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Recession, Tech Kill Middle-Class Jobs
Un pobre guey writes
"'To understand the impact technology is having on middle-class jobs in developed countries, the AP analyzed employment data from 20 countries; tracked changes in hiring by industry, pay and task; compared job losses and gains during recessions and expansions over the past four decades; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, entrepreneurs and people in the labor force who ranged from CEOs to the unemployed.' Their findings: Technology has consistently reduced the number of manufacturing jobs for 30 years; people with repetitive jobs have been easy to replace in the past, and task jugglers like managers and supervisors will be likely targets in the future; companies in the S&P 500 have expanded their business and increased profits, but reduced staffing, thanks to tech; and startups are launching much more easily these days. The response to the article includes the dutifully repeated bad-government-is-at-fault and don't-worry-it's-like-the-Industrial-Revolution memes. But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
What if the sky is really falling?
You forgot trickle-down economics.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Tech has always been for getting things done faster, better and cheaper. Get over it.
Sure it's a big deal. In theory, anything I could do a box could do as well, except be a person, and it may be that one day not to far off it could at least put on a reasonable person impersonation as well. If it were to happen on a cosmic scale, getting everything done without anyone working would probably result in everyone being unbelievably rich. Sounds good I suppose. But if it only gets part way and then slows way down, we'll simply become Eloi and Morlocks, except that the Morlocks won't be doing or having anything the Eloi care about, and the Eloi may decide to let the Morlocks all starve. Either way, our opinions as individuals or all of us together, and what any government decides, won't matter. Just the results will matter.
"What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
Could go either way - Asimov came up with his laws of robotics as a way to counter all the "evil robot" fiction of the 1940s and 50s (so that the implications of having self aware non-humans could be explored in stories, rather than just the "run for the hills" type)
On the other hand, the Skynet robots, came to a conclusion that they were not only in charge, but the humans made their work less efficient.
The outcome will depend a lot on whether the programmers think through all the "edge cases" before implementing - the difference between "Do task in the most efficient way" and "Do task in the way most beneficial to those it is being done for"
"She's furniture with a pulse"
The idea that our government could plan anything this complex and succeed is preposterous.
I'm currently reading Critique of Economic Reason by André Gorz. Despite being almost 30 years old, it describes this situation well. Rises in productivity due to automation are incompatible with a culture that values 'work' on a moral basis, and associates it with a persons identity.
Got enough karma so might as well post this AC: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Captcha: exempt
What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
The final question in TFS is an example of a question that's bounced along the periphery of technology and now deserves centre stage. Nicely put!
Now, what are we going to do for a living after everything's been automated?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
biggest factspinning and made up bullshit ive read in weeks.
It time to make full time 30-32 hours a week with overtime starting at 32 and more rules makeing it harder to pay people salary to get out of OT. or even push people under the min wage while working on salary with so menu hours.
More peopel working part time is better then a few people pulling 60-80+ hour weeks.
Maybe even over time 20 can be come the new full time.
No. College != vocational school. If you have a proper education that teaches you how to think then you can devour the technical manual for some new machine in one night, be slow but proficient the next day, and master it in a month or two.
If you cannot become the type of person that devours the tech manual in one night, then training is just throwing money down a hole. The types of jobs where training consisted of a manager giving you a few simple instructions and leaning over your shoulder for a few days to make sure you have it right? Those jobs are GONE.
The death of the middle class over the past 30 years has been intentional. Our leaders seek to return us to feudalism, and have been very successful at that. Remember that, next time you see a politician crying about the middle class.
So, since this article posits that the rise of technology is also what's killing middle-class jobs, our leaders are... us. Right here in this tech-centric website. Discussing and promoting tech. The tech that's killing middle-class jobs.
Nope, nope, too inconvenient. Has to be teh evul shadow comspeeracy and teh evul evul gummervents lookin' to take our guns and our jobs! Whew! That's much less depressing, and way easier to polarize!
Feudalism? More like Aristocracy. Feudalism would be if honor was still a necessary quality. Also, without middle class, you don't have the main workers that sustains a feudal empire (While not necessarily middle-class, I'd like to think of merchants and scholar fitting in this section).
The article says: In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight "jobless recovery." But that's a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two. Most recessions since World War II were followed by a surge in new jobs as consumers started spending again and companies hired to meet the new demand. In the months after recessions ended in 1991 and 2001, there was no familiar snap-back, but all the jobs had returned in less than three years.
That is not the case. The ratio of working age men who actually work has steadily fallen since the 50s (in the USA). After each recession it plunged and then recovered .... but not to the original levels. Data.
Anyway, whilst I'm sympathetic to the general topic and find the idea fascinating, the article has a lot of other questionable statements in it. Like this one: Even the most commonplace technologies — take, say, email — are making it tough for workers to get jobs. That's obviously wrong. Email and the net allow people to find employers around the world whereas before they might have been limited to their local area. Heck, I hired a commission artist just two days ago, I initiated contact via email.
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
You could learn to repair the machines, or learn to make the machines.
However, we have seen it before and we will see it again.
5000bc
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to the wheel is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history? What will happen to the men who carry the litter?
1840's
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to the machine is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history? What will happen to all the children that spin cotton?
1980's
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to the machine is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history? What will happen to all the people who calculate trajectories when they are replaced by a single machine?
The only constant in this world is that everything changes. I believe the old adage is "Lead, Follow, or get out of the way!"
Time to sledgehammer every PC in sight at your work.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
France has a 35 hour workweek already. Its seen, by conservative UK politicians, as a sign of a failed socialist state on the verge of economic implosion - but then again, they've been saying that for decades and it hasn't happened yet.
we were told that this would free us from drudge work and give us lots of leasure time. Unfortunately, all of the benefit goes to the already-wealthy, and the only leasure time we get is the time to be unemployed.
I hope they are building things that robots will buy!
Technology is providing the ability to exploit unequal labor markets and avoid the regulations that force capitalism to provide broad based benefits. A middle class doesn't happen by accident. It requires government policy to enforce and making work location independent through tech has done much to destroy the middle class.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
A lot of intelligent, educated people can still get too caught up in ideologies to see the big picture.
In order to be viable in the market, a labor-saving device must, by logical necessity eliminate more work than it creates. This is the only way to get the total cost of ownership down below the cost of hiring people to do the work. When successfully applied widely enough, this processes has serious economic implications.
There is a finite (and, ultimately, small) demand for brain-work (you only need one genius to invent a trinket in order for everybody to be able to have one), so the majority of displaced workers cannot simply promote themselves to more interesting work. When production is very high but the labor cost is very low, you wind up with large masses of people who can't find *any* work (or at least nothing that provides a livable wage). That results in severe crime and upheaval.
As tech puts us all out of work, we either start adopting more socialist policies, we put most of our population in jail (where we pay for their needs anyway), or we experience a violent mess.
It's not just schooling. The fact of the matter is that some people aren't too bright. Without repetitive, simple jobs, these people will literally have no place in the economy. There's no comfortable answer here. Do we prevent the births of stupid people? Gene engineer all potential parents so that their children are smarter? How smart? Where are the boundaries? And who pays? Or do we just hand them all a check each month and encourage them to stay out of the way, and reproduce as little as possible?
20th century morality isn't going to stand up long to this 21st century problem. Somewhere, something's got to give. Good luck if you think "the marketplace" is a good way to solve this. I think that was tried in France, and in Russia.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
the goverment are just the puppet heads
well we need more hands on training / apprenticeships.
The college system is kind of out of date and comes with the full load of fluff and filler classes. Tech schools are roped into the college system as well.
There is lot's stuff that is poor fit into a 2 year or 4 year plan and other stuff that needs a lot more hands on training that is a poor fit for a collgle class room. When more of a community College setting is better. Yes community College offer classes non degree.
Also the cost of college is getting to high and by cutting down what is now 4-5 years down to say 1-3 years can save alot and make it quicker to learn skills.
From what little i've read, wages went up a lot towards the end. Today, you have below-inflation wage increases, many wages frozen and many taking pay cuts. The only increases are (in some ways debatably) unjustified and decided by the one/s receiving it.
Due to population increases not counteracting the increases in efficiency, there were food shortages. The Office for National Statistics showed between 2004-2007 the population increased by about 1mil. Whereas that's higher than the 19th century, as a % of the total it's far less. Plus, if you haven't noticed...we as a 'developed' nation throw away a LOT of food, so I doubt we'll have mass malnutrition (no more than we already do because people practically live in takeaways..)
In general, I think there are similar knock on effects of jobs vanishing, maybe coupled with the recession and a mass feeling of social dissociation things can and have been grim (e.g. riots), but I wreckon whatever's to come won't compare, and it will only be good if we move away from choking capitalist agendas forcing people to use their lives working when, lets face it, we would GLADLY let a robot do our job if it meant we didn't have to work..
I honestly can't find exactly what jobs are being killed. What jobs exactly are even considered middle class seems to be highly contentious and subjective.
Can anyone point out to me an exact list of which jobs are reducing by technology? I, personally, don't consider a manufacturing job to be middle class, for example. And, it would seem, neither does wikipedia: "The following is a list of occupations one might expect to find among this class: Accountants, Professors (Post-secondary educators), Physicians, Engineers, Lawyers, Architects, Journalists, Mid-level corporate managers, Writers, Economists, Political Scientists, Urban planners, Financial managers, High school teachers, Registered Nurses (RNs), Pharmacists and analysts, etc...[8][34]".
The rulers of this country (i.e., the corporations) would do well to remember something as they push people into more and more desperate circumstances: Desperate people do desperate things.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I sometimes wonder if feudalism isn't the economic system that is just historically more sustainable over time than anything else once your population exceeds the numbers associated with tribal organization.
How long have we actually had "capitalism" and the kind of capitalism that assumes that its participants should pay fair prices or receive fair wages? Historically it seems like a total anomaly and it requires a ton of energy (political, economic, human) to sustain it.
Given the chance, those who can will hoard resources and charge exorbitant prices for them and will pay as little as possible for labor, with no concern over the standard of living of labor. Slavery isn't inconsistent with feudal organization.
At least in agrarian feudalism there were some limits -- underfed agricultural labor tends to produce less, putting the entire enterprise at risk, and some kinds of feudalism, though unfair by many standards, evolved to at least have a sort of reciprocal welfare, where the continuance of the system was more important than its efficiency.
Oh noez! We have created systems to increase out efficiency and we have achieved it. Now we might have to work less! What a shame!
I think some of the commentors here need to go back to econ 101 (or just use their heads for five minutes).
Automation and increased unemployment are _inversely correlated_. If automation destroyed jobs, than how do you account for the trillions of jobs that have been created over the previous thousands of years given the creation of the wheel, the plow, the assembly line, the computer, etc.?
