, and if they refuse, their contract contains provisions that could force require them quit and pay back the previous three months pay. I struggle to believe this is legal under Australian law, but I am close to one developer who did this and chose to pay back three months pay rather than speak to a lawyer.
Because their big business mates bribe them into doing it. However, Australia is not a corrupt country, so the 'bribe' will mean a high-paid consulting or executive job after their career in politics.
Additionally most of the wages being depressed are actually for entry-level jobs, and the poor have no voice in most democracies since they are not effectively organised.
Its a common scam to get a student visa (often with fake English test results etc) which allows you to enter the country and work 20 hours a week, then to actually work 60 hours and have the boss pay you for 20. This results in payments 1/3rd the level of minimum wage, but this is still attractive enough for poor Indian males to want to come and do it in the hundreds of thousands.
Plus Australia is has very generous welfare for the elderly (aka pensions) and a sub-replacement fertility level, so there is always pressure to maintain that ponzi scheme with more taxable bodies.
Oh, and in addition to all that, the people that are opposing this type of mass immigration are being called racist.
Just sign up for a degree at a degree mill and you'll get a student visa and an easy route to permanent residency.
New Zealand (and Australia) don't care about quality migrants, just quantity, to keep up demand for housing (both countries have housing-bubble-based economies) and to add extra consumption to national GDP.
The migrants they really want are Indians who can put downwards pressure on wages. Go to Auckland, its basically an Asian city.
Go somewhere like Poland, Romania or Portugal and hire your own workforce. You won't even be in the ass-end of the world like NZ.
There is no way I would choose living in Poland over NZ. Unless you like breathing coal smoke. I actually quite like Poland too, but it isn't even a choice.
Also 'basically an Asian city' sounds, basically, racist.
That's the advice I was given when looking at NZ. At the time I had about 15 years experience in IT but that couldn't be considered as I didn't have a relevant degree.
"Do night classes for a couple of years and get a degree"
Instead I decided to forget about NZ even as a tourist.
My wife and I considered moving to NZ as well; I'm a cloud engineer with 10 years experience (20 total in software/sys admin) in the US, I've worked for startups and enterprises.
NZ won't even acknowledge me because I don't have a silly bachelors degree. Too bad I spent those 4 years getting experience instead of university.
Definitely worth a visit, I'd suggest. It's really a beautiful country.
I have a Bachelor's degree in CS. Nobody will hire me because I don't have experience.
Funny thing is, before I got my degree, they were happy enough with my experience but wouldn't hire me because I didn't have a degree. Even had the same interviewer tell me one of those things on either side of my graduation.
"Get a degree and we'd love to hire you for your experience!"
"Oh, sorry, you're qualified but don't have any experience."
I do have a bachelors, but it’s in physics, so I get the same “well, you don’t know computers, but you do know how to contact spirits. We don’t need spiritualists - rejected”
Jesus, if I had a penny for every time I’ve had to explain that physics and psychics aren’t the same thing I’d be a rich man.
I’m more or less at the point of just giving up on being gainfully productive.
Unless you have lived in Poland, Romania or Portugal, I wouldn't be so sure in suggesting these places. These countries have their own challenges starting from language barrier to inefficient bureaucracy. I don't think either of these countries are well-known for their tech quality either.
I don't know about Portugal, but both Romania and Poland have a well developed tech sector. They're not dumping grounds for projects (think Infosys & co).
But you're right that the bureaucracy is really bad right now...
This just seems like a good idea independent of labour costs.
We don't need a planet of 16 billion with so many workers performing simple tasks that could easily be removed with improved processes like at this restaurant.
A planet of 2 billion with cheap land and cheap food for a happy, intelligent, beautiful and productive human workforce and lots of natural habitat for flora and fauna would be a better place. Even if we have to find our own table at a restaurant.
Cut social security and payroll taxes, deliver money right back into the hands of the workers. If more people are employed the need for these services is lessened anyway.
