Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[y66]

From Self-Driving Trucks May Be Closer Than They Appear by Conor Dougherty:

 

Starsky’s ultimate plan, of course, is to eliminate Mr. Runions’s job. But they do not want him to be out of one. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, Starsky’s 27-year-old chief executive, foresees using self-driving technology to replace long-haul drivers on freeways, but having people like Mr. Runions navigate at either end of the trip with remote control consoles that look like an arcade racing game.

 

Drivers would go off to work in offices and might spend their day driving trucks through the last few miles of several different routes in several different cities before heading home for dinner.

 

“One driver can drive 10 to 30 trucks per day,” Mr. Seltz-Axmacher said.

 

The March of Automation

 

Starsky’s vision of a remote operation is unique. But the basic idea — having trucks drive themselves on highways and letting human drivers take over in complicated city environments — is something of an industry consensus.

 

“One of the big misconceptions about self-driving technology is that it is going to emerge and be able to drive all the time in all circumstances,” said Alden Woodrow, the product manager for Uber’s self-driving truck unit.

 

As part of their partnership, Embark, Ryder and Electrolux are conducting what amounts to elaborate dry runs to imagine what self-driving-truck routes will look like. The runs start with human drivers leaving an Electrolux warehouse in El Paso and driving to the edge of the city, where they hitch the trailer to one of Embark’s autonomous trucks.

 

From there the truck drives itself for 650 highway miles (with a safety driver in tow) to Ontario, Calif., where the Embark drivers transfer their trailer to another Ryder driver, who drives the final few miles to one of Electrolux’s California warehouses.

 

“It’s a mirror of what we would do if there weren’t a driver inside,” said Mr. Rodrigues, the Embark chief.

This looks increasingly like a packet switching network optimization problem in which goods traverse many nodes having different service capabilities and costs, not just a self driving technology problem. No doubt it has always looked this way to logistics experts and guys like Jeff Bezos.

[y66]

From My visit to an Amazon bookstore by Tyler Cowen:

 

My commentary here is late to the party, but I had not visited a branch before. Here are my impressions, derived from the Columbus Circle outlet in Manhattan:

 

1. It is a poorly designed store for me, most of all because it does not emphasize new releases. I feel I am familiar with a lot of older titles, or I went through a more or less rational process of deciding not to become familiar with them. Their current popularity, as measured say by Amazon rankings, does not cause me to reassess those judgments. For me, aggregate Amazon popularity has no real predictive power, except perhaps I don’t want to buy books everyone liked. “A really smart person says to consider this again,” however, would revise my prior estimates.

 

2. For me, the very best bookstore and bookstore layout is Daunt, in London, Marylebone High St. You are hit by a blast of what is new, but also selected according to intellectual seriousness rather than popularity. You can view many titles at the same time, because they use the “facing out” function just right for their new arrivals tables. Some of the rest of the store is arranged “by country,” much preferable to having say China books in separate sections of history, travel, biography, and so on.

 

3. I am pleased that fiction is given so much space toward the front of the store. I do not see this as good for me, but it is a worthwhile counterweight to the ongoing tendency of American book markets to reward non-fiction, or at least what is supposed to be non-fiction.

 

4. I have mixed feelings about the idea of all books facing outward. On the positive side, books not facing outward tend to be ignored. On the downside, this also limits the potential for hierarchicalization through visual display. All books facing outwards is perhaps a bit too much like no books facing outwards.

 

Overall I am struck by how internet commerce is affecting Christie’s and Sotheby’s in a broadly similar fashion. The auction houses used to put out different genres, such as Contemporary, European Painting, 20th Century, and so on, for 3-4 day windows, and then they would display virtually everything up for auction. Now they have a single big display, with highlights from each area, and the rest viewable on-line. That display then shows for about three weeks. Like Amazon, they are opting to emphasize what is popular and to let on-line displays pick up the tails and niches. In all cases, that means less turnover in the displays. That is information-rich for infrequent visitors, who can take in more at once, but information-poor in relative terms for frequent visitors. As a somewhat infrequent visitor to auction houses, I gain, but for bookstores I would prefer they cater to the relatively frequent patrons.

