Hmm, treatment plant, then manure. I'm sure they'll have solved the problem of spreading disease through poop. And if not, they can teleport away your diarrhea. Virtuous cycle.

His point is that the intermediate period can be quite tough for some of the displaced people, even if we're better off in the long run.

Isn't this a moving goalpost? Having a TV used to be a luxury. Now barely anyone can live without one. Even having meat regularly is something my parents couldn't count on.

In Star Trek times, people will be taking for granted various things like:
- Being able to live with a view, far away from the city, yet be able to get to work in the time it takes to materialize.
- Having realistic virtual discussions with long passed luminaries.
- Cancer taken care of by automatic scan-and-remove.
- No toilet in your house. Poop removed by teleportation. Also a huge benefit in childbirth.

And someone will have to build the machines to do all these things. Or machines that build machines to do these things.

McDonald's actually have already done this. At my local Macs, there's a number of machines that will let you do exactly that. As an added benefit there's a special queue for people who use the machine which is much faster than the old school queue.

Consider also that hourly minimum wage (well, it isn't legally mandated) is around 20 CHF here.

I presume you have to pay more than one salary to get an average coverage of one. Suppose a cop works a standard 40 hour week. Well, a week has 168 hours, so you need four people. Then you've got pensions, and depending on local laws various other contributions as well. On the plus side, you can rely on existing infrastructure, so the marginal cost of training, equipment, and paperwork is probably watered down in some larger pot.

It doesn't sound totally crazy.

There's an assumption that repetition will help recollection. I don't think it's entirely wrong, though of course you can overdo it.

The reason why you need recollection is so you can see the patterns.

Suppose someone tells you "multiply any integer by 5, and the last digit is always a 5 or a 0". How are you going to get a sense of whether that's true if you don't have at least few results to hand? Now, this isn't rigorous proof, but it is mathematical intuition. Any number of mathematical observations will start with something like that. "I tried to find x^3+y^3 = z^3, but I couldn't. Is that a law?". "All the solutions to this particular function seem to have real part 1/2. Is that a rule?"

If every investigation had to start at the ground, it would take people a long time to find anything interesting. It's good to have a few results cached, and it appears that to cache them you have to go a bit of grinding. It's not even that much grinding these days before you can throw it over on a calculator or other device.

That's what I meant. As long as standards are kept high, there's a limit to how many people can get on the course. And by the sound of it, German unis set a high standard.

Yes, but you have limits on who can attend, right?

It's a "classic" for Aussies because going to the UK is practically a stage of life for many of them. They're not necessarily going to avoid the tax, it's just a convenient side effect.

Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over.

He talks about exactly this problem. You get two populations, a highly skilled but small group that gets paid for providing all the stuff for everyone. And burger flippers.

Ever been to the UK?

Guy who drives a train: Engineer
Guy who fixes your fridge: Engineer
Guy you call when internet stops working (asks you to reboot) : Engineer

When I studied EE, you'd learn about circuit and filters and such. You're taught about how lithographic processes work, and how quantum theory works. But it's not the everyday work of most EEs. You'd also be expected to do a lot of software type stuff. For instance, a lot of VLSI design is done in what is essentially a programming language. Unsurprisingly, this meant that EE folks could transition into software relatively easily.

At the moment there's a lot of hype about software, and not so much about hardware. Perhaps the EEs are simply moving to where demand is.

Pure speculation though.

A buddy of mine wrote an essay in his international relations class about how airplanes could be used to take down the towers, a couple of weeks before it happened.

But obviously those kinds of thoughts would be going through the head of someone who was doing a module on terrorism at the time. Just like it was going through the heads of the guys who actually did it.

Same thing with "precognition" of relatives dying. The thought crosses everyone's mind at some point. Now and again, it coincides with reality.

"That may be a different issue: the Dunning-Kruger effect [wikipedia.org]. Unless social grace can be considered an "expertise", which is an interesting philosophical notion."

I think it is. Among all the people I know, the really smart ones tend to be the humble ones. You almost have to drag it out of one of them that he got a top (they rank you numerically) degree at Oxford and a robotics phd from Cambridge. One of those guy's who'd be able to teach you a new concept after the two of you had just read the same few pages. Once the cat is out of the bag though, he gets the dual benefit of being super smart as well as being seen as a humble guy.

I reckon people who really are intelligent will follow this strategy. Because sooner or later, if you work with someone, you are going to ask them about their background. If you're credentialed, people will find out, and they will know that you were confident they would be impressed.

Less smart/credentialed people will need to rely on how people generally think:
1) In polite conversation, it's wrong to shoot down someone you've just met. So the idea that you're smart needs to at least be entertained even without the creds.
2) Social proof/bluffing. Someone going around claiming how smart they are has probably been told so by a lot of people, otherwise they'd be humble. So maybe other people have done the hard work, and the assessor can rely on that. Right? :-)

Anyway, rambling on a bit, I tend to take note when someone claims they are good at something. Particularly if they claim high intelligence. Unfortunately of late I've been right. Or Dunning and Krueger have been.

The question is whether we expect the car to ever reach the point where something bad happens. It's possible the stresses are so low it's unlikely ever to be driven to wherever the failure point is. Whoever designed it must have considered that bringing in cars to have them checked is expensive and inconvenient. Alternatively, whichever part will fail might be cheap enough that it can just be swapped at a regular service. Would be cool if somebody knew.