Ignoring the massive infrastructural costs and practicalities, but given the efficiency losses of the wireless-charging freeway idea, what would be the benefit of putting solar panels above the freeway and chargers underneath, over just having solar panels on the car instead?
There's not enough surface area on a car to power it in motion though. With a covered roadway you at least get the extra square footage from the empty space between cars. Still probably not feasible but it gets mildly closer.
On the whole idea powering cars wirelessly while they drive just doesn't work on mass scales. It's going to be massively expensive to build it out.
I appreciate the well-thought-out counter perspective. Do you still live in Russia and do you still feel the same way? If you had to put yourself into the shoes of a US voter, how would you feel?
I don't yet feel that I understand US realities well enough to be able to have a proper, informed opinion. Still, from what I've heard, there is very limited competition in a lot of areas, when there are essentially mono- and duopolies. In that case, NN may be beneficial, as it acts as a safeguard, as consumers can't vote with their feet. If things are really bad, I think I'd be for NN, but I'd really prefer there'd be some "this must be carefully reviewed in 4-5 years" clause. Otherwise... I'm not really sure, sorry. But, either way, I'd support those who seek to improve ways for new ISPs to start up and grow, as I've heard the entry barriers are very high in the US.
I got selected in DV 2018 lottery so, hopefully, if I'll get a visa approval, I will have to form a proper first-hand opinion in some years. :)
I'd go so far as to not only agree with your assertions of the best points of Rails, but to also extend your skepticism of the excellence of Rails' templating to calling that the worst part of Rails. Of course, one can use Rails as an API only service and it's quite adept at that.
I don't know if I would call Rails templating excellent, but it is acceptable. The nature of HTML allows for quite a lot of flexibility. However, I have to disagree with your view of Rails in API usage. Maintaining a client contract for fields and value types is far more difficult in Rails, at least out of the box, than similar offerings.
If you send the wrong HTML tag, the content just might look a little funny to the end user. If you send the wrong datatype to an API client, it generally won't be able to do anything with it, and may not fail gracefully at that. Constructs to ensure you cannot make that mistake are invaluable in API design.
And for point b), it's always truck drivers brought up in these instances. Yes, think of the poor truck drivers. I'm sure they love doing a dull job.
If a job is replaceable by machines, it's not worth doing.
I get the worry that people will be without livelihood, but it's not as if this world has a shortage of work to be done. If we had no more work to do, sure, bring on the UBI. But we do. Clean litter out of forests, plant new forests, visit the sick. Whatever it is, there will absolutely be more work for humans in the future. People not being forced to drive trucks means they could be doing something else more useful.
And if people lament losing a particular job and having to pick up a new one, well, sorry but that's reality. I could just as soon lament not getting paid to doodle cartoons.
Clean litter out of forests... for free? Visit the sick... for free? People don't like being truck drivers because they like driving trucks, they like being truck drivers because they like eating, sleeping, and raising their families. The unemployment rate is currently above 0, despite their being no "shortage of work to be done," because plenty of work that could be done doesn't have anyone paying in exchange for that work.
Who's going to pay people to do the things that are more useful, but don't fit in to the standard capitalist system? You? Some benevolent billionaire? The government, if we raise taxes and increase social spending to an extent that makes plenty of Americans recoil in instinctive horror? Yeah, I do think of the poor truck drivers, because I don't want them to starve.
No, he's not, you are. The social programs required to get those things done aren't going to come soon enough due to the cultural rejection of this kind of socialism in America. You're glossing over the hard part, as if "just pass a social program" was an easy thing to do.
UBI has to be worked out "before" these become big problems, not after; now is the time.
All of those jobs you mentioned are not economic, they are public works -- and there is no funding for them, so at best those are volunteer efforts, not something to put food on the table.
You're right, in theory we could have a system where we put truck drivers to work doing great stuff. Losing lots of jobs could be amazing if we had the services and programs that made our society compatible with that. But we don't, they will take a long time to establish, and the political climate appears to be reluctant to even start building them. Thus: a disaster.
