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Jack Ma: In 30 Years People Will Work Four Hours a Day and Maybe Four Days a Week (cnbc.com)
There could be benefits from artificial intelligence, self-made billionaire, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma said, as people are freed to work less and travel more. From a report: "I think in the next 30 years, people only work four hours a day and maybe four days a week," Ma said. "My grandfather worked 16 hours a day in the farmland and [thought he was] very busy. We work eight hours, five days a week and think we are very busy." He added that if people today are able to visit 30 places, in three decades it will be 300 places. Still, Ma said the rich and poor -- the workers and the bosses -- will be increasingly defined by data and automation unless governments show more willingness to make "hard choices." "The first technology revolution caused World War I," he said, "The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution."
No one will have full time employment, everybody will be working multiple jobs just to rent some shitty hole in the wall and buy trash food
Meanwhile Quintillionaires will be jerking themselves off in space
FUTURE!
People said that back in the 1950s too. Then along came this thing called greed, and its enabler called power.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
In Europe we are working on it (35 workweek. 30 days holiday. Sick days are not holidays, maternity and paternity leave, ...)
In the US, if the current situation is any indication there will be one poor chap working 16 hours a day for 6 days a week for a minimum wage and all the rest will be called unemployed slackers and get nothing.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Or as it is currently known, "DMV" or "The Congress"...
This would only be true if ownership of the automatons is widely distributed. Whoever owns the robots will get more for less work. If that's all of us, then we all get this wonderful utopia. If it's a tiny fraction of us, then they get this utopia and everyone else is disposable.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Ever since the middle of the 20th Century, the reduced work week has been a touted benefit of all the automation and technology advances. It hasn't happened yet, but I think it might with this next shift.
UBI is a good idea, but it won't get implemented in the US until the alternative is the majority of the population living in poverty. Reducing the work week and maybe the societal dependency on a 5-day, 40-hour job that you physically commute to might offer a safety valve. The problem is how you keep business owners from turning this into a gig-economy nightmare where no one has stable income and can't afford to buy anything -- or doesn't feel safe buying things. Consumerism in the US worked previously because people were reasonably sure they would have a steady paycheck to cover expenses, and if they lost their job one would be available at another company. This is a fundamental shift that I don't think we're ready for yet.
Hey I'm already doing that! I mean I really only do about 16 hours of effective work a week, but get paid for the full 40. Is that different than most people really?
In 40 years....
1. People will work 50-60 hours a week if they want a job.
2. Most other people will work at call, via apps that will post x number of people needed for said task. It will be cheap work. No benefits. People will fight for it. More niche work will follow the Rover & Uber app model. Workers will be able to take jobs, earn reps. And hirers will post listing that will require a certain rep/xp level.
It will suck....
We will have transitioned to the neo-Feudalism economy.
Today's "modern" technology was supposed to do something like that too, right? Washing machines, dishwashers, et al can all do the job faster than hand washing, and databases can cross-reference information much faster than sifting through filing cabinets, and networks allow for almost instantaneous transference of data, but people are working just as much, overall, as they did 70 years ago, it's just the duties have changed. Granted, we don't have have 16 hour days in a coal mine anymore, but that's probably more due to social revolutions than technological ones.
New technologies themselves demand constant upkeep, development, deployment, maintenance, upgrade, and expansion. Who fixes the AI when it goes awry?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
There is no fucking way any employer will EVER let someone work 16 hours a day and pay them what they're currently paying them to work 40. It's not so much greed (well, it is) but the view that downtime=loafing=slackers. And slackers don't deserve more money or raises or perks, they need to shape up, get to work, or find some busy work to do. Also, it's the people who are so terrible at their job that it takes them 60 hours a week to do what I can do in 15, but they always look so busy and "persevere" through those tough times (that they caused through their own incompetence and mismanagement) that they get all the raises, bonuses and promotions.
No, it would be nice, but it's a pipe dream that automation will ever do anything except destroy jobs and the middle class.
We've been hearing about this shit since the 60s, and in the meantime the productivity of the average American worker has skyrocketed, while their pay has stagnated or been on decline since some time in the late 70s I believe. What does this trend tell you?
This was all predicted decades ago by many futurist writers, but what they didn't foresee is the greed of the 1% saying no we want it all screw everyone else. That's what all this global far right movement is all about. the rich trying to get the commoner to kill each other off, reduce burden on natural resources. It's the 1% form of population reduction.
Dual-income households only served to inflate the number hours needed to make a living family wage (to nearly double). All this new wave will do is halve the number of employable people, and the remaining will barely get by.
"The first technology revolution caused World War I," he said, "The second technology revolution caused World War II."
Can someone clarify this statement to me? Did people start fighting because they had cars, or what?
