Slashdot Mirror
Can Marc Andreessen Stop Technology From Eating Our Jobs? (hackernoon.com)
Technology writer Tom Chanter explores the life story of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to ask whether software will not only eat the world, but also the jobs of what one historian predicts will be a "massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value." Can Marc Andreessen prevent a so-called "useless class" who "will not merely be unemployed -- it will be unemployable"?
Andreessen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin (population: 1,500), and taught himself the BASIC programming language at age 8. He co-developed the original Mosaic web browser before he'd graduated from college, went on to co-found Netscape, and by age 23 was worth $53 million. He then transformed into a "super angel" investor in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Lyft, Facebook, Skype, and GitHub. "Having been an innovator in the tech start-up game, Andreessen is now an innovator in the tech venture capital game," writes Chanter. "He is a jedi that has become the master." In 2011, Marc Andreessen published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, Why Software Is Eating The World. He wrote, "Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic...." 7 years later, it's clear Andreessen was correct. Lyft has destroyed taxi jobs. Airbnb has destroyed hotel jobs. Amazon destroyed independent bookstores. How does Andreessen feel about that? "Screw the independent bookstores," he said in his New Yorker profile. "There weren't any near where I grew up. There were only ones in college towns. The rest of us could go pound sand."
But the 4,900-word article also notes Andreessen's pledge to give half his income to charitable causes -- and his observation in a 2015 interview that outside of the United States, global income inequality is falling, not rising. "He has seen technology transform his own life, and has seen how technology has bridged the global wealth gap. Why shouldn't he be optimistic about the future of America's working class?"
And Andreessen's ultimate answer to the jobs destroyed by technology may be Udacity. The article cites Andreessen's investment in the company in 2012, and points to the online education platform's hopeful mission statement. "Virtually anyone on the planet with an internet connection and a commitment to self-empowerment through learning can come to Udacity, master a suite of job-ready skills, and pursue rewarding employment."
As a boy in Wisconsin he was starved for information. He has created an education institution accessible from Wisconsin to Africa. As a boy in Wisconsin he was starved for connection. He has married an innovative philanthropist and author, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen. They have a son named John. Andreessen is optimistic for both the working class and the future tech elite.
In his New Yorker profile he says of his son, "He'll come of age in a world where ten or a hundred times more people will be able to contribute in science and medicine and the arts, a more peaceful and prosperous world."
He added, tongue in cheek, "I'm going to teach him how to take over that world!"
Andreessen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin (population: 1,500), and taught himself the BASIC programming language at age 8. He co-developed the original Mosaic web browser before he'd graduated from college, went on to co-found Netscape, and by age 23 was worth $53 million. He then transformed into a "super angel" investor in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Lyft, Facebook, Skype, and GitHub. "Having been an innovator in the tech start-up game, Andreessen is now an innovator in the tech venture capital game," writes Chanter. "He is a jedi that has become the master." In 2011, Marc Andreessen published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, Why Software Is Eating The World. He wrote, "Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic...." 7 years later, it's clear Andreessen was correct. Lyft has destroyed taxi jobs. Airbnb has destroyed hotel jobs. Amazon destroyed independent bookstores. How does Andreessen feel about that? "Screw the independent bookstores," he said in his New Yorker profile. "There weren't any near where I grew up. There were only ones in college towns. The rest of us could go pound sand."
But the 4,900-word article also notes Andreessen's pledge to give half his income to charitable causes -- and his observation in a 2015 interview that outside of the United States, global income inequality is falling, not rising. "He has seen technology transform his own life, and has seen how technology has bridged the global wealth gap. Why shouldn't he be optimistic about the future of America's working class?"
And Andreessen's ultimate answer to the jobs destroyed by technology may be Udacity. The article cites Andreessen's investment in the company in 2012, and points to the online education platform's hopeful mission statement. "Virtually anyone on the planet with an internet connection and a commitment to self-empowerment through learning can come to Udacity, master a suite of job-ready skills, and pursue rewarding employment."
As a boy in Wisconsin he was starved for information. He has created an education institution accessible from Wisconsin to Africa. As a boy in Wisconsin he was starved for connection. He has married an innovative philanthropist and author, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen. They have a son named John. Andreessen is optimistic for both the working class and the future tech elite.
