Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder" channel.

  1. Now there you go being one of those howling radical woke maniacs BY SPEAKING TRUTH. Shame on you for speaking truth about the amazing and wonderful president Musk. How are we going to have peace across the Solar System when you insult the future Emperor of Mars?
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  2.  @scottf3456  Yeah that was the coin from Trump 1.0. This is now Trump 2.0 and minting bits of metal doesn't make billions like meme coins do.
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  3.  @swabby913  No not even if Trumps tax returns as well as his communications with the Saudis, Russians & Chinese. Not even if the P P tape was on there. Cos none of it would stand up in court, just as none of Hunter's Lap Top will stand up in court BECAUSE the worlds greatest lawyer Rudy Giuliani DID NOT SECURE ITS CHAIN OF CUSTODY.
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  4. Engineer here - I have worked for companies that deployed SAP and NOBODY I EVER MET liked it in the slightest. I would describe it as the most over hyped load of expensive crap I had ever seen. I know of a company that spent over $600 Million deploying it. What they never figured out was how much it was going to cost in people power to maintain it. SAP somehow manged to convince a staggering number of large companies that their software could track every expense down to the last nut bolt and washer and how long it took to buy, stock, design where it had to go and then install that bolt, nut & washer. IT WAS ALWAYS TOTAL COMPLETE BS because those systems end up becoming so huge they are insanely hard to maintain and keep up to date. YES it is possible to track every employee down to the second and account for every bolt, nut & washer BUT HERE'S THE TRUE FAILURE. What do you actually get in return for all that effort other than a giant pile of data that's impossible to effectively analyse let alone utilise?
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  5.  @gaiustacitus4242  That's a great point.
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  6. It wasn't just Reagan it was an army of scumbags who supported him. And they didn't just do it to America they rammed their neoliberal doctrines down the throats of anyone and everyone they could. I'm Australian, we don't have the neoliberal disease quite as bad as America but we are going through a scandal right now involving PwC that's huge.
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  7. I had never hear of this "abortion reversal" so I googled "abortion reversal pill" Yes its real and there is a treatment which the person off screen describes at around 4:30. The first Google link is from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and they have an article titled "Facts Are Important: Medication Abortion "Reversal" Is Not Supported by Science" The second Google link is to the American Pregnancy Association and they have details of what the process is and how it works and then describe what the proponents claim and what the detractors claim.
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  8. Yeah - I looked him up by typing "talk tv mike graham" into google. There's a Wikipedia page for him and it includes that story about growing concrete.
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  9. Right wingers are ALWAYS obsessed with other people's sex lives. Its probably because they're perverts as well as being hypocrites. Remember how Newt Gingrich was always going on about Bill Clinton and how he (Newt) was a stalwart "good ol' boy and family man" and then it turned out he had a very liberal open marriage where his wife let him have whatever affairs he wanted.
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  10.  @blueberryiswar  Go watch some of Mark Blyth's work on Angrynomics. There's a short intro video on it. He explains that Capitalism has been through 3 major phases and that we should be moving towards a new version and we are NOT. He uses the analogy of a computer. Eventually the computer develops bugs and you need to upgrade. What he points out is that in 2007-08 a major bug hit us and instead of a complete upgrade we got a patch. The problem isn't capitalism its the version we are running and its a patched version and the patch has now failed. On socialism - go and look at what happened in Soviet SOCIALIST Russia and then ask if you want to repeat that. You should have the same response to being asked about repeating any of the Fascist regimes. We need a completely new economic paradigm not a patched or re-hashed version of what's previously failed.
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  11.  @d.w.stratton4078  Thank's I just watch Robert Reich (video titled "What the hell shoudl Democrats do?"") and some of his comments are ridiculous. Robert is normally a very smart guy especially on economics, but on his pandering to the mentality of the Democrats he's stuck in a mind warp. Way back in 2020 (before the election) when Biden had stomped all over Bernie Sanders by making deals behind everyone's backs a person (I forget their name) wrote this incredibly poignant comment. "Joe Biden is the reason why Trump got elected." It probably should have been written as "The Democratic Party Leaders are the reason why Trump got elected" Because its not so much Joe Boden but that whole clique that's centred around the Clintons and Obamas. Neither of those Presidencies were that successful. Clinton blew his up by getting blown and Obama (despite being a great orator) never really got anything done. He had a supermajority and got steamrolled on health care and tired nothing after that. Despite the Democrats having the White house for 20 of the last 32 years SCOTUS is now 6-3 maniac GOP symps.