I swear to God if those clowns had to put in an eight hour day they'd be in tears from the exhaustion.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
"I think in the next 30 years, people only work four hours a day and maybe four days a week...if people today are able to visit 30 places, in three decades it will be 300 places."
Oh really? People who are 100% disabled or on welfare work less than that, so they must be visiting over 500 places, right? Talk about your bullshit delusions that we would all be world travelers if we just didn't have to work.
"...the rich and poor -- the workers and the bosses -- will be increasingly defined by data and automation unless governments show more willingness to make "hard choices." "The first technology revolution caused World War I," he said, "The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution."
Given the fact that we had a second World War for the same damn reason, it sure as shit doesn't demonstrate an ability for mankind to make smart choices the next time around.
Greed is ultimately creating this, and has never given a shit about what it creates or destroys.
Greed will ensure 99.99% of humans will be part of the Global Welfare Generation in the future, if we survive World War III.
We need to Solve for Greed.
story headline should be "Jack Ma threatens WORLD WAR III"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
World War 1 was started by an assassination that was used to impose unrealistic ultimatums on other countries, that triggered a cascade of mutual defence treaties to kick in and then everyone was fighting.
World War 2 was started because Germany wanted a chunk of land that was predominately German and no one wanted to give it to them so they took it by force, which made everyone angry, and the Japanese used this brouhaha as cover for its own imperialist agenda.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
4 hours a day to care for a vast tribe of geriatrics? 4 hours a day to flip burgers? 4 hours a day to cut hedges? 4 hours a day to service aircraft? 4 hours a day to write/debug AI?
The only way to do that would be to greatly simplify government or have many more aides ... or you can have more lobbyists help them make decisions,,,,
The last thing on my list is to "travel more". Perhaps if I were a billionaire corporate chairman or lived in a more open society (like China) but travel is now actually something to be endured. Not a pleasure onto itself.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
World War 2 was started because Germany wanted a chunk of land that was predominately German and no one wanted to give it to them so they took it by force,
I think you're being highly generous to Germany there. The war actually didn't start as WWII until they invaded Poland which they had split with Russia.
That's much more than just claiming land that was predominantly German.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Give them something to dream at night while the factories keep churning.
I'm pretty sure Poland was not predominantly German. You are thinking of the Sudetenland, which western powers were all too happy to hand over to Hitler on a silver platter (along with the rest of Czechoslovakia).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The only way to do that would be to greatly simplify government or have many more aides ... or you can have more lobbyists help them make decisions,,,,
Have you watched CSPAN? Congress spends 90% of their time on non-binding resolutions aka worthless paper pushing. Last time I tuned in, they were debating a non-binding resolution to recognize the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They aren't debating laws or the merits of the laws. They spend their time doing idiotic stuff that they shouldn't even be doing.
"The first technology revolution caused World War I," he said, "The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution
Yeah, this was sort of "when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor" statement. The first technological revolution was more coincident with the Civil War than anything else. World War II was started in every conceivable by Word War I -- they're basically one big rolling wave of political and economic turmoil.
Underground coal mining used to be the canonical shitty job. It was dirty, dangerous, and you died young from black lung disease.
Not sure why any rational human being would want to bring those days back. But I answer my own question.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Shifts constantly changing, sometimes you'll get told when you work at the last minute and you get zero benefits, and the GOP will find some way to make it legal to pay less than the minimum wage if you don't work x hours a week.
Gig economy... that's where the companies gig you the same way you would a large fish you caught, with a hook up your guts.
But we don't need unions....
Yeah, I was trying to wrap my head around what the dude meant there.
If "technology" caused World War I, it was probably the development of gunpowder. If that's the case, it took its own sweet time arriving!
And World War II? All the technology used in that war was many decades old, at least (with, again, gunpowder playing the central role).
#DeleteChrome
*snort*
Dual incomes often are not rational: the household would be better off if one partner stayed at home taking care of domestic chores and children. In different words, you probably don't need dual incomes, and they may make you worse off.
ww2 started because it was essentially more ww1. The steal-each-others-land meme was appropriate for the middle ages, but after the invention of nationalism in about 1848 it's pretty much a mistake.
Lebensraum dates back to WWI. It was a policy of the Germans during WWI to conquer more land and remove the native population to replace them with Germans.
This became more extreme, and in the 20's Hitler started promoting the idea that all the land to the East of Germany be removed of it's native people and repopulated with Germans.
In WWII, Germany's goal was not just to take over land with German speaking people. It is well published that they wanted to wipe out all Slavic people and replace their land with Germans. Once that was done they were going to go into Asia.
They had less problems with people to the West, whom they considered almost as pure. It was the "inferior" people to the east they thought they should displace.
Germany's goal absolutely was way more nefarious than just taking land that already had Germans on it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I'm sorry, if I invest my capital in automation to make my employees more productive, I should give them some of the proceeds of those productivity gains? Hah.