In his New Yorker profile he says of his son, "He'll come of age in a world where ten or a hundred times more people will be able to contribute in science and medicine and the arts, a more peaceful and prosperous world."
He added, tongue in cheek, "I'm going to teach him how to take over that world!"
Yet another tech-bro full of hotair and himself.
Somebody built a replica of the house from Gone with the Wind in antarctica.
c6gunner says it's a Polar Tara.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Back in 80’s the dystopian society of Mega-City 1 could not offer jobs to only 13 percent of poplulation. The rest just had to find a hobby to keep them occupied during their useless life.
NO.
People here say "what happens when the elite no longer need the little people" but they're thinking small.
What happens when the machines no longer need the elite people?
We're going to end up the live-action equivalent of Youtube cat videos, existing for the enjoyment of robots.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Watch out for dirty telephones...
Okay, Mr. Andresssen, put your money where your mouth has been. Open a small independent bookstore in Backwoods, Wisconsin (pop. 1500). Let's see you make payroll with the proceeds. Don't be shy now, get out there and show us how its done. Hint, get your neighbors to read.
We only have so many resources to go around. We don't have enough, and shouldn't worry about feeding and caring for the unemployed or unemployable.
I present a modest proposal as a solution.
This would allow them to have some use.
You cannot avoid the truth of the normal curve of human intelligence. We are walking up the ladder of job complexity due to technology, leaving behind more and more people incapable of educating themselves up for the jobs of the future. There will indeed be a massive and growing class of the unemployed and the unemployable as programmed machines take over the lower level jobs, many of which are the entry level jobs that start one off in work life. And these people will be left out of the benefits of advancing technology due to the lack of the money necessary to avail themselves of it. A huge percentage of the human population is only suited to lower level manual labor.
E Proelio Veritas.
Technology will continue to "eat" jobs and that's a good thing. What's bad is that people who are replaced are thrown out in the street with hardly any safety nets. Retraining is a nice fairy tale but that relies on their being jobs for the people who are retrained and them being able to be retrained in the first place.
In the old days, the unions softened the blow. For example, when diesel trains came to be, the RR union demanded that the RR companies keep the firemen employed - the same for brakemen when the automatic brakes were invented. Yes, it was a waste from a business and economic point of view but from a social point of view, it prevented some angry mobs; like the Luddites. We think of the Luddites in a negative way here in the USA (thanks to US Chamber of Commerce propaganda from the 1930s) but that is what happens when people are booted from their lively hoods with no options.
Automation is great as long as the economic benefits are felt by everyone and not just a select few at the top.
Knowing even with a college education, they may never get a job.
Why would anyone *want* that grueling horrible forced experience that we call "jobs"??
Everybody dreams of relaxing and weekends etc instead!
What we want, is money! Or, wealth to be more exact!
But if only there was a way to achieve that, without having to work...!
No, not employees, Mr. Burns!
Automation!
The problem is, that some leeches managed to take most of the income from our work, without adding value or even really working themselves, and now use that money to replace us.
Which is incredibly stupid, because who's gonna buy those products then? Peope with no money? Or the old debt scheme?
Nobody I ever asked, had a problem with *him* owning said machines, making them do his work, and still getting paid just like before. While he can choose to relax, or so something of actual worth to him, humanity or this planet.
But that option is conveniently left out of the "discussion" that the human livestock is fed hot every day.
What part of "screw the independent bookstores" is unclear?
He put at least $25 million into Udacity - that's where his mouth is.
Exactly, and that is what he is plugging, not Coursera or Xed or the FREE courses on Khan academy.
People want wealth!
And somehow the option of having the machines create that wealth for *us* instead of our livestock handlers is conveniently omitted
Also: "Useless lives"... Seriously? Only in America could people think that way. Because enough free time to start getting bored and start really thinking is unheard of, ... and even if, the education of those is lacking too.
And only there is value defined as how much " the industry" can leech on you.
In reality, given enough free time, people start doing useful things by themselves!
