I smell a lightning-fast settlement

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  8 Responses »
Jul 022016
 

That is, if the people in charge have *any* sort of brains left:

Hannah Cohen: disabled woman badly beaten by TSA on return home from brain tumor treatment

So, short form: a 19-year old woman with a brain tumor, deaf, partially blind, partially paralyzed and easily confused, was beaten bloody by the TSA (with some help by the local PD) in Memphis. Why? Because she was easily confused and didn’t understand why they wanted to run her through the scanner again. Hannah’s mother was *not* allowed to explain to the TSA agents what the story was; instead Hannah was hauled off to the hoosegow.

Authorities later threw out the charges, local news station WREG reported, but the Cohen family has filed a lawsuit against the Memphis Airport, Airport Police, and the Transportation Security Administration.

NO KIDDING.

They’re suing for a whopping $100,000. No, really, that’s it. If there was ever a time to sue for Insane Amounts of Money, this would seem to be it:

fark_AchAqh1hyiHQ_QA0F2vl9H_99_U

As the very first post on the relevant Fark thread said…

This is the face of your government. Have a happy 4th America. 240 years was a good run, wasn’t it?

Ah, now I remember why I haven’t flown in years…

 Posted by at 9:19 pm

Increased minimum wage: unintended consequence success story

 blather, Hmm..., news, politics, science  43 Responses »
Jul 022016
 

This robot-powered burger joint could put fast food workers out of a job

“Momentum Machines” is starting work on a robotic burger joint… in San Francisco, of all places. The already have the robots. they’re now working on the actual storefront.

Best lines in the whole thing:

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” Momentum Machines cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy in 2012. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

Heh.

The higher you raise the minimum wage, the more economic sense it’ll make to simply replace minwage workers with robots. Back in 2013 I estimated that a $15/hour worker might cost a company $40K a year; the article here says that the robot can replace two to three workers for $90K/year. But the thing to note is if the machine can replace three employees *at* *a* *time,* it’s actually replacing six to nine employees, since it can work 24 hours a day… 3 8-hour shifts. Thus saving the employer perhaps $270,000/year in employment costs. If the machine costs half a million, then it’ll pay for itself in two years, and start raking in the cash by year three.

From the burger-eating customers point of view, this will only be an improvement. The burgers will be made to order, with more probability of actually getting it right (I no longer bother to ask for no pickles, for example, as they’d inevitably wind up on the burger anyway). The burgers are less likely to be made sloppily due to the worker being in some emotional distress or sleepy or lazy or drunk, or made with Added Bonus Bodily Fluid Secret Sauce because the worker is mad.

Since the flagship burger joint is to be in San Francisco, I expect to see a lot of protests. Union thugs, illegal alien advocates, brainless hippy burnouts, social justice warriors… all are likely to be tweaked by the idea of a robot that replaces a minwage worker, and San Fran seems loaded to the gills with causeheads like these. But even if they cause enough trouble to cause the San Fran site to fail, the causeheads themselves are in a losing war. The robots are coming. Hell, they’re *here,* and the drive to jack up the minimum wage for minimally useful jobs is only speeding the process.

I’ve yammered about this before

Inevitable socialism?  In 2012 I posted about the notion of a general-purpose android that could do *any* job, and how society might deal with the inevitable consequences.

Robotic Burger-flippers In 2013 I mentioned… robotic burger flippers

Motivation In 2014, discussion of the concept of a Universal Basic Income

 Posted by at 11:35 am

Unlimited uranium

 awesomeness, news, nukes, science  11 Responses »
Jul 012016
 

Some good news:

Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable

A few hundred thousand years of recoverable uranium is available in seawater, and technology improvements are making it economically feasible. Chemical adsorbtion nets are collecting about 6 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent per fifty days, for a cost of about $200 per pound of uranium oxide… about twice the current market rate. And even at that rate, the technology exists to negate any argument about nuclear power being a limited energy source.

Enough uranium is available to also negate any argument against constructing a fleet of 4,000 ton Orion vehicles to conquer the solar system out to Ceres.

