Even though I grab my mail off the net via SLIP/PPP mail client like just about everyone else, I've made a point of keeping my shell account.
If one is on a dialup, it's really handy to be able to go upstream of one's mail client in order to block the multimeg file attachment some spammer or clueless friend thinks I need.
A shell account saved my ass when Sobig.F hit.
Some moron from dsl.net with an infected box hit mine with viral spams by the thousands on top of the rest of the Sobig viral spam I got. Being able to configure my.procmairc file at my provider made it possible for me to shitcan everything with a.scr or.pif before I downloaded it via mail client. Without the shell, my account would have been useless to me for weeks and having my ISP clean it out would probably have cost them hours, i.e. hundreds of bucks worth of sysadmin time. With it, I pretty much took care of myself.
One should not have to run one's own mail server in order to do this. A shell is a good thing even for an ISP in the hands of those who can use it properly.
This doesn't mean that users necessarily need to get one by default, though. Personally, I don't ever intend to get an internet account that doesn' t have one.
If all the ports people don't ordinarily use get blocked at the router, what's going to happen to anybody who creates new Internet services/applications?
If the approach is "opt-in", any new Internet service in the future is going to be DOA because Joe Clueless is going to download the new apps, find out "they don't work", and isn't going to contact his ISP where the problem is.
The other problem is that any ISP big enough to have a clueless "first line" help desk isn't going to be able to handle "please turn this port on" inquiries from Joe Clueless and will be even less able to handle them from anyone with a clue.
Do we have all the Internet services we're ever going to want?
Sacrificing future technological possibilities just to keep the current Net running properly isn't exactly the sort of thing we want if we want to do interesting and maybe profitable high-tech things.
Port 135 and the most commonly abused other ports there's a case for blocking by default.
Do you mean "Super Sprint" or "Championship Sprint"?
Definitely not. My dates may be a bit off because I wasn't looking at my resume at the time.Some of what you mention in the way of ownership I didn't know at the time, what I can say is that we had a "Warner" company store on the premises (which might localize when I was there to anybody else who was at Atari at the time reading this thread - and if any of you are, 'Hi!'.).
I wasn't there that long. Thinking back, I wouldn't have missed it but I had no regrets about leaving.
However, to extend and clarify what I meant, I am talking about instances like Engine designers at Ford. They need to know about and consider usability factors, but they do NOT need to have extensive experience changing the oil in their card to do competent design work.
While I agree, that isn't a great example. A person who hasn't changed oil a few times might not think of putting a drain plug somewhere with mechanical clearance adequate to allow access to it. Little thing, but very expensive to fix if nobody catches it before it goes into production.
I think an EE who can't solder is someone who needs to stay the HELL away from the breadboard prototypes. From direct personal experience.
There were certain "high level technical professionals" we used to distract with bright shiny objects whenever we saw them moving towards anything important carrying a screwdriver.:-)
The 16 year old was still there when I worked for Atari Games briefly in 1987... he was a senior programmer. (he was the only 21 year old senior programmer at the company at the time, had to be him. No, I don't remember his name, but he was very helpful to me when I was trying to figure out the guts of the developmental prototypes.
So *that* is what happened to him. Cool.
What was really neat was working directly under the guy who developed Missile Command.
The most bizarre things about the company when I worked there in 1987 were:
Every game had customized hardware running lots of TTL glue chips, games were generally kludged versions of each other which were turned into production model. Weird stuff, at best, obsolescent technology for the time. Made for great fun when trying to troubleshoot prototypes. I was a development tech (hardware) at the time.
No, I don't know why this stuff wasn't consolidated into a single vector model and a single raster model whose only differences were firmware and hardware user interfaces.
The company was already running out of ideas, our latest and greatest stuff was out of Japan, like Pole Position... ever see it with the original Japanese graphics?
The giant hot tub roughly in the middle of the building that nobody (well, except me) ever used.
No, nobody realized that we were going to become part of history.
A person who doesn't understand how things work at the detail level has no business trying to do high-level design. Your suggestion that an EE doesn't need to know how to solder is appalling.
The "gentleman scholar" approach you advocate to teaching engineering has been tried.
It results in highly trained people with degrees who design and build things that don't work in the real world.
If, as you suggest, the landslide was fraudulent, then the election results would have no relation to either the pre-election polls or the exit polling. This would attract an awful lot of attention in the media, and I believe that any fraud on the scale that you suggest would at least be openly accused.
IIRC, that's exactly what happened, and when the loser demanded a recount, the GOP Secretary of State said that the demand for a recount was "without merit".
They started doing that as of when the Religious Right took it over quite a few years ago. However, the foriegn policy agenda of the Religious Right was never really there, so it's hardly surprising that the GOP would be in need of some snake oil to fill the hole.
The GOP has come a long way since Lincoln and Goldwater. Some call it "progress"
Prediction: Wars between political campaigns and hackers over the 1337 space of the voting booth results in Ohio registering over 30 billion votes in the next Presidential election, with Luke Skywalker edging out both Dean and Bush, and the Democratic candidate coming in a distant 4th.
