Button offers instant gratification for those plagued by airplane noise - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/button-offers-instant-gratification-for-those-plagued-by-airplane-noise/2018/12/29/c1035d32-02e1-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html <comment><USER2> > _" Users sign up via the Airnoise website. With a free account, users can > file up to 15 complaints a month; for $5 a month, they can file unlimited > complaints."_

Commercialized NIMBY, that's damn clever.

<comment><USER3> It's a bit of a Kamikaze effort, really. Enough NIMBY automation and future complaints will be as effective as no complaints at all.

<comment><USER4> Even before this, researchers have noticed that a few people generate a disproportionate number of noise complaints (both links from 2016):

US: [https://www.mercatus.org/publications/airport-noise- nimbyism](https://www.mercatus.org/publications/airport-noise-nimbyism)

UK: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- england-37803205](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37803205) (half of the around 25,000 complaints were made by 10 people)

I wonder if these people are more susceptible to noise than others, or are simply more tolerant of / more incentivized to navigating bureaucracy to file complaints.

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how a "dash buttons" approach to filing complaints affects these numbers.

<comment><USER5> On the disproportionate number of noise complaints from a few people: I've noticed in my own case that there was a _huge_ bar to making my first noise complaint (I don't live under a flight path, but across from a beach park where people like to party after hours and blast loud music). The first few times I suffered through it. Eventually it was so bad, I went out at 3am to ask, politely, for them to keep it down (the park closes at 10pm). I didn't want to be "that guy" that calls the cops on a bunch of kids just looking to have a good time. The guy who owned the car blasting the music was apologetic and immediately complied, but one of his friends got in my face about it. Another couple of incidents like that and, well, fuck it, I'm not going to risk bodily harm to try to be cool for some total strangers. I called the cops, who responded in minutes. Problem solved. Once I crossed that line, I hear music blasting after midnight, I call the cops without hesitation. Aside from my own peace of mind, I like to think I'm helping my neighbors who may be still be in the suffering stage. I have no doubt that I make _many_ more noise complaints than they do.

<comment><USER6> Funny I had the opposite experience in the UK (London). Some 50-ish cars doing a sort of illegal car tuning gathering under my windows in the middle of the night (midnight). It wasn't the first time and I knew it could last for a couple of hours. Making loud noise with their engines and sound systems. I first went to speak to them and asked them to move around (they were also obstructing the traffic). They just laughed. I then called the non emergency police line, talked to a very nice and courteous officer, whose job seemed to be providing reassuring words but did nothing about it.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the non-emergency number seems to be a placebo to me - I've never heard of anyone getting any results by ringing it. I'm sure things were better when one used to be able to ring the local station direct.

<comment><USER8> In Los Angeles I've used the non emergency line a bunch due to homeless individuals causing issues, and in every case I've had a cop come within the hour. I know because they always give me a ring when they are at the location to just walk through what I saw.

My experience doesn't seem to mirror everyone's though in LA, so it may have just been the Wilshire division was all over it.

<comment><USER7> Be thankful you aren't in a country where three successive governments have been pushing "austerity" for a decade, then.

The current one has even had the temerity lately to outright deny that their public sector cuts, which include policing, are in any way related to the obvious rise in low-level crime and disorder here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just wondering if these devices are only issued to people who had houses in that area before the airport was built. IMO if you knowingly purchase a residence under a flight path, you lose any privilege of complaining about the noise.

Modern aviation is already far quieter, and there are plenty of regulations in place to minimise the noise footprint (e.g. modern fanjet engines are far quieter than the older turbojets, most airports have curfew hours to prevent late night/early morning noise, plus I know at our local airport, aircraft cannot use reverse thrust braking when landing in the early morning hours etc.).

<comment><USER10> > if you knowingly purchase a residence under a flight path, you lose any > privilege of complaining about the noise.

Honestly, this line really grinds my gears. Let me explain:

First, people don't always know. Actually I think people _frequently_ don't know. It's not like estate/rental agents are known for their outstanding honesty.

Also remember that the loudness and frequency of air travel can change _a lot_. An airplane every few hours and none during the night? That's probably okay. An airplane every 15 minutes for 24/7? Probably not.

But the most important point is that it's a bit of a discussion stopper; in the end, no one really wants to live under a flight path, and we all have to live on the same planet. I'm not saying we can always accommodate everyone, but dismissing people's real daily struggles with this out-of-hand is probably not great, especially as there are many important details missing.

I had a noise problem at my previous apartment. I lived about 20 metres from a church repurposed as a "community and arts centre". Turns out, that this is code for "we will do rave parties where we literally pump out 100dB of bass until 5am every weekend during the winter season". I wouldn't have minded if it was the occasional thing, or if it wasn't literally 100dB (that was their limit, which by their own admission they also breached sometimes), or if it wasn't every weekend. I complained but they were very dismissive about it. It's one of the reasons I ended up moving.

My point is, there are many factors: loudness, frequency, time of day, etc. In a lot of airports the total loudness may be less (I'll take your word for it), but the frequency and time of day has definitely increased in many cases, as people are flying much more.

<comment><USER11> I appreciate your example especially since it's something you couldn't really have looked up beforehand. Imagine searching "raves til 5am in my area"

But flight paths are a known known. Maps exist. Noise level maps exist. Airport locations, runway directions, departing and arriving flight paths (and altitudes!) all exist.

Caveat emptor, you got a "good deal" on a house because it's in a loud area. If you cared about the noise then you should've done your homework.

Or.. move somewhere else?

Again— all this only applies to people walking in to buying homes under takeoff paths. If the airport did this to existing homeowners that's a prolem, and I think complaints are justified. (This case also runs into NIMBYism, which is also a problem, and so on)

<comment><USER12> Flight paths change sometimes. Airports expand, etc.

<comment><USER9> Airport expansion, or addition of new runways etc. are usually a tediously long process, and usually with a lot of community feedback and approval etc. (at least, here in Australia it is). Not something that can happen overnight without anyone knowing.

Flight path changes are more common. But then again, those are usually departure pathways. The worst noise issues are on final approach or on the takeoff run on runway heading, which rarely change. Most turning points are above 1000ft AGL where the noise levels are a lot less.

<comment><USER13> You would probably use the buttons as part of a campaign to prevent the expansion of an airport further, to prove that aircraft noise is already louder than the authorities say it is. I doubt the current measurement of aircraft noise at ground level over wide areas and long periods is that great, and airport operators have a heavy incentive to understate the levels of noise pollution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, I had no idea this existed. I built a similar thing for my own personal use for my local airport (Minneapolis/MSP). I looked at using an Amazon Dash button, but the lifespan is not great and the convenience is not high. Instead, I use SMS via Twilio and their cloud functions (source: [https://github.com/justinph/macnoisebutton](https://github.com/justinph/macnoisebutton))

It's pretty handy to be able to say to my watch "Hey Siri, text complain to Dan Boivin" to make a complaint. (Dan Boivin is the chair of the Minneapolis Airport Commission, who I have entered into my contacts).

For those griping about people buying homes after airports existed, there are a couple things to defray that argument. Yes, the airports existed, but the traffic at airports have increased. Airlines are flying more smaller regional jets, which means the frequency of flights have increased. The FAA recently changed flight patterns (part of NextGen) that resulted in some areas seeing much more air traffic than they had in the past. And, airlines are not doing the steep takeoffs like they used to in an effort to conserve fuel, putting planes closer to the ground for longer, resulting in more noise.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's a neat idea, but it's not clear from the article what these complaints accomplish. Are the airport administrators held accountable in any way? Are they required to respond to the complaints? Maintain a low threshold? It seems like this could just be a placebo button.

<comment><USER16> What are they supposed to do? They can't move the airport and if they change the routing then someone else will complain.

<comment><USER17> Sometimes you wonder if they could possible move the route a little to the side. I live on an island close to Seattle, and airplains flying from California will fly straight over the island, almost like it is on purpose. You wonder why they couldn't move the route a little to the west or a little to the east and fly over the sea instead.

[https://flightaware.com/live/flight/ASA1041](https://flightaware.com/live/flight/ASA1041)

<comment><USER18> FlightAware on mobile isn't letting me zoom in to see which island you're on. There's a few pilots on HN; we can help you look it up. It's probably not on purpose as in "haha let's fly over this guy's house" but more likely to that it keeps traffic in the busy Seattle area flowing smoothly. You can certainly write to the local Flight Standards District Office and ask them to consider using new waypoints and procedures, or ask them for an official explanation.