There are _tons_ of jobs being created by today's automation, just as there always has been with increased efficiencies. The problem is that those jobs aren't being created in the US! The taxes are too high, the regulation is too onerous, and the labor is too expensive. If we lack job creation in the US, we only have ourselves and our boneheaded policies to blame!
Why not just hand everyone a check, assuming everything is now nearly free since machines make it?
The death of the middle class over the past 30 years has been intentional. Our leaders seek to return us to feudalism, and have been very successful at that. Remember that, next time you see a politician crying about the middle class.
What's good about having a very select few rich at the top, is that the revolution is so much easier to organise.
All of these things are true:
What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?
Then we'll deal with it when the time comes. My suggestion is to handle it by letting the machines work while the rest of us have parties and write open source software (for those of us who think parties are boring).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
Tech could just as easily extend middle class jobs, if we chose productivity over cost efficiency. The problem is the people making those decisions seem to lean heavily towards saving their wealth, rather than investing and creating more. We ought to look into why they are making that decision, and also, why they are the ones who get to make it.
reduction of people in manual labor jobs is intentional or if not intentional then the intentional GOAL of progress. that's what enables us to have droves of scientists, armies of professional athletes and more artists per capita than ever in every field. just a hundred years ago most people were occupied on producing basic necessities like food - now pretty much everyone in developed countries is fed, yet very few of us work in food production. that's on purpose.
doesn't have much to do with feudalism though. quite the opposite. you want feudalism, you keep everyone on manual labor, you keep everyone on leash - you don't just set them free to do whatever they please with all the information in the world. you pay few to tax them to feed the masses.. that's more akin to socialism and the star trek goal there is to eventually have just very, very few of us toiling on food production and have everyone else do research and production of whatever gimmick devices they want.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The fine words of a cult leader are as helpful as piss in the wind. Ask Lenin.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
France has a 10%+ and growing unemployment rate. The idea behind a shorter working week is not "the entire country works less", the idea is that the work which does exist is distributed more evenly over the population. So people work less, but more people work, and because everything is so damn efficient and cheap the quality of life can still be pretty good.
That isn't likely to happen in a place like France because laws make hiring and especially firing people very difficult. So if you have some work that really needs 1.2 man weeks per week, the incentives are all wrong - instead of hiring two people to work part time and ensuring neither is overloaded, it makes far more sense to push the existing employee harder (and pay overtime if need be) because that way you hugely reduce your management risk. If you hire a second employee with the intention of having both work part time and it turns out the second employee can't handle the work, or is lazy or doesn't get on with the team or the amount of work to do unexpectedly drops it's hard to let go of them again. So it's best to not grow unless you really have to. And if you can use a machine, even better, even if that machine is perhaps not quite as good or flexible as a human might have been. You can switch the machine off when the order book is thin. No such equivalent for a person.
I love the idea of a 4-day working week, but when I think through the implications, I can't escape the feeling that labor markets would have to be radically deregulated for it to work. Employing lots more people to work less just increases the risk of personell problems so dramatically.
Don't worry, those people will have a place as cannon fodder in the upcoming resource wars that's going to hit this planet in the next 10 - 15 years.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
what about people who alternative-credentials are a better fit then the old College system. College is to much of a one size fit's all and its turning out people with big skills gaps. I not talking about Repetitive, simple jobs
Plumbers don't set in the class room for 4+ years before starting to work. No They do a trades / tech school with apprenticeship.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/18/manufacturing-industry-taps-colleges-help-alternative-credential
And CS is not IT and it's to much theory geared to programming and not the other BIG parts of tech / IT.
Using a negative term like "killing" rather than "becoming more efficient" or a like term to describe technological progression. We don't know what the future holds for us (oh wait, we've never known that), and it seems to make the terms "bad" and "bad for me" synonymous. The fact that the notion of having to be an adaptable workforce is borderline catastrophic says to me that we've had it pretty well for quite a while.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
You would probably be amazed at how much of that is just the average individual making choices on their 401-k's.
I know I would, if I ever actually bothered to look it up..
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Plumbers do very little creative work.
Cs is not IT, and most CS grads don't have a good grasp of basic networking even. By that I mean what a subnet mask is and how it works(just one such example), not how to config a router. If you know the former the latter is just learning on piece of software. If you don't know the former you will never really understand the latter.
Automation of manufacturing has pretty much already happened. Instead of 40% of the workforce making stuff it's now at 8%.
Farming went through this earlier. Farming jobs are now somewhere around 5% of the total employment base.
As these sectors are already such a small part of the workforce changes aren't going to affect the overall economy that much.
So the question is what segments come next? It's going to be hard to outsource middle managers, as personal interaction is so big a part of their jobs. Engineers are too difficult - part of their jobs may even be beyond what a Turing machine can manage. Health care is obviously very personal.
Feudalism ended for a reason, and it's not coming back unless the conditions that generated it come back around again. I consider that a possibility if we run short on resources like oil, without a backup plan, but it won't come from increased efficiency like automation.
The thing that people forget is that when automation becomes more and more ubiquitous, it becomes cheaper and cheaper. Eventually, the common people will own the means of production without a revolution because the means of production will be self-producing, intelligent, and widely available. The computer I am typing on is more powerful than a supercomputer from a few decades ago. My $499 tablet runs more applications, with more colors, networking and sound, than my 4,000 dollar desktop did in the 1990s.
Yes, jobs where you get paid 70K to fetch tools from a tool bin are going to be history. That's not a middle class job. That's a blue collar job with a ridiculous salary.
Most people can't make many decisions about their 401k. I can pick from like 10 vague choices; small cap US, small cap international, mid cap US , mid cap international, etc.
I will go ahead of the AC won't. During the depression progressives froze wages, business responded by offering incentives like health care and dental to work around the wage freeze when recruiting talented workers. It became an expected benefit, and then a codified one.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
In my extensive observation, most humans only work 30 hours a week anyway at anything beyond a plantation level job. You can make them sit in an office for 80 hours for appearances, but that just means 30 hours of work, and 50 hours of make-work, pretend, talking about sports tv real estate politics... Simply making people only sit at a desk when they actually work, will probably not improve hiring like you think. Now, 10 to 16 hours per week might actually work...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
did you know that 90% of americans were once farmers? and then they got pushed off the land by the emergence of technology and corporate farming (we're still in the 19th century here, folks). and THEN those people and their children took jobs in heavy industry (Carnegie, Mellon...) and extraction industries like logging and mining. And THEN the heavy industry jobs moved offshore and the extraction industries automated and wound down a bit. and THEN those people and their kids took jobs in engineering and technological industries. and THEN Japan took over the automotive and consumer markets. Remember the '70's "japan has won the war". And THEN... well OBVIOUSLY it's a HUGE CONSPIRACY perpetrated over several generations by... some... bunch of people who... well...
Why not just hand everyone a check
That's how things work in Sarah Palin Land.
That's a special case though, since they have natural resources that the state gets income from.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Same, you might not be able to choose if you want to invest in Foxcon, but you can choose if you want to invest domestically vs internationally.
And since the international funds tended to give a better return many people put a lot of their 401k stock in them.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Our leaders seek to return us to feudalism, and have been very successful at that. Remember that, next time you see a politician crying about the middle class.
I'll remember it when I hear the newly minted geek whining about the salary he is being offered at entry level.
In a country where the median household income is $50,000. Median household income falls again [Sept 2012]
All of us benefit from being the heirs of the industrial revolution. Even the poorest of us have better health and nutrition than before. We all have better health care than the mightiest king did 300 years ago. Yet for the average person who lived during the industrial revolution life was poor hell. Craftsmen and herders were sent into Dickensian factories and mines. I hope we can live long enough for the majority of citizens to see a benefit from our present computer revolution.
It's not Feudalism and it's not Aristocracy. It is, however, a form of fascism. What else do you call it when the government favors corporatism over the people?
Since we will be slaves to the machines, the work week should be 8 hours days on Monday, Tuesday. Get Wednesday and Thursday off. Work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Than get Monday, Tuesday off. Work Wednesday and Thursday. Than get Friday, Saturday and Sunday off. In a two week period one would work 7 days for a total of 56 hours or 28 hours a week. The machines would have their slaves 24/7 so they could be used around the clock. Every other weekend would be a three day weekend and one would never have to work more than three days in a row.
What is so special about the middle class?
A true egalitarian society only has one class. Which according to some is an ideal goal.
I personally detest the glorification of the middle class.
I am part of it, but I really see no grand reason why we're special. We're just a group of people skilled/lucky enough to have a better job than those in the working class.
As technology improves and there is less 'extra skill' needed for middle class jobs, there is no moral reason why we should be paid more than the working class or have a higher standard of living.
We shouldn't be trying to prop up the middle class.
This was supposedly one of the effects of the modernization of agricultural work in the early 20th century - - - the widespread loss of farm jobs, and contributed greatly (and some say, primarily) to the Depression. Theorists who belong to that school of thought, also attribute to postwar modernization, the economic recovery through the development of a new middle class, and new jobs. The theory is that, this will happen again, as we lose jobs to technology and automation.
However, after looking at the Powell memo (1971) and seeing how closely correlated that was with the decline in the American middle class, I can only agree with you, that the modern death of the middle class over the past 30 (40) years, indeed, has been intentional.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I think you are a bit confused..
Under Feudalism, the Lords and their top tier vassals were the Aristocrats. That is literally how the word was defined. The "Middle Class" when there was one was small and consisted of free merchants and trades men of one type or another. Their was usually royalty who were also the the top aristocrats. Serfs were people who were not exactly slaves but certainly were not exactly free to leave either, and were employed by an aristocrat. There usually was a clergy class as well where your scholar types would have belonged in most cases and they had their own defined social order.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Boy, are you presenting a logical, reasoned argument backed up by history to the wrong crowd.
Slashdot's really gone downhill since I last was hanging around. It's getting more like Fark every day.
well need some kind of middle ground for CS down to skills like basic networking the tech schools do tech that but even them stuff like networking is so big that it should be on it's own track that is different from say programming or desktops / severs / office networking.
CS is a poor one size fit's all that does not work that well over all.
A person can make things as accurately as a machine, they just take longer. Accuracy can be verified by someone else, it just takes longer. All that sort of stuff is just labour-saving in another guise.
The computer I am typing on is more powerful than a supercomputer from a few decades ago.
No, it isn't. That computer handled the needs of an entire multinational corporation and resulted in numerous scientific discoveries and papers. Your table is so amazingly un-powerful all you can do is play angry birds on it and post to /.
"Economic power" comes from what it DOES not how fast a flipflop toggles in the innards.
