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Is the Creative Class Engine Sputtering?
Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers, but, for most, 'the dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead,' he says."
it's called "patent trolling," "eternal copyright," and "software patents."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Agreed.
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I seem to making a decent living designing chips and I know lots of other people in a similar situation. If you're a 'creative worker' create something that people need.
Evil people are out to get you.
." Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure". A lot of the 'jobs' he's talking about are radically changing or weren't worth anything to begin with. The article doesn't really have a concrete, well laid out argument. It sounds like yet another generalized complaint I've kept hearing for the past couple years: the elite are taking all my money and I'm a poor starving average joe. Except here it is some ill defined "creative class". Adapt to the world around you and use your money wisely. Same age old problem, same age old solution.
The author puts "book editors, journalists, video store clerks" into that creative class. It's hard to see why a video store clerk (what is a video store?) is a creative persona. He is merely shining the scanner on your purchases. He can be illiterate for all practical purposes.
Musicians? Well, those that are good are doing OK. The rest... perhaps they are in the wrong business. Same applies to "aspiring novelists" - there is always ten graphomaniacs for one semi-decent writer. Good writers are even more rare.
Computer programmers are also like that. Those who write simple, boring code - but lots of it - will lose to their Chinese and Indian competition. Those who write difficult code remain in business. I personally specialize in microcontrollers, hardware, FPGA, real-time and high speed stuff. There is plenty of work in this area.
To summarize, if you are truly creative in what is in demand then there will be always someone willing - and desperate - to pay you.
No-one makes money from 'creativity'. You make money from what economists call 'rent-seeking' from creative output, be it yours or someone else's. The people who get rich (or even just make a decent living) are those who are good at rent seeking, and those people aren't necessarily the same people who are good at 'creating'. Hence Disney inc still aggressively rent-seeking from the creative output of illustrators, animators, voice artists etc 70 years after the creative act, and you can bet those creatives or their descendants aren't making any ongoing money from it.
Being able to work at home or from your local cafe on your laptop doesn't magically free you from the need to either have a lot of capital to promote and exploit your creative output, or alternately the need to sell your creative labor to someone who does, it just frees those with that capital from the need to supply the infrastructure of an OSHA-compliant workplace.
The creative class as a driver of the local economy was always a big stretch. If a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle can do something for $X, it's likely that a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Estonia can do the same thing for a fraction of $X. Smart people that make up the creative class are evenly distributed across the planet. There will be places where you can support yourself on a creative class income, but it's not likely to be most of the places that people read /.
Until recently the 'creative class' would be distributed between struggling (70%), getting by (25%) and going great (5%). This applied to photographers, artists, writers, glass workers, a whole swathe of people. But with the rise of the internet all but the last one are being undermined financially by virtually free distribution of material from amateurs, as well as the effects of digitial copying.
Economics suggests that the price of an item will tend towards the marginal cost of production, particulaly with large scale production. So, for all those items which can be reproduced digitally at almost no cost, the price will tend towards zero.
So, the 'creative classes' need to think about new ways of making money from their skills. These days I see many top notch photographers are running workshops, which I think shows more forward thinking. Instead of bemoaning the way digital reproduction has undermined their art, they have started teaching others how to produce great images. This benefits them (we pay $$$) as well as improving the overall body of photographic work.
Maybe some of the other 'creative classes' need to re-assess how to make a living from their skills.
"Laptop powered knowledge class"? Sounds like a disgruntled hipster. The creative class isn't about "content" on servers, it's about creating stuff not just talking.
Be a Programmer, find an artist, make 2d games in Flash. As a game developer myself, I think 3d came too quickly. There is a lot of 2d video gaming that has yet to be explored.
And if you're innovative, make games for iphone/android. I don't like the medium myself, too confined of a screen and no d-pad.
And if you're not a programmer, you can be a professional game reviewer. Just play games, and write review articles or Youtube reviews. It takes some time to get rolling, but if you're charismatic, you can be getting some money through ad revenue.
There is much to be said for being a progamer, especially Starcraft2. If you get thousands watching your stream, you can make like 50$/hr. I used to sell items on MMORPGS for 10$/hr until the Chinese came in. I still get a couple hundred bucks on new MMORPGS before China sets up shop.
I think in the current era, there is a good balance between free information, and paid content. We're not quite to Star Trek where everyone gets their needs taken care of as long as they do their ship duty, but we can work towards that. On that note, has anyone been paying attention to Occupy Wall Street? My only thing I think should be changed is real estate reform so wealthy people can't just 'invest' in real estate. You know a bunch of people buy up all the property, so it inflates the price. Land is a constant supply, but demand is always increasing(more people in the world). So people just buy land like gold as a safe place to put their money. I don't know the best solution, but I was thinking something like a 30% tax on sales could prevent people from just buying up all the land as an investment as their return isn't going to be as high. Sure this would hurt land developers, but they can switch to contract work and build houses when someone else buys the property. The gain would be immeasurable though: People might finally be able to afford land and rent on their 40 hour a week hardware store job. Maybe the game is too far advanced to fix things.