That's exactly what I'd like to see. The problem with UBI is it's not that.
There's room for more than one social program in dire circumstances, but ideally we should have a social structure which incentivizes doing good. Help those who can't help others, and encourage those who can to do so.
I'd like that too, but I think at this point, tactically, we need to come together on "we need some social programs, period", and not bicker so much about what that looks like on the first iteration -- there is always a second iteration to be had.
> Yes, think of the poor truck drivers. I'm sure they love doing a dull job.
I have met some truck drivers who DO love their job. They have spoken about the opportunity to travel (that from a husband-and-wife driver team who claimed to enjoy living on the road). They speak of the opportunity to own their own business (although, to be fair, independent truckers are becoming less common).
See: "And if people lament losing a particular job and having to pick up a new one, well, sorry but that's reality. I could just as soon lament not getting paid to doodle cartoons."
You're rather missing the point; AI will create a shortage of work to do. The alternatives you mention aren't things that pay a living wage so yes, people will be without livelihoods and something akin to UBI will be necessary.
It's not about having something to do, hobbies don't put food on the table, or provide a table, or a roof to go over it. Our current economic system has no answers for a world where labor isn't valued because it's all based on capital and wage labor. You think we're talking about people being bored or something?
Real AI would create mass unemployment, 50% or more of the population unable to find someone to pay them enough to live on because robots will be doing all the jobs they're capable of. How are these people going to survive? That's the issue being discussed.
People bring up truck drivers because its a job we can feasibly being replaced soon, doesnt require an expensive education and unlike coal mining, employs a huge amount of people.
You're very much missing the point. There are lots of jobs that used to exist that are no longer viable. This happens. The fact that people are unemployed is a separate issue from any given job no longer being viable. And yet there's plenty of work that needs doing.
a) will happen, it is just a matter of "when" not "if." Of course, "when" could mean tomorrow or a hundred years from now, no one is really sure and there are both optimistic (it will happen in 1975!) and pessimistic (it will happen in the year 2500!) predictions.
That's still time opportunity cost for the student and merely shifts the financial burden.
I'm not against a liberal education for the betterment of the person, but it's not a sound investment.
We should not aim to make college free by means of government sponsorship, but rather education free or inexpensive by means of lowering the actual costs. As someone else said in this thread, certain kinds of knowledge are rather cheap to be had. Yet even so, degrees are pursued blindly by students, and hired blindly by employers.
Again, there's plenty of benefit to schooling. I liked taking classes with peers, including the non-major classes (for the most part). But throwing more money at the problem is the problem.
I think most of the comments on this topic ignore the fact that the U.S. really does have a mult-tier education system. The most cost efficient ones are state sponsored public universities, which are also the ones that have had the largest cuts in their budgets over the past few decades.
The private ivy-league and liberal arts colleges are the ones with the highest price tag, and also seem to be the ones most likely to give someone a "leg up" into an upper class life, mostly through the contacts gained while attending. They're also losing quite a bit of their value, especially the smaller liberal arts colleges.
> We should not aim to make college free by means of government sponsorship, but rather education free or inexpensive by means of lowering the actual costs.
I think that you're vastly underestimating how much money is needed to provide quality higher education. Trust me, the last thing we need is a race to the bottom when it comes to higher education.
The amount of money that goes towards marketing, administration, and buildings that are far fancier than they need to be is the issue. The professors are a fraction of the costs. Universities spend far more money than they need to on useless extraneous offices and bloat. Get back to focusing on education and the costs will drop.
Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US. Now you may argue that students shouldn't be so superficial, but they are, so universities have to deal with that when competing at the national stage.
As for administration, you probably have no idea how complicated it is to keep a university running. Don't like it? Good luck getting faculty to do the daily grunt work. Their plates are overflowing already just trying to get tenure and keep their jobs.
The higher education system definitely has room to improve, but to claim that it's as simple as "cheap facilities and no marketing" is a vast oversimplification in my opinion.
> Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US. Now you may argue that students shouldn't be so superficial, but they are, so universities have to deal with that when competing at the national stage.
