> I suggest you discuss this directly with archaeological faculty at a university, rather than making claims about dynamite - e.g. those who used dynamite were treasure hunters, for example, not archaeologists. Modern archaeologists do share your distress over most of what you've claimed.
My experience with academic archaeologists has been that they are pretty myopic on this. They like to dismiss past archaeologists as treasure hunters, but they are also eager to get their hands on all the data they can without much regard for the locals or for preservation. They usually justify this by pointing out that they aren't looking for treasure, in the traditional sense.
> My experience with academic archaeologists has been that they are pretty myopic on this.
I wonder if anyone has done a survey of views? There is some "do no harm", exploit non-destructive techniques, and reserve excavation for rescue archaeology. But seemingly a variety of other standards of care for site conservation and consumption.
Not my field, but one thing I've anecdotally seen underappreciated, is the rate of change in molecular biology, and thus eventually in molecular archaeology (aka bioarchaeology outside the US). Where over a mere decade or two, "can't imagine doing X" can change to "doing X costs years and millions", and then to "new trainee can casually do X in an afternoon", and even to "X is a field-deployable box". With a potential impact... for example, it turns out tooth calculus preserves DNA. So from millennia old teeth, one might sequence the owner, their mouth microbiome (with health information), and the species they've been eating. Grabbing a few soil samples might be ok if you're thinking pollen, but rather less so if a single tiny rat incisor might tell you so much. And proteomics is just getting started. And in addition to biology, there's improving imaging, inorganic materials analysis, bulk data management, robotics, and so on. Aggressive excavation, with 'DSLR, eyeball, sample bagging, brush, sift, and float', while largely unchanged for decades, seems rather more problematic if one looks ahead?
> Also, iPhones are extremely economical. My iPhone 6, which cost $749 at the time, is coming up to 3 years old.
Uh, what? I'm on my second ~$70 Android smart phone in eight years. It's a tad slow, but we're talking about literally a few seconds of waiting, nothing truly inconvenient. I have honestly never been impressed by anything a $600+ iPhone can do beyond what my phone can. The only drawback is that it isn't compatible with Apple group texts, but that is more than made up for by the fact that I truly don't care if my phone gets lost or breaks (I back up my files, so I'm only out 70 bucks). I have no idea why people spend so much money on phones.
> It's a tad slow, but weren't talking about literally a few seconds of waiting, nothing truly inconvenient.
A few seconds of waiting is not "truly inconvenient"? I suppose you're either a zen master, or not doing much with the phone (possibly because it's "a tad slow").
For me, the phone is something I use constantly during the day, in lots of brief bursts. Few seconds of lag may be the difference between me staying in or leaving the flow. It would often make a significant fraction of the length of a single interaction with a phone. Those kinds of frustrations add up for me over time. Avoiding all of that is worth the $700, if I can afford it.
That can be a choice. If you know every interaction with your phone is going to be an exercise in patience, you'll be less likely to whip it out for every random thought or notification you get.
You remind me of a friend who, as an excuse for having bought a mobile with shit battery, used to say: "well this way I don't look at it that much!!!". Bollocks.
"A few seconds of waiting is not "truly inconvenient"? I suppose you're either a zen master, or not doing much with the phone (possibly because it's "a tad slow")."
No, he just isn't possessed by the ridiculous "must go faster, must go faster" mindset that plagues most people today.
A website takes more than a second to load? ARGH it must be down, now my day is ruined!
Just relax, if a small delay is enough to make you "leave the flow", maybe you need to reevaluate your priorities. If your "flow" is interrupted that easily, maybe it wasn't particularly important, anyway.
> A website takes more than a second to load? ARGH it must be down, now my day is ruined!
Delays when fetching data on-line are understandable. Delays for simple off-line stuff are not. Especially unexpected delays - as in, the stuff used to work fast (in the past, or on my previous phone), but now it lags. Hell, I had a crap smartphone that liked to hang for 30+ seconds when trying to answer a phone call.
> No, he just isn't possessed by the ridiculous "must go faster, must go faster" mindset that plagues most people today.
You see, time, not money, is the most valuable thing a human being has - because it's hard-capped. Each of us has a choice on how to spend it; I choose not to let crappy consumer hardware waste mine when I can afford it.
Yes, I did. But then I also saw similar issues on other people's phones (both crappy ones and good, but _old_ ones - the latter probably can be blamed on flash degradation).
I would rather use a feature phone than a "slow" smartphone. Responsiveness shouldn't really be a extra feature, at least not for the basic apps(contacts, notes etc).