God spoke to me
The first thing I thought about after skimming the article is, "what about all the hackers making a dime these days." It seems that folks like Lady Ada and some of the folks over at iFixit are making a decent shot of it. I have no idea what their finances are, but their sites and offerings continue to grow. It looks to me like they are making some decent and honest money based off of the industry of others.
Jonathan Coulton of Code_Monkey fame is doing alright. I heard a pice on NPR about him recently. He's making a living writing fun songs and distributing them himself.
Obviously not everyone who gets into the on-line creative business is going to make a fortune, but it looks like there's plenty of niches that aren't all occupied.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Well, you know man, I had a laptop before it was cool.
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There will probably never again me an engine of growth or strategy of success. You do something and if you do it well and you get lucky and no one either steals it before you finish it and or takes the credit, then you can do fairly well. Once again it requires luck to not get robbed, and to receive investor support, creativity alone simply means that people will have more ideas to steal from you.
Video store clerks. Go figure. Who really thought these types would be thriving in the new economy? They're failing and going back to school or pairing up with friends / family and trying again. Because they're mostly entry-level employees. Give them some time, they know how to enrich themselves and indeed have a natural instinct for it.
While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living.
Definitions:
So, basically, the intellectual underpinnings of this "creative" profession are not sufficiently differentiated from what is easily available to the layman to create a high enough barrier-to-entry to the field to sustain its professional status. When someone says "the dream of a laptop-powered 'knowledge class' is dead," he wants that knowledge to be sufficiently hard-to-learn that it provides a basis for class distinction: it's his "dream" to create a separate class (and separate salary rate) based on possession of this knowledge.
Other people, however, dreamed of making this knowledge available to everyone, so that there wouldn't be a class distinction, but rather an overall improvement in the knowledge-base and abilities of people in general. Still others dreamed of making money hand-over-fist by integrating the products of this knowledge into life so thoroughly that there would be a computer on every desk, in every car, in every telephone, and in every pocket: the natural side-effect of the proliferation of the products of knowledge was the proliferation of at least some basic knowledge. The first group made the tools available, but this group of others made it easier to produce media—blogs provided a crutch that let you write WYSIWYG or dip your toes into HTML slowly, lowering the barrier for entry; kids grew up tinkering, adding CSS here and JS there, learning a bit more each time; HTML led to JavaScript and PHP, then on to Objective-C or C#, and so forth. The free-software zealots on the one hand and the capitalists on the other might not have been working together, but the result was the product of both: the democratization of technology. That's a dream that works for most parts of the political spectrum.
Well, except for TFA.
Translation:
While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, I haven't, because I didn't get into deep and specific enough fields to compete with the dirty hippies, the bloggers and fanbois, and the rising generation of people for whom technology is general knowledge, not specialized.
Well at least you accomplished more than TFA.
It's easier (and more lucrative) for existing companies to use lawyers to bankrupt anyone with a creative idea that might threaten those companies.
The moment you try to capitalize on your idea, you'll be looking at cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits claiming some kind of infringement.
The entire system needs an overhaul.
The creative class is failing because the middle class who would support them is shrinking. Instead of money going to thousands and thousands of small creative enterprises, it is going to only a few dozen large enterprises (i.e. the 'job creators').
Its not the creative class that's failing, its the middle class.
Machines made manual labor a cheap commodity, and offshoring made brains a cheap commodity. There's fewer and fewer new organs to economically milk. Maybe our yankers will give us another decade or two.....if you have a good one.
Table-ized A.I.
The true creative class is the people who are willing to put forth the hard work to study particle physics, microbiology, colloid science, differential equations, managerial accounting, and parallel algorithms. Their dedication is what makes carrying out their creative dreams possible. As the article states, they're doing well, as there's still scarcity in that market. Their competition in overseas diploma mills that teach to the test do not produce the same results.
What this article is referring to is the so-called "creative class" who thought they could start a grunge band by learning power chords, buy a Canon EOS and become a professional photographer, or become a psychologist because they were interested in their bad teenage relationships. They are the types who thought they'd win the lottery and become rock stars without the serious learning required to invent, build, and deploy something new.
Those people in the so-called "creative class" locked in an entitlement mentality are a dime a dozen.It may have worked in the 1990s when they and their friends were given unlimited subsidy by coddling baby boomer parents, but these days, you're on your own and actually have to know your shit. Universities today aren't full of ambitious engineers who will take full advantage of their $50K in student loans, they're full of future waitresses and customer service reps with a piece of paper.
A better article would be "Why did 17 million people go to college?" -- http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634
If you confine your definition of "technology" to a computer it's easy to argue that the low hanging fruit is gone, that technologies engine is sputtering, fortunately for us, there is more to technology then that. I happen to think that biology is on a a series of basic breakthroughs, cheap easy genetic sequencing and new understanding of the relationships in cellular structure that will produce several marvels of medical and biological science soon.I also think that materials science is about to breakthrough on a series of developments that will lead to new structural materials, battery improvements, biomedical prosthesis, solar materials,etc.