Yes but that isn't actually making education better overall, it just means you're taking in better students. It's a zero sum game. Every college could deck out their dorms like the 4 Seasons Hotels, but it's not actually improving the quality of the education provided. It's still the same set of students, rotated around a bit more between which ones ended up in which schools.
That's the key part - is separating out what costs actually provide a better overall education vs. which costs just are "marketing in disguise" to take the top students from School A and convince them to go to School B.
So you're proposing regulation of the higher education market? Not a good idea at all, my friend.
Look, public universities in other advanced economies like Japan, Germany, and France probably spend just as much as a typical US state university, yet tuition is basically free. We can argue about how to improve education all day, but let's fund it first so our students don't have to worry about their debts for years. How do we fund it? Higher taxes.
Do you have any justification for this? Or should this just be accepted because you said it's not a good idea?
I don't see an argument anywhere in your post saying why not. Other than as a general rule you are against taxes. Does that mean we should eliminate the fire dept and police dept as well because they're funded by taxes? Or is it only services that already exist are grandfathered in and new services shouldn't be created?
> Do you have any justification for this? Or should this just be accepted because you said it's not a good idea?
I can provide a counterexample: the best higher ed system in the world operates as a free market.
> Other than as a general rule you are against taxes.
And where did you get that from? In the future, make sure to carefully read comments before replying.
To recap:
I said that we should stop arguing about why school is expensive and instead focus on funding it so American college students don't have to carry a debt for the rest of their lives. I then said that the way to pay for their tuition is to increase taxes.
"Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students"
Bullshit.
Relatively recently, the very top students lived in crappy dorms and ate standard issue cafeteria food and worked out in mediocre gyms. None of which mattered. Because they had top rate professors and high academic standards and intelligent peers competing against them. Throwing away money on fancier buildings and food does absolutely nothing to increase the quality of education.
>Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US.
Government paid higher education usually don't care that much about getting top students. They may or may not come. This attitude makes saving on all the extra stuff pretty easy.
Anyway, not all universities can have top students, by definition, so most universities' generous facilities are wasted in an arms race they can't win.
State universities are absolutely trying to pull in better students. They track average SATs and every other metric. For the top schools in each state, this is not just an issue of prestige, public funding, and attracting stronger faculty, its also about endowments growing because those students graduate and have more money to contribute.
By definition, not all schools attract the top students. We need a range of schools for the range of our society, not schools wasting the money of students actually attending the school competing for students that won't attend.
Schooling, like roads and health care, work better when run by government.
I work at a local community college that is in the network of the state University. The amount of waste that goes on is insane. I understand this is a state government issue in general but I'm pretty sure the school could be run with half the funds if they actually tried.
I'm absolutely not saying this is an easy problem. I also agree with your last point. I'm being idealistic, I know, but I'm cautious about accepting any proposed solution.
I definitely see the merit in comparing the US to Europe in terms of what has worked. Even as I am cautious, I value societies willing to experiment and progress forward with solutions to problems.
I'm not sure the US system is amenable to the same thing, but I'll bow out at that point and merely listen to what others have to say.
What I do suspect is that the landscape is changing with regards to what jobs need a degree and how easy knowledge is to obtain.
Depends on the branch, but considering that about 10-15% of costs of college is actually faculty, and marketing is twice that, then something is going wrong.
Oh, we absolutely should. An educated populace fits so perfectly under the idea of "general welfare" that it's a no-brainer to make school free for everyone.
It just runs counter to the goals of our capitalist overlords to have a bunch of learned folks running around. That's why you don't see it. That's why "ivory tower elites" is such a common, cliched even, pejorative. Don't want too many smart folks! They might wonder where all the money's been going for the last 40 years, and might not be so quick to blame immigrants or brown people.
I mean... Theoretically you could make a big fuck off web app right now in JS, it's not like WASM == huge apps. It sounds to me like the back end coders will coming forward to the browser where before you had the front end moving toward the back with things like Node.
You either understand the code or you don't.