Don't forget the people who don't mind paying for things if necessary, but find the whole concept of advertising obnoxious and revel in the magic of technology to expunge them from our computers. If that screws over companies who insist on a business model that is predicated on insulting their customers, all the better! They're insisting we consent to the insult and are whining that we have the freedom to refuse while still legally consuming their product. Fuck 'em if they can't deal. No one ever apologized to me for how the new economy has made finding good jobs harder; why should I feel sorry for those who believe I have an obligation to keep their profit stream afloat? This is all fair within the logic of the free market, isn't it?
Not radical, just an insistence on seeing this in purely moralistic terms without consideration for pragmatism or the possibility of alternative moral viewpoints. That said, you're advocating something that you yourself find cruel. So I don't see how you can make a moral argument for it: Couldn't you just as easily argue that the welfare cheats deserve the right to be cruel based on some arbitrary justification that only serves to obscure the actual rationale of "because I have the power to get away with it"?
If you choose to read the site they built with their hard work, you choose to live by their business model. The same goes if you run a store and someone comes in. They can't just shoplift and say that the store's "shitty business model is not my problem." Get a clue.
One of these things is legal; the other is not. There are reasons for that. Did you know that?
You seem to have lost track of the topic of the article, which was that a CEO himself raised the wages of his lowest-paid employees. Are you saying there's something entitled about his running a business according to his values? Or do you actually have a problem with his values but are too... something (insecure? incapable?) to actually mount a coherent moral argument against them?
The housing price stuff is a related but separate issue. Lots of NIMBYs causing that issue are otherwise quite conservative. And there are at least a few on the left with supply solutions to the problem caused by demand. (Or we could of course go the route of public housing with standardized, non-market-based prices, but something tells me you wouldn't be a fan of that bit of hard-nosed realism.)
I would add to your awesome post that maternity/paternity leave compensation encourages the right people to be having kids — that is, those with the means to raise children comfortably, who are most likely to make them feel wanted and to be able to fill their lives with education and enrichment. We as a society want people to be choosing to have kids when they are best able to provide for them, which makes incentives like this even more sensible.
I guess I could be misunderstanding the semantics here, but when I saw the word "across" I assumed they were referring to a land-based, not coastal, migration. Even if that's not what they were intending to say, isn't it weird that they wouldn't make reference to the fact that the two main competing theories describe very different migration patterns, the only similarity between them being that they took advantage of the proximity of the far eastern end of Asia to modern-day Alaska?
We shouldn't feel guilty about slavery, but we ought to, I don't know, not necessarily feel guilt but at least think twice about how those of us in the middle class have benefited, and continue to benefit, from the shitstorm of not-quite-giving-equal-rights that proceeded for a hundred years after, and then for our government saying "OK! Equal rights for all! We're off the hook for any damage caused that may persist as a result of lingering racism and the past 350 years of fucking you in the ass!" right around the time we determined that Martin Luther King Jr. was a really awesome guy. Which, incidentally, roughly coincided with his getting shot in the head.
There was a government policy in the 20th century, redlining, that was really fucked up and was instituted to propagate the kind of segregation that the white majority deemed necessary after the 13th Amendment let far more black people free than they were, by and large, at all comfortable with; some of the victims of redlining are still alive today. And even if we account for the fact that most people forced into shitty, segregated neighborhoods are dead, if we have our eyes open about this shit we still have to reconcile ourselves with the connection between government-sponsored segregation and the existence of de facto black- and Hispanic-only neighborhoods today, the ones that started decaying when black people were restricted by law from getting anywhere near the same kind of income that whites got, the ones that white people suddenly decided they weren't touching with a ten-foot pole as soon as they became integrated. It was there that generational accumulation of wealth was sliced in the Achilles tendons. That's what we're still dealing with today, and the problems with criminality, drug use, broken homes, and what have you in the ghettos are inextricably tied up in the poverty that exists there. The fact that a sizable minority of blacks have pulled themselves up from that (or that African immigrants have come here from a vastly different background and social capital, and prospered) has nothing to do with the direct lineage of not giving a fuck, and then not giving much of a fuck (but more than before), about poor black Americans on the part of American society as a whole that persists to this day.
