Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@ThanosReXXX Of course, but I mean, come on

@ThanosReXXX Oh shush Euro City boy who doesn't even do the daily rush hour living nightmare. Go play with your imaginary cars. . Don't you have any bus poles to dance on?

@NEStalgia - Yeah, I lived in Philly for a while, and got around the NEC while I was there. It was the most anxiety I’ve ever had concerning driving. Then we moved to Portland and people there are so... relaxed that NObody is in a hurry, just putting around.

I think the fleet model would work in our big cities, but the empty car situation I brought up was in reference to areas like here in the Midwest with vast rural areas. I’m in a city, but, in that fleet scenario, if I wanted to pack the kids up for the 45 minute drive to the middle of nowhere to visit my parents; odds are that automated vehicle isn’t bringing anyone back to the city hub after it drops us off, and it’s most likely not bringing anyone along on the way to pick us up a few hours later. That adds an entire round trip of just solo robot car.

@Octane - What, I see nothing strange about that picture. Looks totally legit to me.

Ugh. On hold right now with my old ISP. They still haven't sent me the return mailers for my router, and it's been about a week and a half since I was disconnected. I'm trying to avoid an equipment charge that'll come around thirty days after the disconnect date. Hopefully I have some luck here....

This is seriously a nightmare for someone who HATES talking on the phone, as well as robo-systems and campy, lame music to boot. >_<

Edit: The rep I finally got a hold of took down my account info and is going to do some investigating. There's a ticket in my account history that even proves I've been disconnected. Gotta wait for an email or call back. T_T

@ThanosReXXX So I've heard. I'm not one to frequent bars often though, so I'm not exactly familiar with a lot of the lingo and hand signs. XD

Oh boy I haven't been that active the last few days in the chit chat thread. Only thing I jumped in on was ninfan asking what ios and Android was 😜. Anything good going on?

I’ve been looking for a couple items for my house, and had a chance to stop by one of my favorite junk/antique shops for a quick browse today. I’m always taken aback by their enormous bedpan collection. I usually see at least a couple of them in any random antique shop, but this place has the motherload. All shapes, sizes and materials. I’ve always wondered if vintage bedpan collecting is a thing? Any vintage bedpan collectors out there, and if so, what got you interested? I know where you can find a LOT of them.

@NintendoByNature - A classic for sure. I’m so glad you stopped by when you did to field that one.

Mobile operating systems
Haunts
Bedpans
Automation
Vehicular use and ownership
Random science-esque toys

I’m caught up now

@HobbitGamer nice thanks. I feel like there should be a news channel dedicated to weekly updates in this thread. It would make for a much easier following if you miss a couple days.

I'm amazed you guys are able to keep up with this thread at all. I skip a weekend and feel like 29,324 different things happened that I missed. Always that very specific number.

Oh I rarely even read more than 10% of each page

Dang. Barring long absences, I'm starting to feel like an overachiever here....

@Octane Like I said: they enhanced the picture. The colors will still be there in real life, except they made them opaque instead of translucent, for marketing purposes: "ooh, look at the nice rainbow on that box, it really caught my eye"...

@NEStalgia Well, at least I don't have any of those semi-rural issues that you have. I can actually WALK to the center of the city, and be back home with all my FRESH vegetables, meats and fish, and all within a very reasonable time frame.

Besides: you REALLY wouldn't even want to have a car where I live, seeing as you'd be putting €4.75 per hour in the meter, to be allowed to park here. And the alternative is waiting for a resident's parking permit, which can take up to 1,5 years, because of data processing, paperwork and of course you're never first in line to get one, regardless of whether or not you already own a car that you'd still have to park somewhere while waiting for that permit to finally arrive...

No, I get around just fine, either on foot, by bike or by all the various means of public transport (bus, tram, subway, train and ferry).

@Tyranexx Well, in some countries, you'd stick up your thumb and index finger, to signal the bartender for two drinks, but obviously, that hand signal also looks a lot like imitating a gun...

