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All Aboard The Technological Revolution
fm6 writes "Our old friends at nytimes.com (click here to tell them how much traffic their silly registration system costs them) have a short but thought-provoking interview with economic historian John Gordon Steele. He compares the economic effect of the Internet to various other technological revolutions, especially the introduction of steam power in the early 19th century."
http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/business/26S VAL.html
If anything, the Industrial revolution made people poorer. A few people got really rich, but the shift to a urban v. Rural lifestyle ruined the lives of generationsof people.
.com millionaire, but Old Money didn't have much of an advantage.
At least with the Net the wealth that's been distrubuted has been a bit more equitable. Granted, nobody went from living on the street to
- Dan I.
They really don't understand how little their reg. system is helping them vs. hurting them
On the sign-in page, have you noticed the part towards the bottom where they let you opt in to receiving offers from their partners? Presumably, they make money when somebody decides to use this feature. And apparently they are making enough off of it that they feel that insisting on registration is warranted. This is why they require logging in.
Don't get me wrong here -- I am just as opposed to the idea of having to log in to read a freely available newspaper article as most everybody else is. I just see the reasoning behind why they are doing it this way.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
This is right wing hogwash. Monopolies run forever because they eliminate competition. If may get lazy, but that just makes them more likely to resort to illegal tactics, not more likely to go under despite massive market advantages.
That's why he can't site a single example to make his case. Monopolies ran forever, hence the anti-trust laws were required to ensure a vibrant economy.
I would imagine that Mr. Steele's article might be a little premature in looking at the economic impact of the 'net. The Internet itself may have been around for a while, but the Web (which for all intents and purposes has been driving this economic 'boom') has only been around for slightly more than 10 years (slight being in the order of months).
It's the mode of the day for pundits to jump on the bandwagon and look at the economic impact of the net, but in terms of history, we're still looking at the birth of this industry. It's too early to truly gauge the real impact.
Despite the recent bubble burst, I think the golden days are still to come. Where we are now is at the dawn of a new age, akin to the very earliest decade of the Industrial Revolution. What happens next will change the world, beyond anything we could imagine.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
Just change 'www.nytimes.com' to 'archive.nytimes.com' for any URL (I think).
So here, it's. html
S VAL.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/business/26SVAL
to
http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/business/26
"Monopolies run forever because they eliminate competition."
No, they all end, because acquiring a monopoly in a market is a sign of market commoditization. In other words, monopoly power is doomed to fail because their monopolies become irrelevant. The marketplace is always changing, and if you stop chasing the moving target, it doesn't matter if you're the master of your domain -- you'll be left behind.
The only monopolies that last are those that are enforced as monopolies, such as the power company.
I've been looking more closely at Microsoft as a business lately. They are in big trouble. Every major source of income they have has become commoditized -- there are several free alternatives to their OS and "Office" software packages. What's more, this software is as good, if not better, than anything Microsoft makes. Lastly, interoperable standards -- such as HTML, XML, Java, and TCP/IP -- have made what OS you use largely irrelevant for the most popular computing tasks. (And before you quote some random special-purpose app that doesn't work on BeOS or something, re-read that sentence, especially the word "popular.")
What's more, the steps they've recently taken to defend that monopoly either alienate consumers (restrictive licensing) or haven't a prayer of becoming profitable (X-box). Losing market share + lack of profitability = bad news. The whole goal of the X-box is to sell the product at a loss to get it in people's homes, and then use it as a source of other income. Good idea, except that (a) gamers are fickle, and are always looking to the new best thing, and (b) game consoles are used for games. PC's and Macs are used for surfing.
No, he's RIGHT. The antitrust case should continue, but Microsoft is in real trouble right now, and their current moves are only making things look worse.
The internet has made the OS you use irrelevant. Microsoft is pulling out all of the stops to keep this from happening. What they SHOULD be doing is pulling out the stops to find new relevance.
That's what they'd have you believe. But although plenty of people made paper fortunes in dot-com IPOs, the Wall St. firms that underwrote them made crisp, folding millions on every one of them.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
It's pretty well known that monopolies can only exist on a free market by producing excellent products at excellent prices. If you look closer at the nasty monopolies we all dislike, you'll normally find that they are not operating on a free market, but owe their position to government privilege. These days you buy that position using campaign contributions etc. The solution is to get the government out of that market, not to make it micro manage it further.
If you read the article you'll see that Holstein is never asked to provide an example, so claiming that he can't cite one is quite dishonest. That rw2 doesn't provide one example of these monopolies that "run forever" himself is also telling.
I rather doubt that a Brit from 1720 would have found the Britain of 1820 incomphrehensible just because it had railroads. A Brit from 1720 would have found most of today's world comprehensible, actually. Change is change, but let's not get carried away.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
the shift to a urban v. Rural lifestyle ruined the lives of generations of people
.com millionare. Weird shit happens out there, and a lot of rich, well-educated Berkeley types spend a couple of years being homeless just for the bohemian lifestyle :-P. And you can do that out there, climate wise; nobody does that in Atlanta or Milwaukee. Still, fewer legitimately impoverished people have gotten cooshy .com jobs than us suburbanite white guys.