 

5. I am most worried by the prominent center table at the entrance, which presents “Books with 4.8 Amazon stars or higher.” I saw a book on mixology, a picture book of Los Angeles, a Marvel comics encyclopedia, a book connected to the musical Hamilton, and a series of technique-oriented cookbooks, such as Harold McGee, a very good manual by the way. Isabel Wilkerson was the closest they had to “my kind of intelligent non-fiction.” Neil Hilbon represented poetry, of course his best-known book does have a five-star average, fortunately “…these poems are anything but saccharine.”

 

Unfortunately, the final message is that Amazon will work hard so that controversial books do not receive Amazon’s highest in-store promotions. Why not use software to measure the quality of writing or maybe even thought in a book’s reviews, and thereby assign it a new grade?: “Here are the books the smart people chose to write about”?

 

6. I consider myself quite pro-Amazon, still to me it feels dystopic when an attractive young saleswoman says so cheerily to (some) customers: “Thank you for being Prime!”

 

7. I suspect the entire store is a front to display and sell gadgets, at least I hope it is.

 

8. I didn’t buy anything.

My favorite local bookstore is Politics & Prose in DC. It's a half block from Comet Ping Pong which is a fun place to meet friends for a light dinner before catching occasional author events. P&P staffers have a good track record of helping me find books that the youngsters in my family enjoy. I always buy something. :)

[RedSpawn]

http://www.ajc.com/news/local/georgia-sheriff-facing-charges-over-school-search-suspended/l8WGCqUBtXuOloz5O1eYDO/

 

http://investigations.blog.ajc.com/2017/10/18/ga-sheriff-in-massive-drug-search-faces-new-trouble-his-own-son/

 

http://www.albanyherald.com/da-sheriff-interrupted-son-s-gbi-interview/article_6c7f9be0-d178-5f2e-a8da-905fb19be590.html

 

What the hell? Is this a lost episode from The Dukes of Hazzard?

 

So is the U.S. Constitution now just "a thing"? Thank goodness the Sherriff violated federal civil laws so the state governor can't circle the wagons and just sweep this huge abuse of power and the U.S. Constitution under the rug.

 

This is out of the governor's span of control. That sheriff screwed up BIG TIME and his Governor knows it!

 

This Sheriff has the presence of mind to barge in and stop the Georgia Bureau of Investigation from interviewing his underage son about marijuana possession charges without his parental consent; yet, the same sheriff never allowed the 900 students who he groped and put on lockdown during his surprise drug search at a high school to call their parents AND his son is conveniently missing from school the day of the unannounced drug search.

 

JUST WOW!

[Winstonm]

Self driving? Where is my steering wheel?

[RedSpawn]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/11/13/roy-moore-threatens-lawsuit-over-sex-abuse-story-threatens-his-u-s-senate-campaign/857598001/

 

Why am I not surprised that Gloria Allred is behind a civil case lawsuit against Former Alabama judge Roy Moore for a sexual assault that occurred FORTY years ago?

 

This case is too old and moldy to have legal merit.

[y66]

From Sujatha Gidla on being an Ant amongst the Elephants

 

Tyler Cowen: You mentioned a moment ago you had, broadly speaking, a Marxist view. As I’m sure you know, there’s a whole intellectual movement of pro-capitalist Dalits. Chandra Bhan Prasad would be one of them.

 

Sujatha Gidla: Ahhh, God! [snorts]

 

Cowen: What do you think of them and where do you differ?

 

Gidla: That particular person, Chandra Bhan Prasad, he makes me puke.

 

Cowen: Tell us why.

 

Gidla: He was in the same Radical Students Union as I was, even though much older than me. He went to JNU , which is the highest university in India for humanities. He studied something or other, sociology or something. The knowledge that he gained from being in RSU, Radical Students Union, and what he studied made him a good person to defect and become a mouthpiece for Dalit entrepreneurship and Dalit capitalism.

 

Dalit capitalists, yeah, there are a few. There were none before. There are a few. I think that they were given some kind of, I don’t know, perk to become capitalists so that people won’t say, “Oh, how come you’re so casteist? You don’t have any Dalit capitalists?” But Dalit capitalists are very, very much lower compared to other capitalists from other castes.

 

Cowen: If you think of yourself as a Marxist, and you came to one of the most capitalist societies for freedom, is that in some way a contradiction in your worldview or you think it all makes sense?