Maybe after I exhaust all other better ideas of what to do with the money.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The idea only works if you assume all individuals are equally capable, which isn't true. What happens is that labor-saving techniques or machines replace the least skilled workers who were doing 40 hours of work. Some of them can be transitioned to do 40 hours of some other type of work, but others will not be.
Over time what we end up with is a society where some percentage of the population is doing ~40 hours of work per week (and a small few doing even more than that because that's just how they're wired mentally) and the other percentage is doing nothing (or very close to it) because they're incapable of being more productive at some task than a machine.
This is going to be an especially big problem and right now neither of the major parties have a good solution because the political right tends to believe that anyone who can't find work is too lazy and needs to get a job (without recognizing that there are no jobs of which they are capable) and the political left tends to believe that all people are equally capable and that with sufficient training a person who's borderline mentally retarded (or a step above that) can eventually become a neurosurgeon.
Bertrand Russell has a good piece covering this very problem that he wrote almost 100 years ago called In Praise of Idleness. He lays out the argument that if people had more leisure time (as may possible by industrialization) they could devote it to scientific pursuits or towards producing culture. Unfortunately he made the mistake of assuming that everyone was like Bertrand Russell and would kill for extra time to engage in satisfying their own curiosity about the world. In reality a big chunk of those people would just sit on the couch and watch TV with their added time, because they're not mentally capable of advancing our understanding of the universe or creating anything society would deem as artistically worthwhile.
I suppose the good news is that in such a future it becomes reasonably inexpensive to provide for someone who does nothing, because industrialization will drive costs down as production increases. However, the bad news is there isn't a lot of incentive to devote resources to people who can't contribute to society either. Hopefully we take a path that reduces or limits the number of people in that position without inflicting a lot of human suffering to get there. Everything I know about humanity tells me that probably won't be the case.
Group childcare before school age is much less expensive than full time employment (except at minimum wage) and automation has reduced the workload of domestic chores to almost nothing.
The alternative scenario is that oil will have run out and become too expensive to fuel even economy eurocars
Current trends are that oil is getting cheaper, and we are finding new sources of oil faster than we are depleting old wells. Cheap plentiful oil is actually a problem, because it makes it harder to transition to carbon-free transportation.
"The trend is more communication and more attention to people."
Where do you see this?
I see the following...
- Reduced Benefits, a vast number of employees find their current jobs offer less benefits, and less vacation/personal time than what they had 20 years ago.
- Increased healthcare, sure Obamacare yada yada...but the truth is, we are now paying thousands of dollars more for healthcare. And rather than the small co-pays we had 20 years ago. We have huge deductibles plus high co-pays.
- Corporations are determined to use every avenue toward reducing worker pay and benefits and maximizing CEO and shareholder compensation.
- Corporations continuously lobby for a legislative environment in their favor. See recent case of Disney employees let go and illegally replaced by H1B visa holders. Judge found a kooky interpretation to dismiss the case. By that judge's interpretation, the law against doing so can never actually be used.
- Salary has become one sided. You're required to work extra, but you get no benefits. Salaried benefits vs hourly full time workers are really no different. The flexibility that was once supposed to exist no longer does. It purely benefits the employer.
So no, I really don't see a prospect of things getting better unless we have a major turn-a-round.
Bzzt!! Incorrect. I know a number of working families with one income that earn enough to live just fine. What inflated those hours is peoples' desire for more stuff. Those households I mentioned aren't loaded with lots of unnecessary crap. Hence their ability to live comfortably on less.
There have been major European wars in every generation going back to time immemorial. Before WWI, there was the Franco-Prussian war, before that there was the Napoleonic War, before that the Seven Years War, before that was the War of Spanish Succession, before that was Thirty Years War etc. etc.
But it was the technological advances that made the world wars uniquely devastating and changed that political landscape to specifically avoid future conflicts at that scale.
I know a number of working families with one income that earn enough to live just fine.
False equivalence. That's not what I said (that a living family wage = exactly 2 full-time wages). I never said that it can't be done on one income, just that inflation has risen to match the increased supply of income.
Lots of jobs already do 4 hours /day, 4 days a week. My boss for example (Joke). Not to mention a ton of people being screwed out of healthcare (you are part time, so I only giv eyou 24 hours a week ) But at the same time, lost of jobs already do 60 hour The question of 'normal' is silly. People have different needs.
The real question is will the legal definition of 'full time' change to 4 hours/day and 4 days/ week, thereby requiring some offer of healthcare/401k for what is now considered part time work
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
We are no longer rural societies. In rural societies, we worked on our farms side-by-side children and relatives. We ran our farms including taking care of the family and home as well. Today, because of the industrial revolution, we commute from our homes to our jobs and those things are separate. We work far more than eight hours when you take into consideration that the 16 hours of "rural work" included taking care of home and family. It's just a question of what work earns you paycheck and what doesn't. The work you don't get paid for isn't any less work.