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  12. One's been to jail the other is on his way to jail.
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  13. The corruption is debateable because there's always going to be the issue of who paid to get what done, BUT WITHOUT ANY DOUBT the narcissistic selfishness is the real problem. This is not just an American problem its starting to rise everywhere. I'm Australian and it might be more obvious that this sort of thing is happening in America but its actually starting to emerge across the developed world. There's been a failure of centrist governments everywhere because they have tried to appease everyone and ended up pleasing nobody. The more radical political people on BOTH the Radical Left and Radical right have seized on this. Its more noticeable with the Radical Right and they are louder and more vocal. The Radical Right also have a lot more political power and media power at the moment. There's no billionaire support for the Radical Left, but they are there and just as bat crap crazy as they have ever been. Where BOTH the Radical Right and Radical Left are going to come undone is the same reason they always come undone - their hypocrisy. Unfortunately we are heading towards a point where political violence is almost guaranteed. Just the other day I heard someone point out that we have forgotten that there were over 4,000 bombings on American college campuses in the 1970s and 1,000s of other protests (many violent) on other campuses across the developed world. I was young in the 1970s but I remember that there were times when it seemed like everyday there was another violent protest with a city on fire or another bombing or another hijacking. I don't want to see us go back to that part of the 1970s but I think its now inevitable we will because our political leadership is so poor and lets radicals like Roberts, Trump and others just get away with stuff.
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  14. Yeah the college kids are chanting: "Ket---a---mine" "Ket---a---mine" "Ket---a---mine"
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  15. You are absolutely 100% correct, but Israel is not doing anything that other countries haven't done. I'm Australian and look at the pile of lies we were part of regarding the invasion of Iraq, where its estimated 1 million civilians have died in the sectarian violence that we unleashed. What's different this time is that for Iraq it took TIME before we knew what had happened. It took TIME for Wikileaks to get hold of information and then release it. This time we are seeing the atrocities happen in REAL TIME not DELAYED TIME and clowns like this idiot form the Israeli Government doesn't get that. He doesn't get we can all see it happen in real time only hours later not weeks or months later. PLUS - Their own soldiers are releasing their own videos of their crimes on social media.
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  16. AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: I did my degree in the late 80s and during my senior year we had an alum who gave a special guest lecture on Terraforming Mars. We were all very excited to hear what he had to say. He started with "Sorry its impossible and here's why!" He then went on to explain just how big planets are and how much stuff you need to a job like Terraform Mars. The numbers are so large that its near impossible for people to grasp. Here's 1 simple thing maybe people can grasp. Imagine a dome (1/2 sphere) on Mars with a volume of 1km. Its about 1562 meters in diameter. So its not a small dome but is the sort of size you'd need for a colony its people, plants and animals. Other than all the materials needed to build that dome (which is substantial). You need 1.3 million tons of air to fill it. Most people don't think of air as weighing much. 1 cubic meter of water weighs a metric ton. 1 cubic meter of air weighs 1.3kg (sea level). There's 1,000,000,000 (billion) cubic meters in a cubic kilometer. So 1 cubic kilometer of air weighs 1.3 billion kilograms or 1.3 million tons. Now considering there's almost NO atmosphere at all on Mars let alone much Oxygen or Nitrogen to make Earth standard air from you have to ask: For the Mars startup colony where are they going to get 1.3 million tons of air from and how are they going to get it to Mars or produce it on Mars? Sorry to bust everyone's Elon Fantasy with math but then WTF I'm an engineer!
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  17.  @LP-ct9nk  NO and even if it was he'd probably ignore it.