With advances in medical care, people can keep working until they are 70 or 80, at a lower rate eg. part time. Work keeps the brain active and prevents degeneration.
Finally reduce the cost of land and rents which is the major cost of life for the majority of workers. Do this by limiting immigration and keeping the country at a stable population, not growing endlessly.
If people truly need welfare or Government services, such a subsidised tuition, healthcare or a cash handout, then tally the paid amounts against their individual tax file, and claim the amounts back by increasing their tax level by single digits. If there is still an unpaid amount at death, then claim it from their estate.
Doing all this you can substantially cut the welfare state and encourage work. The end goal shouldn't be a UBI or negative income, it should be that 20 hours of basic work should be enough to allow you to afford a basic life.
And how do you address the massive injustice in wealth and opportunity distribution already present because of centuries of capital and power sharing the same bed? I'd be all for your proposal if it included a way to nationalise all capital above a certain threshold, bring everyone to that threshold and then distribute the rest based on merit. But I don't think that is possible. But your proposal assumes not just a just world, but that the world already has been just for 100s of years
Ah yes, I have a solution for that. Link tax breaks to having children, and penalise the childless wealthy. Eventually society will be mostly comprised of the descendents of the successful, and inequality will be reduced.
Millionaire parents having one child concentrate their wealth into a small part of society. They should instead be having multiple. Success and intelligence has a genetic component, so you're improving the overall health of society through such measures as well.
Otherwise there are far less radical things than breaking up and dividing wealth (which has worked horribly in the past - look at the USSR). Simply breaking up large monopolistic tech companies such as Valve, Google and Amazon for example, as was done for Bell Telecom.
I'm often amused looking into simple solutions for complex problems. Sometimes though I'm tired reminding about the pitfalls on this path.
What you propose is not particularly well supported by explanations. There are examples in the past (I'm omitting them) when such an approach lead to bad things.
Miner demand was about 50% of sales. Admittedly this is because a lot of gamers were turned off by high prices.
That demand has evaporated since the price of Bitcoin alternatives (eg. Ethereum) has plummeted, and the difficulty of mining is still very high since now ASICs can mine many coins more efficiently than consumers GPUs.
Plus it seems like Nvidia are stuck with a lot of low-end chips. Many miners were buying things like the 1060.
However, Nvidia have no direct competition in the GPU space anymore. They can hold off their next product launch for months and wait for their inventory to clear.
>Nvidia have no direct competition in the GPU space anymore
At what level? AMD does the same thing in GPU they do in CPU: They might not hold the overall performance crown, but their value is often better at several tiers than their competition. I really want an RX 580.
The Vega cards (56 and 64) were definitely priced competitively as NVidia felt the need to release the 1070 Ti out of nowhere. It sits in a weird price / performance area smack dab between the 1070 and 1080 cards. In addition, the Vega architecture is pretty efficient and your statement about being power hungry and very hot is false.
Perhaps they were when on their discounted launch price, but they quickly jumped up in price (around £100 in a week, even more a few weeks later) and just weren't available for quite some time AFAICT.
> In addition, the Vega architecture is pretty efficient and your statement about being power hungry and very hot is false.
Excuse me, but I speak from personal experience here. It's really not very efficient, I bought a 64 on launch day. It was hot, noisy and power hungry compared to nVidia cards at similar performance levels, which is the main reason I didn't keep it for long.
Re the competition in the gpu space: that’s also still the case in the scientific computing / ML fields, where CUDA is still several years ahead in terms of functionality and existing investment.
My understanding is that it's been mostly Ethereum driving demand for GPUs. Bitcoin can be mined on dedicated ASICs and mostly is. Ethereum requires more general purpose hardware with a large pool of RAM so people use GPUs instead to mine it. I presume the recent decline in demand for mining GPUs is due to the decline in price.