If any state's votes have to be thrown out over mangled electronic voting machine votes, that'll get the question of electronic voting to the WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING level.
That's what needs to be done.
A little Googling should disclose every county/state where Diebold has deployed.
Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., told Republicans in an Aug. 14 fund-raising letter that he is ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''
He should have gone on to add: "whether or not anybody in the state of Ohio votes for Bush or not".
RLVs aren't enough. To get the heavy infrastructure needed to bring the kind of space facilities (housing, industrial parks, labs, support facilities) which will make space industrialization and full-time space-based research by scientists going to work in labs up there every day, space tourism other than quick up and down trips, and to make powersats workable at a reasonable price per KWh, we need something cheaper than rockets.
We need to bring the price of getting freight into orbit to dollars a pound, not thousands or even hundreds of dollars a pound.
The candidate technologies are earth-to-LEO railguns and nanotube-based space elevators. Probable price: tens of billions of dollars.
With a way to get freight into orbit (housing modules, machine tools, semiconductor fab equipment, etc.), the number of probable passenger trips into orbit change dramatically, though with the elevator running, the trips change to zero because practically all traffic uses the elevator. As I see it, the railgun is doable with extensions of known technology, the elevator may be a lot further off, depending on research progress.
Given the short horizons and risk-averse business climates, the only way we're going to get railgun launch facilities together or a space elevator is via government sector investment. Of course, the US is too busy playing military games in the Middle East to get the last few hundred megabarrels of oil to think about big, ambitious projects.
So a requirement to work in the jobs beyond earth atmosphere when a skyhook project is finally built may be. . . being able to speak Chinese, one of the major India languages, or it's remotely possible that the EU will get its shit together to do this.
One thing we do know. The oil is going to run out. The question is whether we do this now, while the question of paying for it is a matter of slightly higher taxes, or when the oil is visibly running out, when the choices are do it whether we can afford it or not or watch technological civilization go down the tubes.
It is a very disturbing sign in a community when something like this comes out and people treat it as a list of where to send mail bombs.
Then leave the community. You won't be missed.
If your sense of ethics is troubled by counterattacks against people who are by definition guilty of e-mail harassment directed at the entire Internet population, I doubt you really have all that much to contribute anyway. Certainly not on the subject of ethics or decency, you obviously have no clue about the meaning of either.
Dude, there's so much stuff to do on this planet, it would be generations before 6 billion organized, educated & trained (that's part of the process) human beings completed a complete "renovation". Landscaping, dump-clearing, organic vegetable growing, child educating (with a far greater ratio of teacher:student) are just a small list of possibilities. Some would think this kind of work is retro, but it seems to me that that is what a highly automated/robotized society will tend towards (if the progression is fortunate/wise enough to prevent revolution and comcommitant anarchy).
I didn't say these things don't need doing, but with the exception of "organic vegetable growing", for which full automation is just about ready, all of the areas you discuss can be more efficiently done with humans in the loop supervising automated devices.
The problem with the status quo is that there is only incentive to create financial profit; our society must create economic incentives for companies creating *societal* profit.
Actually, the problem doesn't actually go that deep. All that I think needs doing is for CEOs to have an incentive to create companies with long-term value, which among other things, means companies that don't destroy the communities they are based in in the name of short-term profit. A change in the tax laws to defer compensation for CEOs for several years and base what they ultimately get on the performance of their companies several years after they take over would do it.
BTW, proper welfaring, IMO, involves creating work that benefits the community *and* the individual by advancing his education (which adds self-esteem) as well as providing a roof over his head.
I don't think it's for society to decide what to do with people surplus from the job market through no fault of their own. I think it'll be much more interesting if people decide what to do with themselves. Ever read Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon"? One of the stories deals with such a society.
It seems to me the "evil monster" corporation is the result of corporations looking out for the personal interests of the CEO, not the interests of the corporation itself.
The parent post to this really deserves to be modded up.
Last time I saw that point made was in the book Capitalist Fools, by Nicholas von Hoffman. This is a point that needs to be made in order to understand how modern businesses really work.
Are CEOs 10x as good as they were 20 years ago? Then why are they paid well over 10x as much? von Hoffman was the first I know of to make the point that companies are now run to provide maximum short-term profit to the CEO. CEOs don't work 20 years at companies anymore, with rare exceptions. Stockholder and CEO financial interests don't always coincide, otherwise we wouldn't get the Enrons and Worldcoms, and the dot.com boom would probably never have ended. I say that the boom wouldn't have ended because honest, ethical CEOs would have never started the companies with the most dubious business models.
If a CEO knows he's going to be gone in a couple or three years, his most rational strategy to maximize value is to do short-term things to reduce costs that'll boost profits temporarily in exchange for predictable long-term trouble for his replacement CEO. The public investors who weren't alert enough to sell when he did get screwed.
