partial_accumen

Parrot also needs to learn how to say “what will be the completion date on that item?”

I’ve always seen their endgame as Vance taking over sometime during Trumps term. What I never considered until this moment is that with control of both sides of the Legislature, the GOP would also be able to pick whomever they wanted as a replacement for Vance in the VP spot. Zero primary election vote. Zero general election by the people, just the GOP leadership with a blank check to put whatever monster in the Executive branch without anything stopping them beyond the Constitutional limits that they be American born, be at least 35 years old, and having living in the USA for 14 years or more.

What monster would the GOP pick to be Vance’s VP?

My go-to is “Why do you think that is an okay thing to say?”

Yes but all that money is part of the marketing arm of his portfolio under the legal entity Lisa’s Castle LLC, which is incorporated in the Seychelles, and all funds still on deposit in Seychelles Commercial Bank. As long as he doesn’t repatriate more than $13,850 back to his home in New York City, he stays within the legal bounds of not having to pay income tax.

Lets be real. The Punisher is a vigilante mass murder. He’s not a monster that doesn’t pay his taxes to support a free and fair society.

Possibly not a crime.

TIL The Punisher’s annual income is below the Standard Deduction (in 2023 that’s $13,850).

I wonder if all those “alpha males” that put the Punisher Logo on their trucks know that he lives below the poverty line.

That’s an interesting bit of info I never knew. Thank you for sharing that.

What’s the opposite of forced abortions? Because given the history of the CCP that could be where this is heading.

Decree 770

“Decree 770 was a decree of the communist government of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, signed in 1967. It restricted abortion and contraception, and was intended to create a new and large Romanian population.”

"To enforce the decree, society was strictly controlled. Contraceptives were removed from sale and all women were required to be monitored monthly by a gynecologist.[3]: 6  Any detected pregnancies were followed until birth. The secret police kept a close eye on hospital procedures. "

To my complete lack of surprise, Russia is seems to be a freer country for free software developers than the United States.

What does the United States have to do with this? Since when is Finland part of the United States? Linus Torvalds is Finnish.

Someday soon I’m sure we’ll get that paperless office.

This one I’ve seen pretty darn realized. My last “in office” job was more than 5 years ago, but while there were printers available they were not used often. Nobody would hand you a piece of paper with any exception you’d have to keep it safe or for any period of time, and even then you’d also have a digital copy sent to you. Then and now, I still keep an notepad, but its only for things I need to remember for less than 24 hours or that get entered electronically very shortly after.

This was a fortune 100 company too, not some Mom-and-pop office.

Back in the day (before third party hardware to do this) the only way to get Dreamcast online was to Dialup or the very rare and expensive broadband adapter.

Seeing as the Dreamcast shipped with a dial up modem, it was possble to set up your PC (also with a modem) and with a a couple of resistors, make a type of “dial up crossover cable”. You would set up your PC to “answer” the call from the Dreamcast, then route the traffic to the PCs broadband connection. Zero phone line needed!

Someone needs to invent a waterproof suction-mounted device dedicated to recording actual shower thoughts.

No one needs to hear me butchering Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” off key while humming through the verse because I forgot the lyrics only to belt out the chorus at full volume because that’s mostly what I remember of the song. And no, I don’t do that dance at the same time (because I don’t know the steps).

You’d think they’d have learned from the cold war, but I guess not.

Well, many parts of them have. Eastern Europe, formerly under Soviet conrol, is now firmly in market economies. Armenia has left the CSTO (Russia’s wish.com NATO), and Ukraine famously kicked out its Russia puppet leader. All of these were part of the Soviet Union or under their control before.

Most laws aren’t retroactive. If you do the thing before it’s illegal, then you skated by. That could very easily be the answer here, especially as most all the physical automation is barely existent. If a company deploys now, they don’t pay the tax, but they will when they upgrade models.

You’ll need to provide your definition of “physical automation” for the purposes of your argument. As it stands that is NOT clear, which is part of the quagmire of all the Automation Tax approaches.

As to code automation, same rules apply. Excel macros get by, but I would apply the tax on companies that replace white collar jobs via SaaS or other applications as their core businesses model,

What does this mean? If a company is still running on-prem MS Exchange servers for company email, then the law passes, then the company switches to Office365 for email instead, does your law hit that company with an Automation tax? If so, how would the tax be applied? Amount of spend on Office365? Amount spent on salaries of former MS Exchange administrators? How long would the tax apply? A year? Forever?

What I’m also seeing is that all encumbant companies (shielded from the automation tax because they already put automation in place) would have an advantage forever against existing companies trying to make automation changes (and being hit with the tax).

Another loophole I see is companies completely liquidating or selling to a newly formed company so that there are “no jobs lost to automation, because this company from day 1 has always used automation”.

or for that line of buisness for vendors that do a lot of things. It would have to be refined as to where you draw the line, but you could.