If you want a cruddy analogy, the brain of a Nobel prize winner might be "better" in whatever measure than the average coffee barista. That doesn't mean that coffee made by a Nobel Prize winner is any more "powerful" than coffee made by the average tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I think it existed sometime between the end of World War II and that point in the 1970s when inflation jacked up the cost of living. During that era most households had only one wage earner, lived in decent housing and had a (historically) high disposable income.
Inflation hosed the cost of everything relative to income and from that point on you had trickle-down economics that cut taxes on the wealthy and capital gains, and low-cost computing enabled the rapid expansion of financial engineering and cost cutting which led to further large gains for the capital owning class and losses for those who became cut costs (cuts in salaries, benefits, etc).
At the peak, a job in the unionized auto shops paid pretty well and had an awesome pension.
Nowadays, not so much.
TFA: ''I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years."
No fscking duuuuuh
Did he used to believe that C. Babbage's machine gained sentience for a weekend until it blew a steam gasket trying to hump a fire-engine?
Table-ized A.I.
Different AC, but...
According to memory and ...yup... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United_States#History...
In the US, following WWII there was nation-wide federally imposed wage (and price) controls. In order to get around the wage controls, employers would offer non-monetary benefits so as to attract workers, as the supply of able-bodied workers (i.e., men) was in short supply. Among these benefits, membership in the companies group health care plan (Citation Needed, I'm assuming group health care plans existed and operated in the 1950s similar to when I was last an employee in the 2000s).
Sadly, many people would rather believe that some powerful, competent and malevolent group is in charge and causes all the bad shit that happens. Whether that group is the government, corporations, the UN, the Illuminati, or whatever.
The idea that sometimes shit happens because someone just screwed up is scary. The idea that sometimes shit just happens and it isn't even possible to stop it is scary. No one would have had to come up with the adage "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity" if people weren't so eager to believe that there was someone to blame for intentionally causing all their problems instead.
Note of course this does not deny that governments, corporations, and other groups _can't_ purposefully do shitty things to people, just that people have a strong tendency to exaggerate the power, maliciousness and competence of those groups.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Corporatism?
It's more evolutionary then that. The corporations never planned the whole thing, but they have a distinct desire for certain benefits that may only be had in this way, and so they have done tiny things for years and years, like a river creating a canyon due to the natural gravitational pull of a certain direction, their direction is greater profits, the canyon is their coffers, and all our money is being washed into it bit by bit as they wear down more and more regulations and legal rights to increase the efficiency of their inevitable direction.
Like a river down a hill for 30 years creating a ditch, then a canyon, they wear aware everything that keeps the buying power in the citizenry bit by bit with no more conscious planning of it than a river plans to create a ditch.
our tech jobs put us in the upper or lower class?
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
You pretty much nailed my thoughts on the matter. We still need the people and the advances in science to build increasingly advanced robotics to replace the human workers.
When your job is replaced by a robot, where are you going to work?
AKA the alaska permanent fund payments. Although they're not nearly enough to live off.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Like camp in public parks in the middle of town(s).
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
tech vocational / apprenticeship are needed.
There are some good mixed vocational / apprenticeship things out there but they only 2 year plans. There is to much put on to the university system and 4+ year degrees.
There are lot's of talk of skill gaps with Colleges and part of it has to do with the system being setup to drive people into teaching and not job skills. Also there is a lot of filler and fluff classes out there that are forced to to people going to university (ok some of them are hold overs from the pass but for some one who wants real jobs skills they are worthless topics that eat up time and costs) University used to be the place for rich kids (going back to the start of them) and not about job training. Over time they did become about stuff like doctors and other higher level theory. But we have come to far with them.
We are putting to much into going to University at the cost of vocational / apprenticeships that are better setup for getting skills. Tech schools are roped into the University system and that holds them back.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-selingo/unemployment-skills-gap_b_1880423.html
Looks like that was about the same as now ~2%
http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/HistoricalInflation.aspx
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
No. College != vocational school. If you have a proper education that teaches you how to think then you can devour the technical manual for some new machine in one night, be slow but proficient the next day, and master it in a month or two.
If you cannot become the type of person that devours the tech manual in one night, then training is just throwing money down a hole. The types of jobs where training consisted of a manager giving you a few simple instructions and leaning over your shoulder for a few days to make sure you have it right? Those jobs are GONE.
I'm guessing you haven't read many technical manuals lately. Often enough, it's either absolutely filled with needless fluff and/or missing the actual pertinent details for implementing the product at any level. Pulling what useful details exist is an exercise in frustration. Vocational schools or boot camps are an absolute necessity because of the failures of these manuals.
The middle class is the working and taxpaying class. Losing the middle class leaves a few rich people and a lot of desparate poor.
Eventually everyone will be doing high end jobs or be unemployed. This is not a bad thing - as long as people doing the high end jobs pay for the unemployement benefits.
Good luck, because of supply and demand the pay will be miserable, probably minimum wage. Going to be hard to collect enough taxes off 5% of the population being lifetime grad students at $8/hr to keep the 95% unemployed entertained with a middle class lifestyle.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Note that the bar of "not stupid" will keep raising.
Kurt Vonnegut considered this problem in his novel written in 1952:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano
But to be honest, today I'm less concerned with "robots are replacing humans" (this makes economy more effective, if measured in product per worker's hour) and much more concerned with "cheap labor form overseas is destroying jobs". (which most of the time reduces product per worker's hour value)
Well, when you have people like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist openly proclaiming that they intend to take us back to the glory days of the Victorian age and they're back with unlimited funds from some of the richest people the planet has ever known it's a bit hard to believe that it's all just coincidence. Powerful, competent and malevolent certainly describe those two, and quite a number of people that they work closely with.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Feudalism would be if honor was still a necessary quality.
Reality check: Honor has never been a necessary quality in feudalism.
Ezekiel 23:20
Economically that could work. Except for the coming resource and energy shortages.
Unfortunately, if you look at communities where this is already done (any community with a very high welfare rate, such as native reservations), the social problems that it causes are hard to overlook.
Ultimately people need meaning in their lives and getting everything for free doesn't fill that. They need to do meaningful work.
"The idea that our government could plan anything this complex and succeed is preposterous."
Just like the Koch brothers and big corporations never convinced america to vote against it's own interests? Corporations have been COMPLETELY successful at turning capitalism into a damn near religion in many western countries. If you're a right winger or a libertarian you're not going to solve poverty.
Prof. Francis Fukuyama (pol sci) in Foreign policy magazine says you're voting against your own interest if you vote for the corporate parties (repub and dem).
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136782/francis-fukuyama/the-future-of-history
When even neocon cheerleaders like fukuyama are wishing there was a real left wing movement in america, you know corporations have succeeded in brainwashing many of the worlds electorates.
http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_next_marx
Americans (and people generally) aren't a politically literate bunch, they know a few bits and pieces of information about politics related to issues they personally care about and that's about it.
Because greed, and also "need" for dirty work, underage whores, etc. If there was no poverty to threaten or no greed to entice people with, a lot of people literally wouldn't know what to do and how to live.
Not sure that it will be as impossible for the market to handle as you think it is. More people equates to more services that need to be provided for those people. If you add more services per person, you increase everyone's standard of living.
There is a guy who makes millions from his company that picks up dog shit. There is no need to pay anyone to do that, you should be able to do it yourself. In the past, people would just leave it where it was. By increasing our standard of living to not have dog shit on our common areas and lawns, we have made someone a millionaire.
More to the point, it will eventually cost more to automate than it will to simply hire working class people. People are essentially autonomous machines already. The only reason automation even broke into assembly lines is that they don't strike, can be more precise and don't demand higher wages. Still, working with a robotic tool is like working with an idiot savant. They can spot weld like well... a machine... but if you don't need spot welding, you throw it in the scrap heap. Humans are great general purpose machines. If we figure out how to train humans faster and more effectively, and upgrade our abilities across the board, we don't have to be overtaken by machines.
It is possible that we start considering a post-scarcity system and what that means, but I don't think we're really looking at that sort of situation. And as far as a population bomb goes, I think those are handled very well by allowing people to have as many children as they want, but if you have more than your share, the standard of living you are guaranteed is lower. It is when everyone feels entitled to the same standard of living, despite the choices they have made, when you run into trouble.
We are surely not going to be more socialistic! At least not here in the US with the TeaPartiers calling everyone who get out of work through no fault of their own freeloaders as well as austerity taken into effect in Europe.
Right now, the wealthy are using their extra cash to make sure the government doesn't take their god given right cash saved through automation and will revolt! The Koch brothers are well financed and are afraid of the poor people.
The right in every country is going more and more extreme and the budget deficit shows it. They accuse Obama of being a radical socialist, not because he wants more socialism, but rather does not insist on cutting to the eldery and poor and letting the rich get more cars they do not need.
http://saveie6.com/
It is not delegating all work to the machines, that is a profound misconception. It is delegating all profits to the billionaires, and that, unfortunately, has a very, very long track record.
"What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
Right after mentioning the industrial revolution (albeit in a dismissive way). People don't actually think about the things they write anymore, do they?
If the previous 12+ years of school didn't teach you how to learn and think then 4 more isn't going to do the job either.
Not that simple.
Fixed costs will make it more expensive. Not everything is a variable cost.
It costs $12,000 for software/administrative cost for each $800 computer at work. $10,000 a year in taxes. In the US it costs $30,000 a year for health and liability insurance for someone making just $40,000 a year. Add $30,000,000 for the cost of the building and your $40,000 job cost $85,000 to an employer!
Why are wages flat? Because the costs keep getting higher and higher and your employer can't keep up with the price hikes. Just that you are not getting them.
So making everyone part time at half the wage could still double your costs.
This is the real push to India. It is not that the workers are cheaper. It is the fact you can get an office building for $250,000 not $20,000,000 for the same in San Jose. No health care costs. Taxes are 1/5th per employer. No sue happy lawyers. You can fire Djhrijad and not expect 1-800-sue-you! to come in demanding $10 million in compensation and harassment lawsuits etc. The cost of cheap Indian labor? Well yess that is a small part of it.
The US has a problem with all of the above. Conservatives whine that it is all about unions and taxes only. Fact is if we made it nearly impossible to sue and didn't have corruption and price gouging for health insurance we could hire millions more today! These costs are too much so it makes sense to overwork your existing employers right?
http://saveie6.com/
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
You could learn to repair the machines, or learn to make the machines.
Not if other machines repair the machines and make the machines.
However, we have seen it before and we will see it again.
Not quite. Just because it appears to have happened before doesn't mean that nothing changed or that there isn't an end.
In the pre-industrial age, most earned their income through brute labor.
