This would be true if health care costs were discretionary, but they are not.
Your bank account going to zero due to breaking a leg, or medication needs, or X is not a sign of a a healthy economy. If that health care demand hadn't occurred, you could have spent your "economic surplus" in a way of your choosing -- perhaps frivolously or perhaps on something that provides longer term financial upside to you, your family, your community, whatever.
The problem with counting health care costs as part of GDP in the US is that it is a cost which is not distributed in any rational way -- local markets have vastly different service costs, employers have vastly different bargaining power with insurance companies, and individuals have vastly different health care needs with vastly different costs associated.
If health care were normalized and distributed across a population (instead of cost burden ultimately falling to individuals) then I can see the reason to count it as part of GDP. Then it's somewhat analogous to physical infrastructure -- a healthy economy can support spending money on infrastructure.
But, no one goes bankrupt because the town voted to increase taxes slightly to pay for a new road or renovating the local library. Health care cost is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US -- health care cost increasing does not necessarily mean there is "economic surplus" to support it, instead more people could be driven to bankruptcy.
Exactly. Putting health care in GDP also puts a positive light on rising health care costs -- and in the US there is nominally zero consumer power against rising health care costs. Most of the time it's impossible to know how much something will cost prior to the appointment, procedure, etc -- so people cannot "vote with their wallet" like they can with other spending.
I was surprised to learn that, in the US, health care is part of GDP. How messed up is that? Health care costs are not a productive output of an economy and to include them in GDP is ludicrous.
There is an unfortunately large disconnect between the general public's understanding of robotics, and the reality of robotics. I don't know how to reduce it, and feel it's important to.
The hypothetical "how should a robot car decided which bystander to hit when it looses control" or similar trolley problems are so so so far off in the future. Right now autonomous cars can't even operate in inclement weather.
I do find the concept of "moral reasoning" in robots an interesting one, but again feel the author has skipped into the far further and missed more tractable questions. If moral reasoning were in place today, I think the likely decision of all autonomous cars would be to drive slower. Is saving a few minutes of a trip worth dramatically greater probability of fatality? US DOT found that speed limit increases from 55 to 65 MPH increase the likelihood of fatality by 24% once an accident occurred.
If this attack vector is true, it seems overly complicated to me. Why not have the assembly house load the normal SPI flash with firmware you've altered to control the main CPU the way you want? That is WAY easier than hardware changes to the PCB design and installing a part which isn't on the approved Bill of Materials.
I see a resurgence happening and a great example of that is Micro.blog -- a social network built on top of RSS, JSON Feed, and other open standards for posting and comments.
I wrote a blog article recently wherein I propose that cloud-native infrastructure can be a better foundation for robotic software stacks than ROS/ROS2. I've been involved in several ROS-based robot & robot-sensor efforts and (like many others here) have found it lacking in major ways.
There are a whole host of performant, lightweight, and open source tools for distributed-tracking, pub/sub, logging, serialization, service discovery, KV stores, visualization, etc. Right now it seems the robot world (including me) ignores this fact and continues to reinvent wheels (poorly).
I'm curious for feedback on this idea and will be publishing updates as I experiment with this idea. I'll likely be starting with timing & latency experiments between ROS, ROS2, and other cloud-native pub/sub brokers.
It's really anything branded as by "Apple" on Amazon.
Look at the reviews of the Apple Thunderbolt Cable [1] -- 40% are 1 star reviews and many mention the cable being fake.
Similar story on the Apple USB Ethernet adapter [2]. I bought one a few years back and it identified itself with Chinese lettering in System Preferences.
Ken Shirriff did an amazing teardown of fake Apple chargers [3] and found a number of safety hazards relating to high voltage isolation. Teardown of the USB Adapter [4] found it used a part that doesn't exist (label does not match any known package for that IC).
Full time, US Citizens or Permanent Residents only.
== About Us ==
We started 4 years ago and build everything from autonomous vehicles to 3D stereo heads to GPS-denied pose systems to custom vehicles. We have moved into a new (old) warehouse in Pittsburgh that has undergone a total overhaul:
http://carnegierobotics.com/crl-construction-progress
Fantastic team, very interesting products and projects.
== Position ==
We are looking for software and mechanical engineers who have hands-on development skills to work on a variety of interesting and challenging robotics perception and control projects. We seek candidates who take pride in building solid, rigorously tested systems.
Carnegie Robotics -- Pittsburgh, PA -- Local -- Full Time -- US persons only
We are a 3 year-old spin-out of Carnegie Mellon and have 25 employees. Most employees are seasoned hardware and software engineers and we push hard. Some of our work is related to landmine/IED detection robots, other work is related to smart sensors (cameras, lasers and various combinations). We have both research projects in a variety of robotic sensor areas as well as production efforts underway.
We are hiring for the following roles, each includes a brief description of the work you would be doing:
Junior Mechanical Engineer
- Mentored by our senior mechanical engineers
- Lots of CAD work (SolidWorks) and designing everything from rugged housings to drivetrains to test fixtures.
- Lots of 3 axis and 5 axis machined part design. Some weldment and sheet metal parts design.
- Assist with testing of mechanical components
Embedded Software (junior or senior)
- Work on low level control loops for hardware
- Perception & planning logic
- We have software on everything from Atmel microcontrollers to Atom based computers to rugged i7 computers to GPUs to FPGAs
FPGA Programmer
- Accelerate our smart sensor development efforts
- Bring new stereo and computer vision algorithms to FPGAs inside our existing and upcoming products
System Electrical Engineer
- Design control, data, & power infrastructure inside our large payloads and platforms
- Design test rigs and breadboards for products under development and for production acceptance testing
Your bank account going to zero due to breaking a leg, or medication needs, or X is not a sign of a a healthy economy. If that health care demand hadn't occurred, you could have spent your "economic surplus" in a way of your choosing -- perhaps frivolously or perhaps on something that provides longer term financial upside to you, your family, your community, whatever.
The problem with counting health care costs as part of GDP in the US is that it is a cost which is not distributed in any rational way -- local markets have vastly different service costs, employers have vastly different bargaining power with insurance companies, and individuals have vastly different health care needs with vastly different costs associated.
If health care were normalized and distributed across a population (instead of cost burden ultimately falling to individuals) then I can see the reason to count it as part of GDP. Then it's somewhat analogous to physical infrastructure -- a healthy economy can support spending money on infrastructure.
But, no one goes bankrupt because the town voted to increase taxes slightly to pay for a new road or renovating the local library. Health care cost is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US -- health care cost increasing does not necessarily mean there is "economic surplus" to support it, instead more people could be driven to bankruptcy.