Boredom is painful. Curiosity is natural. Needs drive you. Success feels amazing! Duh.
Everything I have seen, suggests that "management" and "board" are words for rather simple robots without any human-like characteristics. Might as well be Daleks. Very very booring Daleks!
Oh, and ... just for fun, ... go try and contact a human being at Google. ... ;)
Teaching everyone to code is not going to work, as basic hierarchy of competence still applies. There is still finite amount of coding that has to be done, and there still automation of coding tasks that will take place - so with this approach we will be trading unemployed factory workers for unemployed coders.
The future is bleak unless we can re-invent how society works. There isn't a job for most people. Maybe we can re-invent society, but it appears to me that future for masses will be joblessness.
Who gets to determine the "value" of someone? Everyone has value to someone else. Value is subjective and relative.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I suspect that the old practice of wealthy families employing full-time household servants will make a significant comeback over the next couple of decades, when legions of low-skill but able-bodied people find themselves irresistibly replaced by software and robotics. Sure, there'll be crying and grumbling over having to take jobs that many folks today consider to be beneath them, but personal servants for the rich were the norm for much of human history after the rise of agriculture and cities. Social expectations shifted during the Industrial Revolution and will shift again with the Robotics Revolution.
It also seems likely that that skillfully created handmade items such as fine furniture will see wider adoption among the upper crust as their wealth relentlessly increases, leading to steady employment for craftsmen in hundreds of thousands of small boutique shops. This is a historical norm as well although the scale will be larger. The rapidly advancing state of the art in low-cost but capable computer-controlled home milling machines and 3D printers obviously will help fuel this trend. In a side note, I suppose that using automated tools kind of blurs the definition of "handmade," but c'est la vie.
Likewise, personal services should see a continuing rise in popularity -- in-home pedicures, manicures, massages, and haircuts as well as expert home cooking by visiting chefs and so forth. In particular, cooking well is a wildly popular skill, and most otherwise low-skilled folks undoubtedly could pick up the knack if motivated. Really, this all happening already, but the pace should pick up quite a bit once robot-driven mass unemployment becomes a thing. Technology leads to fun possibilities -- for example, it's easy to visualize a lumbering beast of a food truck that hosts expert chefs who prepare custom orders for delivery within a limited service area around the truck by small, speedy delivery robots. Needless to say, said food truck bristles with touch screens that display a steady stream of orders from cellphone apps that also provide continuously updated GPS coordinates for the delivery robots. "Hey, Bob -- looks like your Maine lobster with lemon butter is here. I see the food truck bot coming from that corner."
The basic idea is that wealth always, always seeks avenues for spending. Few people indeed gather paper riches merely for the sake of giggling behind closed curtains over their bank balances. Admittedly, a lopsided distribution of wealth will kind of suck for those at the bottom, but outside of the true unfortunates who live on the streets, the bottom class will still be richer than kings were a thousand years ago. Who among us in the developed world doesn't have a cellphone, a color television, and access to enough cheap food to grow mightily into a fat boy or "woman of considerable girth"? Moreover, depending on political winds, a future United States might indeed see a universal basic income that very effectively persuades the have-littles from ever seriously contemplating revolution. I don't imagine the upper-crust types will squawk too much about the huge cost of such social bribery as long as they can keep tootling around in their auto-piloted Rolls-Royces and sipping their top-shelf boutique wines with Beluga caviar while smiling servants buff their toenails. That's the beauty of the increasingly automated production of wealth -- buying off the peasants becomes more and more affordable for the have-alls, and unlike ancient Rome, there aren't any Visigoths hammering on the gates.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
The fact that this whole story culminates in the punchline, "The answer is Udacity!" is kind of a sick joke. Udacity, from what I've seen of it, is comically awful. Sebastian Thrun seems to be mostly a carnival shyster from what I can tell. Their original premise was to offer a full college education (and "disrupt", run existing colleges out of existence), and they've long since retreated from that goal. Their attempt at solving the remedial-math problem was an epic disaster (link). I haven't really heard anyone hype Udacity in a few years now.