We'll make great pets
You read too many jilted newspapers and fail to understand market dynamics.
Oil is cheap now because of an oversupply.
Discover of new oil sources isn't driving the over-supply. Instead, it's new technology (and the previously much higher value of oil) driving the exploitation of existing, known fields that were previously not economical to tap.
It's also removal of some restrictions on new wells, fracking, and other techniques.
Combine that with a newfound US refusal to depend so heavily on oil from OPEC has led to a price war in essence. OPEC upped their production to force over-supply and a reduction in prices which was intended to drive the North American producers (which typically have significantly higher production expenses per barrel) out of business. Unfortunately for them, many of those producers already invested the large capital and instead dug in their heels and worked to be more cost efficient. They generally succeeded. Now even as OPEC reduces output to try and bring the prices back up, they're on the losing side of the game after having been used to virtually limitless income in the prior years.
Even with that in mind, the move to renewables is well underway. If people would get un-stupid, we'd combine that with nuclear and call it a day for powering the grid and work to replace our ICE vehicles more rapidly with EVs.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Technically there was only one World War, from 1914 to 1945, with a large ceasefire in the interim.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Do you mean NYC? Isn't that one of the most expensive cities in the country. Where I am, it's about half that.
Societal productivity has been improving steadily for 35 years without it affecting the wealth or working-conditions of 90% of the population.
All the new productivity you can imagine will go to the 1% - the vast majority of that to the 0.1% - unless the power balance changes.
If they're doing their job, most of their work is not done in the debating chamber. How productive would you look if someone judged you solely by the time you're in large meetings?
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Group childcare is often quite expensive, and that's only one of many unpaid domestic tasks that people substitute expensive for pay goods and services for. Even for childless couples, a single income may be more rational than a dual income.
Cheap oil means Chicoms annexing Russland, sonething I'm looking forward to
Would have happened differently.
The only thing stopping more wars since is weapons are so good, war is unprofitable.
Stalin was Hitler's ally at the start of WWII. They spit countries after invading together. Russia was at least as big a mess after WWII as Germany and Russia only got worse with time.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
People said that back in the 1950s too. Then along came this thing called greed, and its enabler called power.
The problem isn't greed, it is the belief that the free market will bring about this change on its own. In the free market, companies need to maintain a competitive advantage. This isn't just a requirement to make more profit, it is a requirement to stay in business.
It will never be more efficient to hire one worker for 20 hours and one slightly less competent worker for 20 hours. It will always be more efficient to have the higher quality worker work 40 hours. So companies will always have an incentive to hire less people and work them at least 40-45 hours.
Companies are also likely to find ways to hire more people to find competitive advantages once their current R&D / operations / support processes become more efficient. The more simplistic way is to hire more salesmen. If 60% of their budget goes into providing their service they only have 40% - profit to spend on sales / marketing. If only 30% of their budget goes into their service, they have 70% - profit to spend on sales / marketing. The companies that increase their sales and marketing budgets will probably win out in the market, which again makes the post-work utopia less likely to come about.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I'll be dead of a heart attack from poor genetics in just 30 years. Slacker.
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Now: eight hour workdays, one hour commute in each leg. Total: 10 hours.
The Future (TM): four hour workdays, three hour commute in each leg due to greater distances from home and increasing traffic congestions: Total 10 hours.
So, I'd say it could even be worse.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
WWII was started by unfair reparations that forced Germany into poverty and turned their working class fully against the Jewish merchant class (you're right about the Japanese though).
As for tech that started the World Wars, it could be argued that modern weapons and transportation made the theaters of war much, much larger. Modern farming techniques and mechanization let countries field vastly larger armies. In short, tech is what put the "World" in "World War". It extended the scope and length beyond traditional wars.
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If I work less than 30 hours a week I loose my working train of thought. I become completely useless. 3 day weekend and I can work the day I come in. 4 day weekend and it takes me 3 days to get back into my projects. I suspect I might be on the extreme end but most non-repetitive jobs have a tipping point where if you take to long away from them you have a significant amount of time required to get back into the routine.
The hard choice will be establishing that producers are no more important than consumers. The relationship is becoming more and more symbiotic in the light of growing automation. The ability to turn idea into product, faster and cheaper will (and should) eliminate the million-dollar gimmick. The day will come when people innovate for innovation (or even just popularity) sake and not to get rich.
Politics, and the philosophies on which the politics were based, caused the wars. The wars ended because one side lost. Technological advances sped the course of the wars by making 30-year standoffs unlikely.