I don’t know what this means.

Can you give a concrete example of your Automation tax? Situation before your law goes into place, the law passing, then the Automation tax a company would pay when they make a specific change in your example?

The automation tax that gates/etc proposed to fund UBI/social support networks is making more and more sense.

I’m all for UBI, but the automation tax is a quagmire.

In this theoretical new tax, tell me what qualifies to be taxed?

• An Atlas autonomous robot? Sure, absolutely. How about instead a hydraulic arm that is controlled by a human? Previously there were 4 humans that moved the widget from A to B, but now they have 1 human operating a joystick for a net loss of 3 jobs. Is that taxed?
• How about an Excel macro? Prior to the macro, there was one person filling in the spreadsheet the entire 8 hour workday. Now that person was replaced with an Excel macro that runs in 5 minutes with one click. That is automation too right? What would you tax? The cost of the person replaced?
• Who pays the tax? A company that buys an Atlas robot after the law is passed? Absolutely. How about a company that bought Atlas robots 24 hours before the law passed? How about the company that bought them a year before the law passed? Now apply the Excel macro automation. Excel macros have around since the 1990s. Are you going to go back to the first macro run and tax every company retroactively? How about if the macro only does part of the work?

Automation tax is a nice idea but a nightmare to try to make in policy. Additionally, it will have a stifling effect on any business efficiency efforts after it exists.

If the tax is based upon workers losing their jobs to automation, it will have a massive knock on effect limiting new hires. A company would be very leery of hiring a worker if they could be accused (and taxed) of automation replacement when that worker is let go.

In 1970 there were 1.5 million UAW auto workers. Today there are 400k. source Yes, UAW membership isn’t the only type of auto worker, yes there are other factors that cause auto decline besides robots. However, I challenge you to point to a modern large scale automotive manufacturing factory that doesn’t use robots.

The point with factory work is that you don’t need half of what this robot can do if you change the plan of the factory a bit.

So no I don’t think the idea here is for standard factory work.

You’re changing the problem that is being solved. The CURRENT work process is to use a human with all the benefits and detriments of a human. The idea would be to drop one of these Atlas robots in without changing the work or work environment. Perhaps there is a more efficient human doing the work from 8am-5pm and only some work needed from 5pm-8am. An Atlas robot would be perfect use case here. You don’t have to redesign the work or the environment for a human or robot to switch out to do the same work.

What you’re describing is changing the nature of the task or the environment to optimize for a robot.

• Flat floors? Just use wheels instead of legs.
• Short distance to cover? Drop the entire torso and head and just be an arm with a camera.

Boston Dynamics already has that robot. Its called Handle:

As you can see, its a wheeled robot with an arm, but this robot couldn’t do the task that the Atlas robot can in the video because it doesn’t have the fine motor control or fingers to grasp the engine covers, nor does Handle have the ability to deal with those soft pliable racks where Atlas is placing the covers.

I’m reminded of when a friend of mine quit smoking. He said “OMG I can smell oranges and they taste amazing!”. The “thrill” of smoking had dulled his finer senses to the point he wasn’t able to enjoy oranges before quitting smoking.

I think life is like that too. If you’re living the “thrill” all the time, you can’t perceive or appreciate all kinds of smaller wonderful things around you happening in life.

At the moment it still looks like a technology demonstrator, but with what we saw in this video there are a small percentage of jobs it could likely do today replacing human workers.

My guess is that the task we saw it doing is actually a human job today. The objects being moved from rack to rack were plastic engine covers. The racks are labeled with “Engine covers”. That is WAY too specific to be random. My guess is that they worked/are working with an automotive assembly company to identify tasks that humans do today that a robot could do tomorrow. The auto company likely provided the engine cover parts as well as the racks and described the parameters for the job.

Even if you look at the Boston Dynamics robot and say that a human could do that faster/cheaper/better, consider that the robot works 24/7 with no sick days, vacations, or family emergencies. From a purely business perspective, the robot could be a game-changer for the better. From a societal view, this will have serious negative consequences to the people that our society will need to evolve to change for the better.

Are the largest power consumption steps of semi conductor product happening 24/7? Could we simply align manufacturing times with useful solar production times? So no need to store all the solar power, with the idea of consuming most of it immediately for manufacturing. Then pass a run that Semi conductor fabs have to build out their own solar arrays to cover most of their power consumption.

I mean, “give access” and “double your bitcoin” are somewhat textbook phrases for scams…

You’re underscoring my point. I don’t think either of those two exact phrases were use in the scam video. In my post I was communicating the paraphrased things they were saying. Its like you’re finding the words in the word search because I circled them, then handed it to you, and you’re saying “there’s the word, its in the circle!”.

I didn’t commit to memory the exact language used because as soon as I figured out it was a scam I had no reason to remember their exact words. If you go looking you might find an example of the video. Its beyond my interest though.