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What I'm curious about is the knock-on effect all these pending collapses will have on cities like Seattle and San Francisco where the prices are exploding out of control thanks to all the techies concentrating there.
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Feb 10, 2016 00:07
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Oculus Rift support for Macs? If Apple 'ever releases a good computer,' founder says I agree.
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Mar 4, 2016 05:33
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red19fire posted:Is it safe to say that 'going viral' is circling the drain? Like the local news always starts their fluff stories with 'In a viral video released earlier this week...' and it's some video with 500k views that I've never heard of. What's like the cutoff point for making money on youtube? Because this article warms my black heart. Today I saw "viral" used to describe something that had, I quote, "hundreds of shares". That word is about as mangled and dead as "troll" is.
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Mar 24, 2016 03:30
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Mirthless posted:You gotta admit it's kind of weird that an advertising company owned a bunch of robotics startups In this universe, Google is the Horizon Group. "We Know What You Think."
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Mar 25, 2016 05:34
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shrike82 posted:Whether it's bubble-driven or not, you have to wonder whether devs are being paid what they should and other white-collar jobs are being grossly underpaid. I don't see how a millennial making 40-50K in a major city can afford the standard milestones of middle class life - home ownership, healthcare without worry, kids, retirement savings etc. Independent of productivity and other cocnerns, yes devs are paid an actual middle-class wage and yes other millennial white-collars are being vastly underpaid. Related to productivity, both groups are probably very underpaid but that's a topic for another thread.
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Mar 28, 2016 17:56
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How are u posted:Why do insufferable nerds always dream of a world full of autonomous self-driving cars?? Driving cars yourself is fun. gently caress the self-driving car crew. Because driving in this isn't fun: 
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Apr 12, 2016 16:47
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asdf32 posted:The fact that many people are turning to unsteady contract work for income (or extra income) is symptomatic of structural issues. Harping on uber seems pretty stupid to me especially given, as is pointed out here, that the contract structure isn't new in the industry at all. There is nothing inherently wrong with people having the option of extra part time work with very flexible hours. That's true but Uber is also doing their damnedest to try to exploit this situation so why shouldn't we go after them as well? Just because the system permits their actions doesn't absolve them.
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May 10, 2016 00:52
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/uber-surge-pricing-1.3593940quote:It's no secret that Uber uses surge pricing at peak periods, such as New Year's Eve, when demand is high. Disrupting our batteries~
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May 22, 2016 05:47
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Cicero posted:Japanese salaryman work culture is insane and terrible and you're crazy if you think otherwise. Somehow I think you missed the point of his post.
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May 28, 2016 04:58
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OwlFancier posted:1. Use modern communications technology to create a distributed business, instead of a conventional business where people go to a place and work there. You know, all this talk about "distributed business" (along with some books I've been reading lately) got me thinking. What would be actually good industries to apply this new model to? Presume integrity. We can of course assume that a new business will operate n as little good faith as Uber or Lyft or AirBNB has but that doesn't really get us anywhere in this thought exercise. Our food culture suffers rather greatly from having to resort to concentrated industrial farming, which has enormous subsidized costs that aren't represented in the final sticker price of the food. The food we get from factory farms is less nutritious, less healthy for us, less healthy for the crops and for the animals, and less healthy for the soil itself. Thanks to the necessities of participating in an interconnected global market . Unfortunately, thanks to having to feed a planet of 7 billion (and growing!)* people, and thanks to the profit drive of capitalism and market-oriented systems, we need to resort to an heavily industrialized and mechanistic system. Individual efficiency doesn't matter as much as ability to operate on an eye-boggling scale. Gathering food from 800 small family farms ends up being more "wasteful" no matter how much better and more individually efficient the farms are at transforming sunlight into food, because it's so much simpler logistically to build a pipeline from a colossal factory farm to the groceries and supermarkets. We already have a bunch of people who are seeking out local farmers for regular food delivery, but this is logistically difficult and financially inefficient and it also only works for the people who are educated, informed, and motivated enough to seek these arrangements out, as well as these who can afford paying slightly higher prices for their food. Why not something like "Farmr" that helps manage the problem of distribution for small-scale farming by coordinating them and helping corral the food into nearby/local groceries? Schedule pick-up times and have a fleet of "first-mile" trucks that can