The article says there's scholarly agreement about the most important migration being across the Bering land bridge, which is completely bogus if we're talking about the current century: see Wikipedia for a briefing on the contemporary debate. Fuckin' amateurs.
Why are you talking about the economics of advertising? I wasn't talking about economics. I was talking about how we determine what benefits society or not, or to put it another way how we decide what we value. Trade, pricing, and all those other economic variables reflect the value that we assign via other means (as well as that which is impacted by economic factors).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you are thinking that you can reduce all questions of societal value to economic equations. If that's the case, where the hell did you get this idea and why are you assuming other people agree with it?
His belief system is based on the notion that the government rules and fuck individualism.
If you have to stoop to telling people that their belief system is some absurd caricature of the politics you disagree with, most people will usually interpret that to mean that you don't know how to form a coherent argument. There are lots of free-market cases against government regulation. Why don't you go learn about them before you continue commenting about politics?
Or they can use Uber/Lyft, because we have laws that say that if you get to have a business and make profits, you don't get to cherry-pick as to who you provide service to, even if you have to spend some money to do so.
Or, using your logic, we can just as easily deny Uber and Lyft the right to do business. Users of said services are not the center of the universe. What did they do before Uber/Lyft came along? They can keep doing the same thing.
It is pretty much the only way to fund "free" services of all kinds that have large reach but no direct income. Radio, TV, and most websites would not exist but for it (...)
Even if we take this as a given, why are you then taking it as a given that it's ultimately beneficial to have free commercial media but also have advertising? Not just the media and ads you deem good, but the entire system we're describing. There's nothing inherently worthy about these products — they're just means of making money which may or may not be beneficial to society. And of course that's not counting the possibility of commercial media that's funded in ways other than advertising, or non-commercial media funded by government or a charitable foundation or what have you.
You're acting as though reality as it exists now is the only form in which it could exist. The whole point of having discussions about the world we live in is so that we can decide what, if any, changes might make a better world. And you can bet that advertisers and media companies are already trying to do just that! What do you have against exploring options? Are you afraid that you might not be able to defend the status quo if we didn't assume it's the way things have to be?
Speaking of correlation, has anyone else noticed that Randall shows on those maps that Vermont has a disproportionate number of fans of furry porn? (And maybe also Austin? And a random patch of desert in southern Arizona?)
Ha! You are reminding me that I've been on the West Coast for too goddamn long... this native New Yorker (by birth, at least) is quite eager to be moving to Boston next month but is still in the process of mental recalibration.
The reason I haven't put forth a cohesive position is that I don't have one. This whole issue is too tied in with my field of study that I'm only just starting to delve into. Honestly, the beast that we call global capitalism, that by turns ennobles us and enslaves us, is too fucking complicated for me at this point to have much of an opinion on whatsoever. Even if I see all the good it's done for the world and acknowledge the absence of any real alternative as a global system (individual states' macroeconomic policies being another thing entirely) that doesn't excuse all the fucked-up things that have been done in the name of profit with the complicity of those who should have known better. And the weird-ass morality you hear from some people about what the market dictates we should or shouldn't do or value, I don't even know where to start with that. The free market is a tool, it's something we created to allow economic freedom and bring wealth within reach of the middle class, it's not something that in itself creates meaning in our lives. This whole argument that presumes that productivity and wealth ought to be something other than means to an end ignores, in my view, part of what liberal democracy was created for, to enable us to decide more fully for ourselves individually what we are living for.
But in any case, I'm coming at this from an academic, not political, angle, so I don't know how much more I have to say here. The article was an interesting analysis from that perspective, and I can't sympathize with the overwhelming reaction on here — both in support of it and in denial of it — of a politicized nature. Fuck that. Let's not waste the benefits of the intellectual world that the fall of the aristocracy enabled us in the Third Estate to enter. There will be time to take action, and there are plenty of people champing at the bit to do so. Let's give ourselves the opportunity to explore our options thoroughly first.