Outsource business and customer service functions knowing one is building future competitors who by the time they are ready to go into business for themselves, they will know his customers better than he does. Juggle the books. Lay off long-service workers to replace them with cheaper people... and the companies core expertise and institutional knowledge walks out the door with them. Cut back on long-term R&D.
So future company products and services aren't quite as good, and the company doesn't function quite as smoothly or efficiently. But that kind of decay takes a while to percolate through an organization.
By the time this starts making a visible difference (I've got an HP laser printer from 1987 that still works well. Are there any HP printers made today that'll be working 16 years from now?), the people who made the decisions will have long since cashed out.
When the consequences of outsourcing and technological unemployment become obvious, i.e. when we've got double-digit unemployment and it's obvious that the jobs are never coming back, the CEOs in power there are going to have to make some decisions with long term consequences as to how everyone in the world is going to be living, both by their own actions and through their 0wn3d politicians.
The decisions made by looking strictly within a quarterly timeframe are unlikely to be the ones which are going to be good for the companies, the nation, or the world even 5 years from when the decisions are going to be made.
How bad could this get? How would current unemployment/welfare systems cope with permanent 20% unemployment? How about 20% and rising? What happens to a consumption-based economy if people are forced en masse to reduce theirs to bare subsistence? Who is going to buy these cheaper (or same price but with increased profit) goods and services? Sounds like economic stagnation to me, which profits nobody in the long run.
These problems are not unsolvable. (try Kelso's "Two-Factor Economics") But nobody in a position to work on effective solutions has any motivation to care about them now and won't have any personal reason to care as of when these technologies are off-the-shelf. They're going to want to cash in on the trends and put their profits into either their new foriegn retirement homes or their new fortified US estates.
Read "Street Meat" by Harlan Ellison to get a picture of what the most linear projection of current trends are.
Firstly, like most doom-and-gloom technology-obsoletes-humans and technology-steals-jobs articles, the writer assumes all these jobs will be replaced *instantly*. This is clearly wrong, for several reasons.
First, the major corporations that'd be buying the robots are risk-averse. They'll let someone else try - and be burned by - such a scheme before they try it themselves. This might take place over ten or more years.
A not unreasonable timeframe.
Secondly, he assumes that this entire block of jobs can be replaced all at once, which is also clearly wrong. They all require varying sophisticated levels of working artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot assume robots will become capable of handling *all* these jobs at the same time. AI is like nuclear fusion power plants, in ever since the 1950s experts have been saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and ten years later they're still saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and so on. It is likely that improvements will continue to be incremental, as they have been so far with industrial robots. Robots capable of taking voice orders from anyone who walks in the door, making your burger, and working the register are the kind of robots that will be perfected *last*.
No, a robot capable of driving a truck safely on public streets will be perfected last. The fast food solutions are sufficiently feasible that the only basis on which I'd discuss them is NDA on a "need to know" basis. I'll simply say that neither you nor Mr. Brain have properly analyzed the tasks required to turn packaged food products into repackaged fast-food meals.
Basically, until we've had a quantum jump or two in technology, the "sweet spot" in automation leaves a human in the loop for exception processing. You want robotic vacuum cleaners? Go build some, but unless you leave a human in the loop, your system is going to escalate in complexity and decrease in reliability to the point where it's unlikely o be cost-effective.
Third, he assumes that a robot worker will be cheaper than a human worker, and that the rise of robots will not create any jobs to replace those jobs they displace. This is also clearly wrong. Human replacement will take more than a 1-to-1 ratio at first, as the first ones will not be as versatile as humans - they'll be more customized towards doing a specific task. Checkout line robots won't also be pulling shopping carts out of the parking lot and stocking the shelves, you'll need a few custom bots for each job. If the cost of buying and supplying power to a bunch of robots is more than the cost of a minimum-wage human employee, the robots won't get bought. Plus the diversity of robot types would slow the economy of scale of production, keeping the prices up until their widespread adoption.
That's why the applications which will be automated first will be:
low hanging fruit, the ones that are relatively easy in terms of technological design.
ones that can be made in sufficient quantities to allow significant economies of scale.
Think in terms of lots and lots of custom... not necessarily bots, but automation systems, both stand alone and systems. If you're thinking standalone in some context like a "big box" store, include provisions for networking / monitoring / remote control, even if they aren't obviously necessarily, and if you're one of the first ones at the party, think hard about open technological standards.
When robots DO start to become worth buying, they'll need humans to keep them in service - robot repair is a hard enough AI problem that, again, that'd be the *last* type of job robots would be able to replace. As an additional bonus, the human repairmen would probably make a better salary than the minimum wage jobs being lost. There will also, of course, be a spike in the number of robot engineers and robot programmers and robot company advertising firms and robot company markters and salesmen and managers a
Straight lassez faire capitalism will not work when 50% of the workforce doesn't have a job.
No, it can't. It wasn't designed for this kind of situation.
The stock market's going to do great, though.