Early machines took much of that away but there was still profitable tasks to done by trained hands doing the tasks that machines lacked the finesse for.
The factory automation came in, able to perform many of the many tasks that well trained hands previously did. It became difficult to make a living working with one's hands. But machines still weren't very smart and so people that were smart learned to make their living by using their brains.
But machines are getting smarter. They do brain work too and the kind of work they can do goes higher each higher. A knowledge worker can attempt to move up the food chain, of course, but eventually there will be no further up to go. If one can't profitable use one's brawn or one's brain, what is there left to do? Probably the last stand will be the artists. Human creativity feeding irrational human desires. Unfortunately, society has never provided many artists with a living wage.
Of course, this doesn't happen overnight or with 100% efficiency. There will always be a few people who someone make their living through archaic means. But there will come a time when most people will be unable to provide value beyond what machines are already doing.
The situation is not static. People may be autonomous today, but eventually machines become far more autonomous. Even without big AI breakthroughs, steady improvements would be enough for most everyday tasks, particularly as multiprocessor units become cheap and ubiquitous.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Actually, drone planes are the first step in making sure that we don't even need unskilled workers for fighting wars. We'll have Robotic cannon fodder.
The thing that people forget is that when automation becomes more and more ubiquitous, it becomes cheaper and cheaper. Eventually, the common people will own the means of production without a revolution because the means of production will be self-producing, intelligent, and widely available.
True, on the condition it isn't successfully lobbied and regulated out of the hands of the common people.
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
For a business owner I do not give a shit. I want someone who can walk right in and make me money for the cheapest price with no training. If not then I won't hire you. Expanding your boundaries? That doesn't make me money.
Someone skilled does.
http://saveie6.com/
The State of Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend, to which you are no doubt referring, pays between $1000 and $2000 dollars per annum to all natural persons who have [a] resided in the state for at least one year, and [b] applied for it. It is *not* meant to be an income guarantee. The point of the Permanent Fund was that future generations will be deprived of the value of that oil, so it would be nice if someone besides the ludicrously rich oil companies had something to show for it afterwards.
I have no idea whether you're arguing for or against a minimum income, but regardless, the Alaska PFD does not in any meaningful sense qualify.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Yeah, I'd looooove to see the Republicans, aka Wealth Creation Force (TM) go to town on that proposal: "*We* built this nation, we are entitled to a share (Nontaxable of course, it's investment income. Which shouldn't be taxed, or if it is it should be a much lower rate, obviously.). *You* on the other hand...should've bought a robot..."
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
The best concrete example I've heard of why this situation is troublesome concerns an isolated, self-sufficient farm. Imagine the farmers build a machine to automate some of their work -- milking cows, collecting eggs, harvesting, cleaning, whatever. This is unambiguously a good thing. It means there's less work that needs to be done, so everyone gets more free time to use however they want. Survival just got easier. In the same vein, reducing the total amount of work needed to keep humanity fed, clothed, housed, and entertained ought to be a good thing. But it won't be until we can develop an economic system where less work and more leisure time doesn't come at such a high material and social cost.
I doubt we'll reach that point any time soon, though. There's still plenty of work to go around, and there are lots of other factors involved in the American middle class's problems.
Visit the
Or do we just hand them all a check each month and encourage them to stay out of the way, and reproduce as little as possible?
Woops. You were doing so well until that last bit. Don't worry about how much they reproduce. This is something people forget. Genius doesn't come from genius. Genius comes from average, or even not too bright. The genes that result in really serious intelligence are recessive, and lurk all over the place in the gene pool. Trying to breed intelligent people from already intelligent people too often results in insanity, or at least intelligence-related disfunction. Intelligence comes from mediocre often enough, in the great game of genetic recombination.
Aside from that, yes, what we as a society are going to do about this reality is a serious problem. The whole "service economy" wheeze is turning out to be a joke in poor taste. The not very bright people who are out of manufacturing jobs can't be absorbed into service jobs. There aren't enough of them to go around. And how long will plumbers get paid a middle class income, when the majority of their customers are no longer middle class? It's a vicious downward spiral that The Powers That Be are missing. Medieval feudalism sounds great to rich people who can't think. The shit we hear out of Fox News sure sounds like they're trying to resurrect a noble class, inserting all currently rich people into it by default. But where do you get plumbing if no one can afford to be a plumber anymore?
Why are managers threatened by technology? Their job is to provide high-level, high-abstraction assessments and concise communication and general coordination between teams and other managers. That's something that AI still stinks at.
I agree that things like Wiki's and intranet-based peer reviewing can reduce the need for managers in some cases, but it's mostly the culture of organizations that keep these from being adopted.
There is some truth to the Office Space scene where one manager's job is to "protect our clients from having to talk to our engineers".
Given a choice, high-level managers don't want to talk directly to computers, engineers, or non-diplomatic "grunts". They (secretly) want kissy-uppy lower managers to spoon-feed them easy-to-digest info. (Read Dale Carnegie's classics.)
Maybe the newer generation will accept more raw and blunt business communication, but again that's a cultural change, not technological one. (Technology may change culture, but the impact is usually gradual.)
Table-ized A.I.
You haven't been watching Adobe commercials lately, have you? You can make it go viral by slapping someone. That's also how you measure ROI on social media, btw.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
Usually there is so much inertia in the political system, than any single person with drive and enthusiasm will be slowed down if not stopped entirely. Then if anything does gain momentum it's due to grass roots support or political lobbying.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Look, suppose Republicans and their corporate cronies actually got everything they say they want and you and i are correct about the consequences. The end result would be global economic collapse and most likely revolution and possibly outright war. The poor tend to suffer disproportionately during such things, but the rich aren't entirely immune. (Especially if someone decides to start tossing nukes around.)
I seriously doubt that's what they actually want for themselves. So either they're being selectively stupid about some things, or you and i are being selectively stupid about some things. (Or alternately, the Republicans and corporations are demanding outrageous things either as a bargaining position or in exchange for favors, which could be it's own kind of stupid.)
People are rarely either smart about everything or stupid about everything. It's entirely possible to be good at gaining or maintaining money or power without being able to forsee long term consequences of some of your actions.
I'm not saying they're not wrong. And maybe they're not very nice people. But i seriosuly doubt they're plotting the downfall of western civilization while cackling madly. In fact it's entirely possible they're incredibly competent at some things but so totally deluded in other areas that they'd actually be surprised if their plans didn't work out. Look at Mitt Romney. He was competent enough to get rich and get the nomination, and yet he and a lot of the other Republicans were caught totally unprepared by reality on election day. Unless you think that was just part of a deeper plot?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Those are not desperate people. They are agitated people. For desperate people look at Tsarist Russia just before Lenin, or France just before the general royal beheadings (and subsequent general beheadings).
neocon cheerleaders
The guy who wrote The End of History is a neocon cheerleader in your book? Jesus, you need to get out more.
Really? Then why do they have degrees in things such as Medicine, Law, Religion, Business, Psychology, CS, Economics, etc.? Shouldn't there just be one major: Thinking?
Colleges were created to train people for white-collar jobs. Trade schools were for blue-collar jobs.
But the reality is that colleges have not kept up with the changing society. There are way too many English and History majors, Lawyers, etc. and not enough low-level tech majors like programming factory robots or other IT tasks, which is where there is massive unemployment.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
saving their wealth, rather than investing and creating more
So, without savings, exactly where are they supposed to get the capital to be invested? Rich people don't save by stuffing it under mattresses, people.
That's OK, most of the US is at will employment, so reducing the work week to 32 hours would work just fine in many careers. But in IT, it would be a disaster as we can't find enough people to hire as it is.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Then again, maybe I could get 2 30 hour per week jobs since I am used to working 50+ anyway.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
My next door neighbor was plumber. He didn't just clear blocked pipes and drains. He designed entire bathrooms and house renovations down to specifying the electric systems, insulation, types of wood, varnish, filing planning permission applications as well as the plumbing and drainage. In fact this was why there was a shortage of plumbers in the UK. They were all making more money from home renovations than from basic repairs.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"The guy who wrote The End of History is a neocon cheerleader in your book? Jesus, you need to get out more."
Nope, you're wrong. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement,[1] from which he has since distanced himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama
The reality is he was most certainly a cheerleader for many years, to say he wasn't is to not be literate.
Well, sure, a truly egalitarian society is arguably a wonderful goal - I won't be holding my breath waiting for one though. In the meantime, historically western society has been divided into a very few "haves" who control most of the wealth, and a very many have-nots who are mostly struggling to get by as their servants.
The rise of the middle class created a vast number of people with the wealth and leisure to direct towards art, science, politics, etc. Perhaps even more important is the existence of a middle class tends to be essential to social mobility - if all you have is nobles and serfs you're pretty much guaranteed to die as a member of the same class you were born to - no amount of brilliance and hard work will let a serf be any more than a serf unless they marry into the nobility - at best they'll either attract a noble sponsor and at least live in comfort, or perhaps become a free agent with enough skill to do a bit better than the serfs and at least have their freedom.
In essence: It's not the middle class *itself* that is important, it's the fact that it's a symptom of social and economic mobility. Also the middle class, when healthy, tends to contain the bulk of a population, with very few people being really rich or poor. When there isn't a healthy middle class just about everyone except those at the very top pretty much end up within a stones throw of severe poverty, so a healthy middle class also means almost everyone is doing much better, at least economically, than they would otherwise be.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Then we will stride boldly into that unknown and become more than we once were - for better or worse.
Did Hatta say anything about government? The leadership in what he's referring to comes from the corporate/wealthy and some of their bought off government minions.
We're already here and we've locked your account! *snarl*
*climbs into air duct and scurries back towards the server room*
I assume by cost efficiency, you mean lower costs per unit or more profitability? If so, your argument makes no sense.
(Productivity + hard costs)/units = cost efficiency
Your time as an employee = cost. Sure there's lots of other factors for cost besides your labor, but your labor is likely the largest portion. The more you can get done in 1 unit of time (higher productivity), the lower the cost per unit (aka cost efficiency)
Eliminating jobs is a result of productivity improvements. If the average person can do more, but your customers can't purchase more of your product, then you have to cut back on what is now surplus production capacity. In other words, you have to get rid of jobs.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Tech could just as easily extend middle class jobs, if we chose productivity over cost efficiency.
I'm going to need you to explain this.
Middle class jobs have been disappearing because technology has allowed workers to become more efficient, thus allowing less workers to do the same or more work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/sunday-review/americas-productivity-climbs-but-wages-stagnate.html
Here's a lovely graph courtesy of the NY Times
Some economists say it is wrong to look at just wages because other aspects of employee compensation, notably health costs, have risen. But overall employee compensation -- including health and retirement benefits -- has also slipped badly, falling to its lowest share of national income in more than 50 years while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share over that time.
