The Distant Future. The Distant Future.

According to this, we are only 6 years away from the chronological setting of RoboCop:



Amazingly, Detroit is ahead of schedule on the dystopian future front:

Skynet Daycare II: Road Trip

So given my post from a few weeks ago, and my wife's love of strollers, how can I NOT buy one of these?

The Bomo Baby Carriage is essentially a Roomba with a seat for a baby on its back. There's no way this'll ever go wrong!

It'll follow you around with the kid in tow, avoiding obstacles as it goes. It can also be set to rock the baby to sleep. But the real brilliance is in manual mode, which lets the kid control his or her own destiny by driving using the pedals and steering wheel. It claims to still avoid obstacles in this mode, but I don't know if it senses the top of the stairs as an obstacle.

If there was actually a Roomba in the bottom that would be even sweeter. Although it seems like we're getting close to this pretty fast:

(L-R): Future Baby Chair, Future Roomba, Future Baby Chair

Very Cool

Parse That Headline V

A $20 Billion Give-In? GM And Unions Finally Reach A Retiree Healthcare Deal (GM)

or

Union-Owned GM Agrees To Write Themsleves Some Post-Dated Cheques From Their Account At Imaginary Bank Of Pretendland

Economics in the Weekly Torah Portion

I actually thought about this just-posted bit of Freakonomics when I was preparing for my leining of the last 7th portion of this past week's Torah reading.

One of the better-known biblical passages, Leviticus 27:1-7, lists the value of pledges of silver to the temple based on the value of a person: 50 shekels for a man between the ages of 20 and 60, 30 shekels for a woman of the same age, 15 shekels for a man over 60, and 10 shekels for a woman over 60. Hourly wage rates of workers in the U.S. in 2008 differed greatly from the ratios implied by Leviticus. The average female worker between 20 and 60 years old earns, per hour, nearly 80 percent of a male worker the same age, not 60 percent; and the average older male worker earns nearly as much per hour as the average male worker between 20 and 60.

Most older men and women don’t participate in the labor force, and fewer 20- to 60-year-old women work than men that age. Take all U.S. citizens in each age/sex group, whether or not they work, and assume that men aged 20 to 60 earned 50 shekels per time period in 2008. Then women aged 20 to 60 earned 34 shekels, men 61 plus earned 14 shekels, and women 61 plus earned 7 shekels. Once we ignore differences in labor-force participation, the earnings ratios are not that far from what was expected 3,000 years ago.

I'll bet if you adjust for lifespans (say 60->85) and number of children (forced time out of the workforce) these ratios would be still pretty accurate. It's interesting that these values are clearly not an attempt to NPV future earnings since a 20 year old is treated the same as a 59 year old.

Parse That Headline IV

Authorities probe insider trading at SEC: source

Ouch! That one doesn't even need to be re-parsed. If I were at the SEC, I'd be covering my shorts and going long calls to my lawyer.

Skynet Daycare

I recently purchased a Woot-Off Roomba 530 and it actually does an admirable job of light vacuuming/sweeping.

Unfortunately my 2-year old daughter is terrified by the thing (she's always been sensitive to the sounds of electric shavers, hairdryers and the like) so we are pretty much constrained to using it overnight. She is so scared of it that the mere mention of the word 'roomba' or 'robot' in connection to a mess will cause her to burst into tears and ask for a cuddle.

I've only occasionally harnessed this fear as a motivating factor for her to clean up/behave/stay out of where she's not supposed to be.

As far as dystopian futures go it's not quite the Terminator or the Matrix, but I like to think I'm doing my little part to make my own little Futurama. I wish I still had my Mobile Armatron so I could drive it into her room at night and steal her fuzzy pink blankie while cackling maniacally.