Meeting are useful to the extent you are (1) meeting with the people who are going to solve the problem and (2) brainstorming about how you will solve the problem. All other meetings are needless.
I have had useful meeting with more than 4 people, but never when there were more than 4 people who spoke. A meeting with 1-2 people explaining their design and 2-3 senior engineers tearing it apart is not made useless by an audience.
1% a year across the board is actually pretty large. Don't confuse that with an individual's raise, or even raise after inflation, as that's normally baked into GDP growth. Wages keep up with GDP growth means the benefit from better productivity is actually being shared by workers (which hasn't much happened this century). Going above that means workers are clawing back their share. That will always be gradual, but 1%/year adds up fast.
Especially considering that 1% is probably mostly skewed towards wealthy people.
We're talking specifically about wages here, which don't skew disproportionately as some other measures. The actual salaries of CEOs etc don't amount to much in the scheme of things. Don't confuse wages with the massive stock grants usually given to CxOs.
That leaves 0.5% for the average person. No matter how you slice it, it sucks.
Compared to what? It's freaking awesome compared to the past 20 years of it getting smaller every year (though, again, by a very small % each year).
Well, both sides of this "discussion" have beautifully illustrated and reminded me of what happened to this site and why I left.
Eh? Fluffer and I are actually having a civil discussion. Slashdot too often degrades into name calling and flaming the days, to be sure, but this discussion isn't an instance of that.
As soon as one person says: I have an idea, why don't you let me organize some collective activity so we can do it better with less wasted effort, and here, chip in some of your collected resources / effort-payment tokens to help with it, and get some benefit out of it, they've basically re-invented capitalism.
No, that's pretty much any economic system, it's just a question of focus: economic efficiency for its own sake, or in service of some other goal.
The defining aspect of capitalism is that you acquire the right to direct the means of production through the ability to buy it. That has the feedback loop that if your way of doing things actually is more efficient, you get more money with which you might choose to acquire more authority over the means of production.
Contrast this with feudalism, where you acquire the right to direct the means of production through military conquest. You still have a feedback loop, as efficiency make you better at war, but there are also non-economic factors in military conquest, so the feedback is weakened.
Or contrast with socialism, where you acquire the right to direct the means of production through political favoritism. Again, there's still a weak feedback loop, as efficiency gives you money to spend in pursuit of political favoritism, but that's really just saying that with sufficiently government corruption, the distinction between socialism and capitalism collapses.
Capitalism has the strongest feedback loop, but by no means is the "natural" outcome, as humans fall into war or politics a lot easier than we do the hard work of improving efficiency.
Re: populism - One problem with it is that that populist leaders tend to exploit their superior grasp of psychological manipulation to amp up the anger by whatever rhetorical tricks will do the trick.
Re: people who oppose populism. One problem is that the wealthy elite tend to exploit their superior grasp of psychological manipulation to amp up the anger against populists by whatever rhetorical tricks will do the trick.
If people are vulnerable to manipulation, that can be used for any political aim. There's nothing special about populism.
Rationality and good information seem to be in extremely short supply in populist movements and leadership, as does general good will toward all of humanity, never mind the ecosystems / biosphere.
Err, what does isolationism vs globalism have to do with anything you just said? You can oppose unbounded trade/immigration and still support all of those things, or support unbounded trade/immigration specifically to harm those things (race to the bottom, make stuff where there are no environmental regs, etc).
You're making a lot of arbitrary connections, but those connection don't exist.
A bunch of name calling
When you're reduced to spewing invective at those who disagree with you, chances are you've been psychologically manipulated. Just in general, having more hate than rational arguments is a sure and certain sign of where your beliefs came from.
1% over GDP growth. I'm sure you can read complete sentences. Our GDP per capita is the closest thing to "each person's fair share" I know how to figure. If your wages grow faster than GDP, your share is growing; slower and it's shrinking.
1) Well there are many countries in the world where the top 10% or so live a "western standards" wealthy or upper middle class lifestyle and 90% essentially rot in a subsistence black/grey market economy.
But you're describing scenario 2, not scenario 1. Do we need those rich capitalists for prosperity? Or are we better off without them?
4) The voting power of the disenfranchised will eventually trump (no pun intended heh heh) that of the shrinking number of beneficiaries of the automation. The results of this are unpredictable but could polarize to: a) Uber-Trump Moron Populist Fascism lays waste to pretty much everything, or b) Sensible leader puts in good universal basic income program (and then is probably assassinated, unfortunately - see a)
You seem to think populism is a bad thing. You you also seem to think an elite doing well while the common man suffers is a bad thing. Yet, these are opposites. You can see my confusion.