Based on what consumer demand? A family can only consume so much on a day-to-day basis, of both consumables (food, etc.), electronic consumer items, and capital expenses (housing, transportation, etc.). In conventional capitalism, the surplus gets invested. What's to invest in if demand is static because the normal things that operate to increase demand no longer exist because the population that can afford to buy anything other than the most minimal necessities. The people at the top will be forced to choose between opening the system up to put money in people's hands or watch industrialized society go into permanent econonic stagnation with income distributions straight out of the Third World, and where people who look halfway solvent will need armed bodyguards to go shopping. (then, there will be the situation where... people take their forces of armed bodyguards and use them on each other,
think of Renaissance Italy...)
However, watching the people running our system for their benefit, I don't have a lot of confidence in their making this kind of choice on any basis other than that of very short-term advantage.
Let's add to this... what happens when most semi-skilled and even moderately skilled jobs (let's say grunt-level programmer) cease to exist?
However, we won't have to wait for machine vision technology for this to happen, we're getting a sneak preview via outsourcing already. "Cease to exist in America" is close enough for most Americans.
We're going to get automated fast food long before Marshall Brain expects it, the solution he foresees is a much more difficult one than the one that I expect to be adopted. Fast food could have been automated using the 286 generation of computers. I mention this specifically because it isn't all that difficult.
There are certain parts of janitorial work that. . . can't be automated fully, but whose human component can be made far more efficient than it is now. Would a business mind paying somebody $20/hour to operate a dozen semi-autonomous vacuum cleaners? (no, telecommuting from Bangalore is not an option for this)
People who want to get involved in making the service industry automation technology should concentrate on devices with humans in the loop, because that's where the "sweet spot" for cost-effectiveness is.
I'm hoping that the automation of fast food serves as a wakeup call for the world that we can't take for granted that there will always be unskiled labor gigs to "downscale" to if one's skilled professional job winds up in Bangalore.
Traditional visions of the labor force are becoming obsolete rapidly, and either our economic system adapts, or it will be destroyed from within.
IMO, the solution involves the "haves" having compassion for the "have-nots" which means welfare only for the purpose of getting them a niche where they can be productive (and relatively happy doing it) for themselves, their families and the aggregate society. Ted Turner, you fuck, are you listening?
Compassion or a desire to save money, WHERE ARE THE JOBS COMING FROM?
Remember outsourcing? Remember automation? Service industries are the obvious next wave of automation, as I predicted back in the late 1980s. That's basically the last bastion of "warm body" jobs.
Oh, and makework jobs have been tried, too... there are welfare programs which have had the recipients collecting paper clips. Makes a few OK jobs for the "supervisors", teaches the targets nothing.
The problem here is that this is even more expensive and arguably less worthwhile than simply handing people money.
Punishing people for living in a society where there aren't enough jobs and never will be again is an answer only a Republican or Libertarian could love.
It'll be a lot more useful if you explain how software patents will be used to suppress innovation, stop the creation of new technology, and prevent the creation of new companies, jobs, and products / services / TAXABLE INCOME.
Talk about things like the Amazon one-click patent, I'm sure a quick search here will turn up plenty of examples of absurd patents.
THOSE are the kind of arguments politicians understand.
The market of programers was flooded following the dot.com bubble and there is no way to sustain that market while there is cheap labor else where. Why is this a shock to everyone? I knew this going into college over 3 years ago(which, incidently, is why I'm not a Computer Science Major).
So you're majoring in something that has to be done onsite? Are you sure? Or are you simply planning to go into an occupation where the axe will take a little longer to fall?
Everyone, even this poster can claim ignorance but that won't help them today. They need to find another way to live - either overseas as a post suggested or go back to graduate school and diversify.
Congratulations, you made the same mistake Roblimo did. I congratulate you because ordinarily, Roblimo's a very perceptive guy and a voice of hard common sense. Your post suggests that you're neither, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt long enough to reply.
IT ISN'T JUST IT PEOPLE WHO ARE GETTING OUTSOUCED.
It's customer service and accounting and R&D and middle management and even telephone soliciting (ask the GOP, the RNC is planning to hire Indian call centers to call you to get you to help pay for his campaign) and ultimately, any decently job that can be done from pretty much anywhere with adequate communications.
I define "decently paying" is one that will allow a worker to support a family on one and a half incomes. Something that'll enable a family to pay for housing, food, clothing, school expenses, and go out every once in a while. . . and ultimately, pay for college educations.
Individuals without families can do what needs to be done to survive. Not all of those can afford to go back to graduate school. Will you be able to when your job winds up in Bangalore?
Ultimately, the jobs at risk are the majority of jobs held by what we call the "middle class" today.
What happens when those jobs disappear and at best, are replaced by minimum wage "warm body" jobs?
Outside the lowest cost-of-living areas, a full time minimum wage job can't support an individual, let alone a significant part of a family. And if everyone moves to a "low cost of living" area, it won't be one anymore, the competition in the rental market will drive prices upwards.
What happens to political and social stability in a country where a strong middle class is replaced by a small minority of rich who and a large minority of poor, some of which will be very well educated and all of which are desperate for jobs?