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One problem was that Germans got super raped by Russians who were many times superior. You should be giving thanks to A. Hitler that it was his ass that took a hit, otherwise you would've been speaking Russian, and praying to Marx and Engels by now.
The reason this sounds stupid is because it's forgetting basic laws of supply and demand, it has nothing to do with employees being "mean". As an employee I have a supply of 168hrs/week. Various activities compete for that time, such that I'm willing to provide up to 40 to someone in exchange for some money. My 40 hours are in the same market as tons of other people that are capable of doing my job. If there are two of us competing for the same job and I'm willing to provide only 16, but someone else is willing to work 40, they're likely to get the job, as it's easier to train one person than two (and on top of that government regulations make it expensive to have more people). Though not impossible, I find it hard to believe that we'll get to a point where I'm willing to work 16/week but someone else won't provide a better offer, it would take a lot of changes, and it would take a shift in either regulation or market forces. What's in it for my employee? Only if my 16 hrs are worth as much as my competitor's 40 would it make sense, or if those 16 hrs were significantly cheaper than the competition's 40. For now, 40 is a number that the market (and regulations, of course) have roughly settled on.
You claim that, "It will never be more efficient to hire one worker for 20 hours and one slightly less competent worker for 20 hours. It will always be more efficient to have the higher quality worker work 40 hours. So companies will always have an incentive to hire less people and work them at least 40-45 hours."
Do you have some sort of study to link to that attempts to prove this statement?
I'm not necessarily finding a reason I'd agree .... Presumably, you attempted to hire 2 people for a job with a very similar level of proficiency. No two people are going to be identical, but typically, you encounter all sorts of different challenges as you do your job, day to day. Unless you're on an assembly line, robotically doing a repetitive task -- you're going to generally find there are certain things that come up that you're REALLY good at, and other things you're not so good at.
All in all, I suspect it usually averages out where one person may be "slightly less competent" than the other at the primary tasks at-hand, but the other may have useful skills that allow them to do a better job with the outlying tasks that pop up.
And besides, nobody working a 40 hour week is truly focused on their work the entire 40 hours. People tend to zone out or slack off, especially after they've worked at the same place for a while and know what they can and can't get away with. I'd say you could very likely get more productivity from two people, each working 20 hours weeks, since they'd come in more motivated to get things done during the limited time they're going to spend at the place each week.
World War 2 was started because Germany wanted a chunk of land that was predominately German and no one wanted to give it to them so they took it by force,
I think you're being highly generous to Germany there. The war actually didn't start as WWII until they invaded Poland which they had split with Russia.
Uncommonly known fact, the Germans didn't actually start WWII, the UK and France did. The declaration of war with Nazi Germany was issued by the Chamberlain government. The Nazis had gambled that the western allies would not go to war over Poland but didn't know that the allies made a pact to unanimously declare war if any of them were invaded (in 1937, if memory serves).
The Nazis never wanted war with western Europe. Hitlers original plan was to seek Lebensraum in eastern Europe and Russia.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If they're doing their job, most of their work is not done in the debating chamber. How productive would you look if someone judged you solely by the time you're in large meetings?
I think it's very valid to judge someone on the contents of the meeting. If I spent all day in meetings and we discussed stuff that wasn't relevant to the business like the cardinal's game last week or argue over which employee gets employee of the week then yes, you should be able to judge me for it. Non-binding resolutions are not laws, they are just filler.
The problem with that idea is that the Franco-Prussian war set the stage for WWI in every meaningful sense. France was going to liberate Alsace-Lorraine come hell or high water, and the Germans had that whole lebensraum thing going on -- both sides were spoiling for a fight. I mean, it's not wrong to view things your way, I just don't think that it's particularly useful to do so.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
World War 1 was started by an assassination that was used to impose unrealistic ultimatums on other countries, that triggered a cascade of mutual defence treaties to kick in and then everyone was fighting.
World War 2 was started because Germany wanted a chunk of land that was predominately German and no one wanted to give it to them so they took it by force, which made everyone angry, and the Japanese used this brouhaha as cover for its own imperialist agenda.
WWI was the result of an arms race by waning imperial powers. Most notably a naval arms race, but machine guns and longer range artillery were also making an appearance prior to the outbreak of war. The diplomatic situation was a mess of defensive pacts as imperial powers were anxious to test their new weapons. The assassination or Archduke Ferdinand was just the excuse to go to war. The first world war was a result of the industrial revolution's effect on weapons technology.
The second world war also saw an arms buildup prior, but not due to a technological revolution which was more a result of the war. The underlying cause was German aggression, but also an allied pact to declare war if any of the pact members were invaded (and Poland was a member of that pact).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Predicted the phenomenon that is 'stigginit' or an entire class of people who would consistently vote against their own best interests. In particular he didn't forsee how easy it is for the owner class to put the working class at each other's throats. The concept of a "Welfare Queen" didn't really exist and the southern strategy was a few decades away.
