tjpaudio

Things are going to be bad until people can go back to work, that much is certain. Whether there is a speedy bounce back after things are back to normal, or if we experience economic stagnation, is anyones guess. The metric to watch is m2, the federal reserve's measure of the velocity of money. Basically, a healthy economy in our system is one where money changes hands quickly. Saving money is bad for the economy, which is why the federal reserve has the mandate of maintaining steady positive inflation. Unfortunately, this availability of this measure is lagged a month or two. It could be that when people go back to work, they go on a spending spree after being cooped up for months, or it could be that pandemic scares people into being more fiscally conservative.

Same with WSJ, gym memberships, magazines, tv providers, cell phone providers... Lots of things.

While, yes, it is annoying whenever companies do this, it is interesting to me that OP's life has been insulary enough that this is shocking to them.

To anyone with a detailed understanding of the current limits of machine learning, this should be no surprise; unsupervised learning is far from solved and ML in its current state will always be plagued by the cat and mouse game of edge cases. The reality is the industry has decided to go this way anyways because it has a good profit outlook if you can get it to work, which is the only thing funding the endeavor. Consider two ways of going about automated transportation:

1) AI. The car independently makes decisions and drives itself. 2) Networks. The car communicates with a grid to make decisions.

Why did we go for #1? Well, thats easy, capitalism. Consider:

AI: - Company gets to own the intellectual property to form a temporary monopoly. - Easier to sidestep governments involvement. - No need to build large infrastructure

Networks: - Shared, less opportunity for monopoly formation. - Will need the government to cooperate. Governments are slows.

If I had to guess, we will eventually go the network route. The research used for AI will drive safety features and failsafes, but not the meet of it. Anyways, why accelerate a line of stopped cars one at a time with autonomous vehicles when you could accelerate the entire line of cars simultaneously with a networked setup?

Thanks for the post, tipped me off to the current rock-bottom ram prices to max out the ram of my desktop I built 5 years ago.

This article makes me think of the engineer at one of my past jobs that not only subsided on the free office poptarts, but also would butter them. I like to think I am a very open minded person but I had a hard time taking that guy seriously with anything.

While I agree with the author's sentiment that it hasn't really panned out for professional work, the title is not right. When the iPad came out, I dumped my Apple stock before the quarter where they would report on sales. The stock at the time was heavily forward valued on lots of iPad sales happening. Apple had failed to gain traction with all it's previous ultra-mobile computing products in the past, all of them marketed for productivity. Why would this one be different? Tablets were available in the stores, but they weren't selling. I figured it would be another case of the early adopters getting overly jazzed about a product nobody wanted.

I was wrong. The iPad saw adoption by the everyday consumer. Give it to the kids so they could play games, watch videos and stop bothering mom. Mom liked how simple it was to check her email. Etc. They created an entire new market. THAT, is not a failure.

Oh come on now, really? I have a piece of farmland in the middle of nowhere and let me tell you, even digging a hole out there is harder now than it was 100 years ago because of the things you find buried. Subways in 200+ year old cities? I can't even imagine. What do you do when your borer, designed for medium size rock and dirt runs into a 4ft wide brick and cement wall the city forgot about 40 years ago? This happens! Also, back 100 years ago we were talking brick, cement, some steel, and thats it. Today there is a vast array of engineered materials and machinery that didn't exist back then. It's not 1,000s of unskilled workers with shovels anymore, its hundreds with technology and mostly engineers.

Thats great and all, but also not queue theory.

Maybe less literal than you are thinking. A background in mathematics opens you to many lucrative careers.

Kind of a textbook description of queue theory if you were taking a stochastic processes class. If the author really is suggesting this for use in retail line situations, he is out of touch because... retail managers have no idea what queue theory is. If they did, they would be making much more money, and not working in retail. Staffing is more of a function of how many people you can get on the clock without getting yelled at by regional managers (who also do not know queue theory) for overstaffing.

I would write this author off, this is a rant and nothing more. "We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages..." Wages are certainly going up in places with low unemployment, its just not distributed as evenly as it was in prior history.

What I don't get about these scams is what is preventing them from working with the bank to reverse the fraudulent transfers? Sure I get that in these instances money is usually moving between the banking systems of two different countries, but just like we have extradition treaties, how is this not a thing?

There are like a million blog style posts for these basic intro to ML with pandas & python type thing. It's so prevalent that I am starting to wonder what the motivation is?

Expiration vs. freshness. When I buy coffee or anything at a supermarket, the expiration date is about as far into the future as you can get. When I order on amazon, it's always much shorter. Coffee is a great example. It's usually months fresher if I buy in store. Not an issue per-say but you are totally buying the end of life stuff.

It's been my experience that nearly all items with expirations on amazon are either near the end of their shelf life or past it. Coffee, candy, supplements, whatever. It's very obviously used as a dumping ground. It's crazy to me that this isn't common knowledge by now.