What happens to the even the warm body jobs which depend on businesses formerly patronized by the middle class?
Yes, we're describing Libertarian utopia here. A place where no sane person wants to live.
There are people saying 'as long as you are supercompetent and lucky and well connected, you'll make plenty of money'. True of any economy, but when one is discussing the effects of this situation on the economy as a whole, one has to take into account everyone who isn't supercompetent and lucky and well connected. That's the great majority of the American middle class, regardless of job title.
The faith based on history that new jobs will come along with comparable salaries to the old ones, only requiring a new skill set to acquire them will replace the old does not seem to apply to the new global outsourcing reality.
This is the first time in human history when the bulk of the "good jobs", i.e. jobs that pay well enough to support a family on 1 or even two people's income can be done from "anywhere".
Going to a service industry job, IF there's one available isn't a matter of social stigma, it's a matter of parents telling their kids that they're going to be homeless for the foreseeable future.
A minimum wage service industry gig doesn't even make a decent living (one's own apartment, a car, TV, eating regularly) outside of the very lowest cost-of-living areas.
What does education mean to kids who know that when they get out of school, the jobs won't be there? What does hope for a future mean to someone with a family who knows that the job that was just lost is the only realistic hope of having a decent life? What happens when one mulitiplies this by a very significant chunk of a middle class? Let's call it social destabilization.
Do you want to live a country where most people who will hit you up for money are going to be kids begging for enough money to buy food? Do you want to live in a place where having a decent income means you'll have to have armed security if you want to go shopping?
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No, I didn't know. thanks
If one is on a dialup, it's really handy to be able to go upstream of one's mail client in order to block the multimeg file attachment some spammer or clueless friend thinks I need.
A shell account saved my ass when Sobig.F hit.
Some moron from dsl.net with an infected box hit mine with viral spams by the thousands on top of the rest of the Sobig viral spam I got. Being able to configure my .procmairc file at my provider made it possible for me to shitcan everything with a .scr or .pif before I downloaded it via mail client. Without the shell, my account would have been useless to me for weeks and having my ISP clean it out would probably have cost them hours, i.e. hundreds of bucks worth of sysadmin time. With it, I pretty much took care of myself.
One should not have to run one's own mail server in order to do this. A shell is a good thing even for an ISP in the hands of those who can use it properly.
This doesn't mean that users necessarily need to get one by default, though. Personally, I don't ever intend to get an internet account that doesn' t have one.
If the approach is "opt-in", any new Internet service in the future is going to be DOA because Joe Clueless is going to download the new apps, find out "they don't work", and isn't going to contact his ISP where the problem is.
The other problem is that any ISP big enough to have a clueless "first line" help desk isn't going to be able to handle "please turn this port on" inquiries from Joe Clueless and will be even less able to handle them from anyone with a clue.
Do we have all the Internet services we're ever going to want?
Sacrificing future technological possibilities just to keep the current Net running properly isn't exactly the sort of thing we want if we want to do interesting and maybe profitable high-tech things.
Port 135 and the most commonly abused other ports there's a case for blocking by default.
Do you mean "Super Sprint" or "Championship Sprint"?
Definitely not. My dates may be a bit off because I wasn't looking at my resume at the time.Some of what you mention in the way of ownership I didn't know at the time, what I can say is that we had a "Warner" company store on the premises (which might localize when I was there to anybody else who was at Atari at the time reading this thread - and if any of you are, 'Hi!'.).
I wasn't there that long. Thinking back, I wouldn't have missed it but I had no regrets about leaving.
While I agree, that isn't a great example. A person who hasn't changed oil a few times might not think of putting a drain plug somewhere with mechanical clearance adequate to allow access to it. Little thing, but very expensive to fix if nobody catches it before it goes into production.
I think an EE who can't solder is someone who needs to stay the HELL away from the breadboard prototypes. From direct personal experience.
There were certain "high level technical professionals" we used to distract with bright shiny objects whenever we saw them moving towards anything important carrying a screwdriver. :-)
I've worked both as tech and engineer.
So *that* is what happened to him. Cool.
What was really neat was working directly under the guy who developed Missile Command.
The most bizarre things about the company when I worked there in 1987 were:
No, nobody realized that we were going to become part of history.
The "gentleman scholar" approach you advocate to teaching engineering has been tried.
It results in highly trained people with degrees who design and build things that don't work in the real world.
What legitimate reason is there for a voting machine to push data to a private repository during an election?
You can't think of any, either, can you?
IIRC, that's exactly what happened, and when the loser demanded a recount, the GOP Secretary of State said that the demand for a recount was "without merit".
They started doing that as of when the Religious Right took it over quite a few years ago. However, the foriegn policy agenda of the Religious Right was never really there, so it's hardly surprising that the GOP would be in need of some snake oil to fill the hole.
The GOP has come a long way since Lincoln and Goldwater. Some call it "progress"
If any state's votes have to be thrown out over mangled electronic voting machine votes, that'll get the question of electronic voting to the WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING level.
That's what needs to be done.