Review of Thrun's Udacity statistics course, from a statistics professor (me), on my blog:http://www.madmath.com/2012/09/udacity-statistics-101.html
Previously featured on Slashdot: https://news.slashdot.org/story/12/09/10/129231/the-problems-with-online-math-classes
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
If you look back, the first fatcats all were royals or former royals who took the money of their family, their old boys club and the banks, to buy factories and hire people.
I don't know if that left them in debt or not. But I guess that's where shareholding comes from too.
I guess the crime that enables it all, is that it is legal to take sums of money not related to the amount of work you give. Aka "stealing". Or "profit".
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as we have a universal basic income.
Creating busy work just for work's sake makes stuff more expensive for everyone. For instance, it seems everyone in the younger generation in Germany want to become a bureacrat, not because it's their dream, but for job stability and protection. Does that sound like a productive future as a society for anyone?
There is no magic recipes and no powerful people that can do _anything_ effective here. The jobs are going away because machines are getting cheaper at it than humans and the results are better. There is no way to turn back that wheel without a collapse of civilization. (To be fair, the human race is hard at work to arrange for that...) These jobs go away because even an average capable person is astonishingly incompetent and mostly unable to learn. All the things you see in progress and actual productivity come from a tiny faction of the human race, maybe 20% or so. (This is mostly the number of STEM graduates. Some manual laborers will continue to be needed as well, usually at the high end, like welders, and the low end, like cleaners.) The rest are just administrators, distributors, sellers, self-promoters, etc. The thing is that the search for ever larger profits does expose that. And hence the jobs vanish.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They can be the useful idiots feeding off the government teet who vote the way pop culture stars and charismatic, corrupt politicians tell them to vote.
lower the full time mark start at 32 hours also healthcare for all.
Adapt to it: I've said this before - you're "geeks", right? You're MORE than prepared to do so in robotics @ least - PC/Server w/ servo motors (that'd odds are, you'd replace as needed, not try to "repair" them) pretty much.
* I don't know IF all this "tech/robotics" stuff is for the good but most of ALL of you here can ADAPT as repair techs, coders, etc. - et al for that much of it.
(It's a "YES/NO" w/ many facets to it)
APK
P.S.=> I'm wary of such changes!
1st, economically speaking as we currently structure it: It reduces taxpayers & reduces men to potatos, perhaps not in ALL cases, but I'd wager it would in most - like WELFARE does!
(Since, imo, a man needs some 'strife' OR responsiblities that weigh on him (belongings/family) unfortunately to bring out the BEST in us - ala "when things are @ their worst, be your best" - necessity is the mother of invention)
2nd/On another front (war): It can be MISUSED (e.g. war robots - they will NOT disobey orders, have no mercy &/or reasoning shooting a CHILD as a kid's just another infra-red targetted object, nothing more & THAT takes away human judiciousness decision making).
I.E./E.G. - Picture a BOSTON ROBOTICS "MULE" w/ Vulkan cannons attached, you get my point... apk
Should I be more concerned about robots taking our jobs or immigrants?
Pound sand because where he grew up bookstores didnt operate? Talk about an ignorant, selfish fuck.
Why do most humans insist on following other humans just because of past progress?
There is zero anything guaranteeing you anything -- stop looking to others to make your choices.
Wake the fuck up.
Eating dicks
In the past, we've told the out-of-work buggy whip maker to go get an education, and learn a new trade to avoid becoming a member of the "useless class".
AI is targeting the educated mind, so Andreessen's recommendation is to go get an education??
Andreessen is an ignorant idiot. He also fails to grasp the fact that we already have a "unemployable" class in society (unless you feel infants and the retired elderly somehow aren't). The problem is NOT having an unemployable class. The problem is finding proper ways to support that inevitability, while also not succumbing to the desires of the employable who are simply fucking lazy.
Eventually, humans will be a useless class when it comes to productivity. All of them. Learn to accept that fact, and build the new society appropriately instead of regurgitating the same old "education" line that won't work going forward.
"Our destination is the TALOS stargroup. Our timewarp factor 7" from the StarTrek TOS pilot "The Cage" when VINA says:
"They found, it's a TRAP! Like a narcotic - because when DREAMS become more important than reality, you give up travel/building/creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors... you just sit, living/reliving others lives left behind, in the 'thought records'"
* Makes my point for me in part IF you think about it!