<comment><USER19> It looks like Vashon Island (from Google Maps).

<comment><USER18> That one's easy then - to the west, and you're on the approach path to JBLM. To the east, you're too close to SEA to properly intercept the final approach course. Vashon Island is also far less populated than the land to the east of SEA.

<comment><USER20> For those not familiar with the Seattle area, JBLM is Joint Base Lewis- McChord, where McChord is an air force base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A button would be great to have for cars that run red lights and try to muscle in on pedestrians crossing while the walk sign is on. It would need a camera to catch the license plate, to be effective, though. Probably would be simpler as a phone app, just with a fast (or instant) camera. There's been a rash of pedestrian fatalities where I live recently and seemingly little by way of enforcement; it would be good to have some way to push back.

<comment><USER22> hook it up to a dashcam, and have it send the last 30s of footage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A small part of my job (air force) is taking noise complaints. I find their rate has absolutely nothing to do with actual noise. It is all about time of day. A rainy tuesday afternoon: we can land on a roof without complaint from the owners. But on a sunny saturday evening, suddenly the same flight pattern we have flown for _years_ without issue starts my phone ringing.

Standard, honest, responses:

1) Civilian air traffic control dictate our airport approach. If our helicopter was flying low it was probably because a 737 was on approach above it.

2) Helicopters have to land. They cannot hover down from 5000 feet directly onto the pad. They have to fly over someone's house somewhere to come home.

3) Sorry ma'am, but there was this boat on fire and a man was hurt. The strait line between the boat and hospital was directly over your house. Our bad. Ill ask the pilots to take the long way next time.

What AF personnel want to say:

4) Big helicopter? Did you see a big red star on the side of it? No? You're welcome. _click_

<comment><USER24> > Did you see a big red star on the side of it?

Ah the 'sound of freedom' dodge.

What is the limit for that excuse? Broken windows from sonic boom? 20lb concrete practice bomb accidentally dropped through a roof? Cablecar knocked to the ground during low-level flyying training? All unfortunate but necessary to Maintain Freedom...

<comment><USER23> Yes.

But remember that civilian air traffic causes plenty of accidents and injuries too. Our helicopters (sar) each year save far more lives than all the accidents our airforce have ever caused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >That's because with one click, Deckert has done what could have taken her hours to do a few months ago — she has filed a noise complaint with officials at the Maryland Aviation Administration.

One thing though is that the very ease diminishes how much attention the officials actually pay. Same as when you contact your officials, a hand written letter or phone call is much more effective than an email template or a retweet. When they got a noise complaint in the past, they would have thought: this bothered them enough to spend an hour filling out a noise complaint. Now, they can think: this bothered them enough to spend half a second to push a conveniently located button or use an app.

<comment><USER26> The officials already made clear that passenger comfort isn't a priority; they could have mandated that airlines install noise sensors and file monthly reports with their data, but instead they chose to require passengers to risk suffering and then have to file complaints to seek recompense for it.

<comment><USER27> Assuming you only read the title of the post I can understand your reply, but I would suggest a cursory glance at articles before replying.

The noise complaints are coming from people under the flight path, not from within the cabin.

<comment><USER26> Ah, nuts, I misread before the "You've read too much" cutoff kicked in on the site. Oh well.

I miss the plane noise from my prior home. A bit odd to me that people object to it, so I'll stay out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In San Diego the airport is right downtown. Many people are pretty much gauranteed to be dealing with airplane noise regardless of the routes taken to land.

Of course La Jolla is probably the most expensive area in San Diego. Should we route the airplanes around them? Lol.

I mean you can't move the airports and most people can't move their houses so it feels like this is mostly a structural issue. And to me more direct routing based on satellites seems safer than radar based.

I think the buttons are a great idea though. Hopefully they will make buttons for more practical complaints like muggings or burglary. Or just fix reporting processes to be more efficient in the first place. Although that may not be the best example because if you need a button to press everytime you get robbed you probably need to just move to a better neighborhood.

I feel like this demonstrates the gap between where technology is and where government is.

<comment><USER28> Sats have wild accuracy shifts and depend heavily on the plane being fully operational. Ultimately what you end up with sats anyway is list of waypoints, not anything dynamic, and it can be done with radar as well.

<comment><USER2> Then why are airports trending towards satellite navigation? Do they not realize something that you do?

<comment><USER28> No, they do realize exactly that, which is why quite often the paths didn't change as much as they could and why aviation community tends to rebuke ideas like "remove SSR and PSR because GPS and Mode S + ADS-B is enough".

Sats provide good "happy path" when everything is ok and allow greater density. But approach and departure routes are going to be designed for safety as well, including when those features fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why only complain about something when you remember to press a button?

At some point, someone is just going to hook up a decibel meter and automatically press the button when it hits a threshold. It might file a couple of bad complaints, but if the noise difference is significant, you could definitely increase your throughput.

<comment><USER30> My neighborhood has car alarms which serve a similar function (to warn of excessive noise or vibration by emitting louder noise.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the UK Gatwick and Heathrow airports have been there for a generation. By this I mean that the vast majority of people moved to their noise-affected houses knowing the airport was there already.

Do these people deserve our sympathy? Initially i find it hard to be charitable towards them.

In my local town there is a pub that has been there for around 600 years. A particularly pushy person moved in next door, complained about the noise and successfully got the licensing people to add a condition that the beer garden must be closed after a certain time. Same question again, surely they knew what to expect when they moved in?

<comment><USER32> Sure, an airport may have been there, but, in Boston at least, technology changes have made it so that if you are in the flight path, you have a much higher frequency of planes overhead.

See the traffic from runway 33L at Logan airport as an example: [https://www.universalhub.com/comment/559152#comment-559152](https://www.universalhub.com/comment/559152#comment-559152)

Basically, flights used to have diverse paths, so you would hear a plane occasionally. And so would everyone else around. But now, if you are directly under the path, you will hear flights consistently every 90 seconds for hours on end. That is a major change, and a recent one at that.

<comment><USER33> How recent? (Ex last year, last decade?)

<comment><USER34> > The green lines are flight paths from before the implementation of the new > technology (January 2013). The red lines are flight paths from after the > implementation of the new technology (January 2015).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The problem is IMHO not the airplane noise. As many others have written, the actual noise has gone down over the decades.

The real problem is a perceived lack of democratic participation / a government that _cares_ about its people. The interviewed people actually said so: "It makes you feel like you can make a difference", compared to manually filling out complex forms.

This actually is valid also for other countries: in Munich, there is a constant battle for the expansion of the airport with a new runway. For now, the project is set on hold, but who knows how the situation will look like in 5 years w/ the then-new government in Bavaria. This was also decided above the heads of the affected population (who would have lost their homes or be affected by massive increases in noise) without including them, and politicians didn't do flying f..k and tell the affected people that the state cares for them, their well-being or whatever. For new rail tracks or those where usage exploded over decades, people had to _sue_ the rail company for installation of noise-protection.

Personal bet: Complaints about "NIMBY", endless and expensive judicial battles (as are hinted in the article), noise, playing kids, _anything_ would go down to decent manageable levels if governments would care to meaningfully involve affected residents and give them the feeling that their voice matters for the government. The other way is to continue as usual and watch them fall to various radicals and their "the state doesn't care about you, only about <insert minority/marginalized group here>" message.

</comment><comment><USER36> Not that there's anything wrong with reporting on the same topic by multiple publications, but this article just seems like a poor copy of this WSJ article published in August:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/airplane-noise-complaints- are-s...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/airplane-noise-complaints-are- skyrocketing-i-start-pushing-that-button-at-6-33-a-m-1535121271)

[https://outline.com/Kp3HcG](https://outline.com/Kp3HcG)

Out of curiosity, are there journalistic guidelines about publishing duplicate articles when there are seemingly no new pertinent developments? I haven't seen anything like this before.

<comment><USER37> Could be the author drumming up the attention, a la celebrities giving basically the same interview on the late-night circuit to promote their newest reboot/sequel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't know, sort of feels like this thing really isn't helping anyone other than perhaps the entity collecting the $5. These folks would probably be better served by speaking with some experts to find out whether there are any feasible short term things that can even be done, and if there are then organizing to lobby officials as a group. Punching the button every time a plane flies over is probably just going to limit the effectiveness of the complaints.

</comment><comment><USER39> Another aspect to this problem is that the vast majority of houses in the US are made as cheaply as possible, and that means walls with very little mass and sound absorption.

If you had something like concrete walls like is typical for Germany, the plane noise would barely register.