Even in computers the advancing development of memsistors and magnetic and spin-tronic devices may lead to more revolution in computer circuitry. The Chinese are actually building maglev trains and how soon till we decide we must close this maglev train gap. We are starting to realize we need to get back to basics on our infrastructure needs and basic societal support systems. Sure we had a generation entranced in Gameboys and Walkmen, or their modern I-Pod and I-Pad brethren, but I meet more and more young people who are getting tired of the toys and want to do something positive, build something new. My generation (late age baby boomers) lived on the fruits of our WWII and post WWII grandparents and parents efforts. We created tech wonders and used them to make fancy toys, but my children grew up on the toys and are bored with them. I really think there is hope out there. Yea it's going to be rough for the next five years or so, and it might not be tomorrow before that revolution hits, but it's foundations are being laid. Read the MIT web sites, read what Cal-tech and Cornell are up to. Look at the Maker revolution. Look at the 3-D printing revolution. Nihilism is popular right now, but the seeds are there growing in the cracks of despairs paving over hope. If not here then elsewhere. Will America be the future? That I don't know, but I know the Koreans aren't ready to roll over and play dead. I know China isn't going to give up just as it gets the modernization ball rolling. Japan has been leveled by Floods and Nuclear accident, but they won't give up. You think India will just sit on it's haunches and play dead? What about Europe? There are posters here from everywhere so go ahead my European cousins tell me, is Germany, Sweden or Denmark throwing in the towel. I read Inhabitat.com and every day I read about innovative architecture, green development and alternative, outside the box thinking.I don't see any sign of giving up yet. As for my fellow Americans. Have we truly become such a bunch of anemic lotus eaters that we are just ready to shift out and give up because times is hard. Well blow that for a game of soldiers. I'm not giving up. I'm not ready to declare the end times are here, I'm not ready to shift in. Roll up your sleeves buckoes and start working. Steve Jobs may be passed away but the example he set was don't give in and don't give up. I didn't much like him on many levels but the stubborn so and so pushed and worked on what he wanted till death was at his door. That's how we get out of this crud we're in. Not nihalistic, brow beating and sackcloth like the posted article.Hand wringing don't get the dishes washed! Don't tell me how bad it is, to quote a line from Dr. Who "Postmortems bore me!" Start fixing it. Where you can, when you can, as you can!
The information economy is about the people sitting at starbucks with their laptops making a living. It is not about the people serving them coffee.
Is it sputtering? The whole economy is sputtering.
By referencing closed bookstores and closed video rental stores the article did much to undermine it's credibility.
I think the question being asked is important and I don't claim to have the answers. But, first we have to define what we're talking about.
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I've been through several cycles of recession and doomsday pronouncements about international competition. (Remember the 80s, when Japan was destined to take over the world?)
What I've learned is that, whenever America encounters economic trouble, it's caused by the intrusive, grasping politicians in D.C. who want to control every aspect of American businesses and families, via taxation and regulation.
We Americans never seem to understand the detrimental effect of the public sector taking money from the private sector. Instead, we try to solve America's economic problems by intensifying its cause: re-electing slick politicians who wear a practiced smile and offer a shiny coin, who care about themselves first, their political party second, and us Americans last.
The only way to escape this torpor is to cut the size of government at all levels, and to unleash business both domestically and internationally.
BTW, imaging the job creation if Obama had spent the trillions on infrastructure renewal (roads, dams, bridges, etc.) and energy development.
"The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy"
Does that even merit comment?? If it does, the comment is "Be more cynical, young man."
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I was gunna be a hipster. But it was too mainstream.
At first I thought this was an article about C++. What, creatives have a "class" now? The reality is that every human can be pretty creative in one way or another. Thinking that somehow there is a "class" of creative person is ridiculous. While one person might be very good at choosing color palettes, another might be fairly adept at wiring a building. The thought that creativity is in short supply is an artificial concept created by those who seek to charge you money for it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Whenever I hear people complain about "hipsters," I think of this comic strip.
Well, you know man, I had a laptop before it was cool.
I've still got one now it isn't cool any more you insensitive clod.
Looks like OP hit a nerve. Intel gets best ever profits and has a hiring freeze, Contract pay down 30% from last year,layoffs heavy in tech. You too may soon to be homeless, unemployed and wondering what the hell happened. Morons..
I'm the CTO for a tech startup. We've been operating for almost a year on angel funds. We're well along and getting traction with large customers, and everything looks good.
But here's the thing: while we're stretching "laptop powered knowledge workers" as far as we can by being very flexible with skilled people working from home and whatnot, there's still a tremendous amount of office work to be done. We've been successful so far in large part because the CEO and the sales guy have been kicking in doors and following leads and that means a lot of phone calls and discussions and whiteboards. We have a project manager running the ticket system. Our CFO runs budget meetings. We're constantly getting together to talk things out. This is normal for a business, and nothing about "business 2.0" has changed that.
The fantasy of a laptop-enabled knowledge worker being a techno-nomad was always a fantasy. If you want to build a real business, it just involves a lot of the unglamorous work that doesn't seem so sexy in a Starbucks.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Of course they aren't making any money. They spent all their money on the equipment that you need to be creative: MacBooks, iMacs, and all that.