Conservative and liberal economists agree on many of the forces that have driven the wage share down. Corporate America's push to outsource jobs -- whether call-center jobs to India or factory jobs to China -- has fattened corporate earnings, while holding down wages at home. New technologies have raised productivity and profits, while enabling companies to shed workers and slice payroll. Computers have replaced workers who tabulated numbers; robots have pushed aside many factory workers.
From 1973 to 2011, worker productivity grew 80 percent, while median hourly compensation, after inflation, grew by just one-eighth that amount, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. And since 2000, productivity has risen 23 percent while real hourly pay has essentially stagnated.
We wouldn't need a more progressive tax structure if middle class wages were increasing alongside corporate profits.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
No planning is required. It just happens naturally. They take a little more money each year, take away a little more power, increase your debt to them...before you know it...you're a serf.
No, it isn't. That computer handled the needs of an entire multinational corporation and resulted in numerous scientific discoveries and papers. Your table is so amazingly un-powerful all you can do is play angry birds on it and post to /.
That tablet has the computing power to run an app that does what the supercomputer did. And it can be prettied up with a pretty GUI even a CEO can understand.
It won't be as influential as the old supercomputer, but it is still pretty amazing that that much computing power is available to the average John Doe, without even requiring a security clearance.
the powers that be are getting a rein in on that. The ruling class has taken back the media. Sure, they let them have their little liberal social issues, but on economics it's conservative capitalism 24/7. The little guys didn't do much revolting for over 2000 years, and got put down every time they did (didn't turn out so good for Napoleon, did it?).
The assumption you're making is that you're going to win in the good vs evil fight. Even if good doesn't win, you'll win. You won't. They'll come for you soon too. For all of us. There's nothing you have that the ruling class won't take away. Their greed knows no limits or bounds. It's what they do. They have enough wealth to buy anything. They teach us that if somebody just gives it to you you'll stop there. But that's a lie. They didn't stop. They never stop.
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It depends on where you live.
Here in Seattle, unemployment is 6.1 percent both in the city and in King County, while it's 7.7 percent in the State (or rural and suburban areas).
Industry is growing in Seattle. We make things. Things like fair trade organic chocolate. Things like distilled liquor. Things like planes that have outsourced battery systems from Japan ... but the plane made here works fine.
The problem is really that Wages are at a 50 year low and Profits are at a 50 year high. The old split used to be 50/50 for Capital/Labor and right now it's about 90/10.
There's your problem.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
if nobody's poor?
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you think the moon landings were faked, too?
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Have they factored in the loss if jobs in developed countries? In other words,are we really doing a lot more with a lot fewer people or are we employing different people to do our work?
What makes you think they'll be a revolution? The rich have trained armies with unlimited weapons on their side. The poor have low caliber semi-autos they can barely shoot. Also, the poor tend to just take it. I live 2 blocks from a ridiculously expensive neighborhood, I'm in low rent housing for H1-Bs, and not 2 miles away there's slums I wouldn't walk in at night. The poor keep their misery to themselves. They're convinced they deserve it. Hell, Mitt Romney came out and said it was wrong of 47% to think they're entitled to food, housing and health care and nobody even noticed. They were just made at being dismissed.
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I don't lead $@!^. I'm barely getting by. I think the phrase you're looking for is "Digging our own graves".
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They're trying to scapegoat technology to cover their own mistakes. I've seen the same shit inside my own family -> "the video games made me do it, dad!" Their response? They throw out the video games.
Your job losses are heavily correlated with your ineffectual leaders, leaders bred to dodge blame at every opportunity, blame which is so toxic that it can end a man's life before he has a chance to learn from his mistakes.
I am John Hurt.
There are only two classes. There is a Capitalist class and a Working class. Arguably there is also an underclass: people who would be working class if there were jobs.
more or less. A closet maker that used a CNC machine to do everything. They send a guy out, he measures your closet space, they put the figures in and it cuts the wood. From there it's no different than Ikea furniture. A friend did their IT, and couldn't figure out why the freaked out so much when the computers went down. Until he realized that nobody there know the first thing about woodworking. Accountants do it to now. Doctors too
When I was a kid they talked about the coming of expert systems. Databases that told you how to do anything. They're here, and they make us all pretty powerless...
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The mandate to hold liability, while it has its reasons, induced insurance companies to roll all of their risk into the price of liability, so that those who only pay liability are in fact shouldering part of the cost of the risk of those with full coverage. I don't have a better answer, I'm just saying its not perfect.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I know a lot of people do not like those who are filthy rich, but you guys need to know this ...
Most of those who are filthy rich were originally from lower to middle class, just like you guys.
They got to where they are because of one thing - they got tired of working for someone else.
I know, I know, the recession and the tech have killed a lot of middle class jobs, but to some, this crisis is the perfect chance for them to do something about it ... like starting their own business, instead.
So ... why are you guys moaning the loss of your work?
What is the use of complaining?
Do you think that by complaining here (and elsewhere) you can get a better job?
Why don't you start your own business, for a change?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Aristotle: "most technology has already been discovered." He was, of course, saying that the most important aspect of human affairs is politics. And he was saying it in the book which was dedicated to describing the nature of politics. He did a fine job of the latter despite the silly opinion on scientific progress. Let's deconstruct a little bit. If nothing else, more advanced technology requires a longer period of initial entry point preparation. So more of a life span is spent on studying than before. Which requires more educators, newer methods of education, etc. It seems like most people in education "industry" seem to think they can cash in on that by simply providing more of their services at more expensive prices, but, of course, it will not work. Inefficient constructs will fail over medium term (not short as the students hope), but not long (as the teachers hope). As for the larger question, in general, whenever you hear someone say "this time it's different", they are selling something. Here's why: the point of this phrase is to get a person to throw away their current priorities... to disregard everything they care about at the moment. Once their life priorities are diminished, they are more willing to explore new directions (ie, other priorities) for their time, money, body, etc.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Consider the view that if nothing is done about population, immigration and entitlements the first world nations are going to bankrupt themselves supporting the "safety net" that will be supporting the 99% as they become more and more dependent. How we get there is just keeping on keeping on, adding more and more government heft and weight. Programs like a feel-good health care "reform" that doesn't reform anything at all except getting more people into the system with no visible means of paying for them is just more keeping on as well.
I suppose the idea that fiat money really is imaginary could take hold, but it would trigger the same kind of collapse that people think the 1% or the Republicans want. Sure, when we picked up the pieces there might be a new way that was better, but how long would it take and how many would die in the interim? One way out is a lot smaller population, but 20 years of chaos while the rich stand by and watch doesn't seem like the ideal way to get there either.
We have a huge problem today - many jobs open to people with symbol manipulation skills and few, if any jobs for people that can't handle such abstractions. Today a cashier in a store can't rely on everyting being a concrete object they can touch and move - sometimes someone hands them a piece of paper that represents 1000 products and mishandling the abstract paper will absolutely mean they get fired. Previously there were many jobs for people like this and studies in education indicate that at least 25% of the population can't handle much abstraction. So what do we do with them? Right now, they are sitting at home hopefully collecting unemployment forever. How long is that going to work?
By the way, the idea of retraining people into new jobs sounds appealing but it doesn't work always. Yes, you can take the loading dock worker and train them to be a drone on an assembly line. But the problem with abstract symbol manipulation is that it isn't a learnable skill - either your brain it wired to be able to do it or it isn't. If you learned algebra and differential equations you have the ability. If you never "got" these things and likely dropped out of high school because you couldn't seem to understand how this worked, you likely do not have the ability. No amount of training or remedial education is going to help. Read up on it if you don't understand. It is a real problem and it isn't going to get any better.
We need to squash the idea of the "knowledge economy" where everyone is using or programming computers. It isn't going to happen.
Also, we are currently importing thousands of low-skill workers every month. They were at the bottom of the employment food chain in their own country which is why they are being exported. It doesn't matter much if the guy mowing the grass can do algebra or understand using a computer to control a machine, but their job prospects are very limited. How many landscapers do we really need? Why are we going to make them all permanently our responsibility? Well, we are. And like it or not, they likely can't be trained to do something their brain isn't wired to be able to do.
There have been "real" gains since 1970, at least in the world I live in. Houses are larger, better appointed, cars are much higher tech/safer, foods are... well, fancier if not necessarily better in all ways, and people seem to spend much more time and money on services like restaurants, movies / entertainment, etc. than they did 40 years ago.
The house we bought in 1973 was in a "golf course neighborhood" where people with a lot of money would buy an annual membership to the club for roughly 1/2 what our house cost to build. Main benefit of membership was to have a place to go where you didn't have to be with people who couldn't afford it. Though things like that still exist, it seems less prevalent than it used to be. I'd call that an improvement, too.
It's certainly not rosy all around, but it has been awhile since our last big urban riot, hasn't it? We managed to get through "Occupy" without anybody being shot or killed, and I think the U.S. is showing signs of getting out of Afghanistan before completely imploding economically, unlike the U.S.S.R. just recently did.
I'm all for adopting the German approach to unemployment: persistent rate of 8%? Try programs to encourage workweek reductions: 40*0.92 = 36.8. Change labor laws that quote 40 hours/week to quote 36 hours 40 minutes instead, raise corporate tax 5% across the board, then give the extra revenue earned back as credits to companies that implement 37 hour or lower workweeks for their employees. As an option, 2 weeks standard paid vacation could get expanded to 6 (50*0.08 = 4), and that would stimulate the domestic tourism industries.
If businesses and corporations whine that they can't be competitive while implementing these programs, somebody needs to remind them that taxes are also used to pay for the unemployed, those lacking health care, and the police that keep vagrants out of their doorways. Isn't it better to spread the wealth through employment than to use taxes to pay for the care/feeding/housing/control of the poor?
The roots of this need to be planted in high schools, where the emphasis needs to be on kids learning how to learn. Life will be full of challenges, and being able to learn a wide variety of skills in different ways will become the critical skill.
Instead of asking 'will maths/science/English be useful for my everyday existence', they should be asking 'what methods of learning should I be applying to the diverse array of topics, and what methods work best in which situations for myself'.
there are lot's IT people looking for jobs so why are people not getting the jobs.
The poor don't have time or education to do creative stuff, the rich don't want to rock the economic boat. It is the middle class who have time/education and the will to come up with new and exciting ideas.
If machines become good at everything, it doesn't mean we all become destitute because there are no jobs. It means that everything can be had with minimal effort.
...by those who own the machines, and all the other capital needed to make any kind of living in the world. The rest of the people, who own nothing of any importance and only get to use the owners' things in exchange for their labor, will be SOL when their labor is no longer needed.