 

Gidla: No, it’s not. As I said, Marxism means class versus class, not nation versus nation. In India, there are poor people and rich people. And in America, there are poor people and rich people. Why is it some sort of defection if I came here? I came here not to become a capitalist.

 

On writing and not writing

 

Cowen: You’ve had two jobs here, at least two jobs. One, you worked in the financial sector for the Bank of New York for a while, I believe until 2009. Now you’re a conductor of subway trains for the MTA in New York City. Which of those two jobs have you enjoyed more?

 

Gidla: I would say MTA job. In Bank of New York, I was making much more money. Even in 2009, I was making almost three times what I make in MTA. Then I have unlimited sick leave and personal days and five weeks’ vacation and stock options and things like that.

But the people are really so boring and uncosmopolitan. They are such narrow-minded people. I had this figurine of Darwin on my desk, and this guy was glaring at me because he’s a Catholic.

 

Cowen: Charles Darwin?

 

Gidla: Yeah. We’re not like that in MTA. We are very open and very passionate. We are much more cosmopolitan. We discuss things openly and uninhibitedly, and yet at the same time, we don’t hurt each other.

 

Cowen: You wrote your book, Ants among Elephants, while you had this full-time job as a subway conductor for the MTA. You wrote it during the evening? Or what kind of hours did you have? When did you write?

 

How did you do it?

 

Gidla: Actually, I didn’t do it; that’s why it took 10 years. Then, I grew up in a family where there are always 25 people milling around in the house. We were like sitting on the steps of the house trying to concentrate. I never sat at a desk.

 

Now, it is how I work. I cannot work at a desk in silence and in my privacy. I work while commuting on the train, and I used to work during breaks at work, like that.

 

Cowen: And the break, you’re literally on the train, right? You’re not in an office.

 

Gidla: No, no, no. In the beginning . . . the beginners are called extra-extra, meaning that they’re sitting there, and if somebody got sick or they have to go home, they will jump in and take their job.

 

So half the time, we’re just sitting around for eight hours and going home, and half the time, we’re taking over for somebody else. I always used to carry a computer with me, and one of the names I have is Computer Girl, apart from Hindu Conductor.

 

Cowen: What is it about the MTA that attracts so many interesting people?

 

Gidla: It’s very multiracial workforce. Not so much from Western Europe, but all the other colored countries and Eastern Europe people, they are there. They bring in their own experience, and they talk about it in crew rooms. It’s just more entertaining.

 

For me, the thing is that I was working in Bank of New York writing programs, and I had no idea what it was I was writing programs for. I should have known, but I didn’t really care.

 

Now, I know what I’m doing is how it’s affecting. We’re taking people from point A to point B, where they want to go. I know for sure that what I’m doing is very useful, and that makes me feel self-confident.

[Zelandakh]

From Sujatha Gidla on being an Ant amongst the Elephants

For those not in the know, Dalit, meaning "oppressed", is approximately the modern term for what used to be called Untouchables.

 

I have to say I personally found that Ms Gidla did not come across very well in this interview but I see that she gets generally positive reports so it is probably just the way her past with Mr Prasad comes across. Has anyone read her book? Would be interested in hearing a review...

[y66]

I enjoyed this story by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I admire his clear vision, sense of humor and determination to be a good parent.

[kenberg]

I enjoyed this story by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I admire his clear vision, sense of humor and determination to be a good parent.

 

It's amusing, but lately I have come to wonder whether I am nuts or it is everyone else. If my parents ever had any worries that I was becoming a masculine child, they never shared this concern with me.Nor did they try to steer me in a different direction. When one of the grandkids was about the age of the author's son, he was truly impressive in his ability to spot a working truck a block or two away and insist we go to it and watch what was being done. It's wired in.This does not always follow along expected gender lines though. My younger daughter, when she was 8 or so, loved to run off into the woods and capture snakes. Large snakes. I didn't try to change that either. She knew a lot and never got bit. Or never told me if she did.

 

The author's son likes Batman. I had a huge collection of Batman comic books. People find the damnedest things to worry about. And no, I didn't spend any time thinking about what Batman and Robin might be up to in the Batcave. I recall a time when parents got into some mass hysteria fretting over the possibilities. We go through these crazy swings. I also liked Wonder Woman. Maybe he should buy his son some Wonder Woman.