So, the problem highlighted is that 'creative' people - and lets for the moment give them the benefit of the doubt on the level of their creativity - cannot find paid employment that allows them to produce new the new ideas and culture that keeps a society from stagnating.
My question is, why does everyone have to work?
We are trapped by absurd, outdated Protestant work ethics. Failure to bust your gut 50 hours a week is a sign of moral weakness, according to our leaders (most of whom have only ever worked through choice, not necessity) and our newspapers - sometimes even our teachers and parents.
This ethic is reflected in a society that is structured in a way that survival is next to impossible without work. Don't fool yourselves - even social safety nets here in Europe are specifically designed to make lack of full time employment unsustainable over the long term. What we need is to provide people with a decent living regardless of what they do, and make anything earned through work a bonus.
Maybe its time to stop blindly forcing the square pegs of our society (and everyone else) into the round hole of clock punching, just to serve some ancient disgust at the supposed 'fecklessness' of those who don't like the 8-6 run (I think its safe to say 9-5 is mostly a fantasy in the west now)
Its a valid question of how to pay for this; but not actually a difficult one. The simplest is to go after the rent-seekers; money earned by not doing anything can't possibly be created due to an incentive for the person earning it to do anything, so lets have it. Start with the Earth's natural resources - I have always considered the notion of a creature with a maximum lifespan barely over 100 years claiming that part of a 4 billion year old planet is his and his only to exploit.
Might it not work? Sure. But considering the current economic order is grinding to a halt, it is certainly worth a shot.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Greed never goes back to how it was before...
Solution: govt provides a basic income (get the money from the Fed, the way financial institutions got $16 trillion), and encourages innovation with challenges, while leaving biz alone to innovate in its way. As long as we produce enough innovation that others want the currency remains strong, like Japan.
See: http://occupywallst.org/
The issue here as far as I am concerned is that the article supposes a values system based on money and profit. The phrase "the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. " is a good example. Personally as someone who's values are based on quality of life and advancement of the human race's knowledge and experience, I would say the creative class is booming and the amateurs and enthusiasts are the main engine for that. I personally am an amateur and an enthusiast in the area of game development, and although my own offerings are minimal as yet, it seems that the majority of innovation in the field and also the majority of value added (my values, not money) are coming from the independents, amateurs and enthusiasts. If major game studios were bringing out anything that broke new ground it would be a different story but they seem to be operating on the premise that you make more money from a tried and true formula, than from trying new things. They may even be right about this. This is why I believe that a system of values based on money is flawed. All in all, I hear only good news from the creative sector recently (apart from copyright lawsuits), and the fact that people aren't making a living is more of the same. The less money there is in it, the more the people involved will be working towards other goals, goals like "because I love my art". This increases the quality of the products and decreases the cost to society for enjoying them. I realise it sucks for people who live in countries without a real social welfare system, starving to death for your art, while a time honoured tradition, is not a lot of fun.
In the old days, most new ventures failed. Only a very few people could be at the top when an idea exploded. That wasn't a big problem. Fully exploiting those ideas required hiring lots of people. And thats how most people made their living. They didn't have to make a big win themselves. They just needed to be useful those who did.
Enter the economy of today. Most new ventures still fail. Occasionally, one still wins. But when it comes time to hire all those people to exploit the idea, they don't. Either the need for large numbers of employers never materializes due to automation and the non-physical nature of the work or, if they really must hire, they hire overseas.
The myth of the creative class was created out of need to believe we had an out. It was obvious to anyone that the American dream could no longer be supported by manufacturing. And I don't think anyone really believed that retail and burger flipping was an option. There needed to be something that was productive but different from what goes on in the emerging world and, therefore, safe. Well, it isn't all that different and it isn't safe. Employment security in the info economy didn't even survive beyond the business cycle in which it was born.
There has to BE a new economy before anybody, creative or otherwise, can be an "engine" for it.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, our economy has been (so far) too full of old greedy curmudgeons who will exploit anybody, including the government and the innocent, to keep the old economy going for just a few more years so they can continue to line their pockets.
I have homebrew business ideas that I've been developing and I wanted to own my own servers and learn how to rack and manage them. I could have rented time on a cloud or PHP hosting site or whatever. But I figure that controlling my server infrastructure means controlling my costs. I consider that to be like owning my means of production if you wanna get all marxist about it.
I'm no sysadmin, but I know enough to get around Linux. I'm not doing an awesome job of it, and I have a big meltdown failure once every two years or so. Usually just a harddrive failure that I can recover from, but sometimes it's more serious. My sites haven't earned enough popularity to get sustained intense internet traffic yet; so far, my boxes have done okay with the occasional big burst of traffic for my sites ( https://clubcompy.com/ and http://cardmeeting.com/ ) that I get from Slashdot or some random blog.