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Right. It's words that really matter, not marching boots.
You wouldn't happen to be a lawyer, would you?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What I said to the sib AC applies to you as well.
Understand 'The Mythical Man Month'...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Go on, someone post a link to that story Manna in lieu of any actual informed discussion.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Rubbish. They had a non-aggression pact, which is basically a truce in a war that hasn't started yet. They were ideologically poles apart (excuse pun) and neither trusted the other further than he could throw him.
Well, one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's not as simple as you're making it out to be though. It's not as though we suddenly had a top 1% of earners in America who became exponentially more greedy than any CEOs were in history, suddenly declaring "Screw everyone else! I want it ALL myself!"
Futurist writers wouldn't have predicted such a thing because it made no sense, and still doesn't.
What's really changed is the ability to get your government to collude with your attempt to build an empire. Say you have a big pharmaceutical firm? You get to buy freshly invented drugs from universities who developed them using student labor. Then turn around and mass market them with whatever arbitrarily high price tag you feel like putting on them. Federal government grants you patent protection on those drugs for years, so anyone wanting them has to pay your asking price to obtain then. Competing drug manufactured for much less money in another country? Too bad.... illegal to import it and prescribe it here! But *sure*, you're entitled to getting that asking price because hey, it's a "free market"!
Or take a look at our broadband Internet providers.... The most successful and profitable are companies like Comcast, who categorically get ranked among the most hated companies with the worst customer service. In anything resembling a true free market economy, such things guarantee a downfall of a company in short order. In today's America? Nah ... they're declared regulated monopolies, offering something so special and infrastructure intensive, they need government protection.
Or just talk continuously? Nice to be granted a govt backed monopoly.
They win the business lottery and we act like they have psychic powers.
Go with PROVEN sources who use in-depth reasoning like Limits to growth which gives more insight into actual problems coming and has been amazingly correct... as well as open about the methods which can be updated and refined.
History shows us that we do not have enough jobs for people; meaningful work has long gone-- we socially engineered a consumer econ so we can have meaningless jobs solely for propping up the economy post WW2. That hasn't lasted long because the consuming population has already gone beyond the physical limits of Earth - so we can not extend that population to the 2/7 people in deep poverty today without multiple planets. When robot tech greatly accelerates the lost jobs we should notice...
Employer based healthcare requires full-time employment and until Obamacare helped you were tied ("motivated") into working full time at an employer. Especially a problem for older / less healthy looking job seekers (HR will not tell you that is why you were rejected... but it is.) Kids aren't the problem, it's the family health benefits.
So, we work part time as the new "full time" but somehow we get health insurance? Do we get paid as much for less work time?? Remember the 50-60s and how they predicted we would work LESS hours? we work more; furthermore, we have email etc invading our time off... robbing us of more of our lives. Americans don't seem to know how to live anymore-- work, consume, zone-out on TV. Little legit social activities and zero community... do you know your neighbor's names? (only next door is pathetic.) Only church goers have a little bit 1 day per week and not a great deal goes on most of those places either. It all helps feed into consumer addiction filling the voids created.
I can predict a huge amount of turmoil -- and I will be right because what we've seen already will continue into more chaos and insecurity. We can't go into Star Trek life styles without a lot of bad times first. People have trouble adjusting to major cultural and social changes -- the powerful have too much power at this turning point and they ALWAYS resist everything that can undermine their security! You think the wealthy elite will allow more equity as most tech progresses IN THEIR favor?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's the 1950s in China huh.
No, 80% of us will be unemployed and 20% of us will work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Can someone tell me what the "The second technology revolution" was that started WWII? That doesn't seem to be a thing.
No, we are NOT Finding new sources, we're exploiting more expensive "wasted" oil via fracking and steam pressure, requiring a higher minimum income per barrel to yield a profit.
All out of mod points
Facts seem to make Libertarians curl up like spiders on a hot stove
You'd think 34 years of tax rates cut in HALF while job income has net DECLINED would have silenced that "all hail the billionaires" chanting but it hasn't.
Group childcare for our 2 year old daughter costs us less than a third of my net after-tax salary, and I'm the lower income earner in our house. The only domestic chore we pay someone to do is lawn maintenance, and that's dirt cheap, and unrelated to whether we are employed or not, I used to do it myself, I just don't want to.
So if I were to quit my job to be a stay at home parent, our family net earnings after the savings in child care, would still be a significant decrease.
Now I'm not saying we couldn't afford to be a single income family, we could survive on my wife's salary alone, however our standard of living would be dramatically worse than it is now.
Baltic states: 4, thought the commies got all of 3 of them, it was all part of the same offensive. 'Non-aggression pacts' my ass, they were allies.