<comment><USER40> Houses in close proxmity airports can be designed to help minimize the noise -- I know someone that built a house in the flight path for SFO, so he used triple pane glass windows, clay roof tiles instead of the more typical asphalt shingles, some sort of soundproofing insulation in the attic, heavy solid wood exterior doors (with tight weatherstripping) among other things. Apparently the home builders in that area know what they need to do.

It works, you can barely hear the planes go by from within the house, but outside, they are loud enough to make it hard to carry on a conversation.

I think most people just get used to the noise, I used to live close to a train line - close enough that not only could I hear the train horns at the crossing, but also could hear the rumbling train cars go by and could feel the vibrations in the house.

It was super annoying for the first month or so, and then I forgot about it and never really noticed it until I had a house guest that complained about the late night noise.

<comment><USER20> I once stayed at an airport hotel in Zurich, Switzerland, and I was amazed that while there was a direct view of the runway from the room, you could not tell there was a plane taking off a few hundred meters away. I didn't think it was possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am curious why this wasn't just an app. What's the point of having a physical button other than for aesthetic gratification? If you had an app, it'd be more than just one click, but it'd only be like three "clicks" or steps. You'd have to unlock your phone, open the app, and click a button. Three steps instead of one. Not sure if that warrants a physical button.

Edit: I get why pressing a physical button is therapeutic, but even an app could play some audio when you pressed the button. These people are pretty pissed off when they click these buttons, because nobody is happy when they're complaining about noise pollution. An app could even play a voice-acted "fuck you, <name of airport>" when you click the button in the app. There are about 15,000 airports in the US. You could pay 150 people $10 each to say "fuck you <airport_i>" in an angry, cathartic voice. Each person would only have to say 100 lines.

<comment><USER42> It seems like a lot of users are clicking that button dozens of times a day. I suppose they might consider the extra convenience worth it, particularly at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I used to live directly west of DFW (Euless). I heard the jets maybe 3 or 4 times from inside my apartment; I heard them much more often outside, but it was never disturbing to the point I would have complained.

Two things help DFW: 1. It has a huge amount of land. 2. The main landing/takeoff pattern is North/South and there are roads and businesses to the North and South and not houses.

Now I live right near the landing pattern of ABIA - Austin, but way north. The only thing that bugs me is that the planes directly overfly the office and I've watched too many crash videos. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLPA0Dhi1VXQDGbkXwjDUzQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLPA0Dhi1VXQDGbkXwjDUzQ/videos)

</comment><comment><USER44> One of my pet genius ideas that will never happen is to reserve prime housing areas near airports for the deaf.

<comment><USER20> Your idea is correct: According to mainstream economic theory, the invisible hand of the free market has already resulted in areas near airports being inhabited exclusively by the deaf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I thought I was going to read about a home-sized noise cancelling system that you could activate by pressing a button when you heard an airplane overhead.

<comment><USER46> Me too! I'd just been thinking a few days ago how amazing an invention like that would be... no more concerns about neighbors or trains or airplanes or drones... lots of property values would increase and zoning laws would become obsolete if such a thing existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I wish this would also work with military flights. There's a lot of people here talking about NIMBYism and how you should know before you buy your house and what-not. I agree with most of that, except I don't think it fairly applies here in many cases. Take myself as an anecdote. I bought a house in a nice, quiet, neighborhood 7 years ago. I also live in a city with multiple active military bases, including two Air Force bases which do training flights. At the time it was established practice to limit training flights to daytime if they were overflying residential areas, I worked night-shift so it was annoying, but what can you do?

Now I work days, and multiple times per day and into the late night (stops around Midnight/1AM) there will be military training flights over my neighborhood. These are not high-altitude flyovers with some noise, these are young Air Force pilots in training flying over low, and sometimes breaking the sound barrier over my neighborhood (but at least high enough altitude that it's not breaking windows). I've adapted by basically shifting my sleep schedule so I go to bed around Midnight when it stops. What else can I do?

Short of using my personal connections locally to find out who their CO is and calling them on the phone directly, there is basically no process for me to complain. I'm also pretty certain that generating sonic booms over a neighborhood at night is probably against their training orders, and they'd get disciplined, but since I have no pathway to complain and it's something that could not reasonably be expected, I'm just stuck with it unless I want to move.

It's not a daily occurrence, but probably happens at least 3-4 times per week after 9PM.

There's a reason the pricing for homes is lower next to the airport or next to the Air Force base vs in my previously quiet neighborhood which is in a suburb more than 5 miles from both.

</comment><comment><USER48> Could there ever be such a thing as domestic noise cancelation?

Presumably it would need precise location of ear-drums, such as by wearing a RF reflective stud on the ear lobe. And multiple time-of-flight receivers for triangulation.

I guess, if it were possible such a system would be much better when two or more people are not in the same room together.

</comment><comment><USER49> Where can hobbyists purchase hackable/programmable internet buttons such as this for a reasonable price? I've seen a few around the place but the costs are exorbitant for what they are, and hacking the Amazon buttons is too much effort (and they're hard to get outside the US)

<comment> aaron-santos Is the $15 AWS IoT Button[1] too expensive?

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/1st-Generation-AWS-IoT- Button/dp/B01C...](https://www.amazon.com/1st-Generation-AWS-IoT- Button/dp/B01C7WE5WM/)

<comment><USER50> For a fun side project probably not, no. Anything past that (even a small scale beta) and yes $15 is quite expensive for what you are getting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I have just figured out the perfect IoT device to solve this problem:

Push a button when local infrastructure makes you angry. The device figures out your location from GPS and user input on setup. The device then searches for a local realtor, and sends them an email saying that the device's owner wants to move. The realtor handles it from there.

If flight paths are changing, the housing market will adjust. If you don't want to be subject to the vagaries of metropolitan infrastructure, buy land in the middle of nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER52> Do you also complain about thunder and lightning to the NWS?

<comment><USER2> They should make a button to file noise complaints about city buses. This would be very useful for people living in low-level apartments located on busy city streets.

<comment><USER53> Or maybe the trains in Chicago or New York?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> An air traffic controller acquaintance of mine warned me that they were making changes and that planes on approach would be flying at lower altitudes as a result. Sure enough, jet noise has gotten ridiculous. They have them flying way too low way too far out. You can be 10 - 20 miles out and have a jet noise such that you have to yell to be heard.

</comment><comment><USER55> Does a noise abatement complaint service like this exist for garbage trucks that come in the middle of the night?

</comment><comment><USER56> Looking forward to the one for leaf blowers.

<comment><USER53> I knew an individual that lived in a neighborhood frequently used for film shoots. "Coincidentally", these shoots were always on days when he was planning on doing yard work. Inevitibly, some PA would come offer him some cash to convince him to postpone his yard work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> You can take this one step further. After manually flagging when you hear a plane, generate the next complaint automatically.

</comment><comment><USER58> Airports aren't going away.

Engine makers aren't making them any quieter, laws of physics _and_ time (airplanes in service for decades)

Airplanes have to follow a certain path and certain procedures, for example they can't land like helicopters from 30,000 feet.

So for the people that bought cheaper homes near an airports, it sucks, but get used to it (other than a rare case when the plane deviated from standard procedure). Maybe they'll make complaint filing manual.

<comment><USER59> Engine makers have dramatically reduced engine noise and continue to do so. Some aircraft have "hush kits" developed and installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Someone should do the same thing for filing complaints about homeless camps in San Francisco.

</comment><comment><USER61> My first house had airplane noise.

Was minor league, mostly Southwest airline approaches. (I never inquired why)

Then, for a while, I got ultra intense! Was only for a couple months. And only intense on occasion. Maybe people complained.

I had never really experienced that kind of noise. It was bone rattling. Basic, like "oh fuck, this is LOUD"

Kind of liked it. I would not have had it continued.

</comment><comment><USER62> As someone who lives near an airport (2.4mi) and under flight paths, I honestly don't care. It's the sound of valuable commerce passing through my community and it's not worth wasting official's time with excessive complaints.</comment>


Show HN: SQLBolt – Learn SQL with simple, interactive examples - <AUTHOR> http://sqlbolt.com <comment><USER2> This is so well done, I'm kind of sad that it isn't getting more attention. I love the concept. My one bit of feedback is that the SQL query text area should have a button to execute the query, rather than clearing the results table and analyzing the query as I type. In the exercise on updating records, it was difficult for me to write the UPDATE statement because I wanted to look at the rows I was updating. I'd prefer if it left the results from the previous query up until the next query runs. Or if you could just leave the same results up the whole time and you could visually see the update run and highlight the rows/columns that were updated and see the values change in place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I think I've found a good solution on the updating, it should only update when you have a valid query now. Hopefully, it should be a bit more stable. :)

<comment><USER3> I love the instant feedback when completing a valid query, but as suggested, it can get in the way when trying to compose a filter. Perhaps use a `tickbox` to toggle the automatic table data update?