The entire computing world revolves around "must go faster, must go faster". How likely are you to stay on a website that takes a few seconds for each action? You're not. EVERYONE optimizes for it. Every 100MS of latency, Amazon loses 1% of revenue, and that's only ONE TENTH of a second. http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/radar-theme-web-ops.html
You may have the patience of a saint, but the majority of the world does not.
If two to three seconds of waiting (that's on the high end, and only for certain apps) is breaking your flow, you need to work on your attention span. That's ADHD territory.
Edit: For that matter, interacting with your phone for a few seconds at a time is probably an attention deficit issue in and of itself. I admit that it's common, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
Or, any other IM program (including text messages). Or getting directions. Or checking departure time of a bus. Or switching a song that's playing. Or turning my Hue lights on/off. Or checking my account balance. Or paying with the phone.
Each of those actions should take no more than couple of seconds (occasionally, a couple dozen). And it can, if your phone is not lagging out after lockscreen or when trying to load an on-screen keyboard.
All these things work just fine on these older devices. The pauses the original message mentioned are mostly encountered when starting or switching between applications. Once the application is running things work as intended. I use Telegram on that Motorola Defy I mentioned, no problems. It runs navigation apps (Navigon, OsmAnd~) without problems. It takes photo's of reasonable quality, those photo's can be edited on the device. I use it to play music on the device itself using Dsub (a Subsonic client) or Apollo, to control remote players using MPDroid (which controls mpd (music player daemon) on remote devices). It plays video from the likes of Youtube and Vimeo just fine. I use it to read books and publications, no problems. I even use it as a telephone every now and then...
It can take a few seconds to switch between any of these apps, especially when there are several of them running in the background. Would a new device be faster? Sure it would. Will I buy a new device sometime in the future? Sure, when this device kicks the bucket or another device shows up which offers the same feature set (good performance (compared to current devices), good battery, waterproof and sorta-shockproof yet still looks like a normal device instead of some prop from a B-movie). Do I feel like I'm missing out on something by using a 6 year old phone? No, I do not.
Well, if you use a 6-years-old phone and it works for you, then by all means, stick to it. I would, too.
In my case it's not about chasing the newest features and highest resolutions - it's about certainty of getting a quality product. I no longer want to risk getting a shitty, laggy phone, or a phone that turns into one after few months. I consider it not worth the frustration it causes in daily usage.
> It's a tad slow, but we're talking about literally a few seconds of waiting, nothing truly inconvenient.
Few seconds waiting for what? There's a big difference between a few seconds waiting for an app to load and, say, for it to register that you've tapped a key on its on-screen keyboard.
There's not much to understand why people spend a fortune on phones every few years. These days it's more because of the status of owning the latest and greatest device (nothing wrong with that as people are entitled to do whatever they tf they want to do). Like everything else really.
What are those different needs? What do the top end phones do that the mid range phones do not, other than take better photos? Battery life is comparable, screen size is comparable, they run the same apps. I'm struggling to think of a single reason (other than the camera) why people buy high end phones anymore. There used to be a big difference in quality, but that gap has pretty much evaporated.
That's a non-answer. I'm asking people who buy high end phones why they pay extra. A phone with faster processor and more memory can't be the only reason people pay extra for these devices, which is all I'd get from comparing specs.
I don't mean to sound utterly petty, but most security threats these days seem to be external to the device you are using.
Yes it sucks when a windows xp machine catches a massive virus from a random website.
But here I am with an iphone 5 that cost me $xxx, it gets updates that slow the phone down and break a lot of functionality, and my ssn isn't keylogged from my device, it's just leaked by someone else!
Now luckily my passwords aren't being keylogged but- wait! damnit!
> most security threats these days seem to be external to the device you are using.
It depends. From the top of my head, the smartphone is the most common second factor, so an attacker that's on your smartphone may be able to log onto most services that have 2FA. Or alternatively, they can DoS your own attempts to log into these services by deleting SMS, or just sending the phone into a reboot loop. (Of course, "targeted DoS" is not in everyone's threat model. But still, I have more peace of mind using a dedicated TAN generator device instead of my phone.)
The risk/outcome - that the taxi supply becomes responsive to taxi demand and licenses/medallions become worthless - has existed as long as medallions have. While the risk is hard to forecast and thus price, it's not new. Investors succeed by pricing risk and investors who bought in 2013 significantly mis-priced this risk, so criticism seems reasonable.
Lots of people want to be drones so that they can feed their families. Ideally, they could feed their families without being drones, but your saying that they should be glad to lose their drone jobs without gaining a different means of support is simply cruel.
Isn't it equally cruel to talk like people want to be drones?
Nobody want to be drones. They are forced into being drones.