APK
P.S.=> Additionally - what I DO KNOW, is that the human body (& MIND) is BUILT TO DO WORK & it gets stronger when it does on ALL fronts noted - take that away? ATROPHE - See above: Illustrates it better than I can... apk
Hang on a minute. Rewind. Look at the basic premise here, and realize how there is a poisonous precept in place.
If technology can eat all our jobs, than this means that we should be free. It should be like Star Trek, where we don't have to worry about people cleaning our toilets or doing our laundry, and subsequently don't need to worry about how to the rent or the car.
If technology can eliminate most workers, then we need to ensure that everyone gets to share that prosperity, and not that those who are making it happen get to rule over the rest of us.
It was well-documented and envisioned in Star Trek - money is no longer a thing, and people spend time leveling themselves up.
Unprofitable companies held up by central banking largess is what the real issue here is. Cab drivers aren't going away because of technology, they're going away because one or more companies can undercut the true value of labor in an attempt to gain a monopoly or duopoly at a scale unthinkable just a decade ago. Not all unicorns or tech companies fall into this category, but enough do that it's distorting the entire market and causing chaos.
Those dollars are also flowing into cloud services and advertising. When the money stops flowing, it's going to cause a cascading crash or downturn.
Because like light speed, it already reached the cosmic limit.
We've all had more than enough of him.
No skill in the world is worth so much, that a human can make billions in his lifetime!
That money is simply *stolen*!
They have a word for the part of the income that is stolen: *Profit*.
I'm not gonna work N hours for N Dollars that the payer never worked for himself!
Yes. Retarded. Because "crime" can only ever be, what is written into laws. Even if they were written by criminals to legitimize their crimes.
Never can anyone call harm crime, regardless of what their owners said is a crime! That would be individual thought! The most disgusting act a human can conmit. He should stay a passive-thinker! An undividual! Causr everything else would be fucking *retarded*, wouldn't it??
Protip wise guy: Yes, I am saying profit is legalized crime.
Is that too much for you to handle?
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Mystery Red of the Great American Eclipse
It has blood on it!
ABCNews: Eclipse makes pendulum wander
Losing my religion
Sun researchers find strange eclipse reading
The 'our jobs' in the title question are the jobs for average folks. The 'our jobs' Marc seems focused on are the jobs for a world where all the children are above average.
Marc seems focused on building extremely successful technology companies with exceptional ideas, timing, grit, and folks. A company that is just sustainable is a Zombie and a thing to be avoided. Folks that are mediocre (average?) are to be avoided. This can lead to useful amazing things, but it also ignores or leaves behind what has been the major force in our economy, that is, stable small business built of normal folks.
The industrial revolution and especially Henry Ford made it possible for a job to mean a good life for average folks who just want to put in their 8 hours with little thought to how their job fits into being a useful (competitive?) business. Before this, finding one's place in the world required much more self reliance.
Entitlement is a simple human concept. If one becomes accustomed to having something, then one feels entitled to it. Consider water rights. If one has been using a stream for generations, then he has a right to continue to use it even though this means newcomers can't. For jobs, if a person has been able to make a good living installing fenders on a car assembly line, then it is normal for him to feel entitled to continue this. Politics and social discourse follow this idea of entitlement to a good life through a provided job even as that stream still flows due to nature, but economics and globalization say otherwise for the fender job.
Technology is a common scapegoat when considering the dilemma of job entitlement versus economics. The technology that took jobs by using robots in the fender job has another side. It also makes it possible to buy nice cars at a much lower price. Technology plus globalization make Walmart possible, but it also lowers the odds that someone will have a job to make the money to spend there. If you are at a quandary as to if Walmart is good or bad, then consider Amazon. With technology, the stakes are higher with the Internet. I think things are much better, because many things are now possible for an average person that were unthinkable 20 years ago.
If the fender man has self reliance, then in theory he can adapt and the technology is painful, but still good. Adversity makes one self reliant. A lifetime of installing fenders with a provided job, does not seem likely to make one self reliant. Humans are incredibly adaptable if put in the right situation. To have a stable society we want to live in, we need to figure out how to take advantage of this adaptability.