Another thing, the invalid / incomplete query alert gets in the way of looking at the last data row. Perhaps you can find a better location to show this alerts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I've had the same thought about the popup, so maybe I can move it into the edit text. Otherwise, the result stability issue is important so I'm going to take another crack at it today. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I couldn't really find anything like this the last time someone asked me about SQL, so I whipped up this site (SQLBolt) over the last couple months.

It's an interactive tutorial, and I'm looking to add a few more topics along the way. Curious to see what HN thought, and whether you guys might find it useful or have any feedback on it as well. :)

edit: typo

<comment><USER4> This looks very neat. I haven't used SQL much and while I'm somewhat familiar with it I'll run through it to brush up a bit, thanks!

Also, it took me a minute to find the table of contents - I was looking for an "Index" link or something at the bottom of the page near the previous/next lesson links. For reference, you have to hover over the "Interactive Tutorial" tab at the top of the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I'll try and make it more clear that the TOC is in the menu. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From you site and your ideas you can built a great desktop SQL developer tools for developer thanks to atom shell for example: [http://electron.atom.io/](http://electron.atom.io/) and some node.js database drivers.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome! Great work :)

I've just finished the Scala koans yesterday, and was wondering if there is something similar for SQL. I've been working with ORM libraries exclusively and had not touched `raw` SQL queries at all the past couple of years :(

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm late into the party but I wanted anyway to say "wow" and "thanks". Super well done, super efficient, perfect for raw SQL noobs like me. Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks great! Now we'd also like to know what you used to build this? Just underscore.js?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's mostly client-side with underscore.js and jquery for core js, highlight.js for syntax highlighting, ace for the editor, and an emscripten compiled SQLite lib for the sql processing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the SQL javascript framework used there ? This is great !

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be SQL.js, from the emscripten guys! Props to them! [https://github.com/kripken/sql.js/](https://github.com/kripken/sql.js/)</comment></comment>


Bill and Melinda Gates 2016 Annual Letter - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatesnotes.com/2016-Annual-Letter <comment><USER3> > A cheap, clean source of energy would change everything.

Like nuclear fission? Or how about solar?

Anyhow, while I think the intentions are good, my experience in 3rd world countries has me convinced that all the charity in the world won't help.

In general, the problem in 3rd world countries isn't education, or sanitation, or lack of capital, or mosquito nets, etc...

The problem is corruption and safety. I've seen it in my wife's country - savings rates are generally high, there's lots of labour, a ton of entrepreneurial spirit and the barrier to entry is more or less zero. The problem is, the second you start any sort of enterprise, someone will rob you. Police will demand bribes. Politicians will demand bribes. If you don't give in, they'll send their criminal friends after you. Even if you do give in, they may anyway. Bandits will come rob you in the night, and if you're unlucky enough to be there at the time, they'll shoot you. If you're lucky, they just take some cash. There's literally zero incentive to do anything, lest you get robbed and/or killed. That's reality. You want to fix the 3rd world, you need to start with law and order. Nothing can happen until people feel safe, and feel like doing something will actually improve their life.

After that, it's infrastructure. Power, roads, emergency services, bridges, etc... Infrastructure enables travel, it enables businesses, lights, and so on. When you have infrastructure you can bring your products to market. And so on (most people know the economic benefits of infrastructure).

In my experience, families in the third world often have the equivalent of thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars saved. Witness how much money Syrians and Afghans pay to get smuggled into Europe. They won't invest that because they don't feel safe, but they have no qualms giving a smuggler thousands of dollars.

So much charity is just a band-aid, or worse, gets siphoned off to corrupt entities. You fix corruption and safety issues, and the third world is the new first world. But no, we give charity with one hand, and with the other are propping up horrible dictators, overthrowing democracies for choosing the wrong ideology, and encouraging corruption and oligarchy. Given what's happened in the world since I've been old enough to follow the news, I'm more convinced than ever that the developed world simply wants to keep the third world as dependent colonies.

tl;dr - long rant, something something corruption.

<comment><USER4> Nuclear Fission? Safe?

As long as for-profit companies are running the reactors, they'll end up saving everywhere, and, like we've seen before and before, it ends up in meltdowns (for example, due to refusing to maintain the emergency generators properly, see fukushima).

Any way you try to handle this issue, someone will abuse it. Make it a governmentally funded operation, people will end up corrupt and use money for themselves. Make it a for-profit company, they'll try to get around every regulation and save money.

No matter what you do, you end up with a potential disaster.

<comment><USER3> > Nuclear Fission? Safe?

Nuclear power and uranium mining is far cleaner and safer than coal, oil/gas, even hydro. Coal mining, hydro accidents, and the various deaths from oil/gas extraction, power plant accidents, etc..., far outstrip deaths from nuclear power plant accidents. Not to mention the health costs that coal has inflicted on the world, the amount of people displaced and ecosystems destroyed by hydro, and so on. Nuclear power gets a bad rap, but statistically speaking, is rather safe.

<comment><USER4> For the people who end up having to live with contaminated tap water and only learn about it decades later (see Leukämiecluster Elbmarsch for example) it ends up having similar, or worse, results than coal, though.

And especially the waste issue isn't easily solvable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked in energy development in sub-sahara Africa. Attempted several solar projects, all of which would have sold electricity at a price considerably lower than the utility's avoided cost from imported petroleum. We were unsuccessful because the country was concerned that by contracting with us they might jeopardize the possibility of a grant from the EU. Law of unintended consequences. Or, great example of compassion disrupting a free market doing more harm than good.

<comment><USER6> There's a whole body of poverty work devoted to these kinds of issues, called Institutionalism. My own experience in poverty reduction was working in Microfinance (in Kenya, Uganda and Philippines). I got disillusioned when I realized that even when our loans helped someone make some additional income there was always some group above them in the food chain who would find some way to leach the additional profit from them. The issue wasn't access to loans, our entrepreneur's work ethic, intelligence or creativity - the issue was systemic corruption. Fixing that though wasn't something the free market or bottom up entrepreneurship can solve.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes I think the 3rd world population most view the western powers as Schizophrenic. On one hand you have some westerners trying to help with micro lending and free solar energy initiatives, fresh water ... (the list goes on). On the other hand, powerful corporations and western governments do everything to counter any efforts by: meddling in local politics (outright financing coup d'etats!), installing their local strongmen to further the profits of the western world and keep the dysfunctional social fabric intact ($$$).

<comment><USER8> Microlending counterpoint

[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/microcredit-muhammad- yunu...](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/microcredit-muhammad-yunus-bono- clinton-foundation-global-poverty-entrepreneurial-charity/)

<comment><USER7> I'm not against micro lending. I just don't think they'd need it if 'we' didn't put them in the miserable position they are in now. It's like cutting someone's leg off and then offering them a small fragile cane ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a great opportunity for African countries to build on their energy infrastructure which would both generate revenue for governments and provide a stable industrial environment for development. It sounds like a critical missing component in Africa's economy. Although this would also depend on the public's ability to pay for monthly/yearly energy fees which might depend on subsidies.

I've read a few articles mentioning how Africa has been inspired by China in recent years who focused on infrastructure as a base for domestic growth instead of just exports or raw materials.

I can't imagine the struggle it must be to survive without access to energy and clean water. Our household recently had our pipes burst from freezing and were nearly at a breaking point after three days without water. Worse yet is the occasional black out. So I'm very sympathetic to this cause.

Bill and Melinda are doing some great work.

Sidenote:

> _Changes in weather often mean that their crops won't grow because of too > little rain or too much rain. That sinks them deeper into poverty. That's > particularly unfair because they're the least responsible for emitting CO2, > which is causing the problem in the first place._

Is this really true? I thought farms _were_ responsible for the most generation of CO2 and pollutants? At least in North America livestock accounts for something like 50% of the pollution (aka "cow farts"), even more so than oil/coal. The worlds obsession with meat is actually more harmful to the environment than cars/gasoline... but this is never popularly advertised thanks to efforts of the livestock industry and willful blindness by government agencies.

<comment><USER10> In Nigeria and Ghana, important projects are left undone by the ruling parties because they are long term projects.