gather the products and bring them to processing centers, then eventually to retail outlets. (Of course, here the specter of Regulation rears up again, a significant chunk of the price of food is thanks to off-farm processing to comply with government regulation. On an individual scale this isn't always necessary, but on a mass scale it certainly is because the likelihood of any given farm loving it up goes up and up.) I'm sure there's lots of problems with this that I haven't fully thought through, and I'm not making a fully serious Farmr proposal anyway, but having read through this entire thread I'm now curious which industries that this idea of distributed business would actually benefit and improve. Thanks to ubiquitous Internet and instant electronic communication we have an extremely powerful tool at our hands to transform our civilization and lol if it's being used anywhere remotely close to its potential. Taxis and weekend bedroom rental and handyman jobs seems like seriously small potatoes. The current "disruption" model seems more like parasitism to me, to be honest. And not even the symbiotic kind. *: Off-topic, but who exactly is this explosion in population actually benefiting? It certainly isn't us peasants. There's only so many people you can interact with in your lifetime, and most of us won't even come remotely close to that number. A higher population means more competition for work and more pressure driving down wages, means less individual agency (your voice matters a lot more when it's 1 of a few million than when it's 1 of 300 million), means far more stress on our global habitat, more pollution and waste, means that if something goes wrong with our globalist system poo poo will really really loving hit the fan. Enormous population counts benefit the people at the top, not the people at the bottom. More peasants means a wider pyramid means more people at the top layers and also means more money and power and privilege for the people at the very top, and also means less of an upset population when they realize they're being screwed. Taking a dollar from everyone upsets the peasants more than when you take ten cents each from a population ten times the size.
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Jun 10, 2016 01:10
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Liquid Communism posted:Most of this is factually inaccurate. Factory farmed food is fine, so long as sufficient health and safety laws are present and enforced. The issues are generally ethical regarding the treatment of food animals and workers, and environmental regarding the impact of the techniques used to get modern yields as regards erosion and especially fertilizer runoff, both of which are still a problem with small farms. Small farms also have less resources to act on these problems in the first place, and are more likely to be hurt by the burdens of compliance with regulations or the losses of a bad season. "sufficient laws" is rather nebulous wouldn't you say? Of course with sufficient and enforced laws then anything is perfectly safe and healthy and fine. Ethical issues are rampant in the industry, yes, and while erosion and fertilizer runoff are a (large) problem, I think you're glossing over the impact that pesticides and monoculture have on the health and fertility of the soil. Blasting the soil repeatedly has a nasty side effect of destroying its health and requiring more and more external interference to keep it fertile and able to grow crops. GMO crops are helping to alleviate the pesticide problem, though. I have trouble believing your implication that meat harvested from animals that subsist off corn, protein pastes, and a steady diet of antibiotics, is as healthy and nutritious as that harvested from animals that are allowed to eat and grow as they would "naturally" (here used 'as opposed to in a factory environment"). A varied and natural diet, in combination with plenty of exercise, movement, and sunshine is provably better and healthier for humans than chowing on Doritos while seated indoors 24/7 -- is it really that far-fetched to think that it's also the case for the animals we eat? That's before we get into how much energy is required to operate a global-reaching network to exchange food and fertilizer and all the other things you need to operate a modern industrial farm. That problem is starting to go away as we replace fossil fuels with longer-term and less-polluting forms of energy, but, frankly, it's not going away fast enough (and may already be too late) and it'll still be a long while before we're able to find a suitable replacement for fossil fuels for transportation itself. "Sufficient laws" would, if implemented and enforced, do a lot to address the problems both you and I bring up. Unfortunately, large corporations have a habit of following regulations to the barest possible extent, and there's significant amounts of pressure and pushback from agribusiness against improved regulation, studies on nutritional impact and health, and the like. While it's true that smaller farmers are hit harder by setbacks (either market or act-of-God) and regulations, it's not like the government doesn't already provide assistance for these scenarios. In my experience (which I admit is biased, I interact mostly with local small farmers and these at the farmer's market) conscientious and educated local farmers are better at working their land properly and attending to its unique differences, compared to larger farms leveling and brute-forcing their land and animals with industrial methods. I readily admit that many, if not most, small farmers are (and were) not conscientious and educated. I think we can aim for better ideals with our food and our lives, however, than "Whatever, let the Morlocks out in, heh, flyover country force-feed nature through our industrial machines while the vast majority of us sit around all day in our cities and cubicles." I don't want to start a food derail in this thread though, but I think a thread on the state of America's food industry and attitudes towards food could be a good read and a good discussion.
