Discussion about hot topics trending today

[SoulReaver]

That just means better food for the pigs. I'm okay with this

and better food for us
every1 a winner

[Falcon Horus]

Then there are companies that provide rental bikes (which are currently the bane of the city's existance).

Much like Uber is a bane to taxi companies.

See what I wrote about deregulation. The airlines can't skimp on safety related matters, maintenance, and so forth, so they're cutting their costs in every other way they can. 1 or 2 employees to do the work of 5, low wage workers, cutting corners in everything but safety.

Actually, you'll find that companies have to abide by the labor laws in the countries they fly from. As RyanAir has learned the hard way.

I don't even know what you folks are worried about, if you expected the dog to live, it should have bought it's own ticket.
How long do we poor paying passengers have to put up with this kind of poor service?

For context, USA airlines are in the middle of major crackdown on animal transportation, primarily so-called "emotional support animals". People have been abusing that category of requests on a completely unreasonable scale in order to not pay for transporting their pets, getting fake doctor's notes to fly with hedgehogs, peacocks, large snakes, spiders, turkeys, pigs. Internal instructions for animal transport are in constant flux and hard to keep track of.

I remember the peacock story.

[Annoyed]

Actually, you'll find that companies have to abide by the labor laws in the countries they fly from. As RyanAir has learned the hard way.

Aside from specific exceptions for certain positions, there are very few laws in the US that regulate exactly how a company can require their employees to perform their tasks. Assigning the work of 3 employees to one (or laying off two or more and telling the remaining ones to pick up the slack) is common around here.

Overwork anyone and they'll start to make mistakes.

[LtColCarter]

AZ teacher posts salary and asks 'I need a college degree to make this?'
By Walter Einenkel
Thursday Mar 15, 2018 · 10:30 AM CDT

An Arizona teacher decided to post her “upgraded” salary stub on her Facebook page last week, and it is a very clear reminder that teachers are undervalued and disrespected. While the NRA and Republicans blather on about arming and training teachers to become the first line of defense against a culture of violence that they have manufactured and profited from, teachers are still not pulling in salaries for the work they already do.

Whispering Winds Academy teacher Elisabeth Milich posted a photo of her salary on Facebook. Her salary is $35,490 per year.

She works for the Paradise Valley Unified School District.

Milich posted the photo after seeing her expected pay raise for taking professional-development courses.

"This is my new pay after taking a few professional development classes," stated Milich in the post. "I actually laughed when I saw the old salary vs. the new one. I mean really, I need a college degree to make this? I paid 80,000 for a college degree, I then paid several hundred more to transfer my certification to AZ."

The Facebook post she put up has been taken down, but you can see a screen shot of it here or here. USA Today gives the Arizona median teacher salary breakdown:

The median salary for Arizona elementary school teachers in 2016, adjusted for cost of living, was $42,474, a 2017 analysis by Arizona State University's Morrison Institute for Public Policy found. The median salary for high school teachers was $47,890.

And while Arizona legislators are under the impression that teachers who have two jobs are only interested in buying boats, the hard reality of change is now—as victories in West Virginia for striking teachers and Oklahoma’s legislators on notice from Oklahoma teachers illustrate.

[Annoyed]

Well, that didn't take long.

Granted, the dust hasn't settled on this yet, it's clear where people's concerns are.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-su...led-1521480386

A self-driving car from Uber Technologies Inc. struck a woman in Tempe, Ariz., who later died, police say, in what is believed to be the first known fatality of a pedestrian from a driverless vehicle

A few other snippets from the article are very telling.

The first known fatality of a pedestrian by an autonomous vehicle threatens to stir regulators and damage public perception of driverless vehicles, a critical project for auto makers and technology companies who feel they can reduce deaths and costs by eliminating human error. Uber has called its self-driving-vehicle efforts “existential” and just wrapped up a costly lawsuit from rival Alphabet Inc. over allegedly stolen trade secrets.

Missy Cummings, a professor at Duke University, cautioned Congress in 2016 about companies rushing to put systems into widespread deployment and warned that a death could set back development of the potentially lifesaving technology.

“There is no question that someone is going to die in this technology,” she said to Congress in 2016. “The question is when and what can we do to minimize that?” On Monday, Ms. Cummings repeated that message, saying, “It is a day that we knew would come.”

While the technology is still largely unproven, a range of auto makers like Volvo, General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. and tech giants such as Uber and Alphabet, parent of Google, are racing to put driverless systems on the road and claim a stake in the $2 trillion of revenue tied annually to autos, according to Deloitte Consulting. Alphabet’s Waymo, which has been testing vehicles in the Phoenix metro area without humans behind the wheel, plans to begin commercial robot taxi services there this year.

These companies have braced for the inevitability of a fatality caused by an autonomous vehicle. But car and tech executives contend that while people are bound to die in the pursuit of fully driverless vehicles, the technology ultimately could save thousands of lives.

Never mind the woman that died, the concern seems to be how this will affect a technology that shouldn't even be considered at our current level of computer development.

[Gatefan1976]

AZ teacher posts salary and asks 'I need a college degree to make this?'
By Walter Einenkel
Thursday Mar 15, 2018 · 10:30 AM CDT

An Arizona teacher decided to post her “upgraded” salary stub on her Facebook page last week, and it is a very clear reminder that teachers are undervalued and disrespected. While the NRA and Republicans blather on about arming and training teachers to become the first line of defense against a culture of violence that they have manufactured and profited from, teachers are still not pulling in salaries for the work they already do.