I negotiated my costs as a fixed $150/mo for 4U and throttled monthly bandwidth. And I'm not alone, in the colocation facility I rent at, I see a lot of homebrew rigs racked up with google and yahoo-owned servers (obviously not in the same rack and not as well cooled, heh.) I had no idea what I was doing, and the techs at the facility were totally cool and taught me how to rack my boxes and helped hold them up for me while I mounted them to the rails. The server and network hardware that I have probably totals about 4K and I built them up over years. I've still got 2U free for future expansion. I use only mini-ITX form factor mobos because I want to rack them in teensy enclosures so I can max out my rackspace, and those motherboards run cool so they go for years without any failure - heat kills. I buy passively cooled MB's whenever they're available and still meet my requirements. I have found Intel Atom boards to be extremely reliable in 24/7 operation. CPU-wise they stink, and I wish I could go 64-bit with more RAM, but I just need cheep life support for SATA and ethernet at this stage. I've had DIMM's die before motherboards, I don't mind spending extra for the best manufacturing quality there.
If you have a steady, good paying job and you're a developer, you should have a homebrew project that you hope/wish/dream will someday blow up and become your livelihood. No excuses about cost if you have even a couple hundred dollars a month of discretionary funds to burn. If anything, do it for fun and chalk the costs up to hobby expenses and do it to learn new things. Make it a long term project - over years - and you can pay for it yourself. You don't need magical silicon valley angel vc startup capital to do very cool things on the internet or in wireless apps.
Dave
Agreed, there's absolutely nothing to instantiate it at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This gives me and 7 billion other people a nice incentive to stay at home and make babies (which is SO much more rewarding). Who is going to provide food and basics for my 7 kids, my 49 grankids and their 343 children (while they're at home making babies)?
It would also put doctors and nurses out of work.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm creative on my smartphone. It's gonna be big man, I work away and do productive things with it. It's going to be the next thing.
How often do you go to the theatre and see a one-man show? Probably never because there are behind the scenes staff as well. Normally plays are performed by companies who divide the tasks amongst them. This is one of the things that appals me about 'fork me' repositories... NO! that's the wrong way to do it, it should be 'join me'. Just as a playwright needs actors and publicists and stage-hands so a programmer needs testers, documenters, people who can refine the product in the light of experience and so on.
This theatrical analogy can usefully be extended. See http://vulpeculox.net/ob/mmm.htm When you think of the range of drama from single street performers to huge West-end production you will notice, somewhere along that spectrum, modest companies with a variety of business models (including subsidy) who achieve a lot with a little and develop their talents as they go along. Some go on to earn a living, many have a good time doing something they feel is worthwhile.
Most doctors and nurses don't invent anything. They know things other people discovered or invented. Those other people might well have been doctors but they're just as likely to be chemists or other types of scientists or engineers.
In any event, doctors would probably be fine. But they'd be using the same drugs in 200 years they're using now because nothing would have been invented.
People need to get paid. And the only way to get paid is to force people that use your stuff to pay for it. Give them the choice and often as not they'll stiff you.
Think of a resturant. Imagine if they adopted a "pay if you want" policy. Would some people pay? Sure. But lots wouldn't or would pay far less then the food/service is worth. Consequently the resturant would close being eaten out of house and home. And that's with people looking them in the eye, sitting down in front of the people they're about to rip off, eating food they prepare, and then walking out.
Are people that never have to look the people they rob in the eye more or less likely to rob them? More likely of course.
It's not going to work. Piracy is happening now because the technology advanced more quickly then our ability to control it. Sadly the great freedom we have on the internet would have been entirely sustainable and wonderful if not for this one thing. The piracy is a deal killer. It's toxic. And eventually a solution will be found for it. Hopefully the internet as we know it will survive this process but I somewhat doubt it.
Understand... I don't want the free wheeling internet I love to change. I simply know that the piracy can't go on. The cloud might fix some of these problems. By not giving customers the code and running everything on proprietary servers they can make it difficult or impossible for software to be pirated. Sadly this means the user is at the mercy of the provider as the instant their server goes off line the product vanishes. But that is one solution to the problem. There is no "cyber police" so there's nothing but anarchy out here.
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Japan isn't crippled by lawyers, worthless bureaucrats, and parasitic subcultures.
Why does Japan have earthquakes and tsunamis and the US has lawyers and "gangstas"?
Japan chose first.
The world is potentially heading to a place where an awful lot of people have nothing much to contribute. The stark analysis of such a society is that wages collapse, and anyone who doesn't own property (e.g. real estate, or shares in Google) is pauperized.
Another analysis is that a lot of people might end up growing heirloom tomatoes with nothing much else to do with their time. If they can afford the seed.
If I had an economic crystal ball, my first junket into the future would be the structure of the labour force in 2060. If such a concept still exists.
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if the global warming scare has blown over--the consequences were severe, but we bunkered down and made the best of things with far more resourcefulness than we gave ourselves credit for--and that structural problems with how people contribute to society are a mainstay of the daily tweetdeck.
Those Gforce cards are handy if you need to keep your coffee warm while working. FEATURE
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Think of a resturant. Imagine if they adopted a "pay if you want" policy. Would some people pay?
I only know of two restaurants that have done this, one in London and one in Salt Lake City (I've only been to the latter). Both reported that that their profits increased after instituting this policy.
People need to get paid. And the only way to get paid is to force people that use your stuff to pay for it. Give them the choice and often as not they'll stiff you.
You have a very low opinion of people, and a deficit of imagination. And, judging by your reply to the grandparent post, no sense of humour. You are therefore eminently qualified as a record executive.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
notebook computers were always cool.