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  18.  @uberhikari  You have well summed up the fundamental issue with America's 2 parties. There's the "Do Nothing Dems" who are too scared to do anything in case all those suburban housewives wont vote for them. And there's the "Mind of a 2 year old GOP" who don't care about anything except what they want right now and are willing to break every toy in the toy box just so nobody else can play with them.
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  19.  @RoodiniCats  WHY? If you live in a state dumb enough to elect Ron De Sanctimonious then you get what you deserve no matter how great the weather is.
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  20.  michaeleuthanasia7089  How about that whole chunk of land wedged between Mexico and Canada that seems to annoy the rest of the planet so much???? The Mexicans make great food and the Canadians are polite (except when they play hockey). So who really needs those 330 million M0R0Ns telling everyone on the planet how farking awesome they are every 5 minutes?????
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  21.  @andrina118  That's a great concept except MOST of the human race is either not intelligent enough to discern fact from fiction or they don't care to discern fact from fiction OR BOTH. There's another category which are those who can think through things if they are given enough time and they have people around them patient enough to explain things. The problem they face is the constant bombardment and they suffer information overload. Then there's that group who think they are far more intelligent than they actually are. These are the Dunning-Krugerites and they cause an additional problem of NOT SHUTTING UP and adding to the information overload. So yeah mate its a great concept and I am 100% supportive of anyone pushing critical thinking skills. Unfortunately there's this thing called reality and it sucks.
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  22.  @DownTheHill3  Its pretty farqing stupid to claim you come in piece carrying an AR15. 👉🤯
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  23. A few weeks back people were calling Taibbi out for being Elon Musk's mouthpiece with the Twitter Files. The argument wasn't about the facts but that he was being the MOUTHPIECE for a billionaire and publishing what a billionaire wanted publishing. People went bonkers from both the Left and Right screaming "No, No this is all proving how corrupt the establishment is." Their claims haven't aged well. Fact is the moment someone in the media (irrespective of where they are Left or Right) is reporting the PR that someone with public influence wants published they are NO LONGER A JOURNALIST. You cannot claim to be a journalist when you are the PR conduit for a billionaire.
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  24. Just when you think American politics can't get any more SHlTHOUSE another Trump grift pops up closely followed by others in the Trumpistan Grift Battalion speaking even more stupidity and nonsense. I'm Australian and went to college in America. I was there in 87 and watched the stupidity that went on. I can remember arguing with people that this stupidity will end up one day destroying America. 4 May 2016 Lindsey Graham in a moment when his brain actually functioned said "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it." AND SO YOU KNOW our politics in Australia is going the same way. Right now we are having a referendum that would formally acknowledge that Australia was already inhabited when European settlement started. In doing so it would also give Australia's First nations people a permanent "Voice to Parliament" that is very similar to those constituted in the Nordic Countries for their native Sami people in the far North. The Referendum looks like failing and the NO campaign against it is being fronted by 2 native Australians who work for Right Wing Libertarian Think Tanks with links to Americas Right Wing Libertarian Think Tanks. Their main campaign strategy/tactic is fear backed up by misinformation. And they have very specific targeted campaigns for native Australians that are different to those being used on the rest of Australia. Does that sound familiar???
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  25.  @randibgood  great comment and so, so, so true
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  26. Your absolutely right but right wingers only hear what they want to hear anything else is noise. Everything they accuse others of they do right straight in our faces and that sort of hypocrisy eventually gets very ugly responses. Its like the brat in grade school who enjoys niggling people. They poke and prod and niggle always trying to get a reaction. Everyone in while they push too far and get thumped. When that happens they squeal about how its all so unfair. Those kids grow up to be Republicans.
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  27.  @ShaithMaster  Have you heard hwo Alex Jones lawyers defended him in court by stating to the court its an act, he is playing a part and that he's a "performance artist." He must be a great performer because he apparently makes $50M a year selling his overpriced crap (vitamins & stuff).