A little Googling should disclose every county/state where Diebold has deployed.
He should have gone on to add: "whether or not anybody in the state of Ohio votes for Bush or not".
RLVs aren't enough. To get the heavy infrastructure needed to bring the kind of space facilities (housing, industrial parks, labs, support facilities) which will make space industrialization and full-time space-based research by scientists going to work in labs up there every day, space tourism other than quick up and down trips, and to make powersats workable at a reasonable price per KWh, we need something cheaper than rockets.
We need to bring the price of getting freight into orbit to dollars a pound, not thousands or even hundreds of dollars a pound.
The candidate technologies are earth-to-LEO railguns and nanotube-based space elevators. Probable price: tens of billions of dollars.
With a way to get freight into orbit (housing modules, machine tools, semiconductor fab equipment, etc.), the number of probable passenger trips into orbit change dramatically, though with the elevator running, the trips change to zero because practically all traffic uses the elevator. As I see it, the railgun is doable with extensions of known technology, the elevator may be a lot further off, depending on research progress.
Given the short horizons and risk-averse business climates, the only way we're going to get railgun launch facilities together or a space elevator is via government sector investment. Of course, the US is too busy playing military games in the Middle East to get the last few hundred megabarrels of oil to think about big, ambitious projects.
So a requirement to work in the jobs beyond earth atmosphere when a skyhook project is finally built may be. . . being able to speak Chinese, one of the major India languages, or it's remotely possible that the EU will get its shit together to do this.
One thing we do know. The oil is going to run out. The question is whether we do this now, while the question of paying for it is a matter of slightly higher taxes, or when the oil is visibly running out, when the choices are do it whether we can afford it or not or watch technological civilization go down the tubes.
Then leave the community. You won't be missed.
If your sense of ethics is troubled by counterattacks against people who are by definition guilty of e-mail harassment directed at the entire Internet population, I doubt you really have all that much to contribute anyway. Certainly not on the subject of ethics or decency, you obviously have no clue about the meaning of either.
Otherwise, you're going to need AT LEAST clip per spammer to hit what little brain each has.
Sounds like MSBlaster.
Once you've cleaned out her machine, get the ZoneAlarm firewall on it, this came in via Windoze Messaging on port 135.
usual disclaimers
I didn't say these things don't need doing, but with the exception of "organic vegetable growing", for which full automation is just about ready, all of the areas you discuss can be more efficiently done with humans in the loop supervising automated devices.
The problem with the status quo is that there is only incentive to create financial profit; our society must create economic incentives for companies creating *societal* profit.
Actually, the problem doesn't actually go that deep. All that I think needs doing is for CEOs to have an incentive to create companies with long-term value, which among other things, means companies that don't destroy the communities they are based in in the name of short-term profit. A change in the tax laws to defer compensation for CEOs for several years and base what they ultimately get on the performance of their companies several years after they take over would do it.
BTW, proper welfaring, IMO, involves creating work that benefits the community *and* the individual by advancing his education (which adds self-esteem) as well as providing a roof over his head.
I don't think it's for society to decide what to do with people surplus from the job market through no fault of their own. I think it'll be much more interesting if people decide what to do with themselves. Ever read Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon"? One of the stories deals with such a society.
The parent post to this really deserves to be modded up.
Last time I saw that point made was in the book Capitalist Fools, by Nicholas von Hoffman. This is a point that needs to be made in order to understand how modern businesses really work.
Are CEOs 10x as good as they were 20 years ago? Then why are they paid well over 10x as much? von Hoffman was the first I know of to make the point that companies are now run to provide maximum short-term profit to the CEO. CEOs don't work 20 years at companies anymore, with rare exceptions. Stockholder and CEO financial interests don't always coincide, otherwise we wouldn't get the Enrons and Worldcoms, and the dot.com boom would probably never have ended. I say that the boom wouldn't have ended because honest, ethical CEOs would have never started the companies with the most dubious business models.
If a CEO knows he's going to be gone in a couple or three years, his most rational strategy to maximize value is to do short-term things to reduce costs that'll boost profits temporarily in exchange for predictable long-term trouble for his replacement CEO. The public investors who weren't alert enough to sell when he did get screwed.
Outsource business and customer service functions knowing one is building future competitors who by the time they are ready to go into business for themselves, they will know his customers better than he does. Juggle the books. Lay off long-service workers to replace them with cheaper people... and the companies core expertise and institutional knowledge walks out the door with them. Cut back on long-term R&D.
So future company products and services aren't quite as good, and the company doesn't function quite as smoothly or efficiently. But that kind of decay takes a while to percolate through an organization.
By the time this starts making a visible difference (I've got an HP laser printer from 1987 that still works well. Are there any HP printers made today that'll be working 16 years from now?), the people who made the decisions will have long since cashed out.
When the consequences of outsourcing and technological unemployment become obvious, i.e. when we've got double-digit unemployment and it's obvious that the jobs are never coming back, the CEOs in power there are going to have to make some decisions with long term consequences as to how everyone in the world is going to be living, both by their own actions and through their 0wn3d politicians.