If you ACTUALLY think that would work as a functional business model then consult your drug dealer... your stash was spiked... probably with a neuro toxin... or a very powerful hallucinogen.
As to my qualifications as a record executive... They made the mistake of ignoring the internet and believing through lawyers and meaningless threats they could keep pushing little plastic discs no one wants.
Apple then came along and ate their lunch... by selling copyrighted music.
The issue with the record execs has nothing to do with copyrights and everything to do with not updating their business model.
I can only assume your idea of what the execs should do is just give everything away... and then pay their rent with what? Oh I know... your good will... because that's all they'd have. Which is actually entirely worthless.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Survival should be extremely tenuous if one is unwilling to work. In your desire to tar and feather Protestants, you ignore the fact that the Catholic Church actually teaches the same scripture: "they that won't work, shall not eat." That is how the West has traditionally separated the deserving poor from the undeserving poor. The lazy POS who just has his hand out is not only a burden, but a genuine threat to the survival of the guy who is just down on his luck and wants a helping hand.
People that won't be productive and contribute to the common good are parasites. Their enablers are no better than people who run knowingly infect others with diseases.
The real problem is that creative people often lack business skills, and marketers have found a way to exploit that by marketing other peoples' products without actually paying for the product that they market.
I don't know whether to blame this on the ignorance of creative people or the greed of sales people. I'm inclined to blame the latter because this has been an ongoing problem (e.g. music publishers) and we can't be specialists in everything (e.g. most people are good at producing content or good at marketing, but few are great at both).
Cuts a little close to home does it?
You are welcome on my lawn.
At least, I wish you were kidding. Why do people have to work? Well, because *someone* has got to grow the food they eat, make the clothes they wear, build the apartment they live in. That requires work, and the workers want to get something for the effort they put in. They aren't going to work for nothing.
Any attempt at providing people with "a decent living" for free - i.e., without working - crashes and burns when it hits this simple reality.
Attempts by governments to fight this reality - through socialism or communism - have proven markedly unsuccessful. Productive people expect to get something for their effort. If they don't, they stop producing. Turn it around: if you don't produce anything useful, why should you get a part of my productivity for free?
I am also in Europe, and the social "safety nets" here are pretty good. But - guess what - they are still structured to get people to work. It's not about preventing "fecklessness" - it's about the cold, hard reality that all the things we all depend on in everyday life don't just magically happen. Somebody has to make them, which requires work, and getting good work requires motivation. This is simple, why is it so hard for socialists to understand?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Whooosh !
You mean we aren't all going to become insanely rich by creating the next facetube or goobook?
Man, that sucks!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
“It’s sort of like job growth in Texas,” says Joe Donnelly, a former deputy editor at L.A. Weekly, laid off in 2008 and now pouring savings and the money he made from a home sale into a literary magazine. “Gov. Perry created thousands of jobs, but they’re all at McDonald’s. Now everyone has a chance to make 15 cents. People are just pecking, hunting, scratching the dirt for freelance work. Living week to week, month to month.”
As a Texan, I beg to differ. The jobs were at WallMart, the industrialized prison system, the wars, building toll roads in Texas for companies abroad, and natural gas. How it equated to just %1 job growth and an 8% increase in State poverty levels boggles the mind.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Perhaps this has something to do with it?
http://dilbert.com/2011-10-07/
The rich get richer, yada, yada, yada.
Wake me when the world changes.
So an industry sector was made obsolete due to more innovative ways of distributing content. And?
This is why History and in particular U.S. Economic History needs to be taught more.
Things change. Industries die, new ones are created. Markets shift. New markets created
Get the fuck over it.
Or, you could go Occupy something a whine that you can't fine a decent job with your Liberal Studies degree.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers"
If it is in fact good, I believe it is a false economy based on, less for more, beating up the competition, short term gains, stealing pensions from the employes who grew/built the company, and supporting a substandard wage for the employees who replace the higher paid who leave on a 1 for 2 or 3 basis.
The economy is teetering with little growth, no R&D, controlled by legal wrangling of arcane statutes. New growth is beat to a pulp, purchased for pennies and laid to waste. New technology is not embraced unless a corporate entity can monopolize and control the market.
The technology is there for many new things creating many new jobs (or saving consumers money, saving the environment), but greed, and an eye for short term gains is keeping us in the dark ages, the focus is on squeezing every iota of sweat and blood out of my ass and giving me less than the same purchase yesterday. It is a pyramid game that has a very nasty surprise at the end.
The protests are already starting..... Folks going postal right and left, melting down because they refuse to sell out or have nothing left to give.
Soon they will turn our military against us, they can't do it yet because a human infantry will not follow. Robots and machines will have to do that bidding.
Welcome to the Matrix :^)
Rick B.
I am part of a group that has vast knowledge of solutions to many of our countries problems, but we refuse to reveal it because we do not trust our current leadership(s) to act in the best interest of our country.
We have found ways that are satisfying and profitable to all parties involved in many areas. Here are a few of them.