 Posted by at 11:34 pm

Semi-autonomus car. *SEMI* autonomous

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, news, science, ಠ_ಠ  3 Responses »
Jul 012016
 

The techosphere is going kinda bugnuts over the revelation that May saw the first fatality in a self-driving car. The Tesla Model S has a feature called “Autopilot” which does some very basic driving for you… keeps you on the road and from banging into other automobiles. But it’s not a true autonomous mode; it’s far more basic. Kinda like the standard autopilot in an airplane in the era before GPS… keeps you on course, speed and altitude, but dumb as a post when  it comes to dealing with the unknown. The Tesla Autopilot model requires that you keep your hands on the wheel; if you take your hands off, the car will begin to slow down. It seems in this case the Tesla whammed into a truck that had turned in front of it because the truck was white and the sky was brightly lit; the simple systems in the Tesla couldn’t distinguish the truck in that case.

So, the driver of the car might have had “Autopilot” engaged, but it was still up to him to maintain situational awareness. The Mark One human eyeball remains the best system to judge what’s actually going on around a car, and while truly autonomous cars have some spiffy radar, lidar and optical systems,. the Tesla Model S *doesn’t.* So, that makes this little detail seem kinda important:

DVD player found in Tesla car in May crash: Florida officials

It *seems* that it wasn’t just a matter of there being a DVD player sitting somewhere in the car. Instead,a  witness who was on the scene right after the accident claims that the DVD player was seen to be playing a Harry Potter movie. Ooops.

The message: until you have a truly autonomous self-driving car… Pay Attention.

 

Secondary lesson learned: a lot of Social Jusice Warriors are perpetually cheesed off that every new advance is made available to rich people before po foke. Well, guess what: the rich folk are basically being used as guinea pigs during the beta test phase of that new technology. By the time the tech is cheap enough for average people to access, a whole lot of the bugs will be worked out, largely by beating the tar out of bagrillionaires who willingly put themselves at risk.

 

Tertiary lesson *probably* to be learned: play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If the guy had simply killed himself by being a dumbass… oh well. But not only did he hit another vehicle, he also opened the door to bureaucrats to come in and regulate the bejeezus out of autonomous cars. It is *possible* that this guy might turn out to single-handedly turn the technology from a winner for the American economy into a winner for, say, the Japanese or German economies.

 Posted by at 4:39 pm

Anybody know this NASP?

 aircraft, history, models, spacecraft  4 Responses »
Jul 012016
 

A photo of a McDonnell Douglas X-30 NASP display model that has seen better days. Has anyone seen another copy of this model, or art depicting the same configuration? The tails on both sides are missing, so reconstruction without references would be at best speculation.

broken nasp

The configuration seems fairly generic. McD released a lot of art on the NASP back in the day, along with the vaguely-related “Orient Express” idea for a hypersonic transport. While the NASP and the OE were *not* the same vehicle, they were meant to at least share some similar technologies, but the aerodynamics was something that differed substantially, for example, here’s a McD Orient Express model in the National Air and Space Museum:

The two clearly come from the same line of thinking, but the NASP has a much deeper fuselage. This makes sense… going to orbit as an SSTO requires stuffing as much fuel as possible into the fuselage, and the relatively flat HST has a less efficient volumetric efficiency.

 Posted by at 12:44 pm

Bones Knows

 art, humor, science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 012016
 

It has been my contention since the original reboot “Star Trek” in 2009 that the best feature of the whole effort has been Karl Urban’s Dr. McCoy. Sure, Quinto’s Spock looks pretty much like Spock, but that’s perhaps as much makeup as anything; Urban, though, just *nails* DeForrest Kelly’s characterization.

 Posted by at 12:24 pm

“Sledgehammer”

 art, science fiction, youtube  5 Responses »
Jul 012016
 

A pop singer has released a pop song with a music video that incorporates effects and scenes from the upcoming “Star Trek: Beyond.” Has the Trek franchise ever done this before?

If nothing else, there’s some pretty imagery here.

 Posted by at 1:03 am
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