5) Or of course, there WAS the French Revolution kind of scenario. Of course, after having decapitated the problem, you have to figure out what to do next.
What always happens next: a ruthless dictator kills everyone who orchestrated the revolution, takes over, and imposes a brutal regime on the people.
Even if the tolls pay for the entire construction and maintenance of the highway, which I doubt, and even if the developers are paying to maintain the roads long after they finished building in that area, which I doubt, then there is still fire stations, police stations, garbage pickup, water, sewage.
What's your point, again? You'll notice even very capitalist places cover these things - no one is arguing about them.
Are you on health insurance? You realize if you get seriously ill, others plan members will be picking up the tab for you right?
Ideally, voluntary risk pooling on terms that I found acceptable when choosing my plan. In practice, some crap my employer picks for me, because the government broke the free market for wages during WWII and we're still doing things that way 70 years later for some reason.
But that's all very distant from the medical personnel and technology that save your wife's life twice. How we share risk is mostly orthagonal to actually providing care, unless you reduce the money to be made from technical progress in the field, and thus make progress slow. Your wide was save by medical professionals and technology, not by socialism. Your bank account was maybe saved by socialism? I still don't get your point.
Wages growing faster than GDP grows is great - it means workers are getting a disproportionate share of economic growth. 1% a year is all it takes. That was been the norm in the US last century during boom times, balanced by capital coming out ahead in rough times. But that broke this century - coincidentally around the time of the bank bailout, and for about the same amount (seriously: the couple trillion in missing wage growth equals the couple trillion we gave to bankers).
The trend won't continue. Gas prices are going up and the end of the Obama economy (which started in 2014) is coming.
Perhaps. I'm betting my future the other way, without much worry - but investing is always a risk, that's why it pays. I see you use the "associate good times with the nearest Democratic president" methodology for macroeconomics, just like the press.
I see you pay tolls for every single road you use.
All the highways near me are toll roads, yes. The local streets were paid for by the developers who put the neighborhoods in. What was your point, again?
It should vary by years of ever having worked, which some places try to do by age, or by a 90-day training wage rule (which is a perverse incentive).
Most people need to learn how to work at any job. How to show up on time, well groomed, and ready to work. It used to be that's what minimum wage jobs were: the first job for a teen entering the workforce, and a reason for a company to hire that teen despite the added burden.
So learn to eat laundry soap. Geez, do I have to solve all your problems?
100 years ago, food costs were more than half of an average family's budget. Wages were suppressed for most of this century because of deeply rooted political corruption, but are up significantly for the past couple of years. Hopefully that recent trend continues, and we don't get another $trillion hand-out to the rich like the bank bailout.
You seem to be missing the most obvious thing in the world: who will buy stuff?
Do you believe:
1) The wealthy will make stuff for themselves only using AI and robots, and won't need the rest of us, so the rest of us just have the same old economy as always without those parasites?
2) The wealthy will make stuff for themselves only using AI and robots, and since they're the only capable people in the world, the rest of us will starve to death because we can't manage anything without the elite?
3) The wealthy will make stuff for everyone, and then be amazed and surprised when they go bankrupt because no one has a job to buy that stuff? Since, you know, the successful owners of all the worlds largest businesses don't understand basic economics?
I can't even figure out how people think this dystopian apocalypse plays out.
My wife who was saved by "socialist medicine" twice begs to differ with you.
So your point is: other people paid for it? I mean, you have a real job AFAIK and could afford insurance, so... you're bragging that you soaked the other guy for the cost?
"Yes voter id laws would help a lot." is unadulterated troll bait.
A great many people in the US agree that we need voter ID laws to stem the tide of vote fraud. Disagreeing with that does not make it a troll. This is exactly the problem Slashdot needs to get over. The groupthink is reaching Digg levels, and that's not a good thing.
The Slashdot mods muxt be on the bad crack today, because this is modded "Troll.
Modding based on political preference must stop, or Slashdot will die. "Troll" means "insincere post designed to provoke emotion" (like a GNAA post) not "disagrees with my politics". Slashdot is swirling the drain at this point, and it's our collective fault. We must do better.