Technology development is driven by 'use cases' You think of how the gadget might be used and think through what it has to do to make that use work, then make it so. Humanity is built with a wide variety of folks. PC tells us rightly that it is impossible to accurately characterize these into groups. But I wonder if in thinking how something might impact society, one could gain some insight by breaking the folks into 'use cases'. If so, what would thy be.
From outside, it appears Silicon Valley focuses on 2. The Marc's above average folks making the technology and the eyeballs they sell.
What about the fender guy. Both if he still has self reliance and not.
What about the folks created in a multi-generational welfare society.
Same question, except for a prison society.
Using technology to build a stable society we wish to live in is hard.
That's all this is. Myopic history-forgetters spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Hell, I'm one of those people who see what could go wrong, and *I* am saying this, what does that tell you? Will things potentially suck for some people for a while? Probably. Will it destroy humanity? LOL, no. Everyone needs to calm down and take a breath.
You seem to think that our economy is based on "making stuff". But manufacturing is only 12% of the economy.
12% of the US economy. That is not true globally.
The most valuable companies in the world do no manufacturing.
Want to bet on that? Of the 10 largest companies in the world by revenue, the only one in the top ten that arguably isn't a manufacturer is Walmart and their business is almost exclusively selling manufactured goods made by other companies. Yes oil and gas is wildly valuable and processing fossil fuels IS manufacturing.
If you are measuring by market cap you still have lots of companies that make some/most of their revenue via manufacturing. The top ten there includes Berkshire Hathaway, Johnson and Johnson, Apple, Amazon and Alibaba who all either make stuff themselves or sell manufactured goods made by others.
You'll hear the meme that the US doesn't manufacture anymore which is simply not true at all. The US manufacturing sector is worth about $3 Trillion annually which by itself would one of the top 7 economies in the world.
If suddenly, machines could make everything we currently make, there would be little change in our economy.
Machines CAN make much of it. What they cannot do is make it economically. The limitations on automation are not primarily physical. They are economic. Automation carries large up front costs which require substantial production volume and/or value to recoup. There are and will remain no lack of labor intensive products where it makes no economic sense to automate. Nobody is going to buy a machine that costs more to operate than it does to hire a person.
My grandmother on my fathers side grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, and I don't know that she ever held a job. She brothers were all largely a bunch of dumb swedes that grew up in the country without even a high school education.
The next generation of the family all either went to college and got good jobs, started businesses, or both. They weren't the dumb-swede types of the previous generation. Now, part of this was helped because my fathers father had a good job, and his father was smart enough to have actually patented something in 1917. So the other side of the family helped raise up my fathers mother out of poverty.
The larger picture is of course the western world adapting to a largely agrarian society in the 1800s to an industrial society in the 1900s. Automation and machinery made farms MUCH larger, and you couldn't get by as a dumb swede anymore without. Automation replacing jobs isn't new, it's been going on for literally 200 years.
It DOES mean change however, and investing in the future. We need to make education, both college and various trades free or cheap. The days of getting a HS education and working in a factory for 40 years are over, just like the days of most of the population practicing subsistence farming were over 100 years ago.
Even if higher intelligence isn't genetic (and there are almost certainly genetic components), it is memetic. Children raised in curious, information-seeking, question-pondering experimental households are going to grow up into more new-economy-awesome adults.
And?
And, something like 15% of the eternal-60-hour-week employees of a place like Apple, Google or Amazon South Lake Union are parents. Reasonable to say that most big tech employees will die childless. A kid is the quickest way to sink your new-economy career. Meanwhile the majority of US births for the last decade have been paid for by Medicaid. The majority (!) of K-12 students qualify for free-or-reduced lunches because they're growing up in or nearly in poverty. The *only* way to make that model work over any length of time at all is to try and be Singapore and constantly import the world's smart people (and then economically discourage them from reproducing). That doesn't scale very far.
Fuck off you commie!!!!
I suspect he learnt it from a book, you know. I doubt he spent a few months typing random words in and working out the syntax from the error messages.