Nazis and commies were right next to each other ideologically, It was post WWII russian propaganda that made the Nazis 'right wing', to deflect from the fact they started the war as allies.
Hitler and Stalin were fighting for the same ideological ground. Authoritarian socialism.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Japan's imperialist agenda was in full swing even before the Anschluss, let alone the the invasion of Poland. Their invasion of China in 1937 was the real beginning of the war.
Erh... WW2 was started because the Allied noticed that giving Hitler a finger meant that he wanted the whole arm and they finally put the foot down when he came for Poland after taking Alsace, Austria, the Sudetenland, the rest of the Czech Republic, Slovakia... they finally caught on that he just wanted more and more and if he got what he demanded, he just turned around and demanded more.
If it sounds familiar... well, it seems history repeats itself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only thing stopping more wars since is weapons are so good, war is unprofitable.
Not following you here, unless you are only talking about war at the scale of WWI and WWII. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (Russian and American incursions), Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, would all beg to differ. Those are just some of the bigger actions, and don't even touch on Africa or Central and South America. The economy of war is the deliberate building of things to destroy, and someone is making a shit ton of profit on it.
file:
not everything scales the same way as software development; in fact, software development is a huge outlier in terms of industries, so extrapolating from one book about it is kind of fucking stupid. also it is not very clear how much of a future there really is in software development (as we currently know it).
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Fully expecting to be working 4 days a week well into my seventies so yeah, this 30 year prediction sounds spot on!
The amount of communication required will change, but it will still scale on the order of N^2.
The jobs that don't require communication are going to be the first to be automated.
I see you are smoking the AI crack. Go easy.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The fact that all you can point to is cold war pawn fights proves my point. Without nukes, we'd have had to kick Stalins ass (in his lifetime).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's why the Edmonton Oilers played Connor McDavid for almost 60 minutes per-game over the last season, or more if the game went into OT.
Really, you've got six guys dressed to actually play, four more guys to penalty kill (a specialized skill), and another dozen guys dressed to briefly jump over the boards and send a physical message, as the situation warrants—which seems to be the case, almost invariably, three shifts out of four.
Weird.
That's a lot more "messaging" than the self-evident efficiency curve would seem to suggest.
Briefly, your raw curve was almost so convincing.
Facts are deadly to any form of ideological purity. The world is a complex place and no one-size-fits-all solution exists.
The stock answer to why we have to keep feeding tax cuts to the 1% is "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", despite the obvious fact that very few people even ever become millionaires - much less billionaires. Or the stats that say that your best chances of being rich are by having rich parents.
But I suspect a lot of it has to do with a steady propaganda campaign that it's the Eevil Libruls who raise taxes and all they want to do is steal your hard-earned money and give it to illegal immigrants and lazy undeserving poor people. We all know, after all, that you're only poor if you're lazy and waste your money on drugs and avocado toast.. And besides, Libruls hate Freedom and would give our proud country to the Russians in a heartbeat if they weren't kept in check.
I used to be in the 30% tax bracket and lived in financial security. Nowadays I pay 8% and almost every dime goes into savings for the next time I and my co-workers get laid off. That particular lifestyle gets old. Not to mention interferes with my ability to overcome my millionaire embarrassment.
No. Everyone will keep on having to work just as much as before, except the portion of people in pointless occupations will increase. Yoga instructors, market managers, employee engagement consultants, telephone sanitizers....
World War II was caused by World War I.
I suspect this is just another example of someone who knows how to do one thing thinking his views on everything are correct.
"I'm pretty sure Poland was not predominantly German."
Danzig was majority German. Soldau was majority German. Upper Silesia was 40% German, and the plebicite of 1921 was 59.4% in favor of remaining in Germany. Pozna was 38% German until the Greater Poland Uprising*. Pomerelia had a significant German population until the Greater Poland Uprising*, but I can't find specific figures.
*Of course, the Greater Poland Uprising was a response to the previous partition of Poland and the subsequent Germanization in many areas. History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme.
than access to food, shelter and healthcare. That's not an alternative fact, it's a real one. Perception is not reality. We don't live in a world of magic, we live in one comprised of physics. There really are just some things that are true. Not because we agree they are, but because they just plain are.
The trouble is convincing those poor white southerners that reality is objective, not subjective. I'm not sure you can.
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Ever heard of renewable energy?
You're American and don't belive in such? AMEN!
In 30 years - we'll be living mad max style in the wastelands.
I didn't feel like giving a good history lesson just to knock the author's point that technology started these wars.
My summation is good enough for that purpose ;)
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Lived in Japan for a large chunk of my life, the whole "Japanese work themselves to death" thing is a fabrication. Some people are workaholics, same as the U.S. Most people work normal hours, 9-5, and get about 3 weeks worth of company/national holidays in addition to PTO. At the company I worked, if you logged too many hours in the office they'd send you to a therapist and put you on paid leave. Almost everyone was happy, same as you'd expect anywhere else. That meme is total bullshit so stop repeating it please.