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Jun 10, 2016 07:10
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Liquid Communism posted:Your 'experience' amounts to accepting their marketing at face value, and your argument against regulation is 'criminals exist, therefore laws are impossible'. I don't know how you could possibly read that and think I'm arguing against regulations. Feel free to go see for yourself, no marketing needed, the results of intensive monoculture farming on the soil, and the reality of how factory-raised animals live and are fed.
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Jun 10, 2016 08:09
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Industrial organic farming, especially thanks to the efforts of industrial farmers, is better than actual industrial farming... but not by such a large margin. It is good that they're avoiding a lot of the worst excesses and techniques of standard industrial farming, but they follow a similar paradigm, and many large-scale organic farmers follow the requirements and regulations for organic certification (which is often not as stringent as it could be) to the letter and none beyond that. Nationwide and, often, international shipping also undoes a lot of the non-nutritionally-focused good that organic farming ostensibly accomplishes. How much better is it for the planet if, even if your carrots are grown without pesticides or petroleum-based fertilizer, the carrots end up being shipped a couple thousands miles away using fossil fuels? The discussion should be about minimizing reliant on the international system as much as possible in favor of localized and specialized farming, but lol if you think most people are going to see that as a good thing instead of something that makes them less rich because they have that much fewer things to extract value out of. I can see that this is a hot topic (as food-related topics tend to be). Should I or someone else make a thread for discussion? MikeCrotch posted:Wouldn't doing what your family does on a society-wide scale necessitate huge amounts of people going back into agricultural labour since the yields are not as good per person? As in, reversing the trend of how less and less people are being farmers every year because agricultural work is pretty lovely? As has been pointed out already labor is a resource as well, alternatively if you are organic farming on the same scale (if not the same methods) as industrial farming then you are still going to be using as much fuel etc. to cover the area and get a lower yield at the end of it. There's this cultural idea that agricultural work is necessarily and inherently lovely so we've been pushing more and more people into cities. Who exactly is this benefiting? It's certainly not the poor who end up destitute and without work. Living in the country is not really any less lovely or less cultured than having access to the latest One Direction concert or nanobrewery -- especially nowadays with ubiquitous Internet access and international shipping. Do people need to be surrounded by millions of other people and to work in cubicle farms for their lives to be culturally fulfilling? Liquid Communism posted:Ag labor is, in great part, lovely dangerous work that doesn't pay all that well. I live out in the middle of flyover country, just corn and soybeans far as the eye can see, and every farmer I know is constantly bitching about how much debt they have to take on just to stay in business, and that's with relying on family labor for everything humanly possible. It's why the family farm is a thing of the past, they just can't compete with the yields that the big operators get driving down food prices. Good in what way? Why is cheaper better? Why sprint as fast as possible towards the bottom? For a century we went for As Cheap and As Many As Possible and it got us a planet of over seven billion people and a looming civilization-destroying ecological crisis. Why not As Quality As Possible? Your farmers are bitching about not being able to keep up with the factory farms because, unless you left out some details, they're growing the exact same things as the factory farms using similar methods and practices. Of course they can't compete with the mega-operators who have huge resources at their fingertips to force compliance from the land and to soak short-term turbulence. It's a losing proposition either way. The more they grow the cheaper their food they get, so the more they have to grow to just be able to keep up, and they get mired further and further in debt. Government subsidies help with this but it doesn't prevent the problem from growing and ensnaring these people. These massive yields of corn and soybeans, by the way I should point out, are a huge reason why American food sucks and a huge contributor to the extreme obesity crisis we're facing. I shudder to think of what it's doing to the soil, especially with the huge amounts of external input necessary to keep the soil fertile. We urgently need better variety in our agriculture.
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Jun 10, 2016 17:21
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There's enough discussion going on that I started a new thread. Let this thread return to the topic of that 21st century innovation, breaking laws for profit.
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Jun 10, 2016 17:34
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