Curiously I have a feeling that diamond jewellery falls further when you just look at the short term. What I mean is that (according to a few things I've read, and neatly summarised at http://diamondssuck.com) immediately after purchase the resale value of your diamond ring hits the floor - whereas you can at least punt a GPU for a short while afterwards.
This is mostly beside the point though - you're right that GPUs are effectively obsolete after a very short period and have very little value in the long term :)
I think its a general cultural disdain for the environment within some cultures.
Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.
This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed.
If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else will reign in the Asians and Africans who are busy destroying their environments?
The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level. This means hugely reducing fertility in some developing countries, mostly by making sure contraception is widely available and that women are educated enough to know how to use it.
> Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.
Well I've been to a lot of places with plastic pollution problems and I picked up gobs of that shit off the world's beaches. I can tell you that despite their prevalence, plastic bottles, chip bags, straws, flippers, lids, cups, forks, and knives don't spring out of the ground. They don't grow on trees. Most aren't made in local factories. They are manufactured elsewhere, shipped there, and sold to the locals, each hand in that supply chain extracting a little bit of profit, a huge portion of which is sent overseas, stolen from the local economy.
You can blame locals for being trash monkeys if you want--and they absolutely are--but absent outside influx of these one-time plastic use goods, they'd be piling up paper and wood and banana peels since they have since the beginning of time, and nature would be taking care of it using age-old biodegradation.
Plastic is our mess and its global reach is absolutely due to Western greed.
It's possible - just perhaps barely possible - that you might get a better reception from a more friendly audience if you didn't describe trade as theft. In the eyes of many, it robs your truthful, necessary, utterly critical message of credibility to the people who most need to internalize it.
It's not so much cultural disdain as weak governance and a current priority for jobs and economic growth over environmental protection. If 'enlightened' western countries really cared more about the environment perhaps they would impose more restrictions about the goods that they allow to be imported into their countries.
Britain or France in the 1800s was equally if not more egregious in terms of disdain for the environment, though they didn't have the size or technology to wreak as much impact as modern technologies allow us to do.
> The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level.
We need to stop making non-biodegradable garbage. Period. You can blame the last hand to touch it, but the whole pipeline should just not exist. Population will take the better part of a century to stabilize--we need to fix our waste problem no matter what population does, and we cannot wait for some mythical world with fewer people.
The Philippines are catholic so birth control might actually be illegal, if the Catholic Church is concerned about the environment they need to promote birth control not present it as a cardinal sin. Countries like this the pope holds a heck of a lot of sway. He talks a good game about global warming but here is where the rubber meets the road. For the sake of the common good they need to shift the focus of sin from sex to wrecking the environment and causing overpopulation.
And what is the solution given that these people exist ? Because undoing that seems immoral now, even by non-catholic standards.
I mean the best interpretation of your comment is wishing for an alternate world (in which millions of people would never have been alive in the first place). In the middle the comment is assigning blame for that. At worst ...
I get that dozens of millions of people not being alive would solve your problem ... but I do hope you understand that nobody, especially not those few dozen millions, agree. And that does mean that you'll have to come with a different solution.
We'll have to figure that out, won't we? The Philippines birth rate is somewhere in the vicinity of 3 children per woman. What's a more sustainable number?
I would come to the number by calculating how people will support themselves and others, and yet have a reasonable load on them.
That number seems to be at least greater than 3. So 4. Probably it's more like 3.1 or so.
How did you get to the conclusion that the island of the Philippines can't support (from now, and for a VERY long time in the future, even if perhaps not indefinitely) 3 children per woman ?
The first thing the world needs is to wrestle money from these billionaires and fund education for people.
Educated people will understand the impact of their kids, and also have a better chance at making a contribution to society, and taking care of their families they do have.
Huh? Isn't Bill Gates spending his money strategically to best help those people. He's spent over $15 Billion dollars on vaccines. I highly doubt a government will be able to spend that money more effectively.