The decisions made by looking strictly within a quarterly timeframe are unlikely to be the ones which are going to be good for the companies, the nation, or the world even 5 years from when the decisions are going to be made.
How bad could this get? How would current unemployment/welfare systems cope with permanent 20% unemployment? How about 20% and rising? What happens to a consumption-based economy if people are forced en masse to reduce theirs to bare subsistence? Who is going to buy these cheaper (or same price but with increased profit) goods and services? Sounds like economic stagnation to me, which profits nobody in the long run.
These problems are not unsolvable. (try Kelso's "Two-Factor Economics") But nobody in a position to work on effective solutions has any motivation to care about them now and won't have any personal reason to care as of when these technologies are off-the-shelf. They're going to want to cash in on the trends and put their profits into either their new foriegn retirement homes or their new fortified US estates.
Read "Street Meat" by Harlan Ellison to get a picture of what the most linear projection of current trends are.
Firstly, like most doom-and-gloom technology-obsoletes-humans and technology-steals-jobs articles, the writer assumes all these jobs will be replaced *instantly*. This is clearly wrong, for several reasons.
First, the major corporations that'd be buying the robots are risk-averse. They'll let someone else try - and be burned by - such a scheme before they try it themselves. This might take place over ten or more years.
A not unreasonable timeframe.
Secondly, he assumes that this entire block of jobs can be replaced all at once, which is also clearly wrong. They all require varying sophisticated levels of working artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot assume robots will become capable of handling *all* these jobs at the same time. AI is like nuclear fusion power plants, in ever since the 1950s experts have been saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and ten years later they're still saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and so on. It is likely that improvements will continue to be incremental, as they have been so far with industrial robots. Robots capable of taking voice orders from anyone who walks in the door, making your burger, and working the register are the kind of robots that will be perfected *last*.
No, a robot capable of driving a truck safely on public streets will be perfected last. The fast food solutions are sufficiently feasible that the only basis on which I'd discuss them is NDA on a "need to know" basis. I'll simply say that neither you nor Mr. Brain have properly analyzed the tasks required to turn packaged food products into repackaged fast-food meals.
Basically, until we've had a quantum jump or two in technology, the "sweet spot" in automation leaves a human in the loop for exception processing. You want robotic vacuum cleaners? Go build some, but unless you leave a human in the loop, your system is going to escalate in complexity and decrease in reliability to the point where it's unlikely o be cost-effective.
Third, he assumes that a robot worker will be cheaper than a human worker, and that the rise of robots will not create any jobs to replace those jobs they displace. This is also clearly wrong. Human replacement will take more than a 1-to-1 ratio at first, as the first ones will not be as versatile as humans - they'll be more customized towards doing a specific task. Checkout line robots won't also be pulling shopping carts out of the parking lot and stocking the shelves, you'll need a few custom bots for each job. If the cost of buying and supplying power to a bunch of robots is more than the cost of a minimum-wage human employee, the robots won't get bought. Plus the diversity of robot types would slow the economy of scale of production, keeping the prices up until their widespread adoption.
That's why the applications which will be automated first will be:
Think in terms of lots and lots of custom... not necessarily bots, but automation systems, both stand alone and systems. If you're thinking standalone in some context like a "big box" store, include provisions for networking / monitoring / remote control, even if they aren't obviously necessarily, and if you're one of the first ones at the party, think hard about open technological standards.
When robots DO start to become worth buying, they'll need humans to keep them in service - robot repair is a hard enough AI problem that, again, that'd be the *last* type of job robots would be able to replace. As an additional bonus, the human repairmen would probably make a better salary than the minimum wage jobs being lost. There will also, of course, be a spike in the number of robot engineers and robot programmers and robot company advertising firms and robot company markters and salesmen and managers a
Straight lassez faire capitalism will not work when 50% of the workforce doesn't have a job.
No, it can't. It wasn't designed for this kind of situation.
The stock market's going to do great, though.
Based on what consumer demand? A family can only consume so much on a day-to-day basis, of both consumables (food, etc.), electronic consumer items, and capital expenses (housing, transportation, etc.). In conventional capitalism, the surplus gets invested. What's to invest in if demand is static because the normal things that operate to increase demand no longer exist because the population that can afford to buy anything other than the most minimal necessities. The people at the top will be forced to choose between opening the system up to put money in people's hands or watch industrialized society go into permanent econonic stagnation with income distributions straight out of the Third World, and where people who look halfway solvent will need armed bodyguards to go shopping. (then, there will be the situation where... people take their forces of armed bodyguards and use them on each other, think of Renaissance Italy...)
However, watching the people running our system for their benefit, I don't have a lot of confidence in their making this kind of choice on any basis other than that of very short-term advantage.
Let's add to this... what happens when most semi-skilled and even moderately skilled jobs (let's say grunt-level programmer) cease to exist?
However, we won't have to wait for machine vision technology for this to happen, we're getting a sneak preview via outsourcing already. "Cease to exist in America" is close enough for most Americans.