1. Illegal Immigration
2. Space exploration
3. Social and Scientific advancement.
Once leadership is replaced and believed to be acting in the best interest of the American People, we will come forward with these Ideas and provide the ideas to Senators or anybody that can make them happen, but until that time, these and many other solutions will remain hidden.
... to fix a light bulb? Or computers? For a country?
Similarly, how many creatives are needed?
Seriously, what is a sustainable number for a nation of 300 million. (Yeah, the standard answer is that the market will tell you, but I think that is exactly what the OP is about).
Everytime a new profession is touted as the new avenue of skills etc. exhorting a whole bunch of people to follow suit, It just confuses the heck out of me as whether anyone has thought of how many such people are needed?
Esp. when "broadcasting" (one person or a small group of people makes X and sells to millions) is the new mode of creation & consumption.
Without a real thought into this, the "narrower" professions will always be hard to make an entry into and will result in high failure, but also high incomes for the folks established within that profession. Similarly, a kinder entry is afforded to "less narrow" professions, but with correspondingly lower income.
as people say in jobs even if they can do a lot more just to keep there health care.
The entire intellectual property business is a luxury, and in bad times it gets cut. We must not allow an excessive portion of our national economy to become tied to the creation and export of luxuries or in a downturn our economy will collapse. (ex. see USA)
"Innovation through litigation" is VERY cheap compared to actually having to step out and do R&D cycles.
Buying a couple vague patents and handing them over to a "subsidiary" whose job it is to tie everyone up in court that is related to it is a lot more lucrative than trying to beat a competitor at having a better product. Especially if the local courts tend to favor your business (which is why FB always litigates in CA, or that little chunk of TX that is home for patent lawsuits nationwide.)
I think, if I am not mistaken, that if you join the Navy, you get a bunk and are fed food. What other needs are there to be taken care of on star trek. So I think we are there, as long as you join the navy.
The problem is the new markets don't always fulfill the economic needs of the country as well as the old ones.
One trend with technology is that it allows more to be accomplished with less labor. But the labor force is still there and needs something to sustain it. We no longer need a factory worker to put a door on a car, and another to put the hood on, and another to do the windshield. We just need one to supervise the robot that does all of this. You can't just expect a large portion of the population to commit suicide because there's no longer an economic use for them. Or maybe, as you suggest, they should just 'get the fuck over' the fact that they have no job and no money and are only alive because of food stamps.
If only someone had warned us. Oh, wait, Kurt Vonnegut did when he wrote Player Piano half a century ago. Bill Joy did when he wrote Why The Future Doesn't Need Us a decade ago. Ray Bradbury with Fahrenheit 451. Each of these warnings were brushed aside as implausibly dystopian. Of course, there are no easy solutions and none of them involve 'getting the fuck over it.'
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Yep. You have (what should be called criminals) jerks searching high and low for old outdated material, whether it be print, art, whatever and copyrighting it. And then suing everyone who's ever used it.
with an MS in applied math/CS focus?
Do you look at some list of the hottest jobs and see somewhere "applied math/CS"? I would be pretty surprised if that was the case.
The wholesale slaughter of the golden egg laying geese is being carried out by the corporate/rentier class. As an inventor or designer, my odds of making a profit on my creativity or software/hardware design skills are just precisely zero. If successful, I'll be sued out of existence. If I work for others, I'm forced to sign away my rights. Basically, the economic/legal environment is telling me to be a chicken farmer, not an inventor.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Imaginary economy is imaginary. Call me when you have some news.
I'm doing just that. But I'm still pulling 40 hours full time and coding in my spare time.
I'm writing some ECU Tuning software for performance vehicles. It's a "Map Tracer" which is a fancy term for playing back datalogs from a vehicle over the top of the "maps" that are just 3D tables for tuning ignition/cam timing/air-fuel ratios/knock control/boost control, etc.
Basically there's a huge market for vehicle enthusiasts that tune their vehicles. I have a tool that plays back that data using a snazzy OpenGL interface. I have live graphing as well but that's not yet released or in the video.
I plan to charge for it along with releasing a free community version with less features (such as no live graphing or vehicle specific definitions) but for now I only have the free version out and people appear to be using it.
http://forums.evolutionm.net/ecuflash/564464-introducing-acidtune-cross-platform-opengl-map-tracing-package.html
EDIT: Captcha was "Ambition" :)
Fucked over and over beyond all recognition?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I have brought a lot of software products to market, and I would say good ideas are scarce. Lots of things may sound like good ideas but UNTIL you implement and put them to market, you cannot really tell - so to say good ideas abound is silly when so few get produced into a real product.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
-- Saving the Rich, Losing the Economy by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
And....
-- Saving the Rich, Losing the Economy by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you were only kidding.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
doesn't mean that there are any jobs available in that career--although it is an understandable assumption. And frankly, it is just a horrible time to be looking for a job in almost any profession.
My advice is to look at who is hiring and for what, and try to morph yourself into the ideal candidate for that job.
If you're willing to put hard work, you'll likely succeed. And it's not easier or harder in particle physics than in a grunge band. The problem is the mentality of the people. It's far easier for somebody to believe that with a tiny bit of skill/devotion/time he can succeed in 'arts' -also blame media for that- , compared to some hardcore science.