Just a moment.... "Technology revolution" caused WW I and WW II?
Hitler was as anti-socialist as it gets. This is why he was funded by all the big business in first place. Nazis have been right wing the whole time since beginning, the socialist part of NSDAP was literally killed off in 1934. Hitler and Stalin were no allies, Stalin knew that the war is coming and needed time to prepare for it because the USSR was not ready, hence the pact. As the history shows the time Stalin got wasn't enough.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Show me the divisive message because last I heard, equal rights for all was highly supported, personal choice in abortion had 70% approval, and murder by testalying blue suited thugs had ZERO approval!
If there's no need for everybody to communicate with everyone else, the communications costs are likely to scale as log N. There's lots of that kind of job that isn't going to be automated any time soon.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
From what I've figured out, the naval race didn't play much of a part in starting WWI, although it's played up in most of the English-language histories. However, the main alliances were set before it became significant, and since Germany was going to invade Belgium it would force the Brits' hand. The actual events that caused the war were governed by Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Russia (with strong encouragement from France), and Germany, with Britain making some vague gestures in favor of peace. It may have contributed to French belligerence somewhat, since the race is one thing that made Britain turn from pro-German to pro-French, but no more than that.
It had a significant effect in the outcome of the war, in that the German surface navy was a very expensive luxury, and aside from wandering cruisers early in the war and the actions of German warships in the Black Sea accomplished pretty much nothing. If it had been half the size, or somewhat smaller, it would have been more than enough to dominate the Russian Baltic Fleet, and it would have freed up resources to be used somewhere more useful. The German submarines were quite effective, but they weren't part of the naval race, and played little or no part in prewar Anglo-German relations.
The Allied pact to declare war in WWII was a response to German aggression. One big mistake was in not seriously trying for an alliance with the Soviet Union. Stalin's first choice was an alliance with Britain and France (Britain in particular showed no interest), and his second choice was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Allies were going to have to stop German aggression some time or other, once the takeover of all of Czechoslovakia showed that Germany would not stop with territorial expansion. Had Hitler stopped with the Sudetenland, as he promised, the West was willing to stay peaceful.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Stalin wanted safety for the Soviet Union, ostensibly to finish the Communist revolution. He was afraid of Germany. Initially, he tried negotiating a mutual assistance treaty with Britain and France, in an effort to avoid fighting Germany without strong help, but Britain and France pretty much blew him off. He made a pact with Germany to try to hold off the inevitable clash while creeping up to war. He took what he could as buffer territory. Had he not annexed eastern Poland and the Baltic States, the initial German attack would have been far more devastating. Neither Hitler nor Stalin intended this as any sort of permanent alliance. The Soviets got time to rearm, and Germany got time to attack the West. It was purely pragmatic.
Any knowledge of socialism, combined with any knowledge of what Hitler actually did, would show that Hitler was no socialist. The National Socialist German Workers' Party had a Socialist wing until the mid-thirties, when it was basically murdered. The Nazis stuck firmly to capitalist principles throughout their stay in power. They cut off the cooperation with the Soviets that von Seeckt had started in the 1920s, in which the Soviet Union helped the German Army train and develop new tactics with weapons forbidden by the Versailles treaty, and got to see what the Germans were doing. They pushed the Anti-Comintern Pact.
That there was anything socialist or left-wing about the Nazi party of WWII seems to be modern propaganda from people who want to claim the right wing is morally better than the left, and who count on their listeners having a very tenuous grasp on history.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Even if petroleum gets back into the $100 range, it won't be the end of hydrocarbon fuel. "Artificial petroleum" made by thermal depolymerization of turkey guts (or whatever) gets economically viable around that price (well, a bit more, with subsidies and tax breaks removed).
The stuff that used to be made at the plant in Carthage, MO, near the turkey processing plant, was comparable to high-grade crude. You couldn't power a diesel engine with it, quite, but it didn't need much refining.
Recycling plastic bottles and sawdust and newspapers and household garbage at the local TDP plant looks better and better, the higher petroleum prices go.
If they ever do up much again.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Great, except you mentioned the N word. Nuclear. Whacko environmentalists still think that's a bad thing. Greenpeace is driving most of it. Even though one of the founders wrote an op piece in the WashPo back in 2006 -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Then the fukishima plant.. which was a basic engineering failure by the Japanese. They should have hired a US firm to build it, they wouldn't have put it in an earthquake zone, that gets Tsunamis, and put the generators in the basement. Thought the Japanese were supposed to be smart. Now they have places like Germany, others trying to eliminate them.
Wouldn't it make more sense to devote myself to removing an asshole like you from the gene pool?