As a sector, video game development is bad. It's not just EA. It's not just Blizzard. It's not just Ubisoft. It's every large game company. Of course, you can start your own games company, but then you'll find your boss is really demanding.
As far as we know, animals don't have a sense of identity, in the same way that people do. A person may be able to step outside themselves and think: "that's me, and my name is XYZ". Animals can't, and don't.
We don't know either way. Humans assume humans are special, but there's almost no science behind that.
If everyone and their dog want to do it, then there's lots of cut-throat competition and employers know they can treat you like crap. My relative found this out in the clothing designer industry.
"And the man in the suit has just bought a new car with the profits he made on your dreams."
"publicly held" means. It doesn't mean that it's owned by the general public or that it's publicly owned. It just means that anyone can buy shares.
It has been a key distinction in multiple SCOTUS rulings, including Citizens Unieted. A group of people, peaceably assembled, have a First Amendment right to political expression. in a partnership or tightly held corporation, the rights of the owners aren't reduced by the fact they've gotten together.
A publicly held corporation, OTOH, has no rights, constitutional or otherwise. It does not have the right to political expression. If corporate involvement is politics hurts the people, and it damn well does, it should be banned full stop.
This distinction is everything when it comes to cleaning up corruption in the US without destroying First Amendment rights. Partnerships and tightly held corporations retain the rights of their owners. Publicly held corporations never had any right in the first place.
it's their company, and by law (and Supreme Court precedent) they can do whatever the fuck they want
There are many thousands of pages if regulations that say otherwise. I believe regulations governing what companies can do are actually enacted at a faster rate than a single person can read. On the whole, we seem to be better off than that - you can point to exceptions where over- or mis-regulation is causing harm, of course, but those are exceptions.
Sen. Josh Hawley tore into Twitter yesterday, calling for a third party audit of their policies. When you have Republican senators calling for more regulation, clearly you've lost the thread. Or just not bribed enough senators, it's hard to say. Did I mention that we need to ban publicly held corporations making campaign contributions?
Slashdot Mirror
Right. That's a rational discussion about VoterID. That's great.
My point is that nothing about this is trolling. Slashdot is going off the rails.
Meeting are useful to the extent you are (1) meeting with the people who are going to solve the problem and (2) brainstorming about how you will solve the problem. All other meetings are needless.
I have had useful meeting with more than 4 people, but never when there were more than 4 people who spoke. A meeting with 1-2 people explaining their design and 2-3 senior engineers tearing it apart is not made useless by an audience.
1% a year across the board is actually pretty large. Don't confuse that with an individual's raise, or even raise after inflation, as that's normally baked into GDP growth. Wages keep up with GDP growth means the benefit from better productivity is actually being shared by workers (which hasn't much happened this century). Going above that means workers are clawing back their share. That will always be gradual, but 1%/year adds up fast.
Especially considering that 1% is probably mostly skewed towards wealthy people.
We're talking specifically about wages here, which don't skew disproportionately as some other measures. The actual salaries of CEOs etc don't amount to much in the scheme of things. Don't confuse wages with the massive stock grants usually given to CxOs.
That leaves 0.5% for the average person. No matter how you slice it, it sucks.
Compared to what? It's freaking awesome compared to the past 20 years of it getting smaller every year (though, again, by a very small % each year).
Well, both sides of this "discussion" have beautifully illustrated and reminded me of what happened to this site and why I left.
Eh? Fluffer and I are actually having a civil discussion. Slashdot too often degrades into name calling and flaming the days, to be sure, but this discussion isn't an instance of that.
As soon as one person says: I have an idea, why don't you let me organize some collective activity so we can do it better with less wasted effort, and here, chip in some of your collected resources / effort-payment tokens to help with it, and get some benefit out of it, they've basically re-invented capitalism.
No, that's pretty much any economic system, it's just a question of focus: economic efficiency for its own sake, or in service of some other goal.
The defining aspect of capitalism is that you acquire the right to direct the means of production through the ability to buy it. That has the feedback loop that if your way of doing things actually is more efficient, you get more money with which you might choose to acquire more authority over the means of production.
Contrast this with feudalism, where you acquire the right to direct the means of production through military conquest. You still have a feedback loop, as efficiency make you better at war, but there are also non-economic factors in military conquest, so the feedback is weakened.
Or contrast with socialism, where you acquire the right to direct the means of production through political favoritism. Again, there's still a weak feedback loop, as efficiency gives you money to spend in pursuit of political favoritism, but that's really just saying that with sufficiently government corruption, the distinction between socialism and capitalism collapses.