Because, the opposing party would be the ones to reap the rewards, and praise from the populace.

They'd instead focus on building new roads instead of maintaining existing ones, building new schools instead of improving existing ones, starting new high sounding schemes instead of continuing projects the previous regime begun.

And btw plants convert CO2 to O2.

<comment><USER11> That's how government works everywhere, to some degree.

The planning horizon does not stretch further than the next election. For long term projects, private entities do much better.

<comment><USER12> What about China?

<comment><USER13> Or old-fasioned kingdoms and monarchies. A number of English kings underwrote the wool trade; in general, the smarter sort of king tended to take an interest in improving his country's manufacturing and agriculture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bill's focus on new tech still seems odd to me.

Maybe he's thought about it, and as a famous geek thinks that the number one thing he can do is champion tech innovation.

But he specifically talks about increasing energy efficiency. An obvious opening to talk about carbon taxes that bake efficiency decisions into everything we buy (and provides a ready made market for new, low-carbon tech).

Or he talks about coal, again a great opening to talk about removing subsidies from that industry and getting the workers retrained in something else.

And he seems dismissive of solar, like those will only help African farmers when the sun is shining and so are barely worth even thinking about.

In general he seems too focussed on getting carbon to 0, and not enough focussed on the low hanging fruit which, if solved with todays existing tech and policy instruments, would extend the runway we have to find breakthrough tech before our world descends into anarchy and global warfare.

Just swapping natural gas for coal gives us much ability to burn fossil fuels, since it halves the carbon per energy output. Might not be as cool as a fusion reactor, but every carbon molecule counts.

<comment><USER15> Gates doesn't govern any countries and he's not in charge of any global policies. Also, he is not superman and he doesn't have infinite resources. He's just trying to find niches where a rich geek can make a difference. Child vaccination was a good example.

Significantly, he's trying to do practical things to improve the lives of poor people in the third world, as opposed to founding libraries or building more William Gates computer buildings at elite universities.

It's fair to judge what he does against what he _could_ do, but it's unreasonable to judge him for what he can't do.

<comment><USER16> I don't think anybody would judge him badly for not doing what he's unable to do. Of course not, just go back to Hume's "ought implies can".

I do think, however, that it does make sense to question whether he might be wasting resources and effort.

<comment><USER15> Agreed, and that is exactly what he does: the foundation has an annual Fail Fest to try to learn from its mistakes.

The website says: "Some of the projects we fund will fail. We not only accept that, we expect it — because we think an essential role of philanthropy is to make bets on promising solutions that governments and businesses can't afford to make. As we learn which bets pay off, we have to adjust our strategies and share the results so everyone can benefit."

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General- Informatio...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General- Information/Letter-from-Bill-and-Melinda-Gates)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While I commend this, there's still also a clean water/pollution crisis that plagues the world. And in this sense, I don't mean air pollution, but as in trash - tons and tons of trash. While the US has its fair share of pollution and clean water issues, other countries like the Philippines, Brazil, and African countries allow mass amounts of garbage and pollutants into the waterways and ocean. Huge amounts of toxic waste are being exported to Africa and seeping into the oceans and ground water, or dumped into the ocean. Everything in the world is connected, so pollution on the one side of the world will eventually make its way over to the other. Another reason why this is a huge problem is that a few drops of the right(or wrong) chemical can contaminate hundreds of gallons of water, so when there's tons of pollutants being dumped illegally or stored irresponsibly, just think about the damage that can do.

<comment><USER18> And don't forget that the developed countries like to export their most pollutant industries. So great part of China pollution is for producing things for USA and Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Poverty is not just about a lack of money. It's about the absence of the resources the poor need to realize their potential."

<comment><USER20> Paul Graham would disagree with you on that definition of Poverty. In his world poor people can wake up one fine day and start a business.

      Aaron : What drove the decision to go start a business?

      Paul : Poverty.

      Aaron : Poverty.

      Paul : I was tired of being poor. I was working as a    freelance programmer, and it was this sort of boom/bust thing where I would get money and then I would run out of money, and then it would be a disaster, and I just got tired of it. And then I thought, "I'm just going to work until I won't run out of money."

<comment><USER21> Thats not what I think of when I think of poverty.

Paul got tired of being broke. When you're tired of being broke, but you're educated, young, healthy, and/or from a privileged class-- you go to school, open a business, hustle, whatever.

People living in poverty live the lives they do for various reasons-- born into poverty, low education, mental illness, substance abuse, poor health, elderly, single mothers raising children, or some political or historical context (e.g. slavery, discrimination, unequal access to education/healthcare, language/cultural barriers, recent migration).

Poverty (in my mind) means you are stuck on an island where every nation around has guns pointed at you so you cant leave and there are only dirty cookies to eat.

<comment><USER20> Its scary how a gatekeeper like PG doesn't even have the basic understanding of poverty.

<comment><USER22> He used "poverty" instead of "broke". What's the drama?

<comment><USER23> One is a systemic condition that requires changes from society, the other is a temporary condition caused mostly by factors under your control. Confusing the two encourages ineffective 'solutions' for poverty to be created like 'we just have to make it embarrassing/uncomfortable/illegal to be in that condition'. These rely on motivating the poor person to fix themselves, instead of attempting to fix the surroundings that are the actual cause and address the symptoms that the poor person is unable to fix on their own, and then dismissing the ones that don't bootstrap themselves out as lazy and undeserving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What about nuclear power? Isn't that pretty much the cleanest, most efficient power source we know of today?

<comment><USER25> With just a few "minor" issues with safety and waste.

<comment><USER26> _With just a few "minor" issues with safety_

History shows that nuclear power is very safe as long as you don't build the plants in tsunami-prone seismic zones, operate them for decades beyond their intended service life, or allow a bunch of unhinged Russians to play "Hold my vodka and watch this" in the control room.

 _...and waste._

We've also learned that disposal of radioactive waste isn't a problem as long as you mix it with carbon-combustion products and spew it into the air, like coal plants do. Out of sight, out of mind appears to be the optimal way to deal with deadly pollution.

<comment><USER13> On nuclear safety, consider that France runs on something like 80% nuclear power. Hardly anyone knows this, because French nuclear plants are run well, and haven't had any disasters.

<comment><USER27> A few years ago you could have said the same about japan.

<comment><USER26> I can't remember where I read it, but Japan apparently has a history of playing fast and loose with nuclear stuff. Their safety record prior to Fukushima was far from spotless.

<comment><USER27> After a nuclear accident in France you will be able to read the same about the "safety record" in France. The safety record of eg. Fessenheim does not sound reassuring.

<comment><USER26> Regardless, it would take a pretty bad nuclear accident to do as much harm as existing carbon-based power plants do when operating as designed.

Not all harm involves glowing green blobs of radioactive doom on CNN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great letter, totally agree with the 'Clean Energy Crisis'. I'm glad Bill Gates stepped into the cause as it will get more lime light now. As an aside, I wish there was a way to turn off/on those side note in his blog, it was bit of distraction - that is why I prefer Safari's reading mode.

<comment><USER29> Hear, hear! I agree with my esteemed colleague on HN. Clean energy is important. After 60 years of warnings, let's be happy that Bill Gates has stepped up.

[http://youtu.be/m-AXBbuDxRY](http://youtu.be/m-AXBbuDxRY)

Now back to that Reader mode thing. Firefox and IE have them too.

Can anyone guess why clean energy hasn't been solved? Look at the chart in the 1950's and 1960s. We were barely doing any damage compared to today.

<comment><USER30> Why it hasn't been solved ? Little political will arriving just recently(mostly due to economics i think). Further more many of the energy technologies have slow improvement trends, we didn't work until recently on nuclear innovations due to political and economic reasons, and even with that replacing everything that emits co2 is a huge project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's nice knowing that a powerhouse like the Gates foundation is working on clean energy. In my view, that's the most important problem that society is facing right now.

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone care to do a back of the napkin calculation on whether there is any scenario where mercenaries could offer "law and order as a service"?

<comment><USER33> Well, that's usually what happens in 3rd world countries.

Private Security is an extremely established service in countries such as mine (Uruguay), and even bigger in others like Brazil.

One link mentions 4 million security guards in Brazil alone (compared to less than a million policemen).

Other links speak of 1.5 million of legally registered security guards.

Compare to 600.000 security guards for the entirety of Europe.

