Oh, don't get me wrong, both is idea - the fewer people using the roads, the better for me. But come Paving Day, I'll be cruising the paved Earth in my atomic hypercar while those who chose the wrong path will be pit slaves.
I'm not so worried about regional "centralization", as delivery networks are pretty robust as long as you're using trucks (harder to send a train to a new warehouse, but even there there's some options). I'm working in a related area right now, and you'd be amazed how quickly you can shift to a new distribution warehouse when everything is already hyper-optimized for truck transport.
Crop monoculture is more of a worry - 80% of consumed calories come from corn (at some level of indirection). Even there, though, we grow significantly more corn than we consume, and burn the extra, so there is a margin.
... should choose a different example. Oddly, the only revolution in the past few centuries I can think of that ended well for the revolutionaries was the one that started with an attempt to confiscate guns from the people - that one's probably an outlier though,. Maybe go with an anti-globalism example instead, like India tossing the British out. Hmm, why do all the good examples involve tossing the British out?
Are you suggesting that supply and demand does not in fact apply?
I'm suggesting you're fighting the last war - last century's war. Those jobs that "went to China" are, for the most part, no longer in China. This century the jobs are "lost to robots", and that genie isn't going back in the bottle. As the man said: it's gonna steam engine, come steam engine time.
Which is why H1B visas and the like exist, to bring down wages for more than just unskilled labor.
Only if you believe the work can only be done in this country, which clearly isn't the case for IT work - that H1B guy is making a higher salary than he was before, and the work was getting outsourced to him either way. H1Bs don't much affect software developer salaries, BTW, it's the "IT" sector that's affected by all the abuse. But, let's face it, most IT is only barely skilled labor to begin with.
In any case, the total number of H1Bs is tiny in comparison to the unnumbered millions of migrant agricultural workers, and those that stay in the US and pay taxes on 6-figure salaries are certainly welcome.
perhaps you recall boom times, for example 1999
Don't confuse an unsustainable bubble with "boom times". Bubbles happen in a variety of industries, and the long term effect is always nasty.
Mass immigration allows the 1% to never share the pie. You can force them to share under threat of guillotines
The geniuses in the French revolution instituted price controls which led to mass starvation, and then the original revolutionaries meeting the guillotine themselves. Maybe you should
If you add more lanes, people will commute closer to their desired hour, or live closer to their desired location, so peak traffic won't change. But that's not the damn point The point is that people get to live closer and have better lives. Traffic is secondary.
So, based on your value system, why should their tax dollars go to build your road system?
Most the highways I use are tool roads, so, yeah. And most of the wear on roads is from heavy trucks, no cars - and everyone benefits from groceries being there to buy in the grocery store, so paying for that via taxes seems OK.
How is a bus (or train) driven by a government employee along a route chosen by the government on a schedule chosen by the government and subsidized by taxes not "the government"?
And, yes, you need wider surface streets as well as bigger highways.
Most software is designed to be easier to write and maintain and not to run fast. It also turns out that if you want software to run REALLY fast you do need to understand linear algebra..
In that domain, if you've moved beyond using the "Fortran Lobster", you're doing OK maintainability-wise. Thanks goodness for hardware acceleration (CUDA and othewise) for matrix operations, or that ancient Fortran code base would still be the fastest proven option.
You act like public transport is a goal in and of itself. Sorry, I want my own car, not transport at the pleasure of my government. Instead, build cities around everyone driving to work every day - accept reality. Just built freeways wide enough to solve the problems - sure, they may need to be 100 or 1000 lanes wide before congestion goes down, but hey, that's just concrete. And you get the freedom to go where you want. when you want, without the need for a government worker to take you there in a government vehicle.
The skilled trades are starving for workers in the US right now. Skilled manufacturing is starving for workers in the US right now. Efficiency doesn't always displace people, if the demand remains unsaturated.
Unskilled manufacturing had entirely gone to China etc. by the 90s. It has nothing to do with the wage stagnation in this century. Heck, those jobs have been leaving China this century, mostly because robots finally got cheaper.