Its easy to think that from here, but I believe that's a bit of 'grass is greener' thinking. We've never experienced true rural lifestyles. Especially not pre-industrial rural lifestyles. Life in feudal England was best described as nasty, brutish, and short. The same may reasonably said of 1850s London, but that really cannot be said about the majority of Londoners today, even in the worst neighborhoods.
It took a while to figure out how to make that work, but in the end I do think it works better. We can toy with going back to the land, and build little communes, and admire the Ahmish and Mennonites in their horse-drawn carriages. But there are trade-offs to living off the land that we should recognize before throwing it all away to go back to the trees.
And actually, that was the Bay Area. I bet there were some folks that went from living on the street to
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
Dear New York Times Reader Feedback:
It has come to my attention that you require reader registration to have access to your articles. Don't you realize that this costs you several opportunities to be Slashdotted every month? Other sites enjoy the pleasure of watching their service grind to a screeching halt whenever somebody on Slashdot finds an interesting article -- don't miss out on this wonderful opportunity!
Slashdot readers are generally upper-middle class with lots of disposable income, and would be a very valuable commodity to your advertisers, if it weren't for the fact that 80% of them use banner ad blockers to block out all your ads, and the other 20% just write Perl scripts to grab your content directly.
Anyway, I hope you take my words to heart and realize the sooner you make your content free and unrestricted, the sooner your site will end up on fuckedcompany and we can make fun of you for giving away all your content for free.
Sincerely,
A concerned reader
There. I think that oughta do it.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
You Said:
>If anything, the Industrial revolution made
>people poorer. A few people got really rich,
>but the shift to a urban v. Rural lifestyle
>ruined the lives of generationsof people.
Clearly you have had your history fed to you by spoon, or else by a Marxist. In actual fact the shift to the urban lifestyle broke the back of old aristocracy by giving people a freedom of choice they didn't have before. No longer must there choices consist of working a farm owned by a landlord or starve...
Read some books about the lifestyle of the average person in the middle ages and then compare that to the wage slaves of the Industrial Revoloution. Were they better off? You bet. Were they still exploited, treated like cattle and forced into lives of desperation. Damn right.
The point is that there was an incremental *increase* in the quality of living for the new urban working class. And the ensuing increase in literacy and the narrowing of class boundaries led to the reforms that truly made the working(man)'s life better and gave hope and upward mobility to (his) children.
The industrial revoloution was a *good thing* (tm). Don't let anyone tell you different. The fact that it also came with its own set of *bad things* (tm) is just the way things work. The pendulumn swings and over time things balance out.
Please don't post regurtitated historical pablum in the future. Do some reading and think for yourself!
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
On the other hand, if they get 100,000 complaint emails, they'll realize that they're losing traffic, and thus revenue, and discard their registration system.
The plantation masters. Yep - they were the economic future of America
Yep, they were entitled to slaves because they put money and effort into them
And without slavery, they had no *incentive* to grow cotton or tobacco
even better, if you freed a slave, you were stealing
and I pitty those poor fools who thought that the slave states could nicely get along with the free states.
to the plantation masters, technology ment using the cotton gyn and slaves to run bigger plantations than ever in history - yep thats what they thought the industrial revolution was about.
however, when it all hit the fan, nobody ever expected so much loss in life and property, the civil war was brutal
In submissions, text in italics is text written by the submitter, not a Slashdot editor. And I dont think fm6 gets paid anything to submit stories (do you?), be they two words or a novel.
Secondly, I think Slashdot not posting links to the unregistered content is a good thing if suddenly archive.nytimes.com was getting upwards of 25 hits per seconds, someone over there would notice and shut it down. Remember, before archive it was channel.nytimes.com, and thats gone now.
Liberty in your lifetime
>Clearly you have had your history fed to you
;-)
>by spoon, or else by a Marxist.
Perhaps being a Marxist is a bit like reading history with a spoon, I really don't know, but I have read some books about the lifestyle of people in the medieval and industrial capitalist England, and I got the distinct impression that the industrial revolution actually made a lot of the poorest people even poorer.
Sure, a century or 2 later things are a bit different, but at the time, thousands of poor peasants were displaced and forced into the cities to work in appalling conditions for virtually nothing. As agricultural workers they were made redundant by new agri-technologies. Many of these early industrial workers (including young children) were worked literally to death in a few years. There was wide-spread starvation. In short, their quality of life (never that high) turned to shit. At least as serfs they were sufficiently valuable to their masters to be kept alive, but as cheap industrial labour to the industrialists they were expendable.
Maybe the industrial revolution was a "good thing" but that doesn't mean it was all sweetness and light at the time. On the contrary it was accompanied by unprecedented exploitation, widespread civil unrest, and police repression. Don't be surprised when these same things happen today as a result of the "IT revolution". What the poor and working people of the world need is a political revolution so as to turn the new technologies to the benefit of the majority, rather than a few rich Yanks (present company excluded of course
As computing and the Internet begins to show it's real effects, doubtless there will be many who lose their jobs (aside from boom/bust effects). Eventually, most of them will get better, less grueling jobs - or do you really wish you were an 18th century weaver?