These rich guys who push "learn to code" seem to only actually hire people with masters degrees from Stanford, but think OTHER should hire bootcamp grads...yeah, okaaay.
Note: this is the correct thread for the same comment moments ago mistakenly cross-posted at Revisiting the Jobs Artificial Intelligence Will Create with two tiny revisions.
I don't usually play the Jurassic card, but I was there in the late nineties when George Gilder whipped the telecosm into leaping headlong into a giant bluff of Gillette Foamy.
Question left unanswered: what are you lavishing below the elbow which requires an underhand application? It's almost as if Gillette thought to themselves: screw the magnetic screwdriver—we'll invent the magnetic screw head instead.
[*] Note: this is the seventies, man. Any hint of metrosexual grooming (outside of San Francisco) was a standing invitation to the hombre prom, out behind The Oak and Dagger, at closing time. The proposed use is not for visible grooming.
Question answered all too well: why are they lowering this scantily clad woman into your manly foam product?
Tom Chanter manages in this piece to revive some of the old Gilder magic. "I was there, Gandalf." Deep down, Gilder was barely left of the Taliban, but he a definite knack for massaging the adrenal glands of the unwashed masses to plummy plumes of imminent mass technogasm.
The Madness of King George — July 2002
"people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value"
WTF?
There are no classes in America. The president, the dog catcher and even Marc Anderson are one and the same.
You are not a god Marc Anderson, not even special.
Can the arrogant talk, and can the fake concern about the "poor". If you want to do "social good", take on your own class, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Monsanto, Bronfrman, the pdeophile guy with his own island. Police your own "class". Expose some "open secrets" in Hollywood, New York, DC, London, Saudi Arabia. That takes balls.
Not sure that 53 million puts you in any "class" though. That is pretty rinky dink.
You are a sick man if you only measure people by their "economic value". I hope god, or jesus or allah or budha or your higher power or perhaps you wife awakens you and shines a light on your arrogance, hubris ---- and you fallibility and mortality.
Marc, you're a programmer. Hardly qualified to comment on deep structure social issue.
Marc, eff off. You are a nothing.
"Virtually anyone on the planet with an internet connection and a commitment to self-empowerment through learning can come to Udacity, master a suite of job-ready skills, and pursue rewarding employment."
Sure but they can't actually receive that employment. Companies are still obsessed with degrees and even where they will hire people without the overpriced, slow, and poor education they treat them like second class citizens if they don't have a decade or better experience.
Places hiring with multiple years of experience per year education you have it backward. 4 years of education is almost up to par with a year of experience but in truth there are some aspects which simply can't be replaced by any amount of education.
I've always believed in Postel's robustness principle: be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. For this reason, I'm harder on myself than I am on other people in fiddly matters orthographic.
But this is not a good venue to misspell both Andreessen and Horowitz, once each.
First:
Second:
In his defense, he did get "Andreessen" right in 53 other instances, and it all honesty, if any modern software (including Firebox) had half a spell-checking clue, your helpful software agent might have inquired: did you really mean to spell "Andreessen" differently one time out of fifty four? So I guess he only has Andreessen, himself, to blame, after all.
Also, for the nit-picky record, "Luddite" remains a proper noun.
Smart people get rid of things that serve no purpose.
Sometimes I maybe trust the Slashdot eggheads to fill in the blanks more than I ought to.
If you were paying full attention, you would have noticed that by managing to misspell Andreessen as "Andreesen" and "Horowitz" as "Horrowitz" he effectively fudged A16z into both A15z and A17z (not to mention a crypto A16z, because sometimes two wrongs do make a square number).
Which is partly why I drew attention to this being exactly the wrong venue for that double-action slovenliness.
I don't know about you, but it's been widely reported in recent years in reputable publications like The Economist that there's actually a shortage of hotels.
I'm in a first-world country that's not the USA and in mid-tier city that's more of a back office than corporate headquarters type of town and there have been hundreds of new hotel rooms added in the last few years with hundreds more under construction because there's still a shortage of accomodation. The annualised hotel room occupancy rate here is at 80%
If AirBnB is having an effect on the hotel industry, it's probably only slightly retarding the growth rate.