American colleges aren't supposed to train, they are supposed to educate. If companies had better training or mentoring programs, it wouldn't be as much of a problem.
I'm also afraid of water, particularly large bodies of water (river, lake, ocean) where I can't see what's in it with me or see the bottom. My fear came after I learned how to swim. Its taken me years to build up the idea of trying to do something like this to get over the fear.
Robots also don't play favorites or office politics. If there is a more efficent/better way, it will do it. Even better when it is allowed to re-calculate with new parameters.
That really depends on how the robot has been programmed. It's quite likely that robots in office-type settings will have political aspects to their decision making, at least to the extent that bits of corporate policy have been embedded.
I just can't find the Wiki page on it, but there is a great "rule" out there: As soon as you tell people what they are getting measured on they will put their whole energy into gaming the measurements to their advantage.
The issue with this is the efficient way is not always the better way.
If you keep assigning the same menial and crappy task to a worker because they get it done quick, yay efficiency! Except if you're asking the same worker to clean the bathrooms three times a day every day, it's not going to take long before he goes "fuck this, I'm going to work somewhere else!"
The robot will assign the next most efficient person, who's going to be right on the train out too and so will everyone who sees it coming. So you'll either end up with people gaming the system and slacking, or you'll end up with an empty business.
People might like the idea of robots because they don't play favourites or office politics. However, I'm willing to bet that people are going to hate that same robot really quick because it doesn't play favourites or office politics.
If you know you can always count on Joe to cover a shift, if he comes and asks you a human for a day off and you know it'll leave you short staffed for a day. Would you? Yes, because you know the 99 other days you're going to end up short staffed you won't because you've got Joe. You know if you say no that you'll be short staffed those other 99 days because Joe's going to make sure he's busy laying on the couch eating cheerios watching jeopardy because you pissed him off.
The worst managers I've personally faced are either the ones that blame everyone else, or the ones who are there to "do a job and not make friends". The latter is the robot.
While you're correct in that bad algorithms will produce bad outcomes, forward thinking companies will improve the algorithms with feedback from the workers.
If previous Lean / Six Sigma studies are correct, this feedback loop will lead to improved employee morale as they become the drivers of decision making and less likely to feel disenfranchised.
A layer of management can be removed and it is mismanagement that generates the most workplace animosity, as you say yourself.
Hopefully over time the system could also optimise retention, if it can correlate being assigned certain tasks often with quitting. You could also have employees fill out satisfaction surveys and weight efficiency with enjoyment, perhaps better employees could be rewarded with more weight given to enjoyment.
Naturally there's going to be more variance in employee performance on some tasks rather than others. For example being a cashier during a quiet time will have less variance than toilet cleaning. A workaround might be to pay a bonus for good performance on high variance tasks.
I'd invert that. You can't complain, whine, or plot social solutions in response to getting assigned tasks by a robot. There's a lower mental load in response to getting a task, since you don't have to worry about how your response to task assignment gets interpreted by your boss.
And I'd invert that: unlike a robot (unless programmed to be cruel), you can see your boss getting off on commanding you to do ridiculous shit. With a robot, you can just think, "Well it's just a brainless robot." With a boss, you think, "Why doesn't that glib asshole use their brain... or better yet, let me use mine?"
(Pardon if my language seems salty; "asshole" and "shit" are actually popular technical terms when dealing with the domain of bosses.)
I know a family with two young kids that do not have a car. The use public transportation and try to live near a grocery store. They seem to be more of the exception than anything else. It's not impossible, just difficult.
Growing up I loved the Myst games and 'Jewels of the Oracle'. I got to explore and solve puzzles. Even now I play RPGs, but I like games that encourage exploration (Guild Wars 2) and I'm always on the look out for a good puzzle game. I would love to see a RPG that had both combat and puzzles more.
Happy medium. I use the library for my 'summer reading books', the books you read once, enjoy and never thing about again. I use Kindle for books I really enjoy and want to read again (or for free/cheap summer books that the library doesn't have). I buy physical books for reference or if the library/kindle/nook/ebook provider does not have it available.
I buy physical books because they're cheaper than ebooks. I'll usually pay about $.50 to a buck for them. Sometimes my friends just give me a box of books they're done with. The local thrift store often has bestsellers for a buck.
The usual price for a used book on Amazon is $.01, which with shipping comes out to still far less than the ebook.
I did that once (don't remember what book) but in the end I didn't like it. While I don't like to re-read books it kind of annoys me that the book is gone from my list of stuff I've bought/read. Plus the limitation of 1 per month means you can't switch to reading something else unless I buy that something else.
I don't like losing access to things. If it was "you can download one per month and keep access as long as you're a subscriber" sort of the way Playstation Plus works that would be OK with me.
But the rental program feels more like a cruddy crippled library than a real service.
I'd rather pay the $5-$10 for the eBook and not have to deal with it.
This new service is interesting. I don't read enough for it to be useful, but I could see it saving my dad quite a bit of money (or trips to the library) if they had enough books.
Last time Amazon gave me a free trial of Prime, I tried out the free rental. As best as I could make out, it was only possible to use it by browsing on my Kindle, which was a rather suboptimal experience, allowing only specific search or a paginated list of about 50,000 pages. I couldn't actually find anything I wanted to read.
If you know how to use Amazon's interface it's possible to see the list of books online so you don't have to do all the browsing on the Kindle, but you still have to 'buy' it from the Kindle.
It's sort of a hidden link or a special way of narrowing search results with the criteria on the left side of the page. If you google I'm sure you can find instructions.
Here's the super-secret password for the clubhouse.
In the search box on the main amazon.com page, there's a drop-down list on the left hand side of the text entry. Click that and change it to "Books". Now just hit search (you can leave the text field blank). That will bring up a search results screen with a bunch of filter groups on the left. Scroll down and select "Kindle Edition" under "Format". After the page reloads, scroll down even further and you'll have a checkbox for "Prime Eligible". Select that, and you'll have only the books you can rent with Prime. You can then further refine by genre, search term, whatever.
You can buy it from your phone or computer. Even if it is a Mac. You pick which device you want it sent to. And I totally don't get that y'all are saying ebooks cost more than trad.and "awful" selection? What don't they have?
Oh, that's right, that's what really killed it for me. I'm used to reading on my kindle and picking up my progress on my phone when I'm stuck somewhere with some free time.
Losing the sync ability basically killed the main utility I get from eBooks. If I have to carry the Kindle around, I can carry a library book around.
I'm 4'11, so really short and overweight. I tried to keep to the 1200 calories that everyone says is the minimum, but I can't, it's often too much food for me and never really saw much in weight loss. I've been trying to go closer to 600-1000 and have seen much more results and feel healthier.
One thing about this is paying attention not only to what he eats, but also how his body reacts to food. In high school, I would often only eat one meal a day (I could have had more meals, but I wasn't hungry). In college, I also still only ate the equivalent of one meal a day. Once I had a full time job that included lunch breaks, I felt obligated to eat more, and the more I ate the more I was hungry. Having more money and more freedom to eat what I want, when I wanted (compared to living with parents or in college eating on poor starving student rations), I stopped paying attention to what and how much I ate.