Mass immigration doesn't help, but if you can do skilled work you're not really competing with the tide of migrant agricultural workers.
Unskilled and semi-skilled jobs are slowly going away, and never coming back. Some people just aren't smart enough to do skilled labor, and that's a huge problem for the world as a whole. But those who just need training? It's clearly in society's interest to provide it.
When going to school I got the impression that the kids taking vocational classes, were doing so because they were stupid. The teachers never directly stated that, but it was implied and we caught onto that. Warning to students if they want to be ditch diggers if they don't do better on the test, etc....
The punchline is that if you compare the lifetime earnings of a plumber and a dentist, the dentist doesn't pull ahead until around 40 (net of education costs). And if the plumber owns a small plumbing business (a "two truck shop"), just as the dentist must to be successful, the dentist may never pull ahead.
Vocational training really should be expanded for a lot of jobs even into more white collar "Smart People" jobs like Coding.
I couldn't agree more, though it would be a very different sort of school as there's a lot of abstract stuff to master, and you need reasonable written communications skills in English as well. But I do think it could be a 2-year program.
Being a good student does not mean you are a good sheep that a boss can herd. Businesses don't want to pay the cost of training but that has other effects; a shortage of qualified people, people who recognize an absence of commitment from that businesses.
Germany has solved this problem. Part of the class is actually working in the actual factory doing the actual job under supervision. It's a votech internship, and the company is taking no risks when they employ the guy (or not) later on.
The government has stepped-in, providing a form of corporate welfare. This has allowed businesses to enact more cost-cutting by demanding experience.
Yes. We should demand better from our government, or fire them. You may have noticed that non-establishment populist candidates, left and right, did OK in the recent election (Bernie wuz robbed, but he got a shocking amount of the popular vote). No reason to keep any incumbent who doesn't care about US workers.
What you say is true, but that's a much harder problem. In the mean time, there are plenty of people who are smart enough to retrain, and we have a growing economy, but we completely dropped the ball on connecting those two.
Where did the jobs go? It's hardly a mystery: automation.
The real question is, why is it so hard for displaced workers to train for better jobs - skilled trades and skilled manufacturing are very hungry for workers right now. The labor demand is there, what's up with the supply?
America is shockingly bad at adult vocational training? Where are the public schools for this? Where's the corporate participation? Companies don't want to (pay to) train people because they'll just jump to another company once trained, but that's a solvable problem, and companies really need to be involved in the training.
We have scam votech schools that charge a lot, and make empty promises of jobs. We need votech schools directly entwined with employers so that if you pas the class, you get the job, and you only worry about the cost if you change jobs soon after.
The US also kept it's industrial base intact - we just went with robot workers. Total US manufacturing has risen every decade. We do suck (really, embarrassingly suck) at training skilled manufacturing workers, and Germany is probably the best at that, but that has nothing to do with globalism - plenty of German cars made outside of Germany, Germany is as "pro open borders" as anyone, etc, etc.
By your logic, why don't people just move to Mexico or elsewhere if they can't afford rents in America?
You know there are vast retirement communities (for Americans) in places like Panama, right? Where you can actually live on the pittance Social Security pays, and the standard of living there is higher than most people had growing up in the 50s.
Also, you spoke of comparing for functionality but not social signaling. Thing is, there is functionality to social signaling.
Yes,but that's the crux of the problem. It's not about living better than we did before, it's about living better than your neighbor. There is no possible economic model that results in everyone living better than their neighbors, obviously. But the cost of status symbols relative to median wage can't really change, now, can it?
Numbers form the US census: median household income in 1970 was $7700 - that's $47,500 inflation-adjusted. Median household income 2016 was $57k.
The problem with wage stagnation started ~2000, but there were real gains form 1970-2000. Until recently, automation reliably brought higher standard of living.
The reason for the recent wage stagnation isn't much of a mystery: automation is replacing jobs faster than before, and America has no meaningful infrastructure to retrain people. Companies don't want to pay for training, as workers will just switch to another company one trained, and the government can't seem to do vocational training at all, let alone for free. Very solvable problems if anyone in political power gave a shit.
The number of rooms per house has roughly doubled, BTW.