Simply keeping those jobs around, merely as an exchange of blood labor for basic living support, is not a mercy to the people you are trying to help. No, it is slaver's talk. It signals a greater failure of the social security network, or the dysfunction of redistribution of wealth to benefit the general public, that people cannot keep basic living standard without such compromise.
> Isn't it equally cruel to talk like people want to be drones?
Well, I didn't append all the qualifiers I could have because I assumed that my comment would be read in a reasonable way.
Right now, those drone jobs are the difference between eating and not eating for a lot of people. I obviously want to see the eating problem solved before the drone job problem is solved. Until then, saying that these people should be happy to lose their drone jobs is cruel. I encourage you to go present your theory to some of those drones. Tell them about how they can cast off the chains of their slavery and be free to starve.
Talk about failures of the social safety net is nice (and I agree, as far as that goes), but it's just talk. Talk is not going to fix the social safety net. These are real lives that depend on this issue.
Difference is, in this case, nobody loses their jobs and no one is starving. What you are saying, is the loss of future drone jobs. Should it be that case, we should never automate agriculture ever, since it had been the major sector of employment for many many centuries.
I think in this article's case, it is good automation, not the aggressive kind, so I want to know why people would lament over the loss of the those non-existed shitty jobs.
First of all, the "no layoffs" claim can easily be achieved through attrition, as covered elsewhere in this thread. That means that someone would have been hired to replace a departing worker but now isn't getting that job.
Second, even aside from attrition, there are absolutely people who would have wanted the jobs that the robots are doing. Some of those people would have wanted those jobs because it would have been their only option. I would rather they had other options (via a social safety net, presumably), but that's not the world we live in right now.
At this point, I suspect you are intentionally reading me in the worst sense you can manage. I think I have adequately explained my position, and if you really want to continue this discussion, I encourage you to go back and re-read my comments. Engage the statements I made or ask questions about the points you don't understand. Otherwise, have a good one.
Some people really do just want to be drones and are perfectly happy going in and doing a simple mundane task over and over.
If anything, this last election should have exposed this. There is a whole cohort of people out there that feel they've been slighted and left behind because of the shift in manufacturing. They feel like they should still be able to go in and be a drone and get paid well enough to raise a family.
Only a very tiny portion of the global population is in a position to own productive capital (or, at least, enough to support themselves). Even if the portion were higher, though, you are basically just advocating rent-seeking as the solution to job losses caused by automation, and that strikes me as dubious at best.
There's a lot more to sexism (and other bigotry) than simple economics.
Presumably, we have all had coworkers who weren't great workers, weren't very bright, etc., but managed to get ahead by schmoozing and playing politics. Their brighter and harder-working colleagues who didn't play that game didn't progress up the ladder as quickly. Bigotry presents a similar issue, but on an even larger scale.
You clearly don't have experience in law firms. White shoe Wall Street lawyers, for example, generally can't just hang their own shingle and do corporate M&A as a solo practitioner.
Law firms get started somehow. None spontaneously appeared. Besides, what better way to prove one's worth than start a competitor and kick the former employer's behind?
That last link is the American Bar Association explaining how to do it.
(Experience in law firms may actually work against you there. In big companies I've worked for, none of the people working there had any idea how to start their own business, and would try to convince others it was impossible.)
Islamic banks are issuing loans without interest to this day. They have a clever fee schedule though, and I'm not sure it works out any differently for the borrower at the end of the day.
There was a Planet Money episode [1] where a bank setup a no-interest loan to a Muslim family because Islamic law prohibits charging interest.
In the end it was basically just a workaround that was effectively the same as charging interest and that same Muslim family ended up taking a conventional loan when they moved instead of an "Islamic-compliant" mortgage because it was a lot easier.
You joke it, but it's a major problem that our tech for very stable WORM media has lagged behind demand.
Our use of data has grown so much faster than our network capacity (and indeed, it seems like we're going to hit a series of physical laws and practical engineering constraints here). "Data has gravity" but the only way to "sustainable" hold a non-trivial volume of data for 20 years right now is to run a data center with a big dht that detects faults and replicates data.
For certain millennials, crypto-currency already seems to hold the role that gold does for certain baby boomers. I would expect that phenomenon to grow during a bear market.
Yeah there have been quantifiable "bubble bursts" multiple times.
It's like multiple, concussive "Stock and awe" campaigns where the price has plummeted by $600 per coin. Everytime that happens, the subreddit for /r/bitcoin posts the national suicide hotline and the price rallies in 4 months.
My experience with academic archaeologists has been that they are pretty myopic on this. They like to dismiss past archaeologists as treasure hunters, but they are also eager to get their hands on all the data they can without much regard for the locals or for preservation. They usually justify this by pointing out that they aren't looking for treasure, in the traditional sense.