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  28.  @taranullius9221  Basically what you have said is what I meant. WTF is wrong with people like you that your reading and comprehension skills are THAT BAD. 🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤷‍♂🤷‍♂
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  29.  @taranullius9221  If you subscribe to the Milton Freidman school of economic stupidity as people like Reagan and Thatcher did. THEN YEAH the government should do as little as possible and let the private sector work it out via the markets. In which case you need to ask the question why do we even have governments at all?
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  30.  @ehyena  Population of America is 335,236,943
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  31.  @ordohereticus3427  Go watch the recent Triggernometry interview with Andrew Doyle. He's just written a book on that subject of people madly labelling others as hard as they can. I don't know if the book is any good but the interview was worth the time. He has a great story about the time he was labelled a Right Wing Homophobe. In response to something he said.
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  32.  @ehyena  Oh sorry missed what you meant. I thought it was $400 but who really knows tother than its so much more than Hunter ever earned its not worth comparing. AND that's before we consider they did it from inside the Whitehouse. What Harris is saying is that Hunter Biden is like a small pebble in your shoe. Yeah its annoying and you need to deal with it but compared to being smashed over the head with a big rock its irrelevant.
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  33.  @daviebananas1735  DO YOU REALISE THAT BEING LEFT LEANING DOES NOT MEAN BEING WOKE SJW? This is the problem with woke SJWs. You all claim to represent EVERYTHING on the left and you just don't. You don't even represent a fraction. You paint anyone who disagrees with you as some right wing radical maniac. Nobody can speak reasonably to you, nobody can have a rational discussion with you and you wonder why people can't stand your bullshit. For every good cause you might have had you have alienated EVERYONE who might agree with you. Its why you are just as bad as the maniacs on the far right.
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  34.  @daviebananas1735  Bananas is a really apt monika for someone like you, because you are completely farking banana's. Have you ever heard the expression "Your worst enemy is the fanatic who tries to own your ideology" or similar. Go look at the history of revolutions involving fanatics. Once they have overthrown the rulership they start purging their own people. Because the onw thing fanatics can't handle is anyone questioning what they do. Stalin is a good example. The early Russian Communist also practised democracy and elected their leaders. Stalin didn't agree and massacred most of the Russian Communist Party early on and ended Russian democracy. The worst enemy anyone on the right has are the fanatics on the Right. The worst enemy anyone on the Left has are the fanatics on the Left - LIKE YOU.
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  35. Yeah that's one thing the Trumpists have NEVER explained about 2020. Its also something the Democrats have IGNORED, because other than Biden winning the Whitehouse the Democrats lost almost everywhere else. Down ballot they were hammered. - They did NOT win the Senate outright as they should have; - They actually lost seats in the House; and - They got smashed in the states houses, senates and governorships. If anything 2020 was a disaster for the Democrats and its now lead to the "Biden won't go" disaster. What actually happened was that a lot of GOP people turned up in 2020 and voted GOP for everything except for Donald Trump because they were tired of his crap. But this highlights just how delusional BOTH the Democrats and GOP are. They are BOTH so wrapped up in their narratives they can't see anything clearly and the die hard supporters on BOTH SIDES are equally deluded. America is now malfunctioning at so many levels its hard to see how America survives as a nation going forward.
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  36.  @mindhackz  that's a great point and something I've pointed out a few times. In 2020 the Dems did NOT win the Senate, lost House seats and got smashed in the state seats. There were lots of GOP voters who voted GOP for everything except 1 thing - Donald Trump. This has not only been misunderstood by the GOP but also the Dems. Other than Biden getting the Whitehouse the Dems were smacked everywhere else. 2020 was NOT a Triumph because a triumph would have seen Trump laughed off the stage never to return and here he is right now looking the winner. The Dems are truly hopeless. They whine about the 6-3 bias in SCOTUS and yet the Dems have had the Whitehouse for 20 of the past 32 years compared to the GOP with only 12 years in the Whitehouse AND YET they have lost control of SCOTUS.