We're going to get automated fast food long before Marshall Brain expects it, the solution he foresees is a much more difficult one than the one that I expect to be adopted. Fast food could have been automated using the 286 generation of computers. I mention this specifically because it isn't all that difficult.
There are certain parts of janitorial work that. . . can't be automated fully, but whose human component can be made far more efficient than it is now. Would a business mind paying somebody $20/hour to operate a dozen semi-autonomous vacuum cleaners? (no, telecommuting from Bangalore is not an option for this)
People who want to get involved in making the service industry automation technology should concentrate on devices with humans in the loop, because that's where the "sweet spot" for cost-effectiveness is.
I'm hoping that the automation of fast food serves as a wakeup call for the world that we can't take for granted that there will always be unskiled labor gigs to "downscale" to if one's skilled professional job winds up in Bangalore.
Traditional visions of the labor force are becoming obsolete rapidly, and either our economic system adapts, or it will be destroyed from within.
Compassion or a desire to save money, WHERE ARE THE JOBS COMING FROM?
Remember outsourcing? Remember automation? Service industries are the obvious next wave of automation, as I predicted back in the late 1980s. That's basically the last bastion of "warm body" jobs.
Oh, and makework jobs have been tried, too... there are welfare programs which have had the recipients collecting paper clips. Makes a few OK jobs for the "supervisors", teaches the targets nothing.
The problem here is that this is even more expensive and arguably less worthwhile than simply handing people money.
Punishing people for living in a society where there aren't enough jobs and never will be again is an answer only a Republican or Libertarian could love.
Talk about things like the Amazon one-click patent, I'm sure a quick search here will turn up plenty of examples of absurd patents.
THOSE are the kind of arguments politicians understand.
So you're majoring in something that has to be done onsite? Are you sure? Or are you simply planning to go into an occupation where the axe will take a little longer to fall?
Everyone, even this poster can claim ignorance but that won't help them today. They need to find another way to live - either overseas as a post suggested or go back to graduate school and diversify.
Congratulations, you made the same mistake Roblimo did. I congratulate you because ordinarily, Roblimo's a very perceptive guy and a voice of hard common sense. Your post suggests that you're neither, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt long enough to reply.
IT ISN'T JUST IT PEOPLE WHO ARE GETTING OUTSOUCED.
It's customer service and accounting and R&D and middle management and even telephone soliciting (ask the GOP, the RNC is planning to hire Indian call centers to call you to get you to help pay for his campaign) and ultimately, any decently job that can be done from pretty much anywhere with adequate communications.
I define "decently paying" is one that will allow a worker to support a family on one and a half incomes. Something that'll enable a family to pay for housing, food, clothing, school expenses, and go out every once in a while. . . and ultimately, pay for college educations.
Individuals without families can do what needs to be done to survive. Not all of those can afford to go back to graduate school. Will you be able to when your job winds up in Bangalore?
Ultimately, the jobs at risk are the majority of jobs held by what we call the "middle class" today.
What happens when those jobs disappear and at best, are replaced by minimum wage "warm body" jobs?
Outside the lowest cost-of-living areas, a full time minimum wage job can't support an individual, let alone a significant part of a family. And if everyone moves to a "low cost of living" area, it won't be one anymore, the competition in the rental market will drive prices upwards.
What happens to political and social stability in a country where a strong middle class is replaced by a small minority of rich who and a large minority of poor, some of which will be very well educated and all of which are desperate for jobs?
What happens to the even the warm body jobs which depend on businesses formerly patronized by the middle class?
Yes, we're describing Libertarian utopia here. A place where no sane person wants to live.
There are people saying 'as long as you are supercompetent and lucky and well connected, you'll make plenty of money'. True of any economy, but when one is discussing the effects of this situation on the economy as a whole, one has to take into account everyone who isn't supercompetent and lucky and well connected. That's the great majority of the American middle class, regardless of job title.
The faith based on history that new jobs will come along with comparable salaries to the old ones, only requiring a new skill set to acquire them will replace the old does not seem to apply to the new global outsourcing reality.
This is the first time in human history when the bulk of the "good jobs", i.e. jobs that pay well enough to support a family on 1 or even two people's income can be done from "anywhere".
Going to a service industry job, IF there's one available isn't a matter of social stigma, it's a matter of parents telling their kids that they're going to be homeless for the foreseeable future.
A minimum wage service industry gig doesn't even make a decent living (one's own apartment, a car, TV, eating regularly) outside of the very lowest cost-of-living areas.
What does education mean to kids who know that when they get out of school, the jobs won't be there? What does hope for a future mean to someone with a family who knows that the job that was just lost is the only realistic hope of having a decent life? What happens when one mulitiplies this by a very significant chunk of a middle class? Let's call it social destabilization.
Do you want to live a country where most people who will hit you up for money are going to be kids begging for enough money to buy food? Do you want to live in a place where having a decent income means you'll have to have armed security if you want to go shopping?