You don't need human-equivalent to make stuff, nor to customize it. For example, we already have AI that "paints" portraits. Paying a large premium for a human to do it isn't going to work, because there will be far too few who can afford that premium.
There are three forces are work here.
One is, as soon as anything is mass produced very cheaply, it loses any social signalling value, so you need something new to fill that void. And people everywhere except the homeless and the upper class spend a lot on status symbols - look at what's spent on e.g. tennis shoes in poor neighborhoods. That won't change, so there will be an economy there.
The second is that as soon as you have more money because of mass produce cheap goods, you have some money to pay other people to do some work for you, even if you're not exactly rich - it's not the rich who switched to fast food once food became so cheap. There was an explosion in fast food jobs because even the very poor are buying prepared food. I can't guess what the next thing like that will be, but there will be an economy there.
The third is: only a human-equivalent AI will be creative, sort of by definition. The point of a painted portrait is where it differs from a photograph with a filter - the part where the artist makes you look more like you imagine yourself - but portraits are a bad example as that's highly skilled work. There will be plenty of new service jobs requiring a touch of creativity.
Because all the displaced workers would have money to pay for customized junk?
Yes, exactly, because all those displaced workers will be paying each other for that customized junk. That's all an economy is - people providing each other what we collectively need. If the basics for survival are nearly labor-free, we'll have plenty of time to provide other things for one another,
You're acting like there's a cabal of a dozen big industrialists who provide all the jobs, and the world will end because those bastards will stop providing jobs. But jobs come from people's desire to have more (plus anyone with the competence to run a business, which is a somewhat rare skill admittedly). There's lots of question what the jobs will be, but none as to whether people will want more.
Also, this line of argument requires AI to not keep getting more human-like so that it crowds out the humans
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, don't get me wrong, both is idea - the fewer people using the roads, the better for me. But come Paving Day, I'll be cruising the paved Earth in my atomic hypercar while those who chose the wrong path will be pit slaves.
I'm not so worried about regional "centralization", as delivery networks are pretty robust as long as you're using trucks (harder to send a train to a new warehouse, but even there there's some options). I'm working in a related area right now, and you'd be amazed how quickly you can shift to a new distribution warehouse when everything is already hyper-optimized for truck transport.
Crop monoculture is more of a worry - 80% of consumed calories come from corn (at some level of indirection). Even there, though, we grow significantly more corn than we consume, and burn the extra, so there is a margin.
... should choose a different example. Oddly, the only revolution in the past few centuries I can think of that ended well for the revolutionaries was the one that started with an attempt to confiscate guns from the people - that one's probably an outlier though,. Maybe go with an anti-globalism example instead, like India tossing the British out. Hmm, why do all the good examples involve tossing the British out?
Are you suggesting that supply and demand does not in fact apply?
I'm suggesting you're fighting the last war - last century's war. Those jobs that "went to China" are, for the most part, no longer in China. This century the jobs are "lost to robots", and that genie isn't going back in the bottle. As the man said: it's gonna steam engine, come steam engine time.
Which is why H1B visas and the like exist, to bring down wages for more than just unskilled labor.
Only if you believe the work can only be done in this country, which clearly isn't the case for IT work - that H1B guy is making a higher salary than he was before, and the work was getting outsourced to him either way. H1Bs don't much affect software developer salaries, BTW, it's the "IT" sector that's affected by all the abuse. But, let's face it, most IT is only barely skilled labor to begin with.
In any case, the total number of H1Bs is tiny in comparison to the unnumbered millions of migrant agricultural workers, and those that stay in the US and pay taxes on 6-figure salaries are certainly welcome.
perhaps you recall boom times, for example 1999
Don't confuse an unsustainable bubble with "boom times". Bubbles happen in a variety of industries, and the long term effect is always nasty.
Mass immigration allows the 1% to never share the pie. You can force them to share under threat of guillotines
The geniuses in the French revolution instituted price controls which led to mass starvation, and then the original revolutionaries meeting the guillotine themselves. Maybe you should
The alternative to efficiency in food production and distribution is starvation.