Over here, people either just stick up their entire hand, which is actually meant to say "please get over here because I don't want to shout across the bar or have you misunderstand my hand signals", or if they do only use fingers, then the thumb always stays out, except for when you'd want five drinks. For two drinks, I'd stick up my index and middle finger (edit: kinda like an almost closed peace sign), so I wouldn't be doing the "pistol" sign...

@NEStalgia Yeah you may be right. Who knows, maybe automation is actually the next great leap in human civilization akin to moving from hunter-gather societies to subsistence farming. Even with the leaps in productivity the industrial revolution brought, labor essentially stayed the same with just as much effort/time being exerted (even though the output increased). Labor was in a sense still manual in way, since pressing a button or moving lever still requires a mental and perceptual understanding of the environment and the tool being operated.

With that above process being totally automated in addition to other everyday task like driving, it really would free up time for people to perform a variety of other task. I have no idea what the result of those task would be, and if this “free time” would create leaps in philosophy, science, and the arts. Or if this change in ones relationship to work will lead to the development of a new technocratic society, that will make my arguments surrounding economic planning and our relationship to the labor conditions meaningless.

@NotTelevision @NEStalgia I think automation is inevitable but I have not seen a proposed, viable, solution to what would happen to the millions of people who will be out of a job as it becomes more and more prevalent. In conversations and reading that I have done:

1. We end up with mass amounts of people just living off of government support because there is simply no need to have billions of workers in a society where almost all production is automated.

2. We fail to reach full automation because those disaffected revolt in a pseudo-Marxist style revolution against big corporations that are abandoning them.

We can't close pandora's box, as automation takes over, labor is made obsolete. And while there will likely always be a need for technicians and specialists I can't yet picture a way for society doesn't end up as distopia one or two...

@ThanosReXXX No rock out signs for you eh?

Handraising in the context you describe it is pretty universal. Come to think of it, I've heard that gesture is used in noisy bars too.

I'm not adverse to a good drink every once in awhile, but I prefer it in quieter environs that I'm more comfortable in.

@Heavyarms55 Yeah you bring up some great points here.

I think point 1 is a future where essentially a populace is living off of “universal basic income”, since jobs are limited to those who have high levels of education and can program AI.

Point 2 is also a possibility, since in an automated society the ownership class is even less incentivized to see the big picture in favor of short term gains. I say less incentivized because automation further distances owners from the employer/employee dichotomy. If the populace drops even further into debt and economic subsistence, than there is a risk of the whole structure collapsing on itself since even basic needs won’t be met.

Anyway, interesting concerns going further.

Highly unlikely.... The jobs you'd be replacing there wouldn't really have those sorts of people Are we going to mostly automate the machine building, running & maintenance?
Then, the more complicated ones become self-aware & start the war against humans?

@NotTelevision James Corey goes fairly deep into this idea. In the Expanse the future state of the Earth has something like half the population living off of something called "Basic Assistance". Basically minimal housing, food, and credits for a very limited amount of recreation/luxury. This is because the human population and technological automation has rendered human labor largely obsolete. In this setting people only work in roles that either need, or are preferred to have humans working in them. Anyone in the world can get an education, but they must first show their determination by working a service job for a set amount of time to show they want to work at all. Everyone else lives in tiny apartments, has a computer/TV and lives off of nutrient bars, tea, fake coffee and fake juice.

It's not an ideal system, but it's a future that was described as having been achieved rather than having to commit some kind of atrocity to cut back the population. Of course a massive war ends up wiping out roughly half the population anyway.

@BruceCM haha. There you go.

I have a friend studying machine learning and he tells me everyone ask him if has an internship at Skynet. Then I couldn’t help but press him about it even further 😄.

@Heavyarms55 That’s awesome. I just got into science fiction writers a few years ago and read a lot of the classics by Asimov, Le Guin, Dick, and Herbert. I can’t believe I didn’t hear about this writer. I’ll check out his books.