[https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/flavie- halais/spe...](https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/flavie- halais/spectacle-and-surveillance-in-brazil)

[https://www.oas.org/dsp/documentos/Publicaciones/PUBLIC%20SE...](https://www.oas.org/dsp/documentos/Publicaciones/PUBLIC%20SECURITY-%20URBAN%20CENTERS.pdf)

<comment><USER32> But you would want private security that is willing to engage in serious shootouts with roving bands of warlords, but make those warlords fearful of doing that because they expect the security to win decisively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Whenever I see smart geeks talking about tons of CO2, I always wonder what percentage of them know whether the Arrhenius effect (temperature forcing as a function of CO2 concentration) is exponential, linear, or logarithmic.

Answer here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect)

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh Bill, oh Melinda...

There is so much wrong with their thinking it's sad. Here's one example:

"If you're an American, three out of four moms at your school have a job. Your father probably does at least some cooking. There's a 35 percent chance you live with one parent"

She mentions these things in passing and goes on to claim how women do more 'unpaid' work and that that needs to change.

Really Melinda?

You think 'equality' is more important than not having the choice to stay at home and raise your children?

You think 'equality' is more important than the alarming number of single parents?

How many Americans are obese? Are they really happy with themselves? Not for long if they are. Where is that in your letter?

When you can't get the 'best country in the world' to stop eating itself to death, have failed marriages and constant fear of unemployment which causes financial ruin, not to mention absence of free education and health care - <USER2> you really think the priority is 'unpaid work' between men and women?

Unbelievable. Who raised these people? Rich people are so out of touch, even when they try to 'help', it's simply insulting to your average brethren.

<comment><USER36> I see marriage failures or catastrophic divorce rates bandied about a lot in these types of societal decay rants, and it bothers me. The divorce rate has been dropping for decades[1]. A proposed reason for that actually has to do with more equitable opportunities in career, in that women are more free to pursue a career of their choice, and so value systems have realigned to where marriages could be based more on couples being partners, with similar interests and ambitions.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the- div...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-divorce-rate- is-falling.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER35> You must be confusing me with somebody else - I'm not pointing out decay so much as abysmal state of affairs.

Whether things are decaying or not - you can look up how much the prices for the basic human necessities like housing and food have gone up in relation to wages. From what I recall there's no question the middle and lower classes are getting screwed right?

Anyhow one can be wrong with 1 instance out of 10, the overall picture remains the same.

What you're doing is referred to as nitpicking :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "...I feel very lucky and blessed that email@example.com were able to turn my marriage around like this with his powerful spell. My husband used to spend as much time as he could away from home with other women. Since he cast the love spell on him, My husband is now so in love with me and committed to our marriage than before. its so funny that my husband had not go out for weeks now!"

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm surprised Gates, for all his work in this field, has failed to recognise that we're burning up more food growing cattle and farming animals, than if we were to just eat the plant resources we use to feed the animals.

It's mathematically crazy that, during a mass shortage of food in some parts of the world, we're feeding a net loss of food in order to eat animal produce.

He's even insane enough to support getting more meat, dairy and eggs to Africa, instead of just bringing the nutrient filled crops.

With his attitude about energy and carbon footprint reduction, there's no way, India, China and Africa live sustainably on a meat filled diet.

<comment><USER39> We will not solve the problems of the meat industry by convincing people to eat less meat, asceticism never works as public policy.

The way forward on that issue is to develop synthetic meat products that can out-compete animal meat on economical/ethical/environmental dimensions.

<comment><USER40> You just have to put a sin tax on it like we do with (for example) cigarettes.

<comment><USER38> This is true. If the US stopped giving tax breaks, money, to the corn guys, the hamburger would be a more expensive meal.

Tax-payers are currently paying for people to get cardiovascular diseases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> _Poverty is not just about a lack of money._

Someone who was gifted $1 million on the day he was born preaching about poverty is like someone who has never written a line of code running an I.T. department.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, or like a doctor who has never had cancer running an oncology department. You know the old saying: "write what you know, and absolutely nothing else because empathy does not exist".</comment></comment>


At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won't Be a Job Killer - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-chief-predicts-artificial-intelligence-wont-be-a-job-killer-1484669444 <comment><USER4> There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Agricultural employment went from 90%+ of the population to ~1% over a few generations. People using computers at work went from less than 1% to complete ubiquity in 30 years. And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate. Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?

<comment><USER5> Yes, this time it is different.

I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.

Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?

Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall below minimum, in our case.

Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.

But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.

<comment><USER6> Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the _reason_ we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge.

Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that _is_ a possible outcome of too many unhappy people, changes will be made to ensure people have some base level of happiness on average to prevent that. It's one of the things that makes our current government as stable as it is - the need to respond to the people.

<comment><USER7> People absolutely are tools in the eyes of their employers. I've never been at a company and not heard them refer to employees as "resources" when talking about scheduling and allocation of people. There's nothing special about humans in a factory compared to robots other than our ability to adapt and learn. But as robotics and AI/ML get better that gap narrows until you reach a point that the robot is "good enough". That same robot might be a little slower than a person at first but it's operating for a fraction of the hourly rate and it's doing so 24/7 with no breaks and no slow downs.

Your point about millions of displaced people rising up and being unhappy is 100% valid. But you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employe people just because it's the right thing to do. Especially in the US where the entire culture is based around corporate profits only ever increasing at a rate greater than inflation. The US is in one big race to the bottom to see who can shave $0.01 off the sale price of their product. That naturally leads to two things. Monopolies and hyper efficiency. Because when your profit margin is pennies per unit you have to move one hell of a lot units to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue.

<comment><USER6> > you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of > their earnings to employee people just because it's the right thing to do.

Sure, but that's what legislation is for. We have a minimum wage and laws protecting workers for a reason. Companies do have a disproportionate influence on politics, but only to a point. When it comes to a truly unhappy populace, politicians know what's more important to continuing to perpetuate the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is all you need to read from the article:

> Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms > of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that > technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities

\-- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty

But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancements will be fewer than old jobs displaced.

My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.

<comment><USER9> I agree.

It all seems so obvious to me that I feel like I must be the fool in the room, but that can't be. Technology and progress in science changes the kinds of work we do. The processes are accelerating, and we're reaching a point where work is better done by machines. I can see no viable future for humans other than Universal Basic Income, with options for additional creativity and work unbounded by time spent doing menial tasks to earn wages for shelter and food and clothing. Yes that all sounds utopian, but what other futures are there? The masses won't have jobs - the machines will. What will people do when there are no jobs? We'll have UBI and we'll have the strongest entrepreneurship and artistic discovery we've ever had. It doesn't matter what side of the politics you're on - UBI is going to be the future simply because it has to be.

"Job creator" is the most intense insult I can think of to call a politician but everyone else seems to love it. Aren't we supposed to be destroying jobs as fast as possible so that automation can make our lives easier and provide higher quality of life to all?

Creating jobs sounds like the worst possible path for people to take - and for CEOs like Rometty to encourage the idea that jobs are here to stay seems dangerous. Jobs are not here to stay, even as the work changes and some new jobs are created along the way, the numbers of jobs will decline to 0.

<comment><USER6> I think part of what drives your view on this is a particular idea of what a "job" is. It's likely that the meaning, in aggregate, will shift somewhat over time.

Another way to look at it is that some people _like_ working, and find having a job fulfilling, regardless of whether it pays the bills or not (many senior people get simple jobs after retiring because they like it).

If we think of a "job" as a means for acquiring the resources for happiness (all too often money for basic needs, but also often a feeling of advancement and status among peers), then it's not something we necessarily want to do away with. It may be that it's less based on money and more on some other capital (social?) instead though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We've seen this before with the transition from a labour force that was 50%+ involved in farming to one that became a manufacturing based society and then again in the move from manufacturing to services.

One of the bigger differences with AI is that it now may take away many of the lower tier "white collar" jobs along with blue collar jobs that were previously displaced by technology shits.

I'm not terribly familiar with my economics history but is it possible that a huge tide of AI backed apps could be the first time that a significant portion of white collar jobs are lost along with the typical blue collar jobs that are more traditionally lost with tech shifts?

Then again, in 2000, alot of first world programmers were worried about offshoring of programming jobs, I haven't seen any real impact of the loss of these jobs on programmers in North America so perhaps IBM is correct that AI will produce as many new jobs as it replaces.

<comment><USER11> The issue is not that yet another group of cowards is whining. The issue is that once machines can do everything better than humans, we will need a new way to organize society.

Machines have already replaced animals including humans for the application of pure physical force to solving problems.

Now machines are now replacing animals including humans for the application of intellect to solving problems.