If you add more lanes, people will commute closer to their desired hour, or live closer to their desired location, so peak traffic won't change. But that's not the damn point The point is that people get to live closer and have better lives. Traffic is secondary.
So, based on your value system, why should their tax dollars go to build your road system?
Most the highways I use are tool roads, so, yeah. And most of the wear on roads is from heavy trucks, no cars - and everyone benefits from groceries being there to buy in the grocery store, so paying for that via taxes seems OK.
How is a bus (or train) driven by a government employee along a route chosen by the government on a schedule chosen by the government and subsidized by taxes not "the government"?
And, yes, you need wider surface streets as well as bigger highways.
Plenty of urban centers are not on either coast.
Most software is designed to be easier to write and maintain and not to run fast. It also turns out that if you want software to run REALLY fast you do need to understand linear algebra..
In that domain, if you've moved beyond using the "Fortran Lobster", you're doing OK maintainability-wise. Thanks goodness for hardware acceleration (CUDA and othewise) for matrix operations, or that ancient Fortran code base would still be the fastest proven option.
You act like public transport is a goal in and of itself. Sorry, I want my own car, not transport at the pleasure of my government. Instead, build cities around everyone driving to work every day - accept reality. Just built freeways wide enough to solve the problems - sure, they may need to be 100 or 1000 lanes wide before congestion goes down, but hey, that's just concrete. And you get the freedom to go where you want. when you want, without the need for a government worker to take you there in a government vehicle.
The skilled trades are starving for workers in the US right now. Skilled manufacturing is starving for workers in the US right now. Efficiency doesn't always displace people, if the demand remains unsaturated.
Unskilled manufacturing had entirely gone to China etc. by the 90s. It has nothing to do with the wage stagnation in this century. Heck, those jobs have been leaving China this century, mostly because robots finally got cheaper.
Mass immigration doesn't help, but if you can do skilled work you're not really competing with the tide of migrant agricultural workers.
Unskilled and semi-skilled jobs are slowly going away, and never coming back. Some people just aren't smart enough to do skilled labor, and that's a huge problem for the world as a whole. But those who just need training? It's clearly in society's interest to provide it.
When going to school I got the impression that the kids taking vocational classes, were doing so because they were stupid. The teachers never directly stated that, but it was implied and we caught onto that. Warning to students if they want to be ditch diggers if they don't do better on the test, etc....
The punchline is that if you compare the lifetime earnings of a plumber and a dentist, the dentist doesn't pull ahead until around 40 (net of education costs). And if the plumber owns a small plumbing business (a "two truck shop"), just as the dentist must to be successful, the dentist may never pull ahead.
Vocational training really should be expanded for a lot of jobs even into more white collar "Smart People" jobs like Coding.
I couldn't agree more, though it would be a very different sort of school as there's a lot of abstract stuff to master, and you need reasonable written communications skills in English as well. But I do think it could be a 2-year program.
... if you pas the class, you get the job ...
Being a good student does not mean you are a good sheep that a boss can herd. Businesses don't want to pay the cost of training but that has other effects; a shortage of qualified people, people who recognize an absence of commitment from that businesses.
Germany has solved this problem. Part of the class is actually working in the actual factory doing the actual job under supervision. It's a votech internship, and the company is taking no risks when they employ the guy (or not) later on.
The government has stepped-in, providing a form of corporate welfare. This has allowed businesses to enact more cost-cutting by demanding experience.
Yes. We should demand better from our government, or fire them. You may have noticed that non-establishment populist candidates, left and right, did OK in the recent election (Bernie wuz robbed, but he got a shocking amount of the popular vote). No reason to keep any incumbent who doesn't care about US workers.
You seem to be talking about tech. I was talking about plumbers, welders, skilled manufacturing workers, etc. Not gonna outsource those jobs to India.
What does that have to do with someone becoming a plumber, or doing skilled manufacturing?
What you say is true, but that's a much harder problem. In the mean time, there are plenty of people who are smart enough to retrain, and we have a growing economy, but we completely dropped the ball on connecting those two.
Ha, you peasants think you're smart, but I've already angled my air vent so that he who dealt it smelt it.