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  37. Great Comment. I'm an Australian engineer who went to college in America (late 80s). A couple of years ago I started informally studying economics out of the frustration of the interference in projects by clowns waving economics degrees. What you are describing is yet more symptoms of neoliberal economics. One of the core beliefs of neoliberals is that Government SHOULD DO as LITTLE AS POSSIBLE because the private sector does everything better. At the ideologic level its more libertarian than liberal (and yes there's a difference). Liberals believe freedom isn't absolute and security and safety comes from having limits (laws, rules, codes, regulations,...). Libertarians believe that government should do nothing but protect their property and their interests. its an incredibly narrow minded and narcissistic view of the world. One of the main reasons I started looking into economics was because Australia like many other nations really wasn't doing anything regarding energy infrastructure. Its like they are all waiting for someone from the private sector to do it for them. This is standard neoliberal economics in reality. "The government should do nothing and let the market decide what to do." The problem is that if there isn't a business case or the private sector can get better returns elsewhere then NOTHING HAPPENS. Its not just an energy thing it happens to all forms of infrastructure just like you describe. Another aspect of what you describe is the idea that everything has to act like a business and make money. This is another of the idiotic fallacies of neoliberal economics. Its really obvious in Universities. In the 1990s they were told they had to "be more business like." Yeah fine a way to hear that is WE (the university) need to mange our money better and where possible have some form of ownership over IP so that the money generated helps fund the University. Great but its really easy to lose sight of the fact the PRINCIPLE TASK of a university like all forms of education is to EDUCATE the next generation so that they have the skills to keep a society functioning. By the same account government departments (no matter if they are local, sate or federal) have as their PRINCIPLE TASK the job of providing the necessary services to the community, state or nation that are required to keep it functioning. There is this idiotic concept among neoliberals that EVERYTHING HAS to be run as if its a "for profit" business. The problem is there is no business model that works long term for some of these basic services that any and every society needs. For some things there is no viable business model in neoliberal economics. Things like education, roads, communication services, health care services,.... The problem is you can't explain it to the professors in their ivory towers or to the super wealthy in their marble castles.
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  38.  @danielhann4439  Welcome to the club. I recommend listening to people like Mark Blyth, Marianna Mazzucato who both recently gave guest lectures to Stephanie Kelton's class on the history of economics. They are all part of what might be called "Rebel Economics" as they are all trying to explain "How we got here!" In fact one fo Marks best lectures from a couple of years ago is titled "How we got here!" Another guy worth everyone's time is the young British economist Gary Stevenson who has the YT channel Garys Economics. He's right at the top of the very smart brigade on economics and why's its gone wrong.
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  39.  @perrymason866  Absolutely true and if the British people ever reject Gary Stevenson he has a place right here in Australia. If I had the money he'd already be here EVEN if it was only for 1 semester a year to teach economics. Our only problem is the same one you have in Britain, we have too many people who wont listen because they've been force fed and indoctrinated with neoliberal free market fundamentalist nonsense and can't conceive there's anything else. As an engineer (who's been looking into economics out of frustration) the one thing that astounds me more than anything else is how NARROWLY FOCUSED the solution to everything is a free market solution. Just only a week ago the head of the Reserve Bank of Australia was asked bout our housing crisis and his answer was "it just the market correcting itself." That's pure Milton Freidman "Do nothing. Just let the market fix itself." Its at a level of insanity that's the equivalent of asking an technician with all the skills and tools needed to defuse a nuclear bomb by watching the clock tick down.
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  40.  @faitaccompli5878  I just checked the results and according to AP Trump got almost 1 million FEWER votes than in 2024. The killer is that Harris got 12 million FEWER VOTES than Biden did in 2020. So whatever the message was. Over 12 million people did NOT BUY IT and simply did not turn up. I'm stunned Trumps vote went down and the Democrats still could NOT WIN.
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  41. I hate to say it but I can see the day when Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh or one of the other narcissistic clowns steps out their front door to be confronted by a parent or spouse who's lost their child or partner because of something they've instigated. The tragedy will be that person who confronted them will end up in a cell while the rest of this clown brigade of narcissists will whine and rant about how their liberties are being taken. Meanwhile the life that was lost will become just another statistic for others to rant about.