[y66]

Ha! I don't think Nguyen is overthinking this, just paying attention really, but yeah, kids will find their way which I suspect he totally gets. I remember Max Brooks talking about his old man, Mel Brooks, at an author event several years ago in DC that went something like:

 

Mel: Hey son.

 

Max: Hey dad.

 

Mel: Do you need money.

 

Max: No thanks dad. I'm fine.

 

Mel: Good son. Good.

 

End of verbal interaction for the day. Max did not say if they ever talked about Thanksgiving, Batman or Wonder Woman. It looks like he turned out okay and quite capable of making his way in the world which is a pretty good test of parenting. In this interview with Terry Gross he says "You have to remember that my father came from a generation where if you put a roof over your head and food on the table, you're father of the year. My dad also didn't have a dad. My father's father died of tuberculosis when my father was 2 years old. So this sort of new-agey notion that a dad is also a pal, that was not in my house. What I did get from my father was stability. And I'm very grateful for that". I have a feeling Max's mom had something to do with that too.

[kenberg]

This resonates. I think I will skip the details.

[Aberlour10]

450 000 000 USD for a "maybe-Da-Vinci" lower quality, strange days have found us.

[Winstonm]

450 000 000 USD for a "maybe-Da-Vinci" lower quality, strange days have found us.

 

450 million here, 450 million there, and before you know it you're talking about spending real money.

[RedSpawn]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2017/11/22/terminix-fined-pesticide-use/888444001/

 

Is it just me or does that $9.2 million fine seems kinda low?

 

Hmmm.

[Zelandakh]

Is it just me or does that $9.2 million fine seems kinda low?

You read down to the penultimate paragraph, right?

[RedSpawn]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nbc-fires-matt-lauer-over-sexual-misconduct-allegation/ar-BBFUkZa?OCID=ansmsnnews11

 

It appears that news organizations are also using "sexual harassment" to clean house of its older veteran reporters that are costing too much money in their new streamlined cost structure.

 

I am not suggesting that NBC shouldn't take this allegation against Matt Lauer seriously; however, the removal of so many veteran reporters from a variety of news establishments leads me to believe that this is also a race to the bottom in terms of cost control for the cottage industry of "NEWS AS INFOTAINMENT".

[y66]

From Tom Whitwell's 52 things I learned in 2017:

 

One Friday in May 2017, Solar panels in the UK generated more energy than all eight of our nuclear power stations [Andrew Ward @ FT]

 

A Norwegian fertiliser company is building a $25m battery-powered unmanned robotic cargo ship to carry chemicals from a plant in Herøya to ports in Larvik and Norvik, replacing 40,000 lorry journeys a year. [Adam Minter at Bloomberg]

 

Dana Lewis from Alabama built herself an artificial pancreas from off-the-shelf parts. Her design is open source, so people with diabetes can hack together solutions more quickly than drug companies. [Lee Roop]

[y66]

From DeepMind’s AlphaZero crushes chess

 

20 years after DeepBlue defeated Garry Kasparov in a match, chess players have awoken to a new revolution. The AlphaZero algorithm developed by Google and DeepMind took just four hours of playing against itself to synthesise the chess knowledge of one and a half millennium and reach a level where it not only surpassed humans but crushed the reigning World Computer Champion Stockfish 28 wins to 0 in a 100-game match. All the brilliant stratagems and refinements that human programmers used to build chess engines have been outdone, and like Go players we can only marvel at a wholly new approach to the game.

From The future is here – AlphaZero learns chess by Albert Silver

 

12/6/2017 – Imagine this: you tell a computer system how the pieces move — nothing more. Then you tell it to learn to play the game. And a day later — yes, just 24 hours — it has figured it out to the level that beats the strongest programs in the world convincingly! DeepMind, the company that recently created the strongest Go program in the world, turned its attention to chess, and came up with this spectacular result.

If Karpov had been a chess engine, he might have been called AlphaZero. There is a relentless positional boa constrictor approach that is simply unheard of. Modern chess engines are focused on activity, and have special safeguards to avoid blocked positions as they have no understanding of them and often find themselves in a dead end before they realize it. AlphaZero has no such prejudices or issues, and seems to thrive on snuffing out the opponent’s play. It is singularly impressive, and what is astonishing is how it is able to also find tactics that the engines seem blind to.