Where did the jobs go? It's hardly a mystery: automation.
The real question is, why is it so hard for displaced workers to train for better jobs - skilled trades and skilled manufacturing are very hungry for workers right now. The labor demand is there, what's up with the supply?
America is shockingly bad at adult vocational training? Where are the public schools for this? Where's the corporate participation? Companies don't want to (pay to) train people because they'll just jump to another company once trained, but that's a solvable problem, and companies really need to be involved in the training.
We have scam votech schools that charge a lot, and make empty promises of jobs. We need votech schools directly entwined with employers so that if you pas the class, you get the job, and you only worry about the cost if you change jobs soon after.
The US also kept it's industrial base intact - we just went with robot workers. Total US manufacturing has risen every decade. We do suck (really, embarrassingly suck) at training skilled manufacturing workers, and Germany is probably the best at that, but that has nothing to do with globalism - plenty of German cars made outside of Germany, Germany is as "pro open borders" as anyone, etc, etc.
OK, but aside form the roads, public order, and the aqueduct, what great ideas has this jerk ever come up with?
By your logic, why don't people just move to Mexico or elsewhere if they can't afford rents in America?
You know there are vast retirement communities (for Americans) in places like Panama, right? Where you can actually live on the pittance Social Security pays, and the standard of living there is higher than most people had growing up in the 50s.
Also, you spoke of comparing for functionality but not social signaling. Thing is, there is functionality to social signaling.
Yes,but that's the crux of the problem. It's not about living better than we did before, it's about living better than your neighbor. There is no possible economic model that results in everyone living better than their neighbors, obviously. But the cost of status symbols relative to median wage can't really change, now, can it?
Numbers form the US census: median household income in 1970 was $7700 - that's $47,500 inflation-adjusted. Median household income 2016 was $57k.
The problem with wage stagnation started ~2000, but there were real gains form 1970-2000. Until recently, automation reliably brought higher standard of living.
The reason for the recent wage stagnation isn't much of a mystery: automation is replacing jobs faster than before, and America has no meaningful infrastructure to retrain people. Companies don't want to pay for training, as workers will just switch to another company one trained, and the government can't seem to do vocational training at all, let alone for free. Very solvable problems if anyone in political power gave a shit.
The number of rooms per house has roughly doubled, BTW.
You don't need human-equivalent to make stuff, nor to customize it. For example, we already have AI that "paints" portraits. Paying a large premium for a human to do it isn't going to work, because there will be far too few who can afford that premium.
There are three forces are work here.
One is, as soon as anything is mass produced very cheaply, it loses any social signalling value, so you need something new to fill that void. And people everywhere except the homeless and the upper class spend a lot on status symbols - look at what's spent on e.g. tennis shoes in poor neighborhoods. That won't change, so there will be an economy there.
The second is that as soon as you have more money because of mass produce cheap goods, you have some money to pay other people to do some work for you, even if you're not exactly rich - it's not the rich who switched to fast food once food became so cheap. There was an explosion in fast food jobs because even the very poor are buying prepared food. I can't guess what the next thing like that will be, but there will be an economy there.
The third is: only a human-equivalent AI will be creative, sort of by definition. The point of a painted portrait is where it differs from a photograph with a filter - the part where the artist makes you look more like you imagine yourself - but portraits are a bad example as that's highly skilled work. There will be plenty of new service jobs requiring a touch of creativity.
Because all the displaced workers would have money to pay for customized junk?
Yes, exactly, because all those displaced workers will be paying each other for that customized junk. That's all an economy is - people providing each other what we collectively need. If the basics for survival are nearly labor-free, we'll have plenty of time to provide other things for one another,
You're acting like there's a cabal of a dozen big industrialists who provide all the jobs, and the world will end because those bastards will stop providing jobs. But jobs come from people's desire to have more (plus anyone with the competence to run a business, which is a somewhat rare skill admittedly). There's lots of question what the jobs will be, but none as to whether people will want more.
Also, this line of argument requires AI to not keep getting more human-like so that it crowds out the humans
Aaaaand we're back to the singularity.