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  42. Go and put "how much does laura ingraham make" into Google and look at what she is reportedly getting paid each year. It will put all her comments in perspective.
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  43. That's actually their purpose. If you go back to Reagans infamous "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem." This is the sort of shitfuckery that Libertarians just love, because they claim it proves their point when in fact THEY are the sort of people THAT ARE the reason why government is the problem. Just hours after this vid was posted there's another one about an Ayn Rand clown named Norton who called in to debate Sam. Among the top comments was "The only thing I find interesting about Libertarians is trying to guess how long it will take before they completely contradict themselves. The over/under is usually 5 minutes." Look at Milton Friedmans comment on minimalist government (see below) and note the second part on the economy because if Friedman's advice had been taken by Reagan and Thatcher then they would never have rearranged their economies. Reaganomics and Thatcherism would never have existed because both are examples of a government rearranging their economies. This is the destructive stupidity of people like Matt Gaetz. They deliberately interfere and cause problems with government to prove that government is the problem. Plus note Friedman's point on legislating morality which is EXACTLY what the GOP tries to do. Its mindless. Milton Friedman said, "Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government-- in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player."
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  44.  @clairewright332  Simple answer is "Not really" Its Left of the Libertarian view but America basically does NOT know what a real Left is in the first place because both your major parties are fundamentally to the political Right. America never had a union based political party like British Labor or Australian Labor. American has the Democrats who started in the South and were so far to the Right the Klu Klux Klan was formed out of them. The Republicans under Lincoln freed the slaves while the modern Republicans would re-introduce slavery in a heartbeat. Obama famously admitted his economics were in line with Ronald Reagan's. America doesn't have Left and Right it has Right and Far Right. Don't panic in Australia right now we refer to our parties as SHlT (Lib Nat Coalition) and SHlT LITE (Australian Labor). BUT what America does have that's similar to everywhere else is they have to political sides that basically see each other as the nations greatest threat. A couple of years ago there was a comment attributed to Johnathon Haidt that basically went "There's a cacophony where the Radical Left and Radical Right just scream at each other while the rest of us, trapped in the middle, are simply exhausted." I think that's essentially true in almost every developed nation right now. Each side just screams at each other and its exhausted the rest of us. Its very true in Australia and from what I can see Britain, New Zealand and Canada as well. Every public debate is framed in the context of "Its their fault because they are terrible and a threat to our way of life, our freedoms and our basic rights." You often hear lines like "We have to take our country back!" I even heard that from One of the New Zealand politicians recently and their politics is usually tame compared to ours. Fueling it all is a media (all of them) that's totally (and often fanatically) obsessed with attention. They will do anything to get their audience's attention and then lock it down with the right social media tags. AND IF a story isn't burning bright enough they will throw rocket fuel at it until it does. AND IF it causes both sides to be outraged at scream even louder at each other they see that as an invitation to throw even more rocket fuel at it.
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  45. ​ @kindGSL  I largely agree except that what you are doing is EXACTLY what so many other Americans do. You believe that America cannot fall and yet it almost did on January 6th. You had a President totally out of control and NOBODY willing to reign him in. That's as dangerous as it gets. I agree 100% it will be very hard to break America but you can break anything if you really want to. Since then American has utterly FAILED to deal with him and this is part of an ongoing issue with America NOT holding its top echelon accountable. Nobody at the top was held accountable for the invasion of Iraq. Nobody at the top was held accountable for the prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Bagram AFB. Nobody at the top was held accountable for the 2007/08 GFC. On that there's a PBS Frontline on it where Lanny Breuer (Eric Holder's Deputy) says straight to the camera they chose NOT to pursue charges against the Wall St CEO's for economic reasons. Mitch McConnell could have simply said "NO, this is too much." and simply impeached Trump after January 6th and disqualified him from future office. I went to college In America and had these sorts of discussions 30+ years ago. I've heard all about the systems of "Checks & Balances" that would never fail and allow someone like Trump to do what he did. What NOBODY has grasped is that we are NOT living in the 80s or 90s when these systems still worked. Reagan was held accountable for Iran-Contra. I was in college in America as that went on. Bill Clinton lied about getting blown and was held accountable. Then 9/11 changed everything and ever since America's systems have slowly been broken. Back in the 80s or 90s if anyone had told an American that in their lifetime they'd see an enraged mob storm the capital chanting "Hang the Vice President!" they would have called you crazy and yet that happened and NONE of the instigators have been held accountable. If you had told anyone back in the 80s or 90s that half of Oregon wanted to split away and join Idaho they would have called you crazy but that is happening right now. American's are always talking about the "slippery slope." Well News Flash you are already on that slippery slope and sliding. The only question is how far will you slide before you wake up. And so we are totally fair Australia is doing the same sorts of stupid things and its mostly because we have had a lot of people go to places like Harvard and Yale and they wave their degrees in our faces AS PROOF of their irrefutable expertise. We have stuff going on here RIGHT NOW that could easily break our nation. Societies are fragile things and can break if you aren't careful.
