@NEStalgia - It’s amazing that you can bang out five paragraphs in the time it takes me to write two. Double posting so I can reference your response.
Ha, yeah, I’m not sure there will be a big market for V10 Chargers and Camaros in the looming recession. I believe you’ve said you’re in the NEC, which makes road travel for you a nightmare at best, maybe topped only by the City of Angels in its quest to ruin people’s lives. It seems clear that automating vehicles and reducing the speed they travel while streamlining the roadways and eliminating traffic lights is the way to go (I think I saw this idea as far back as Warner Brothers “World/House/Car of Tomorrow cartoons).
Maybe China’s solution will be ours, we do have similar land masses, though the population density can’t be compared. Outside of our major cities, it seems like there would be a whole lot of empty cars on the road driving themselves an hour back from where they came so they can make the same trip all over again. Unless we’re talking alternate fuel sources, it doesn’t seem super efficient. I’m certain our solution won’t come from US auto companies. They’re prisoners of the moment, with almost no foresight or gumption to innovate. Ford has done well upping their standards in the last decade, but that was only in an attempt to come even with Japanese design.
Edit - Aaaand I didn’t even double post because it take me way to long to poorly translate my thought into words.
@NEStalgia The consistent problem I have with the whole discussion around automation, is that it just seeks to replace activities that humans are already capable of doing. Convenience is a good thing obviously, but a lot of the basis for arguments “things need to be more efficient” seems to equate human progress to economic progress.
I’m in favor of machines working in conjunction with labor to some degree, but I think it has just overshadowed a much needed debate on the nature of labor in our current economic system.
Given the possibilities that AI and machine learning have, not just for understanding the machines but human cognition as well, we seem to be devoting too much time giving machines mundane and rote task.
@ThanosReXXX - That’s the one. If they can combine it with the principals of a theremin so that I can make music by bending the light, then it would be the coolest little invention ever in my book.
I should look it up later and see what the light source is on that thing. It does seem like something you wouldn’t want to beam directly in your eyes. I’ll check out the amazing gadgets video as well, thanks!
@Tyranexx Well, one country's rude is the other country's expression of politeness/courteousness: in certain Asian countries, it's considered a good thing, if you belch after having eaten or drunk something. Apparently, it is supposed to let the host know that you enjoyed the food...
@bimmy-lee Sounds like a cool idea. Better trademark it before someone beats you to it...
The light sources are probably LEDs or some kind of diodes, possibly with some kind of magnifying or enhancing effect added on, to cause the distortion/elongating effect.
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@ThanosReXXX Got a link? Amazon or something like that? Because that YouTube user has three of these ''gadget'' videos, all three feature a rainbow toy in the thumbnail that is clearly CGI. I agree that the rest of them are real, but these CGI rainbow toys are just used as thumbnail clickbait.
Here are the other two videos:
Apart from the fact that they clearly look CGI, they don't even behave like actual light or lasers would in real life.
I've always found it interesting that some human gestures and actions have varying contexts throughout the planet. For example, the okay sign, when done palm out in countries like Japan (from what I've read) means you want money.
@Octane I've already seen these videos, seeing as I've already posted various videos of that channel myself, a couple of weeks ago, as @bimmy-lee pointed out. Well, I actually just now tried to find this contraption, and lo and behold: you were apparently right, so to stay in rainbow terms: color me surprised...
Even so, how are they "clearly" CGI? Just because it's light beams behaving in ways that aren't correct according to you?
Sounds more like that "good" old Dutch skepticism to me. One of the very few, but decidedly lesser traits of the people of the low lands, albeit warranted, this time around...
But they certainly fooled me, probably because all the other stuff is real, so mixing that rainbow gadget in with the actual toys kinda gave it more credibility to me. Oh, well. YouTube, right?
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@ThanosReXXX Oh, they definitely fooled me at first as well. But since all those other gadgets can easily be explained with simple physics, those rainbow toys definitely can't. When you give them a closer look, you'll see that everything is a bit too clean. A simple device, no cables, flat metallic surfaces, and some pretty light effects; and computers are very good at rendering all those things!
@Octane That's a bit to generalistic, to be honest. That all depends on the power of the rig and the costs spent on after-effects and post-processing, as seen in movies where certain CGI effects definitely look almost realer than the actual thing.
@ThanosReXXX Yeah, that looks more believable. But no way it looks as good as it does on the box
Reminds me of those toys I got when I was younger. The advertisements always looked way more impressive than the actual thing itself, which was always a bit of a letdown.