Unless you're willing to go back into fields and harvest wheat by hand... I don't want to hear this luddite shit.
Man, it's weird as shit to see this huge-ass reply that is not only responding to a point of view that I don't hold... but is responding to a post that lacks any point of view on these matters entirely! WTF?!
I mean, I get that you seem to want to soapbox, and I guess that's part of what Slashdot's for, but am I right in thinking that you're trying to argue against me in particular? I think you've got the wrong guy. I'm not getting into my views on inequality or opportunity right now. And I'm straining to work out any consistent, widely held viewpoint it might be that you're arguing against.
But since you have taken the time to reply to me, may I suggest that you chill out a little? Maybe try reading some modern historians on the left (not suggesting anything too far left, just the left end of those in favor of free markets here) to get to know a little better an actual argument in opposition to yours. I don't think the more common ones are as antithetical to your perspective as you think they are. And I certainly don't disagree with you as much as you seem to think I do, but you're not doing yourself or your allies any favors huffing and puffing like this.
To which I would say that some forms of economic systems haven't lasted 500 years, either. This idea that we (Who's this "we", anyway? The West? The industrialized world?) have been doing things more or less the same way for 500 years is absurd. I mean, just to pick one example, one-sixth of the entire wealth of the United States 155 years ago was legally owned human beings! We've had to keep changing things, thank God. And when you do that, you change how labor is divided and compensated. The change has been continuous — the more closely you analyze it, the more this solid trend line looks fuzzy and jagged-edged.
I'm not challenging the notion that we've had continuous economic growth on a worldwide basis for centuries, nor am I challenging the concomitant drastic increase in standard of living that's accompanied it, even in the poorest places (well, some of them, at least). I agree fully on that point, as well as on that many countries have shot themselves in the feet. And if we're going to talk about faith in the future, I have enormous faith in humanity and the ability of us to come together and work our way out of the messes we've been dragging ourselves into lately.
But that's not relevant to any discussion about what we can and can't know, which is what I came into this discussion to bring up. I'm just saying that this notion that wage labor is going to continue functioning in the same manner as in the last 150 years until kingdom come is patently absurd. And what goes along with that notion is that the changes that this future system will bring are unknowable. The best we can do is observe any changes from previous trends, which is precisely what the authors of the linked study have done. I don't see how prognosticating on the basis of that study would be useful, but nor do I see how assuming that this doesn't indicate a change in labor distribution, full stop, is productive or reasonable either.
There are ways to be positive about the future of business without relentless optimism about the labor systems we have in place. If anything, I personally welcome a world with greater automation, in the hopes that it will accelerate the pace of change in macroeconomic policy and make for a more equitable world. But again, that's just a bit of faith on my part. None of us can claim to know with any certainty — certainly economists are no exception!
I know this to be true for several reasons. First of all, countries that have more tech get more jobs, not the other way around, in the long term.
This is in the present. You don't know what will happen in the future. Your certainty is what I'm saying is unsupportable.
Second of all, most of what I wrote is not simplistic logic it is instead obvious facts.
Obvious to whom?
The basic problem is that you think there are X jobs available.
I don't recall saying a damn thing about what I believe; I was just telling you that your argument didn't hold water and was simplistic. Facile. Based on stating personal beliefs as "facts" and then telling me they're "obvious" when I challenge the whole epistemic basis of your assertions.
I know that (...)
How do you know anything beyond your own inherently limited personal experience? You haven't formed a cogent argument yet based on empirical evidence.
There are ways to make arguments that work. You aren't using them. That's my point.
We may end up all working for the government on government funding terraforming jobs (except for a few people owning robot based businesses), but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.
And that wouldn't be within the scope of current normative capitalism, which doesn't plot out a course as to how to do that. You're going off into unknown territory here! Once you're willing to entertain the notion of a world operating under different worlds from this one, you're being inconsistent if you refuse to entertain other notions about how economic rules might change.