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  46. TEACHING INUDSTRIAL ROBOTS: 2 of the most common tasks industrial robots do are welding and pick & place. Welding is mostly a matter of following the joint line between 2 pieces of metal. Pick and place is our term for tasks like stacking boxes on a pallet as in we pick something up and place it down which is a very common task in robotics. For all the robot guys out there. This isn't for you this is for all the non-robot programmers so things are more phonetic than code. Imagine we have a robot and has a gripper that closes to grab hold of a part and opens the let that part go and we want it to pick that part up from Point A place and put it down at Point B. To do the most basic pick and place we have to get the robot to know at least 3 points. There's the pick position (Point A), the place position (Point B) as well as a home position which we'll call PHome where its out of the road of everything else . Now to make a robot work we don't just tell it to go to a position because it will (in general) take the fastest path which might not be a straight line. Robots aren't that smart and will simply crash into or through whatever is in the road. Even the best anti-collision software (like airbags) only limits the damage. So we never just tell the robot to go to the safe position. In most cases we tell it to go vertically up to get clear of everything so it can then go directly to the home position without hitting anything. So we end up with a list if commands that looks a bit like this except its all phonetic rather than in code. 1-move (current location + home position height) 2-move (home position) 3-wait for a go signal. 4-move (pick position + vertical clearance) 5-move (pick position) 6-pick part (as in close the gripper) 7-move (pick position + vertical clearance) 8-move (place position + vertical clearance) 9-move (place position) 10-place part (as in open the gripper) 11-goto step 1 NOW TO MAKE IT WORK we have to TEACH the robot those 3 points and this is where the word tech has a completely different meaning to how normal people use the word teach. We take the hand control pendant and MANUALLY DRIVE the robot from point to point and when we get to the location we want with the right orientation we will go into the right menu on the pendant and RECORD that location and save it to memory. We don't stand there and tell it something. It doesn't have a camera and a brain to work it out. We have to MANUALLY drive it to the right location and record that location. Things like vertical clearances we'll work out along the way and just put them in as distances from the location. As things get more complex we have to go around things we just "teach" more points for the robot to go to or go through. We don't just move-stop-move-stop we'll also move-go through the next point, then through the next point,........ and onto the final point. For really complex paths which we get with things like welding and gluing we'll do the programing on a cad system then go out to the robot and "teach" it some reference points and then link the complex paths to those reference points. When we "teach" a robot we don't talk to it we don't read stories to it. We drive it to a location and record that location. Once it starts going it will simply crash into or go through whatever is in the road. The only comment in movies or TV I ever saw was a comment in the film the "Terminator" when he said it does not think and can't be reasoned with it just has its program and will do it. This is why we encase them in gages with interlocked gates for normal operation.