Capitalism has the strongest feedback loop, but by no means is the "natural" outcome, as humans fall into war or politics a lot easier than we do the hard work of improving efficiency.
Re: populism - One problem with it is that that populist leaders tend to exploit their superior grasp of psychological manipulation to amp up the anger by whatever rhetorical tricks will do the trick.
Re: people who oppose populism. One problem is that the wealthy elite tend to exploit their superior grasp of psychological manipulation to amp up the anger against populists by whatever rhetorical tricks will do the trick.
If people are vulnerable to manipulation, that can be used for any political aim. There's nothing special about populism.
Rationality and good information seem to be in extremely short supply in populist movements and leadership, as does general good will toward all of humanity, never mind the ecosystems / biosphere.
Err, what does isolationism vs globalism have to do with anything you just said? You can oppose unbounded trade/immigration and still support all of those things, or support unbounded trade/immigration specifically to harm those things (race to the bottom, make stuff where there are no environmental regs, etc).
You're making a lot of arbitrary connections, but those connection don't exist.
A bunch of name calling
When you're reduced to spewing invective at those who disagree with you, chances are you've been psychologically manipulated. Just in general, having more hate than rational arguments is a sure and certain sign of where your beliefs came from.
1% over GDP growth. I'm sure you can read complete sentences. Our GDP per capita is the closest thing to "each person's fair share" I know how to figure. If your wages grow faster than GDP, your share is growing; slower and it's shrinking.
1) Well there are many countries in the world where the top 10% or so live a "western standards" wealthy or upper middle class lifestyle and 90% essentially rot in a subsistence black/grey market economy.
But you're describing scenario 2, not scenario 1. Do we need those rich capitalists for prosperity? Or are we better off without them?
4) The voting power of the disenfranchised will eventually trump (no pun intended heh heh) that of the shrinking number of beneficiaries of the automation. The results of this are unpredictable but could polarize to: a) Uber-Trump Moron Populist Fascism lays waste to pretty much everything, or b) Sensible leader puts in good universal basic income program (and then is probably assassinated, unfortunately - see a)
You seem to think populism is a bad thing. You you also seem to think an elite doing well while the common man suffers is a bad thing. Yet, these are opposites. You can see my confusion.
5) Or of course, there WAS the French Revolution kind of scenario. Of course, after having decapitated the problem, you have to figure out what to do next.
What always happens next: a ruthless dictator kills everyone who orchestrated the revolution, takes over, and imposes a brutal regime on the people.
They are much nicer highways than the free ones. I enjoy nice things. But, hey, you do you.
Even if the tolls pay for the entire construction and maintenance of the highway, which I doubt, and even if the developers are paying to maintain the roads long after they finished building in that area, which I doubt, then there is still fire stations, police stations, garbage pickup, water, sewage.
What's your point, again? You'll notice even very capitalist places cover these things - no one is arguing about them.
Are you on health insurance? You realize if you get seriously ill, others plan members will be picking up the tab for you right?
Ideally, voluntary risk pooling on terms that I found acceptable when choosing my plan. In practice, some crap my employer picks for me, because the government broke the free market for wages during WWII and we're still doing things that way 70 years later for some reason.
But that's all very distant from the medical personnel and technology that save your wife's life twice. How we share risk is mostly orthagonal to actually providing care, unless you reduce the money to be made from technical progress in the field, and thus make progress slow. Your wide was save by medical professionals and technology, not by socialism. Your bank account was maybe saved by socialism? I still don't get your point.
Wages growing faster than GDP grows is great - it means workers are getting a disproportionate share of economic growth. 1% a year is all it takes. That was been the norm in the US last century during boom times, balanced by capital coming out ahead in rough times. But that broke this century - coincidentally around the time of the bank bailout, and for about the same amount (seriously: the couple trillion in missing wage growth equals the couple trillion we gave to bankers).
The trend won't continue. Gas prices are going up and the end of the Obama economy (which started in 2014) is coming.
Perhaps. I'm betting my future the other way, without much worry - but investing is always a risk, that's why it pays. I see you use the "associate good times with the nearest Democratic president" methodology for macroeconomics, just like the press.
You are too dumb to understand. But you can try.
I see you pay tolls for every single road you use.
All the highways near me are toll roads, yes. The local streets were paid for by the developers who put the neighborhoods in. What was your point, again?