The solution to the problem of course is to fix the underlying problem where only a small set of people own the world, and the rest of us rent it from them. When we're all shareholders in the means of production, then the savings provided by automation will actually benefit us all. Until then, it only benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
But, I see you get to that in the end anyway:
A world without jobs is an awesome world. Getting the super wealthy to share with the less wealthy is an entirely different problem that can maybe be solved with threats of revolution and guillotines, but slowing the advance of technology, and diminishing the total potential pool of wealth is a step in the wrong direction.
I agree completely, but think that the anti-automators needs to be responded to first and foremost by pointing out that while they are absolutely right that there is a problem, the real problem is ownership disparity ("income" per se doesn't really matter, if your income comes entirely from labor and we're talking about eliminating the need for that labor). People afraid of automation have a very valid concern, but it's not really with automation, and their concern needs to be pointedly redirected to the real problem: that they don't own the automatons.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What evidence is there that fluff courses "teach you how to think"? They do push people toward accepting a particular (pc) viewpoint, but how does that benefit society?
Most of those who are filthy rich were originally from lower to middle class, just like you guys.
(citation needed)
There are plenty of mechanisms in place which make it easy to assume most of the filthy rich made it because they were born into wealth, either directly through inheritances or indirectly through financial help, family connections, and better schooling. Just as an example, 4 of the top 20 richest people on earth are part of the Walton family, which inherited their wealth from Sam Walton.
That isn't to say I dismiss your point outright, but I think I need to see some actual data before I accept your point.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool.
I took a few college classes, and right now I'm thinking "not fucking tradeschool" so it looks like it worked!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The Luddite argument has been wrong for 200 years and will continue to be wrong. The only thing I see changing this is the possibility of strong AI -- and that will change EVERYTHING.
"where the continuance of the system was more important than its efficiency."
Yes and much like in evolution, once continuation was achieved the serfs were more or less expendable. Lose a worker, well there's another to take its place in a few years time.
The bigger problem is life expectancy. If serfs are healthy for too long they'll grow old and become a burden. Low infant mortality would create a population problem. Too many mouths to feed.
If you maintain the hierarchy, add in good health care, adequate food production and scale up you end up with socialism ruled by a monarchy. Sound familiar?
I much prefer Patronage. The currently wealthy spend their capital magnificently on cultural status symbols, public works named after themselves and on industry and trade. It's like modern capitalism (it is capitalism) but with an emphasis on spending capital rather than hoarding it. Very trickle down but in a way that benefits everyone. As long as there is no class system preventing people from becoming a Patron through hard work or creativity it is an ideal system.
The problem is people. They get greedy or corrupt and either hoard capital, create class barriers (status hoarding) or decide to fight with other Patrons over resources, enlisting their patronage into wars of one kind or another. Usually this is done to protect their family's position at the top (especially when their children are undeserving of the position).
In an ideal system a Patron would spend all of their capital by the time they die, leaving no inheritance. If they spend it on educating their children and spreading good will for their family then their children will have every opportunity to prove themselves and become Patrons as well. All of the distributed capital will enrich society and keep the economy liquid. It will also provide opportunities for others to acquire status and wealth.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
... easy to assume most of the filthy rich made it because they were born into wealth ...
If that's what you like to think, that's what you'll end up thinking.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Exactly... like the Rothechild's, Jim Walton, Bill Gates, who started at the top and worked his way up, Warren Buffet, who also started as a child of privilege, ...
In fact, well over 2/3 of the current wealthiest americans all started rich.
They got their because their PARENTS were already wealthy and in America, your parents' income now accounts for 50% of your adult income potential- that's worse then many companies in EUROPE where it only accounts for 10%.
America HAS some benefits- like forgiving you if you go bankrupt. You actually can start over again here unlike so many places (unless the reason is student debt- then you are frakked).
But "land of opportunity" isn't one of them in the way you are talking.
You can work your way up a rung or two. The rest is all connections, family names, and inherited money.
And now those guys are using the money to buy machines which have been destroying jobs for almost a generation (15 years).
Once you stop employing people- you can't use the capitalist model any more.
If you have a job- do what I did. Save over half of what you made. Don't carry any debt. Then when they lay off 500 of you and take a SEVEN figure raise for "saving money on salaries", you will be safe.
Worst run offshoring/outsourcing I've ever been part of. Our replacements didn't even arrive until 4 months after the layoffs- most of us were already gone. Companies probably screwed... but wait- that just means the executives are all going to get TWO YEARS PAY for highly damaging the company.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They've gotten greedy.
Study's have shown they now think people poor is the fault of the poor person and that being wealthy is entirely because they worked smart/hard/morally and the poor person was an immoral, unwise loser.
And as a result, anything they want to do to the poor person is justifiable and moral.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Wow... some very suspicious modding on the informative threads in this article.
Parent is NOT a troll. Has good sites.
You may or may not agree with his opinion but modding him down is chickenshit and cowardly. Post why he's wrong with your own links. Fight speech with speech- not with censorship. Save the troll mod for real trolls.
Parent Poster said:
"The idea that our government could plan anything this complex and succeed is preposterous."
Just like the Koch brothers and big corporations never convinced america to vote against it's own interests? Corporations have been COMPLETELY successful at turning capitalism into a damn near religion in many western countries. If you're a right winger or a libertarian you're not going to solve poverty.
Prof. Francis Fukuyama (pol sci) in Foreign policy magazine says you're voting against your own interest if you vote for the corporate parties (repub and dem).
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136782/francis-fukuyama/the-future-of-history
When even neocon cheerleaders like fukuyama are wishing there was a real left wing movement in america, you know corporations have succeeded in brainwashing many of the worlds electorates.
http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_next_marx
Americans (and people generally) aren't a politically literate bunch, they know a few bits and pieces of information about politics related to issues they personally care about and that's about it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You explained it yourself. "The same or more work". Companies are picking "the same" over "more", or replacing middle class jobs with poverty line jobs.
You ain't seen nothing yet. There's a short story about where all this is going.. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm.. two models of the future in there, but I only find one plausible.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Not all the factors of production can become more and more ubiquitous.
at the Holodeck.
All those things that a supercomputer could do 20 years ago ... they got done.
So that powerful tablet is doomed to executing Angry Birds because the interesting
problems that might create economic wealth still need a supercomputer and
always will.
"America HAS some benefits- like forgiving you if you go bankrupt. You actually can start over again here unlike so many places (unless the reason is student debt- then you are frakked)."
Yeah, which some (already rich), use to buy companies suck their money dry, declare bankruptcy and move to a new target. Increasing their fortune out of that.
In my opinion they are the real society parasites, not those living on food stamps..
At the same time of fewer and fewer living wage jobs, the GOP still wants to 'Ayn Rand' the shit out of the US.
It's what Jesus would have done.
Yep, pretty much the post I was going to write.
I remember back in the '70s there was some discussion about investing on the behalf of citizens by governments to ensure basic levels of support --- see Hal Clements' mention of ``draft dodgers'' in his short story ``The Mechanic''.
Bit late for that now --- perhaps a tax on CPU processing power?
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Ok, but for all you know those international funds are just funds buying other funds that are holding US stock. Or the other way around.
To me it looks like a big government give away to investment firms.
So, MakerBot vs IP holders (patent and even copyright owners). Hmm, so hard to predict who will be supported and protected by courts, media, politicians, regulating agencies and so on. So hard.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
It is amazing that you are blinded to the democrats and their corporations. How do you think Obama raised a billion dollars twice running for president? He raised a ton of money from corporations and their employees. He also raised a ton of money via micro donations. Did you know that the small dollar donations that he received via the web site did not require verification? You could have given him a million dollars using a large array of visa gift cards. Hollywood, Labor, Lawyers, Insurance Companies, etc tend to contribute more often to democrats. Democrats have their sectors and republicans have theirs. It is naive to speak of "Republicans and their corporate cronies".
I've often heard this meme about soldiers refusing to fire on their own countrymen. Is there any example of a professional military refusing such orders?
Yet we can't blame everything on cheap labor either. A lot of manufacturing has been returning to the United States. The problem is that the new model of manufacturing does not generate the same number or quality of jobs that it did for traditional factories. Today, you may have a handful of well paid, highly skilled labor doing advanced design and engineering work and then a mass of low-wage employees doing menial labor that is not cost effective to automate... yet.
I should also point out that I was talking about two different machines. I have a desktop and a tablet. My desktop *could* run a multinational. My tablet... maybe. ;)
Wages won't go up, it simply means we'll all be working 32 hours a week for 32 hours worth of wages. This of course assumes that you can find the quantity of employees who are able to do the job to run that sort of staffing scheme.
And if we get technology to the point where the 'working' class can live a pretty good life, there is no need for social mobility as a 'good'. I'd argue, we're already at this point.
Were it not for our attempts at propping up the middle class, being working class would be a pretty good life. Things like propping up the housing market is good for the upper middle and rich class. It's bad for the working class as the cost of a basic element of life (Shelter) goes up. Propping up the drug war to fund middle class lawyers, police officers, prison guards...
When I look at it, the attempts to prop up the middle class have resulted in far more harm and more poverty for most of the populace.
And yes, historically there have been a few haves and the vast majority on equal 'poor' footing. Perhaps that says something that the rise of the middle class has more to do with the industrial revolution and is an anomaly of that era and shouldn't be a model in a post industrialized society.
Here's my first question: Since when are assembly-line jobs considered middle class? IMHO, these are lower class jobs. If you take offense to that, A) tough noogies and B) what then ARE lower class jobs?
Second question: What makes anyone think that dismissing technological advances and replacement of menial tasks with machines in favor of simply preserving the paycheck of a human is a good idea? Machines don't demand benefits, a pension, and a pay raise every year. Do you really think the employers are going to simply take the extra costs up the a$$? Hell no. They will either pass the costs on to the customer thus resulting in inflation or they will go out of business.
And here I was worried my sarcasm would be missed.
Also, we don't have a population that's anywhere near that desperate.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Why would you post this as an AC?
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is amazing that you somehow read my post and thought i said anything at all about the Democrats. Or do you believe in a black and white world where if i say something negative about the Republicans it must mean that the Democrats are positive in exactly the opposite manner?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
if you are unable to think at the age of 20, it's too late for you either way.
And if you think that you should not apply the concept of ROI to higher education at all, you are kidding yourself. If the costs are out of whack when compared to the returns, the wealth is squandered, end of story. More often than not you are better off reading few books or stuff on the internet.
In fact, well over 2/3 of the current wealthiest americans all started rich.
Of course they did you are talking about the top top top of wealth.