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  47. AUTOMATION SYSTEMS and LEARNING This is again another word we use in engineering that maybe we shouldn't because in engineering its nothing like what learning is for humans. The most common place in my work where we see this is in what we call closed loop control which is where we use some kind of sensor to loop back into the control system. The alternative to closed loop is open loop and we use the basic data of a system to estimate what's needed. Its simpler and suitable where accuracy isn't required. But where you need accuracy you have a sensor feeding back data. If you draw a diagram of this it has what looks like a loop - hence the term closed loop. Between the sensor and what ever you are controlling which could be the speed of a pump or the position of a control valve there will be some kind of algorithm and that algorithm will have parameters that need setting up. At the most basic level we call setting up algorithms "tuning" as in we are tuning the algorithm. More complex systems have statistical data analysis algorithms constantly refine the system over time. In essence these systems are LEARNING how to do the job better and better over time BUT THEY ARE NOT learning like a human being does. They just collect data and use statistical analysis (or similar) to refine the parameters. I once installed an oven on a process line. When we first set it up, its controller would take about 45 minutes to heat the up the oven and settle the temperature down before production could start. Over the first 9 months (or so) it collected enough data from each days start up to refine its parameters and got that 45 minutes down to around 15 minutes giving them about an extra 1/2 hour each day of production. The controller did that without any human involvement at all. To a non-engineer these days it might sound like we installed an AI on that oven - WE DIDN'T. As I said it was just a data analysis package. In past generations they'd usually task a young engineer to collect data over several months and do all that analysis by hand as a character building exercise. If you listen to what people are saying about systems like ChatGPT its not that much different except the data its analysing is NOT something as basic as a temperature or pressure sensor its analysing a massive amount of written information. But they do a similar thing in that they effectively average out all the data which is why some people are calling them stochastic parrots. The danger is assuming the stochastic parrot was trained on good data because just like having a faulty sensor causes problems so does a faulty data set for teaching a language AI like ChatGPT.
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  48.  @sebastianbardon391  WTF are you talking about. I HAVE NOT MADE ANY PREMISE about how many shares are purchased by anyone. I've just said the simple fact that public companies are owned by communities of people democratic and they operate democratically except that its 1 share = 1 vote. This is why economics, politics, education and human society in general is such a basket case right anytime someone points out a basic truth then a dozen clowns have to stand up and say nonsensical BS. You have just demonstrated why people with STEM backgrounds think everyone with an Arts Degrees is a M0R0N who's constantly trying to outthink and over explain everything.
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  49.  @Zhagg1  Like all economists your NOT stepping back and looking at some fundamental realities. Your just diving into the details and specific examples while not considering some basic realities. I am not talking about the details of how corporations work or communist states work or even trying to compare them. I am pointing out the basic fact that public (and the public thing is really important) corporations are fundamentally community enterprises with a democratic system of governance. You say they are not democratic on the assumption that democracy is based on 1 vote per person. I studied Ancient Greek society as a humanities option and Democracy has NEVER been 1 vote per person. There has always been systems of exclusion and there still is. In many countries people are not allowed to vote unless they are over 18 and a citizen. Permanent residents are often excluded. So when I say public companies are democratic I am NOT saying they operate like political democracies which is why I keep saying 1 share = 1 vote. If you want to discuss what's fair and what's not fair we could discuss Puerto Rico as other US territories where the population has ZERO effective representation in the government that rules over them. if you want to talk about unfairness then how come a handful of superdelegates each get the same voting rights as 1000s of registered Democrat voters when it comes to nominating presidential candidates?
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  50.  @Zhagg1  You should start listening to people who DO KNOW what they are talking about. People like Mark Blyth, Adam Tooze, Jacob Sholl, Eric Helleiner and others all ARE ALL POINTING OUT THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS because it explains how we got to this point in time. People like you are so infuriatingly IGNORANT and your SMUG ARROGANCE is disgusting. Communism is based around the concept of COMMUNITY ownership. PUBLIC Corporations are built around a COMMUNITY of share holders WHAT THE 'F' is so damn hard to grasp about the similarity. You people with all you smug arrogant theories on markets, derivatives, politics, psychology, philosophy and other crap while you IGNORE basic realities. Karl Polanyi said you can't commodify human beings and yet what has every economist done since Marx and Smith?????? And you people wonder why others get angry and frustrated with your smugness.
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