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Read some books about the lifestyle of the average person in the middle ages and then compare that to the wage slaves of the Industrial Revoloution. Were they better off? You bet.
Nothing so clearly contradicts your statement than the condition of child labour in 19th century England, which was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. It was only after the recommendation of a Royal Commission in 1833 that children age 9 to 11 were limited to working a mere 8 hours a day in the textile industry. In mining, where there was no regulation, children began work at five years old and were typically dead by 25.
The purpose of this example is to show that the improvement in the lives of ordinary people did not come about as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but from legislation and trade unions that mitigated the depredations of industrialization.
It is also important to remember that at the same time as the Industrial Revolution another tremendous accumulation of wealth was going on that involved simply conquering weaker countries, dispossesing the natives and keeping their land and resources. A large part of the wealth from the Industrial Revolution didn't come from the factories, it was stolen from abroad with as much brutality as necessary.
The pendulumn swings and over time things balance out.
Is this pronouncement your alternative to "regurgitated historical pablum"?
So, ironically, even in one of the last Communist holdouts, the real laws of economics hold true; progress may not be easy or clean, but it's better than stagnation.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Gordon says: Old Andrew Carnegie's formula still applies. Whether you're making steel or software, you invest to be the low-cost producer.
Could there be any two products more different than steel and software? Could the costs of production be calculated any more differently?
In software economics, there are no economies of scale. There's no concept of a vertical monopoly like Carnegie had. Assets for software companies are all labour, not capital equipment. Cost of manufacturing software is trivial while for steel, cost of manufacturing is the name of the game. In the steel industry you can invest to cut cost; in software you invest to improve quality.
Steel is capital intensive. Software companies have been started for pocket change.
Successful software companies can meet any competitive threat through upgrades and innovation. Steel companies are nearly powerless to deal with competitive threats from cheaper and stronger materials like new plastics and alloys.
Carnegie is, in fact, better remembered today for his idealistic theories of philanthropy. I suspect that the 19th century industrialists probably don't have much of value to tell the information economy beyond the homilies of thrift and hardwork. Even those don't apply so much.
It took about a century, from 1600 to about 1700, to develop the components needed for a steam engine. Steam powered water pumps (no piston, just valves) were developed, and were useful enough to get a very modest boiler industry going.
Newcomen, in 1705, had the first useful steam engine, although it wasn't very good. Newcomen had it backwards; he let the steam into the cylinder at maximum displacement, then injected water to condense the steam within the cylinder, allowing atmospheric pressure to move the piston in compression. It took until 1768 before Watt fixed this and got it right.
Suddenly things speeded up. By 1781, Watt had all the components of the modern steam engine - valve gear, governor, flywheel, indicating devices, and double-acting piston. 1782 brought the steam hammer, the first power tool. This was a major step - steam engines providing the power to make more steam engines. 1784 brought the first model locomotive, although it was 1804 before the first full-sized one, and 1825 until one that was commercially useful.
Then things really speeded up. 30 MPH in 1829. Railroads went everywhere in the next 30 years. So did industry. The rest, of course, is history.
Now that was a technological singularity. The Internet looks minor compared to steam.
Gotta go now, I want to be sure not to miss the NYT Internet Police *not* showing up at my door again to arrest me for ignoring the 2 or 3 pieces of spam I've gotten from them over the past 2 years.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Well then just make it a pedestrian bridge. Only the hardiest of immigrants will make it to the other side and the rest can be used to lure sharks away from our shores.
Or, if you have to make it a car and truck bridge, build an inclined ramp that starts at its highest point on the west coast or in the Rockies and goes all the way to the east coast and the beginning of the bridge, so that you can coast all the way. :-)
What, that's not practical and a bridge across the Atlantic is?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
MS are not standing still either. With .NET and hailstorm, they want to control the transaction infrastructure (and exacting a toll from people using it). MS would be hoping that their current position will hold long enough for them to entrench .NET. Commodity components don't count for anything if someone else owns the keys.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
It really doesn't matter what the average user thinks, even if they are thinking about it (outside of this site, there is a huge number of people who would gladly give MS complete control over their computer so they needn't worry about it).
.NET and its add-ons will be driven by corporations and government as an easy means of authenticating transactions. My bank does online banking, and I cannot (will not) use it because it requires a Win32 app. As far as they are concerned, if Windows is OK for 95% of the population, why can't I use it?
The adoption of
Then there's added attractions to content providers in that Linux will likely never offer the complete chain of security that MS can offer. Want to watch Titanic IV? You'll need Windows08 and a valid passport account.
Titanic IV will be far more important to the web surfers of tommorrow than chosing their OS (which is a commodity anyway) or the prospect of some spook reading their credit card bills.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
At least the old Seaboard Airlines overpasses are much more picturesque than a bunch of defunct web sites.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.