And, lets face it, arts attract many more people as they sound more hip/cool/whatever, compared to "boring" math and physics etc. Most people care about fame (arts/sports) or money (doctors/lawyers/arts again/sports again) anyway, before they get disillusioned by reality. And end up serving McCrap or sth.
There are just ideas, and there's plenty of them
What makes an idea "good" is subjective
You might think a lot of your software are not "good" because they didn't do well on the market. But for those who bought them and enjoyed them, they probably think it's "good"
Ferriers
Blacksmiths
Typesetters
Lamplighters
Elevator Operators
Milkman
Stables
etc.
I don't recall any mass suicides when each of these occupations were rendered obsolete.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Their spin on the phrase is more of artists, website writers, newspapers, film makers, and for some reason software writers (don't get that one, myself).
Three things:
To get a book published before you needed a publisher that was willing to pay for the physical object upfront (unless you went to a 'designer press'). Now, with e-books, the barrier to entry is much lower, so you may make a few sales of a few bucks.
Publishers used to take responsibility for editing and promotion, and people would rely on a publisher's brand for fact checking. Some of these e-book sales channels correspond to "designer presses", without giving readers any way to distinguish reliable from questionable sources.
If a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle can do something for $X, it's likely that a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Estonia can do the same thing for a fraction of $X.
This could be because labor is temporarily undervalued in Estonia. As the economy of Estonia shifts to producing more tradable goods and services, be they manufactured widgets or contract programming, wages will rise overall, as will the cost of living. See also how trade affects the cost of living.
FTFA: Optimists like Florida are undoubtedly right about something: This country doesn’t make things anymore and never will.
Beware of the word, "never". There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today about the costs of manufacturing in China rising so much, (due to the Yuan's strengthening, increasing affluence, higher wages and transportation and material costs, etc.) that manufacturers are beginning to repatriate these jobs to the US. It cites a furniture manufacturer who is opening a new factory in South Carolina, Ford announcing that it will manufacture some auto parts in the US now, and the seven industries where advantages of manufacturing will likely tip back to the US over the next four years. In the same issue there's an article about a German tire manufacturer opening a new $500 million plant in South Carolina. We have a tendency to think that because things are a certain way now that they'll be that way forever. If history tells us anything, it's that change is continual and nothing is permanent, and where manufacturing is done is no different.
There are more than enough creatives out there. But artificial barriers are keeping them from working in fields they're qualified to do. How this happened? Who knows. The problem definitely not for lack of talent.
I've got a college degree (Bachelor's in Graphic Arts), and am more than qualified when it comes to doing things with PhotoShop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Maya, Premiere, etc... Give me a decent project with understood guidelines and a reasonable schedule, and I'll show you that (pardon how I say this - it's to make the point) I know what the fuck I am doing. You will get quality work!
But every damn place I've applied to says "We need 5 years experience." Excuse me? I thought you were advertising an "entry level" position. Hello? (Most employers even lack the courtesy to reply to my resume submission.) No really, WTF? SERIOUSLY!!? How exactly does one define "entry level" when it comes to doing design work for things like web pages or ads and page layout for print copy?
It seems the people that get experience aren't necessarily the best qualified or most talented. If you have family running a business, you're pretty much a shoo-in elsewhere even if the quality of your work sucks. (Because you can go work for daddy or mommy or uncle bob for those 5 years while not fearing being fired for your screw-ups, such that HR gives you the OK stamp due to those arbitrary qualifiers.)
Not that there aren't people that get picked up because they're notably awesome. Yet those seem to be side cases compared to most of the stuff I'm seeing in print or on the web. I hate saying it, but many businesses seem to be fine with running poorly done ad copy with shoddy workmanship.
So the one job I'm apparently experienced enough for has nothing to do with my degree. I'm lucky that I've got perfectly clean driving and criminal records, and being that I'm 35, those count as experience I can use. Driving kids around to school for a transportation company doesn't pay much, but at least it's better than no job. (And believe me, I've been trying.)
Still I do what I can to keep my creative skills in practice on the side, but my software for such is a few versions out of date. It makes keeping the resume up that much harder, particularly when you don't have the means to upgrade. (I try not to pirate if I can help it.)
> where manufacturing is done...
When I see smoke again pouring from the stacks at the Packard plant on Grand Blvd, I'll believe manufacturing 'has returned'. From the evidence, it'll just find some 'virgin' ground to exploit outside of China (Brazil, one of the other 'Tigers', manufacturing cities in Somalia surrounded by 25 ft walls...)
The economy is so bad right now that most people don't have enough time or resources to be creative. Most people don't even think about being creative when they aren't sure where their next meals are coming from, or are afraid they're about to get laid off.
All the while, the fat cats are wondering where all their money is going because they aren't being creative and making new products people want to buy. Of course it's our fault for not being creative enough.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
No, not really. There are plenty of us who don't spend our time whining that other people have more.
Today's struggle is between the haves and the want-mores. It's not really compelling to see people bitch that they deserve free entertainment and a bigger TV to enjoy it on.
you can do better than colo at that price.