It is not clear that there is any next frontier. Would it be "love" or "spiritual practice" or what?

Some people say that AI will not progress as far as industrial-age machines did in obsoleting humans. They sometimes give specific examples, claiming that they find AI-generated art to be dull or that AI-guided robotic surgeons only succeed in narrow tasks, etc. It's OK to argue that this will take a long time but I haven't heard anyone explain why the AIs won't win in the long run. Maybe the run is so long we shouldn't worry about it?

Some other people say "we found new jobs before, we'll do it again." For example, the IBM chief. And that seems like empty wishful thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with AI is that it's dynamite when it comes to capital-labour relations. You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies? Yes. But in the meanwhile, for a category of work that defines a plurality if not majority of the functioning economy (basically anything that doesn't require creativity across multiple domains or empathy), there are going to be SEVERE income share implications.

Keep in mind that labour share of income has gone down drastically in the last few decades and that as a result, real wages have stagnated -- which has produced significant unrest in developed countries and unseated the established political order. If that trend continues...

<comment><USER8> > You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. > Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies?

Follow your own logic to its conclusion. If AI does that then what are the new jobs? We are eliminating entire job categories. While the new jobs will be in entirely different categories (e.g. manual labor will be all but eliminated, and the new jobs will be in creative industries). There is very little cross over between those job categories so we are heading to a future with a significant portion of the population jobless.

<comment><USER12> Machines are bad at transferring domain knowledge and generalizing/making unconventional linkages between topics -- what some would regard as creativity, they're also not going to be very good at empathy without essentially solving for strong AI and regularized data on human emotions -- there also are going to be human jobs because of protectionist instincts. ex: A machine right now would actually probably do a more optimal job of determining interest rates if given more economic data and more data on outputs/outcomes, but replacing the Fed and analysts under it with a machine is a political football and a half to even say.

If we solve for strong AI, we might as well kiss the species goodbye, never mind just jobs -- but the AI we have in between is not going to completely eliminate every category of work in the present, never mind future ones that might arise.

<comment><USER12> I think we agree on the larger point, just to the degree of the damage. I think I'm on a 7.5, you might be on a 9 in terms of damage AI can do to employment.

<comment><USER8> When I wrote my comment I was thinking long term (e.g. decades). Regardless, the disruption is going to be sufficient enough to force us to redefine our economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is IBM CEO Ginni Rometty someone who can actually provide insight on the impact of AI on society? I'm sure some of her subordinates could, but the only thing I've ever heard about her personally is that she's driving IBM into the ground by chasing some unrealistic financial metric, and I'm not super inclined to bypass a paywall just to hear an executive say executive things.

<comment><USER14> >I'm sure some of her subordinates could

Where do you think CEOs get their information from?

<comment><USER15> From people trying to protect their own ass by not telling her that Watson doesn't work.

<comment><USER16> I'm not familiar with Watson. Why do you say it doesn't work? Does it fall short compared to other offerings in this space?

<comment><USER15> Watson does not offer anything more than you can get from popular, free open- source projects, and often it offers much less, because it is complex, costly and closed-source. Nobody looks to Watson for the state of the art in AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In discussions of the issue, AI and automation are often used interchangeably and this entirely clouds the issue.

The AI that is so far real is a particular kind of software that has helped large-scale decisions and processes in large enterprises, large websites and etc - places with a lot of data to agregate.

Automation is an ongoing process of replacing people with machines and it is what has eliminated jobs. Advances in software has helped some automation and some of those advances are connected to AI but a lot of the advances involve materials, processes, a willingness-or-not of consumers to use automated processes rather than interacting with a human (whether buying online or from automatic kiosk or whatever).

Indeed, the AI-in-particular and job losses in general narrative is just about a sales-pitch for IBM's Watson etc rather than a serious threat.

<comment><USER18> This position, "AI as automation", is the important one.

Tasks, whether they are manufacturing or service, have a difficulty level in automation. That difficulty is generally scored as a 'cost' with respect to having a person do the task or service and the cost to have them do that.

There are two costs associated with execution, training and marginal cost of execution. So if you spend 10 hours training a factory worker to use a machine, that is your training cost, if it takes them 1 second to operate the machine to do the task, that is the marginal cost. Consider the printing press.

The printing press replaces a fully manual process. A scribe takes 3 to 5 years to write out a copy of a book. They are trained for many years in calligraphy, and each book takes years to produce. The printing press on the other hand you train a 'scribe' to arrange the letters from a type tray into a plate, to ink it, to press it onto sheets. That training takes less time than calligraphy training. Then for each book the scribe puts together the plates, prints out multiple copies of the page, and then assembles the book from the various pages. One or more copies of a single book can happen in a week. Your marginal cost has gone down as well.

Then plate printers, removed the type trays. Then mechanical paper handling fed paper into these machines. Etc to the point where now you need nothing, the author writes, uploads it to their kindle publishing account and the readers down load and read.

But all through this process "employment" around the notion of books changed. And who was employed and how also changed. The product, written and illustrated communication from one person to many, was fundamentally the same but delivered differently.

What we think of as "AI" today allows automating with less people training tasks which defied automation before. And by doing so it changes the market dynamics around that good or service. The most popular example is livery and delivery services with automated drivers. It only became possible to automate a driver when you had a machine that could recognize and respond to a wide variety of conditions in its environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Deep learning-ish advances can theoretically automate a ton of things now, but it will take a few years for those AIs to be engineered/trained/marketed. That is actually a continuation of automation which is as much a social process as it is about technology.

But if you look at projects like Deep Mind Lab, Open AI Universe, Good AIs Lab and 5 million usd AGI contest, combine those 3d environments with incremental learning transferred across domains, leveraging deep learning, hybrid and other advancements, as well as (hopefully) the existing body of research from the field of AGI (which has existed for a number of years, despite many pretending it didn't) -- we now have very powerful parallel learning tools and many public projects aimed at general agents. And very convincing demos in more narrow domains. Because of all of this I personally believe the core AGI technology will be demonstrated within the next two years. How long before that makes its way into embodied robots and gets trained up to the point it can be readily adapted to various industries may be another few years.

So my own belief is that we should expect ALL jobs to start to be 'threatened' by AGI systems by around 2022-2023.

<comment><USER20> You are proof that the hype surrounding AI/Machine Learning has gone way too far.

<comment><USER19> _I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me though is it?

Look at the Open AI Universe, Deep Mind AI Lab, Good AI Universe, etc. Look them up. They all say that the goal is artificial general intelligence. All of these companies/programs have multiple literal geniuses and tens or even hundreds of millions or more in funding. The AGI environments are public, so who knows how many hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of talented programmers and scientists are working towards the same goal.

Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would be so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible? If not within two years, then how many years do you think it will be before these projects yield results that have human-like generality or abilities?

If you suppose they will never achieve that, then what level of generality do you assume them to be limited to? Certainly those groups expect to achieve some type of general intelligence. So perhaps you assume in the near term it will not be human-level, then at what level do you suppose it will be limited? Dog-like intelligence? Once agents achieve dog-like intelligence, why would you assume there would not be a way to progress beyond that? We have already achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular domains.

<comment><USER20> > _I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me > though is it?

Fair enough. _Your post is proof

> Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would > be so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible?

Sure, it happens all the time.

> If not within two years, then how many years do you think it will be before > these projects yield results that have human-like generality or abilities?

I'm not sure those projects ever will but in general before we get AGI? It's totally unpredictable. My current best guess is that self-driving car systems won't be as good as promised and because they've pierced the public consciousness, we will get AI backlash setting in another AI winter. This winter will trim the fat of all the crap that gets published now and _maybe* a couple new fundamental techniques will be born. _Maybe_ those techniques lead to AGI when we emerge from the winter. We'll get AGI like we'll get cold fusion. When it comes it comes.

> We have already achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular > domains.

Sure but show me a system that can do just two unrelated tasks. Doesn't even have to do them above human intelligence, but something that can say put blocks in holes like a two year old and do some basic language processing. Or play chess and recognize pictures of dogs. What kind of leap is even required to get there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think a lot of people here are missing why these labor changes will be so harmful.

Yes, when agriculture, industrialization, etc, emerged, old jobs were replaced with new jobs that people could not have previously predicted.

But these new jobs are terrible. They are degrading, dehumanizing, and absurd. We have 63% labor participation, and about half* the people working do nothing. They make Power Point slides, they send emails, they form working groups, they schedule conference calls to schedule other conference calls. Apple hires a bunch of lawyers to sue Samsung. Samsung hires a bunch of lawyers to defend itself. Nothing is accomplished. They all feel like shit, they're addicted to the internet and they are on prescription anti- depressants.