[gwnn]

Kitten Academy Live Stream:

[Winstonm]

Paramount, California, birthplace of the Zamboni.

[RedSpawn]

I'm in love. . .

 

 

A picture is worth more than 1,000 words. And this, ladies and gentleman, is where we are with our financial industry.

[y66]

From How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America:

 

Sean Illing: Who are the baby boomers?

 

Bruce Gibney: The baby boomers are conventionally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. But I focus on the first two-thirds of boomers because their experiences are pretty homogeneous: They were raised after the war and so have no real experience of trauma or the Great Depression or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they never experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during war time and that helped produce the New Deal.

 

But it’s really the white middle-class boomers who exemplify all the awful characteristics and behaviors that have defined this generation. They became a majority of the electorate in the early ’80s, and they fully consolidated their power in Washington by January 1995. And they’ve basically been in charge ever since.

 

Sean: So how have they broken the country?

 

Bruce: Well, the damage done to the social fabric is pretty self-evident. Just look around and notice what’s been done. On the economic front, the damage is equally obvious, and it trickles down to all sorts of other social phenomena. I don’t want to get bogged down in an ocean of numbers and data here (that’s in the book), but think of it this way: I’m 41, and when I was born, the gross debt-to-GDP ratio was about 35 percent. It’s roughly 103 percent now — and it keeps rising.

 

The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow money without any concern for future burdens. They’ve spent virtually all our money and assets on themselves and in the process have left a financial disaster for their children.

 

We used to have the finest infrastructure in the world. The American Society of Civil Engineers thinks there’s something like a $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure in deferred maintenance. It’s crumbling, and the boomers have allowed it to crumble. Our public education system has steadily degraded as well, forcing middle-class students to bury themselves in debt in order to get a college education.

 

Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, which they’ve done almost nothing to solve. But even if we want to be market-oriented about this, we can think of the climate as an asset, which has degraded over time thanks to the inaction and cowardice of the boomer generation. Now they didn’t start burning fossil fuels, but by the 1990s the science was undeniable. And what did they do? Nothing.

 

Sean: So what’s your explanation for the awfulness of the boomers? What made them this way?

 

Bruce: I think there were a number of unusual influences, some of which won't be repeated, and some of which may have mutated over the years. I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it.

 

This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.

 

Sean: I’ve always seen the boomers as a generational trust-fund baby: They inherited a country they had no part in building, failed to appreciate it, and seized on all the benefits while leaving nothing behind.

 

Bruce: I think that’s exactly right. They were born into great fortune and had a blast while they were on top. But what have they left behind?

[RedSpawn]

From How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America:

The whole federal debt burden is conspiracy theory cookery. We in America can deficit spend with reckless abandon. Arithmetic and market fundamentals and analytics are highly overrated in rhetoric.

 

America is not heavily burdened with debt. Think of it as carefully constructed leveraging of risks. LOL.

[kenberg]

From How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America:

 

 

 

So I was born in 1939, which is just outside his 1940-1965 window of sociopaths. I really get tired of people who get their kicks calling other people names.

I did a quick google search and Wikipedia quotes Kirkus Reviews on his book:

"Kirkus Reviews called the book an "endless, broadest-possible-brush harangue" that has "some points, all of which would have been better made without assigning damning agency to them: of course health care has to be restructured, and of course taxes have to be raised if the nation is to escape insolvency. His prescriptions on those fronts are sound, though some are surely controversial."^[20]"

^{He can call me a sociopath and I imagine I can find a few names to call him. This helps how? It sells books I guess.}

[Zelandakh]

So I was born in 1939, which is just outside his 1940-1965 window of sociopaths.

That makes you a Silent, Ken. Wiki gives a pretty good listing with links if you want to read up on any of them. It should of course be fairly clear to anyone that these boundaries are highly artificial though and therefore not to read too much into it. As you write, this Gibney guy has to sell his book. He is a venture capitalist by trade so he probably knows how to talk a good game. That said, there is some degree of truth in what he writes on a financial level, not that a generation are sociopaths of course but that the people born after the end of WWI took a disproportionate amount leaving comparatively less for future generations. He is, like me, a Generation X child - I guess it is expected of us to hate Baby Boomers somehow. He just takes the whole thing too far.