@Octane Well it's less terrifying that the magnet is shoving itself into the putty rather than the putty devouring the magnet.
@bimmy-lee LOL at least you understand the nightmare here. Nightmare is putting it mildly. And it gets worse annually. Sometimes monthly. Their "solution" to the gridlock of the major roads was this expensive traffic flow monitoring system that monitors the road and adjusts light timing dynamically. it solved some of the backup on the highway. The result is all the back streets the locals have to use are now absorbing the gridlock. So the commuters driving to work through the area zoom along, and the locals literally spend 15-20 minutes of their day just entering and exiting their own street. Crossing the street to the convenience store is literally a 15-25 minute commute. And in that commute you'll see 3 people run red, two pass thorugh oncoming traffic, and nobody going below 10 miles above the limit. 6 months ago, that wasn't the case. So you watch you life get worse and worse each and every year.
Oh no it won't be empty cars returning anywhere, at least not in China's implementation (changing American car culture would be harder though.) People wouldn't be owning cars anymore. A random commercial car nearby would just swing over to pick you up when you summon it. No car purchases, no car maintenance, no car insurance....economically it would be a boon compared to what would ,likely be subscription to "car service" (and sure those with more cash buy into a more luxurious set of car services...even in China.) The idea would be a vast reduction in the number of cars required (and in China's case, the overt elimination of parking lots entirely....the only cars will be the ones actively going somewhere.)
It absolutely upends the way of life. Just as the internet and cell phones did. Nobody wept for the end of the pay phone and the rise of eTail. But everyone screams bloody murder if you try to take their cars.
@NotTelevision Overall I agree with you in the quest to automate everything. I'm largely against it. And I agree with you on the nature of labor. That's a "dead end " debate....it will end up in a very tumultuous century reflective of mid 20th century when the idea of industrialism upended manual labor. Now auotmation upends industrialism. There really is only one solution every time that happens. Half the population dies and the remnants put it back together. Brief boom, stagnation, decline, then it happens all over again.
But in the case of roads there's hordes of obvious reasons. The act of transportation isn't a goal unto itself. Humans using century old tools to manually drive to places is not just a waste of time, but as there are ever more humans it becomes and ever growing amount f time and effort wasted. That's time that could be spent solving world hunger....or that's time that could be spent playing Luigi's Mansion 3. Either way, nobody actually wants to spend that time driving. Rush hour commutes are nobody's desire, it's a suffering everyone endures. Atop that, humans have desmonstrated unending incompetence and belligerence in the task that would be improved with automation. Atop THAT, as populations keep growing, traffic flow systems that depend on humans predicting other humans causes more and more backup, delay, frustration, etc. When there were few people and few cars it worked ok. But now? Look at Times Square and tell me that system works even slightly. It doesn't. Like with trains (ha ha, I had to) that are modernizing, traffic flow is MUCH better handled at a central level....with a computerized overview of each moving object in the system, it can sort, arrange, direct all of them where they need to be to keep everything moving fluidly. Think at a minimum of the phrase "gaper delays". People inherently slow down to look at the accident caused by some other human's incompetence or belligerence. That kind of human problem doesn't work well with a huge system involving most humans all moving in different places at different speeds.
It's the one case where, because it's a highly complex system of moving physical objects, the flow of it would be greatly improved by central automation. It's actually one of the very few cases I don't fully agree with your view above.... I agree human tasks should not be eliminated because they simply can be and it's more efficient. But this is one that the actual process has almost no benefit, has no economic reward (and lots of economic detriment), keeps people stressed and miserable, can injure, and human control can't run it as smoothly as automation can that knows the location and velocity of every other moving object within the system. All humans know is what's in front of their windshield....not the velocities intentions, turning points, turning radii of the other 600 vehicles around them on 5 nearby streets.
Edit: I'll add one more piece to it. Air travel and rail travel already have central management. It does involve humans in addition to computers automating the routing and positioning. Both of those forms always have had top down management of the whole system (though computerization is improving how close and how fast the objects can safely be). Imagine air travel without air traffic control sorting the positions, directions, speeds, and approach angles for each plane? Or rails without the operations towers controlling which train is on which track, when? You could see the fireballs from everywhere! Yet cars are just millions of autonomous moving objects with a single human controlling each one. At a minimum, if not automation, we need a control grid monitoring and directing each car, just like rails and planes have.
@Octane Here's the product page. More pictures there: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/6203629
I'd say they're not entirely fake, but just retouched/enhanced, to show the effect more clearly, but I've seen what even a relatively cheap prism can do, and the rainbow effects can actually be pretty clear.
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
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