These jobs are rituals, they are not productive in any sense.

When ancient Egyptians developed agriculture, they did not go on to live lives of luxury. Workers who would previously have spent their days hunting and gathering instead spent their days pushing limestone blocks up to the top of the pyramid.

*bullshit on my part, but look at these statistics ([https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm](https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm)) and come up with an industry-by-industry estimate for yourself, it is depressingly high

</comment><comment><USER22> The sad thing is she has to say this to appease her public sector clientele that still holds to the believe that life benefits tied to 'jobs' are the only way to keep the unruly masses under control.

<comment><USER23> Do you have a citation to suggest that that is her motive?

That would be extremely interesting to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Most of these discussions revolve around when and how sufficiently intelligent AI will be available to revolutionize society, but what about the hardware? As in, is there a limit to our ability to design and create (cost-effectively) the mechanical and other _physical_ components that are required for building the precise robots and other machines of this automated future? At what point do we hit a physical limit of cost prohibitive machinery for full automation?

I'm not sure what "full automation" really entails, but those who envision to inevitable automation future don't really explain it either. Everyone focuses on the software without considering if there may be limits to the hardware, and by that I don't just mean the computing machines but everything in meatspace.

</comment><comment><USER25> 1\. not certain about the articles demographics - <USER2> [https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf)

The big problem with immigrant-fueled growth in America is that the first derivative of most Latin American demographic trends indicates larger reductions in growth rate than the U.S. or Canada. So North America, in general, could become dependent on higher-risk immigrant populations from Asia to maintain any significant growth.

2\. Most boomers will be dead and turned to dust before 2060. And age distribution could become flat as fertility rates go flat. After 2045, the over 65 population rate will probably decrease to under 25% for North America. Some actuaries are thinking that people will not necessarily continue to have increased lifespans.

3\. Quality and financial incentives for production and design automation have been driving industry at increasing rate for at least 25 years. My three current employers (one full-time regular, two contract) are all under 200 employees, have all reduced head count by at 15% to 40% over last 5 to 10 years, and have mandated to either not increase bodies or to further decrease bodies.

4\. Too much emphasis on self-driving vehicles. Most industrial automation is after the obvious low-hanging fruit - logistics and production, where you do not necessarily see actual robotics, but much process automation and decision- making sustained by ML.

5\. Mid-level jobs are being increasingly targeted: parsing of legal documents, accounting, warehouse management and stock control, and some of the more simple product design functions.

6\. Anecdotal stuff.

In Early 2016, employer's main site in Southern California terminated OVER half of the engineering group - mostly support and mid-level management. Only one technician, no PCB designers, no mechanical designers, and no engineering managers remain. The remaining engineers do it all - feasible because design automation tools have reached a 'critical' mass.

Spent most of October through December automating the crap out of a factory warehouse and related processes. Last week, 14 people were terminated at the Mexico factory site. The factory warehouse had 14 full-time and 4 part-time employees in warehouse; there are now 3 full and 1 part-timer; and the part- timer will probably go away next quarter. And no robots in sight...

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems like these articles about AI are just a distraction from the real wage suppression caused by temporary work visas, illegal immigration, and workers being classified as contractors. Perhaps tech companies want to signal they have other options for labor as a sort of threat to combat increased scrutiny of their labor practices. Perhaps the message is: "Don't take away our cheap labor or we will release the AI overlords."

</comment><comment><USER27> This whole question is missing philosophical context.

Maybe not now, but once we all get automated, what is the goal we're trying to reach?

Where are we going with this?

<comment><USER28> what do you think will happen to the working class when it becomes useless to those in charge ? Don't you think they'd enjoy more living on earth without us, plebeian ? (eg, like the spacers living in Solaria in Asimov novels: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The AI revolution will wake up the west to the realities of capitalism. Trump's spat with China over trade barriers is just one example of America coming to terms with the fact that capitalism has no sense of patriotism or morality. If the price (of labour) is right capitalists will do business with anyone. The capitalist philosophy, based on Adam Smith's "invisible hand" which mysteriously takes care of the common good, is a fallacy behind which the greed of the 1% masquerades as success. Capitalism's goal is to drive down the price of labour which it can only see as a cost. AI is the capitalist's dream, presenting for the first time the possibility of eliminating human labour altogether. There is only one question we must ask as a society - <USER3> whom will the capitalists of the AI age be accountable? Marx wrote about this endgame 150 years ago and of all the economists since then I'd say his analysis has been the most accurate.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it is also matter of time scale. There may be new jobs once this all settles down. Today I have real fear of mass job disappearance. If I lose job today due to AI and tumultuous times continue for next 50 years it is of no use to me that 2080 is the start of AI based golden era.

</comment><comment><USER31> AI is a flaky term changing its meaning every now and then, and indeed, as the backbone of the hype, Deep Learning itself is rapidly evolving unlike any other fields I have witnessed.

Take CV for example. AlexNet is wakeup call for deep learning renaissance, however no one has predicted that we would go beyond human-level performance in just 3 years(ResNet developed in 2015). Same goes for AlphaGo/Machine Translation/Speech Recognition, or the latest photo-realistic stacked GAN.

All in all it is hard to predict what we will end up with by looking at history because we are in such an exciting time of ML/AI development. No matter how prestigious that person might be, his or her words affect very little what the future will actually be, only technology itself could.

</comment><comment><USER32> If I was Ms. Rometty, I would spend my time playing up the fact that A.I. will lead to a vastly improved quality of life for everyone. Advancements in knowledge always tend to do that and A.I. is a great leap forward in tech knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does she mean AI won't be a job killer "for a while" or "ever"?

Does anyone really believe the latter?

</comment><comment><USER34> In other news, IBM announced today that CEO Ginni Rometti has resigned in order to have more time to spend with her family and the new CEO will be Watson.

</comment><comment><USER35> We can only pray that AI will help correct knowledge inequality.

</comment><comment><USER36> So it WILL be a job killer but hopefully there will be new ones.

</comment><comment><USER37> BREAKING: CEO who's compensation and job depends on selling advancements in computing downplays the downsides of said advancements

</comment><comment><USER15> Rometty doesn't even know that Watson is a vaporware boondoggle, so how would she know what's going to happen when AI impacts society. She is probably the least qualified person at IBM to talk about AI, and IBM itself is one of the least qualified companies practicing "AI". She too far removed from the trenches. But IBM has excellent PR, and this is the line I would take if I were betting my company on AI services.

<comment><USER38> What part is vaporware? I've used the AlchemyAPI bits they acquired in building [https://www.findlectures.com](https://www.findlectures.com), and it's useful, albeit way oversold.

<comment><USER15> I don't know, you tell me how much of this you believe:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can- ibm...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can-ibms-watson- do-it-all)

> A doctor reads about a half dozen medical research papers in a month, > Meyerson says, whereas Watson can read a half million in about 15 seconds. > From that, machine learning (one of the key types of artificial intelligence > today) can suggest diagnoses and the most promising course of treatment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> More corporate propaganda where they leave out the key details and don't address easy questions.

Much like IBM's bullshit 25,000 jobs PR stunt this one has no substance besides the empty words of a suit who will do anything to increase revenue.</comment>


Stop burning fossil fuels now: there is no CO2 'technofix', scientists warn - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/03/stop-burning-fossil-fuels-now-no-co2-technofix-climate-change-oceans <comment><USER2> "Well then how do I get home from work today?" \- Employed people everywhere</comment>


Lame Neutering Performance Reviews - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/lame-neutering-performance-reviews-b9b76ed29713 <comment><AUTHOR> The entire idea of HR centrally controlling or even measuring performance of jobs other than things like easily measurable manual labor is fundamentally flawed.</comment>


They Blinded Us with "Science" (Regarding Covid-19) - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/covid-19-questionable-expert-guidance <comment><USER2> The book "Wrong!" by David H. Freedman describes in detail how this occurs in hundreds of cases. We've been blinded by institutional science and experts for decades. I've had to put the book down repeatedly out of dismay after reading yet another description of how scientists, experts, consultants and entire organizations have misled the public, other scientists and themselves.

[https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship- cons...](https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship- consultants/dp/0316023787)

Science is in very, very bad shape in the USA right now. The Covid-19 crisis has pulled back the curtain revealing only a fraction of the errors, uncertainties, and misdeeds of modern "science" and "experts".</comment>