It should vary by years of ever having worked, which some places try to do by age, or by a 90-day training wage rule (which is a perverse incentive).
Most people need to learn how to work at any job. How to show up on time, well groomed, and ready to work. It used to be that's what minimum wage jobs were: the first job for a teen entering the workforce, and a reason for a company to hire that teen despite the added burden.
So learn to eat laundry soap. Geez, do I have to solve all your problems?
100 years ago, food costs were more than half of an average family's budget. Wages were suppressed for most of this century because of deeply rooted political corruption, but are up significantly for the past couple of years. Hopefully that recent trend continues, and we don't get another $trillion hand-out to the rich like the bank bailout.
You seem to be missing the most obvious thing in the world: who will buy stuff?
Do you believe:
1) The wealthy will make stuff for themselves only using AI and robots, and won't need the rest of us, so the rest of us just have the same old economy as always without those parasites?
2) The wealthy will make stuff for themselves only using AI and robots, and since they're the only capable people in the world, the rest of us will starve to death because we can't manage anything without the elite?
3) The wealthy will make stuff for everyone, and then be amazed and surprised when they go bankrupt because no one has a job to buy that stuff? Since, you know, the successful owners of all the worlds largest businesses don't understand basic economics?
I can't even figure out how people think this dystopian apocalypse plays out.
My wife who was saved by "socialist medicine" twice begs to differ with you.
So your point is: other people paid for it? I mean, you have a real job AFAIK and could afford insurance, so ... you're bragging that you soaked the other guy for the cost?
"Yes voter id laws would help a lot." is unadulterated troll bait.
A great many people in the US agree that we need voter ID laws to stem the tide of vote fraud. Disagreeing with that does not make it a troll. This is exactly the problem Slashdot needs to get over. The groupthink is reaching Digg levels, and that's not a good thing.
The Slashdot mods muxt be on the bad crack today, because this is modded "Troll.
Modding based on political preference must stop, or Slashdot will die. "Troll" means "insincere post designed to provoke emotion" (like a GNAA post) not "disagrees with my politics". Slashdot is swirling the drain at this point, and it's our collective fault. We must do better.
Windows 98 killed my pappy!
Stop complaining about how windows worked 15 years ago.
As a sector, video game development is bad. It's not just EA. It's not just Blizzard. It's not just Ubisoft. It's every large game company. Of course, you can start your own games company, but then you'll find your boss is really demanding.
As far as we know, animals don't have a sense of identity, in the same way that people do. A person may be able to step outside themselves and think: "that's me, and my name is XYZ". Animals can't, and don't.
We don't know either way. Humans assume humans are special, but there's almost no science behind that.
If only there was enough good Netflix-original content to actually matter.
If everyone and their dog want to do it, then there's lots of cut-throat competition and employers know they can treat you like crap. My relative found this out in the clothing designer industry.
"And the man in the suit has just bought a new car with the profits he made on your dreams."
It's an old story.
OK, I get it. You just love censorship, as long as the other guys are censored. All else is rationalization.
"publicly held" means. It doesn't mean that it's owned by the general public or that it's publicly owned. It just means that anyone can buy shares.
It has been a key distinction in multiple SCOTUS rulings, including Citizens Unieted. A group of people, peaceably assembled, have a First Amendment right to political expression. in a partnership or tightly held corporation, the rights of the owners aren't reduced by the fact they've gotten together.
A publicly held corporation, OTOH, has no rights, constitutional or otherwise. It does not have the right to political expression. If corporate involvement is politics hurts the people, and it damn well does, it should be banned full stop.
This distinction is everything when it comes to cleaning up corruption in the US without destroying First Amendment rights. Partnerships and tightly held corporations retain the rights of their owners. Publicly held corporations never had any right in the first place.
it's their company, and by law (and Supreme Court precedent) they can do whatever the fuck they want
There are many thousands of pages if regulations that say otherwise. I believe regulations governing what companies can do are actually enacted at a faster rate than a single person can read. On the whole, we seem to be better off than that - you can point to exceptions where over- or mis-regulation is causing harm, of course, but those are exceptions.
Sen. Josh Hawley tore into Twitter yesterday, calling for a third party audit of their policies. When you have Republican senators calling for more regulation, clearly you've lost the thread. Or just not bribed enough senators, it's hard to say. Did I mention that we need to ban publicly held corporations making campaign contributions?