They started with a lot and grew it bigger whats so bad about that
Now take a look at the thousands of Americans like my younger brother
That are worth over one million we were just regular middle class growing up
My brother started his own company when he was young and worked his ass off
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
I believe, and have been believing for more than a decade now, that we are in a transition into a new era, which would best be simply described as an age of cyberpunk. Giant quasi-national corps and mainly administrative nations ruling large chunks of regular ultra-economized life with the fringes morphing into different, post-industrial citizen societies alltogether, with areas where money isn't worth as much as reputation or skill or simular non-monetary values such as honor or membership in some group like something quasi-religious or something. Human interaction will be paid for, stuff and convenience will come free.
Pick your standard William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel on the subject and you get the picture of what I mean.
The simple fact is: we are living in paradise with a bizare abundance of things quite a few of which would have been considered impossible in the 50ies.
The shit our field has been whishing for humanity all along has finally arrived. You can get computers that would have been considered borderline magic two and a half decades ago and would have taken up a mid-sized 5-story building; so powerfull, lightweight, easy to use and with software usefull and manifold beyond comprehension for a single individual, so cheap, they can be payed for with 4 days of regular manual unskilled labor!
Just last night I saw a poster of an offering for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Wifi for 250 Euros. Two-hundred and fifty fucking euros! I payed more than 2 times that much for my friggin Sony MD700 Minidisk player back in 1997, a device so old-school in its tech and so single-purpose, it close to appears to come out of the early steam age compared to my HTC Flyer.
The truth is we've basically just about arrived at where we wanted to go. 5 years into the future algorithms and large computing clusters won't just be interpreting language, they will be translating it, and quite probably in real time. Tablets will have print resolution, weigh less than a book, have 15+ hours of uptime of the grid, be forever connected for a token fee and do *anything* you would want to be able to do with such a device ... and then some. And they will cost as much as a round-trip to the next big city.
Jobs are dropping left, right and center because they aren't needed anymore. Imagine when paper documents have finally moved out. An entire field of jobs will simply vanish.
I made compareatively big bucks developing in Flash/AS3 5 years ago. Proprietary lock-in stuff. Neat, but adobe totally missed the touch-screen dev train. Tough luck. Now I'm lucky if I even get one gig in that field every two years. I'll probably be doing specialized vertical market PHP and webdev the next few years for less money and after that, who knows? Even the LAMP stack is so old-tech I feel like in an entertainment programme when developing for it. ... Maybe afters this I'll become a massager for old lonely ladies and do touch-screen development just for the kicks on the side.
Bottom line: The world our field lives in and caters to is changing. Fast. We're seeing to that ourselves.
It's the age of cyberpunk, plain and simple. That's what I call it anyway.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
According to Ray Kurtzweil, we'll reach the singularity by 2030. That's when machines are supposed to be nearly as smart as people and when people will have to meld with technology in order to keep pace. Fortunately for me, I'll be old enough to retire by then :-)
That isn't to say I dismiss your point outright, but I think I need to see some actual data before I accept your point.
You are quite right to doubt him.
Relative upwards mobility (in the US) is quite limited from everything I've read. Generally you end up in the same income quintile as your parents. Absolute income may be higher (hopefully, if you want to keep up with inflation), but relative income stays the same.
There are tons of articles online on the subject. Here's a cute little video that explains relative vs absolute income change. They claim the upper and lower quintiles to be "sticky" (i.e. less likely to see movement). They seem to have some interesting research on the subject of economic mobility.
The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and the middle income shuffle around. In Canada we're finding the "middle class" quintiles (middle 3 groups) are spread quite wide now. A family income of $40K-$125K is considered "middle income". A family making $125K is a whole different standard of living and level of financial security from one making $40K. If a tax policy benefits people that make more than 70K but less than 125K can we actually call it a tax break for the middle class? The US middle class looks a lot more compact (by some quick googling). Of course that's because the wealth is a lot more concentrated at the top in the US. In the US you have to make >380K to be a 1%er. In Canada a mere 280K will get you into the 1% club.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
First, if robots take over all of our jobs and give us more free time for our families AND we can still make a living that will sustain a family, then I am all for it. As a person who has programmed those assembly line robots, it is to eliminate human error and costly waste. There are somethings robots just can't do, but if it is a routine task that is deterministic, it is a better fit. We need to educate our population to be able to have higher skilled positions. We need more education (and people to CARE about their education) than we need less robots. Middle class is not made up of assembly line workers. Maybe in Detroit they were, but we see where that went. The cities have agreements with manufacturers to limit the hourly wage to keep the local area competitive. Government does prohibit progress. So does corporate greed. You have to find out which is worse in your cities. I have seen both cases. We also need to offer more trade related classes than just academic classes. Making people do the same math from 4th grade to grad school is just inane. If someone is interested in finance, teach them financial math. If they are interested in engineering, teach them the maths required for engineering. If we target education to actual careers instead of this generalized method that few people care about, I think more people will come out of school with actual fundamentals to get good paying jobs. Make the fluff optional. I like the rest, but I think it causes some people to tune education out.
In fact you can quantify the effect that the rich tend to stay rich in the US and the poor are stuck in poverty using something called the "intergenerational mobility index". Basically, the US is one of the worst countries in this regard and it has gotten that way mostly over the last few decades. Here is a summary from "The Price of Inequality," by J. Stiglitz, p. 18.
"It is at the bottom and the top where the United States performs especially badly: those at the bottom have a good chance of staying there, as do those at the top, and much more so than in other countries. With full equality of opportunity, 20 percent of those in the bottom fifth would see their childen in the bottom fifth. Denmark almost achieves that - 25% are stuck there. Britain, supposedly notorious for its class divisions, does only a little worse (30%). That means they have a 70% chance of moving up. The chances of moving up in America, though, are markedly smaller (only 58% of the children born to the bottom group make it out)."
Data on these claims:
"Some 62% of the children of those in the top quintile wind up in the top 40%"
from "Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America:" http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2008/02/economic-mobility-sawhill
This type of elitist response leads directly to Right-Wing extremism and to the "Final Solution", referring to the Nazi extermination of people it deemed as marginalized. This manifests today as some forms of Libertarianism and comes from the same roots. Please remember that many of the people who post here are already in one of the elites. It is pretty obvious that many are engineers or wanna-be techies. Such people tend to be too smart for everybody's good, and some of the extreme ideas that come out of their mouths is the revelation that intelligence does not make wisdom, especially when it is driven by self-centeredness, and the assumption that everybody of value is just like oneself.
In fact you are your brother's keeper and just because you fancy yourself as smarter than 90% of the population doesn't mean that you can dismiss them, like the Nazis did. Because most people are smart enough to put a bullet in YOUR head. Nazi Germany was driven by engineers and elites that ordinary guys that they dismissed put a stop to. It could happen again, so be careful what you do.
Perhaps you should study history a little more before embracing a feudal society too strongly - serfs rarely had much in the way of wealth or power, often they lacked even the right to leave to serve another lord, and had very little to call their own - their land, home, etc. all belonged to their lord. Generally a bit better than slavery, but not by much.
It is true that with modern technology we could give everyone a pretty good life using only a few percent of the wealth, but ask yourself this: why would the people controlling the power wish to do that? Think for a moment of the sort of people that seek out wealth and power successfully - I'm not talking .com millionaires, they're small fry, I mean the *real* powerful sorts who can make nations bend to their will. It's a full-time job acquiring and holding that kind of power, requiring enormous dedication and cunning since you're competing with other similarly driven people and anyone who doesn't play hard tends to fall out of the game quickly.
Perhaps you have faith that democracy would survive and keep the worst abuses in check - I tend to believe that historically "rights" and "power" are held only by those who are willing and able to fight for them, and if we (the commoners) hand back to the lords all the power that we stripped from them in the last few hundred years we'll find ourselves right back under their boot heel in a generation or two. And the addition of cheap automated surveillance drones would make it far more difficult to win free a second time.
A final thought - without social mobility the people running things will be there because they were born to it - it doesn't matter if we call them Kings, Nobles, or "old money" - family dynasties are real and enduring facts of life, and the only qualifications are being born into it and being ruthless enough to hold on to it. Are those really the sort of people you want running the entire show? Right now the rest of us at least have a bit of a voice.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
I do wonder, though, if they might have taught you to write, and without using expletives; and a little punctuation would help too!
That said, I actually agree with you. A well-rounded education, along with the ability it gives to reason, is far more important than a job-oriented trade-school education whose skills become obsolete within the lifetime of a career.
To this I would add that emphasizing an engineering curriculum does not meet the above criteria, which your poor writing ability might reveal.
Unfortunately, to find that genius in the pool of mediocre or below, how many millions of mouths will you create that need feeding?
Our voice comes from democracy.
As to tackling the big money guys. I don't think there has ever been a period where us little people can overcome their influence... aside from the limited impact our democratic institutions have.
The super wealthy have been and will always be wealthy.
The interesting thing is that the attempts to prop up the middle class have resulted in great abuses... and continue to be used by the super-wealthy to keep them in power.
The lords of power as you would call them have used the fight of the middle class to make their power permanent. Trillions of dollars spent in financial games and bailouts... by what justification did this pass democratic muscle? Precisely because the middle class was convinced... and rightly so... that they are dependent on that system.
While I agree we might find ourselves on the heel of oppression again... my point is that the attempt to prop up the middle class is part of the oppression.
if you are unable to think at the age of 20, it's too late for you either way. And if you think that you should not apply the concept of ROI to higher education at all, you are kidding yourself. If the costs are out of whack when compared to the returns, the wealth is squandered, end of story. More often than not you are better off reading few books or stuff on the internet.
Actualy, the ability to reason has to emerge far sooner than age 20.
I agree that the costs associated with getting a formal education and degrees are too high. As to the reasons, I do not choose to elaborate at length here. More to the point is your contention that reading and the Internet can substitute for classroom and homework. I tend to think that it cannot because one really has to produce results to show what you've learned. It might be possible to take a programming course on-line, provided you have to submit to code reviews, also on-line. But I'd be concerned if you told me that your qualifications to be a brain surgeon came from taking on-line courses.
The already bureaucracy-laden world of Corporate America would be much more efficient with less middle-management in most place I've seen.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
If you want a cruddy analogy, the brain of a Nobel prize winner might be "better" in whatever measure than the average coffee barista. That doesn't mean that coffee made by a Nobel Prize winner is any more "powerful" than coffee made by the average tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista.
But then the question becomes what you do with the tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista when he has been replaced by an AI driven expresso machine? This is the issue we are going to face.