The Facebook post she put up has been taken down, but you can see a screen shot of it here or here. USA Today gives the Arizona median teacher salary breakdown:



And while Arizona legislators are under the impression that teachers who have two jobs are only interested in buying boats, the hard reality of change is now—as victories in West Virginia for striking teachers and Oklahoma’s legislators on notice from Oklahoma teachers illustrate.

That's pathetic.

[Gatefan1976]

Well, that didn't take long.

Granted, the dust hasn't settled on this yet, it's clear where people's concerns are.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-su...led-1521480386



A few other snippets from the article are very telling.




Never mind the woman that died, the concern seems to be how this will affect a technology that shouldn't even be considered at our current level of computer development.

So, one person dies from a driverless car, and you pull the pin?

[jelgate]

Are you really surprised?

[thekillman]

Well, that didn't take long.

Much longer than the average driver. Fact is, so far driverless cars make more miles with fewer accidents.

Never mind the woman that died, the concern seems to be how this will affect a technology that shouldn't even be considered at our current level of computer development.

The Curie's died from radioactive experiments, yet during the manhattan project one experiment involved bringing two halves of plutonium together with a knife. Had someone's hand slipped, a small tactical nuke equivalent would've gone off.

Messing around with literal doomsday devices didn't stop us back then, what on earth do you think we'd do with autonomous cars? Besides, we already let incompetent people drive cars. As long as manufacturers can prove it's better than the average driver (and that's a low bar to set), everyone will jump on it.

[LtColCarter]

That's pathetic.

Yes, it is. Quite pathetic!

[mad_gater]

Self-driving car kills pedestrian - and you wonder why I'd rather computers that can malfunction, be shut down by an EMP or power surge, or be hacked be used to drive multi-ton vehicles capable of going 60+ mph?

Yes it's possible that not even a human operator could've avoided this accident even though human reflexes (at least human reflexes that haven't been dulled by drink or other form of drug) are insanely fast. Case in point of how insanely fast normal human reflexes can be is when I was driving on a road that was starting to become icy because the rain that had been falling started turning into freezing rain and was starting to coat the road with ice. There was a car stopped at a stop sign in front of me and so I stopped too....or at least tried to. But the road was too icy and there was no shoulder on the road that I could've used to go around the stopped car in order to avoid the accident so I had to have the presence of mind to run myself aground in a shallow snowbank off to the side of the road to stop my car from rear-ending the person in front of me. yeah I had a bit of a difficult time getting it unstuck but I managed it and managed to avoid hitting another car with a human person inside of it (and thus avoided a potential lawsuit by Cellino and Barnes ). My reflexes had to do all that in a split second. I know of no computer algorithm that can respond as quickly as normal human reflexes.

But again, given how common the stupid practice of crossing a street outside of a crosswalk governed by either a traffic light or some stop signs is, this could've been one of those unavoidable accidents that not even insanely fast human reflexes could've responded to in time. This is also why I never cross a street outside of a light or stop sign-governed crosswalk. I don't understand why it seems like so many people today have for gotten to stop and look both ways before crossing a street. I see so many people just blundering right on out into the crosswalk without even trying to stop. I saw it happen all the time when I was going to UB. Scores of college students seemingly so oblivious to their surroundings that stopping and looking both ways for a minute to make sure you're not gonna get made into a permanent part of the pavement by a passing vehicle seems such a chore. Wonder how we got to this point?

[mad_gater]

Well, that didn't take long.

Granted, the dust hasn't settled on this yet, it's clear where people's concerns are.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-su...led-1521480386



A few other snippets from the article are very telling.




Never mind the woman that died, the concern seems to be how this will affect a technology that shouldn't even be considered at our current level of computer development.

I just posted the same story...it appears you beat me to it

[mad_gater]

Much longer than the average driver. Fact is, so far driverless cars make more miles with fewer accidents.

The Curie's died from radioactive experiments, yet during the manhattan project one experiment involved bringing two halves of plutonium together with a knife. Had someone's hand slipped, a small tactical nuke equivalent would've gone off.

Messing around with literal doomsday devices didn't stop us back then, what on earth do you think we'd do with autonomous cars? Besides, we already let incompetent people drive cars. As long as manufacturers can prove it's better than the average driver (and that's a low bar to set), everyone will jump on it.

Normal human reflexes (ones that haven't been dulled by drink or other form of drug) are actually insanely fast. Normal human reflexes can have us responding to an unexpected obstacle in the blink of an eye. Computers can crunch numbers and process data a lot faster than we can. However computers don't have the capacity to carry out reflexive responses. The human capacity to carry out a reflexive response to an unexpected situation in the blink of an eye is not something that I believe can be effectively reduced to binary 1's and zero's in a computer's memory chip.

[SoulReaver]

Well, that didn't take long.

Granted, the dust hasn't settled on this yet, it's clear where people's concerns are.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-su...led-1521480386

bah just give it a couple o centuries & those cars will be smarter than us

btw another one a few weeks back:
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/28/...car-collision/



anyway this should be interesting cause now the question will be, who's held responsible?

[jelgate]

Normal human reflexes (ones that haven't been dulled by drink or other form of drug) are actually insanely fast. Normal human reflexes can have us responding to an unexpected obstacle in the blink of an eye. Computers can crunch numbers and process data a lot faster than we can. However computers don't have the capacity to carry out reflexive responses. The human capacity to carry out a reflexive response to an unexpected situation in the blink of an eye is not something that I believe can be effectively reduced to binary 1's and zero's in a computer's memory chip.

False