Ever think about how excess, marginalized, people were managed in the past? They were turned into canon fodder. War is driven by idle hands, and is surely the devil"s workshop. Take charge guys start trouble and get people to kill one another. These guys might be running marketing campaigns, today, and running some military campaigns, tomorrow.
doesn't have much to do with feudalism though. quite the opposite. you want feudalism, you keep everyone on manual labor, you keep everyone on leash - you don't just set them free to do whatever they please with all the information in the world. you pay few to tax them to feed the masses.. that's more akin to socialism and the star trek goal there is to eventually have just very, very few of us toiling on food production and have everyone else do research and production of whatever gimmick devices they want.
Too much time watching Sci-Fi and not enough time studying history. Feudalism existed because the infrastricture for Europe didn't empower development and sound investment. The Roman Empire had the beginnings of the modern world in roads and means to manage wealth. So without good roads and a financial system people were isolated and under the thumb of the local king-pin, and they lacked the power and incentive to innovate. It had nothing to do with how smart they were and everything to do with the ability to suppress creative destruction and to isolate them.
Our current age has a different problem that leads down the same road. There isn't enough investment to support everybody becoming creative, and there are large numbers of people who being average or below-average in training and ability, could become marginalized, that is, not able to support themselves in the economy. So, elites will benefit, but what about everybody else?
My theory is, that like the Crusades, greedy politicians, even evil clerics, or businessmen, will turn them into canon fodder of one type or another. Society will no longer be inclusive. Human rights will erode, people will be enslaved, because this is what always has happened in the past when economic systems do not include everybody. Political systems follow in the path of economic exploitation and become repressive. This has to do with whether society can make a useful role for everybody in society. Can you trust greedy entrapeneurs, and engineers to find a place for people, especially those that don't match the elite? I don't think so.
Oh gag. Regurgitate grade school much? Nobody's "dismissing" them. If we were, everyone with an IQ under 100 would be sterilized at birth. End of story. But the reality is that some people are born maladapted to modern technological culture, and the question is, "What do you do about it, if anything?" Moralistic, "Oh my god, the nazis!" hand wringing helps nothing. Morality is subjective, changeable with time and culture. Is genetic engineering for greater intelligence moral or immoral, and says who? You?
As a practical matter, as resources shrink, particularly energy resources shirink over time, decisions like this will be made, if not in the USA, then certainly in other countries. You can deal with them as rationally as possible, or you can continue whingeing, disclaiming all responsibility and doing nothing while overpopulation continues and EVERYBODY starves.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Sure, there will be protectionism and IP laws and all of that, but those measures only last until they annoy the wrong people. People used to burn down factories too, it didn't stop the Industrial Revolution for very long.
Why don't you start your own business, for a change?
All of the housewives (and a couple husbands) I know have some sort of business started in selling crafts, writing, landscaping or other semi-talented labor, and most of them don't make what they could be making if they were employed/contracting, some lose more money than they make.
I know several friends who started businesses with investment and several unfortunate enough to use their own.
Basically, what I'm trying to say, is that I know there are success stories of a few people that are always held up in front of us as encouragement, but I have not yet met anyone who "got rich" from starting their own business, and I've seen many try.
Me personally? So far I've contributed a grand total of zero. That may change. May not. As for how many total it takes to find that genius? Billions, by the evidence. So you pays your money and you takes your chances. And so what? The resources are available to support many more of us than are already on the planet, without any dramatic environmental concerns, either. The US federal government famously pays farmers NOT to plant crops, in an effort to keep the farmers in place, but knowing the food isn't needed (at least not where it can make its way into a distribution system that can get it somewhere useful in time). We can and will eventually get all of our electricity from solar sources, be that wind, hydro, or photoelectric. The power is available and is cost effective. Tapping it is merely a matter of will. The fact that our current system is somehow unable to muster the will in no way invalidates the math. As to why the will is a problem, I refer you to the end of my previous post.
You have to accept that the economy is not a natural thing, it's a human made game whose outcome HAS TO BE beneficial to humans by definition. All the laws and regulations and trade agreements and monetary policy and all these complex things will either serve the general welfare of humans of *get thrown the fuck out* and replaced by something that does.
IF you want to see what a "natural" economy looks like, head over to Somolia or Rwanda or Congo. Pack your pretty wife or girl friend too and stay a few weeks "free of goomint regulation" in your perfect Ayn Randian "free market" with all those supermen who have gained positions of power thanks to being free from that damn 'goobmint and tell us how it goes for you.
The economy is not a natural thing. It's a game; an agreed upon lie that can and should be replaced when it starts to fail with something that works. . Maybe that something is just a little bit of socialism where we all work some hours and get what a lot of of what we want in return. The reality that is technological progress could take us there and if it does,who the fuck cares ? When we can grow houses
http://www.popsci.com/arbona/article/2006-11/grow-your-second-home
and clothes and high quality protein meat is created in test tubes ,
http://www.helium.com/items/2162168-meat-grown-in-test-tubes-only-a-few-years-away
that is when food clothing and shelter are too cheap to meter , then what? Something new. Something we haven't thought of, that's all.
Sure tech is ruining the economy. Is it really that surprising? The economics of scarcity is the ultimate buggy whip.
Why don't you start your own business, for a change?
a) Starting a business takes a shitload of money
b) I don't have a shitload of money
c) Nobody will loan me money, because I'm already in debt up to my eyeballs
d) Every business in the universe has been done 15,000 times already anyway
"Most of those who are filthy rich were originally from lower to middle class, just like you guys."
Yeah like Bill Gates,
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
Hmm... people, who used to burn factories, were they from the police or army? Were they backed up by the full extent of the law, publicity and all-powerful corporations? I don't think that Industrial Revolution and Luddites are correct analogy to modern times and reactional forces like RIAA.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
This is why universal health care will spur more "small business" than the GOP can shake a stick at... a lot of the "working middle class" are hanging on to the jobs they have rather than starting their own venture because health care for a family is just so darn hard to get without an employers "group buying power". Make it easier for people to take a chance and not put their family's heath at risk and watch a lot of smaller ventures take a chance!
It is like we see everything is running fine, then we develop technology to give machines a little more power, check to see if everything is OK and rinse and repeat. One day will we give machines too much power and it will be too late? When are we going to cross this line when machines and technology take over us? In the effort for machines to protect us will they kill any human that resists "the greater good" like in "I Robot"? Will it be like "The Matrix" when humans serve machines? Is is possible to live in peaceful symbiosis with a machine race that is stronger, faster, and smarter than we are and still maintain control over our own lives? At what point should we stand up and say "No More!"? When we reach that point will we be able to stop? Will we be so addicted to technology that we will not be able to stop when we need to?
I disagree. We do not have the resources to feed billions more. Unless your goal is to keep billions at abject poverty and basic sustenance is all you believe is necessary for "living" then you're wrong. If all 7 billion people on this planet lived a first world lifestyle as we've defined it today, we'd have stripped this planet clean long ago.
>Our voice comes from democracy.
And democracy comes from our ancestors seizing enough wealth and power to demand a voice. If we lose the power you can bet we'll lose the voice as well - I give you exhibit one: the current state of American "democracy" in which enough people have been convinced to make largely meaningless choices, or forgo exercising their power entirely, that special interests have been able to seize and fortify their control of the government.
I think you're wrong - it's not "propping up the middle class" that's caused the problem. The class seems to arise fairly naturally if we create create some semblance of a free market - i.e. allow people to work and invest as they see fit and deny monopolistic power to any given group. The problem comes from wealthy, powerful people seeking to expand their "empires" by crafting legislation that favors their long-term agenda, and then running PR campaigns to convince the middle class that it's in their interest, or at least not objectionable enough to cost the purchased legislators the next election. I challenge you to name any legislation that actually attempts to meaningfully prop up the middle class, that a cynical eye wouldn't instead see as the creation of an opportunity exploitable by the wealthy. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but the thing is it doesn't take much of a conspiracy - just a lot of powerful people jockeying for advantage behind the scenes.
For the examples you gave - I don't see how propping up the housing market helps anyone but the bankers making loans, *everyone* else loses because of inflated prices (aside from the few who made money investing during the bubble, which was inherently a short-term phenomena). As for the "War on Drugs", again you have powerful interests jockeying for advantage - I believe it started out with opium, which is in fact an economic and sociological weapon which China has historically used to good effect, so perhaps shutting down the dens was justified. The "War" really started with marijuana though, which (along with hemp) was a major competitor to the lumber, pharmacology, and alcohol industries. Then as the private prison industry gained power and had incentive to increase incarceration rates it expanded even further. Neither was an attempt to "prop up the middle class" except in the PR campaigns - they were instances of narrow interests purchasing legislation to further their own agendas.
>The super wealthy have been and will always be wealthy.
Historically false - it's only with the birth of civilization a few thousand years ago (an eye-blink in the history of our species, even in its current biological form) that the gap between the wealthiest and poorest started to really grow. As for the future, well we can't really say much, can we? It may well be that Marx (?) was right and communism really *is* the natural economic endpoint, it seems to work very well where it's actually implemented - virtually all private households, nunneries/monasteries, and other such communal institutions. And while it would likely take some clever social innovations to get it to scale up to the national scale, as far as I know thus far nobody has ever actually attempted it, rather than just using the name to veil a return to what is basically a feudal system.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How is that trolling? But hey, thanks for proving me point re:doofus ^_^
Which means we might finally be able to work less while still having plenty to eat. That should be good, as we can simply spent more time enjoying life. :)
The only question is, how are those increased profits distributed.
hany
[...] But the reality is that some people are born maladapted to modern technological culture, and the question is, "What do you do about it, if anything?" Moralistic, "Oh my god, the nazis!" hand wringing helps nothing. Morality is subjective, changeable with time and culture. Is genetic engineering for greater intelligence moral or immoral, and says who? You?
Sounds like Lebensborn to me
.
As a practical matter, as resources shrink, particularly energy resources shirink over time, decisions like this will be made, if not in the USA, then certainly in other countries. You can deal with them as rationally as possible, or you can continue whingeing, disclaiming all responsibility and doing nothing while overpopulation continues and EVERYBODY starves.
Nazi Germany was driven by the engineering mentality. There was a technological solution for everything. But note that I didn't use the word "scientific". Because of the closed mindset Hitler and the government lost sight of the science that was intended to defeat him and then reduce Germany to even more of a cinder that it was. It was labeled as "jewish" and dismissed.
At worse we have started the ball rolling on a mass extinction event that no-one will escape. It is not simply that fortunes or national treasuries will be lost, or that some Uber class of people, so-called "smart" people, will be able to survive, for it was those leaders in technology and business who are causing the disaster, and it might wipe out the human race altogether.
As you sound paranoid, be careful that in setting yourself up as wise and above the frey that the great unwashed don't come gunning for you as the cause of their suffering.The same happened to Hitler.