Again, I repeat the basic concept - that you may think is simple - but is obviously true to me and most of the rest of the world.
The rest of the world. Really.
Human beings are greedy sons of bitches
Speak for yourself!
(Not saying that greed doesn't exist, just that your posts are full of so many assertions that the world works just the way you say it does and that most people agree with you. It's as if you've never entertained the notion that your personal experiences and common sense could ever have led you to an understanding of the world that's inaccurate!)
The industrial revolution is the period in which many, many tasks formally done be humans began to be done by machine. And the standard of living improved by an order of magnitude.
The Industrial Revolution started what, 200 years ago? History didn't end after that. There were changes that led up to the outbreak of automation, and society has been changing continuously since then. There's no reason to believe there won't be another revolution that will again change a bunch of the rules we've so audaciously set forth.
You mention price elasticity, an economics term? Consider that that discipline was first brought into being in the 18th century. And then consider how long civilization existed before then and how many times before then people thought they had everything more or less figured out. (Well, to be fair, that whole mindset seems to have gotten a lot more prevalent from the 19th century on, but people regardless didn't perceive themselves as profoundly ignorant of the way society worked.) These understandings we've built are predicated on global markets functioning in roughly the manner they function now. Our economic models break otherwise because we've never had global markets on this scale before so we've got no alternate method birthed from a different economic milieu with which to compare our existing understanding of how employment and trade work. And that's not even getting into macroeconomics...
People have been profoundly certain of the inevitability and absoluteness of many, many things over the ages. Many times they've been wrong. It's a little premature to state with such confidence that our wage system isn't going to wind up alongside the shattered statue of Ozymandias, half-buried under the desert sands (enlarged by climate change, naturally).
We have no reason to believe that capitalism will endure until the human race ceases to exist as a species. We also have to acknowledge that if humanity will eventually stop being capitalist in the way that we understand it today, that capitalist economics contains no way to predict its own demise. And as a result, we can't use orthodox capitalist theory to prove the continued validity of the orthodox system it both describes and espouses. That's circular! The future is mired in uncertainty. We have every reason to expect that many fundamental rules of economics will be broken at some point — it's just a question of when.
You skipped over, or didn't respond to, the part of my post that already responded to that:
all the models we have to predict future behavior are entirely based on what has happened in the past and by definition can't account for events in the future that defy current models
History doesn't repeat itself, even if certain parts have an awful lot of (usually superficial) similarities. And I should add that the Roman Empire lasted, in one form or another, a hell of a lot longer than 500 years. Agriculture was the primary form of wealth generation for the most powerful nations of the world even longer than any one empire. And yet both of these are long since consigned to the history books.
Or to put it another way: While we might not be able to know definitively that anything is changing permanently right now, there's certainly no cause for this certainty that it's going to stay the same.
and I'll say it again - technology INCREASES jobs, never decreases it - over the long term.
What do you have to back up that assertion (especially that bold "never" part)? Is it just that you know this is true and the whole world is supposed to trust you? Even though all the models we have to predict future behavior are entirely based on what has happened in the past and by definition can't account for events in the future that defy current models? What about your apparently trenchant knowledge of "the nature of mankind"? How could you possibly be able to support any kind of summation of what human beings are like independent of the societies in which they live — never mind that you yourself are the product of a society that has some pretty set ideologies on work, value, wealth, social class, innovation, and so on which undoubtedly influence the range of human behavioral difference you have been able to observe regarding these things that you are making claims about!
Come on, man! I know this is Slashdot and you were trying to post early, but your analysis is just SO simplistic!
Once your personal collection busts a couple hundred gigs you hardly know what you have anyway.
I understand your sentiment here, but if you lose track of what you have after only a couple hundred gigs I can't help thinking you might be doing it wrong.
But it's two-year-old level childish thinking at it's finest to think you can get all the free and subsidized stuff out here in the world without the advertising that pays for it.
You had a perfectly reasonable argument up until this point, upon which you essentially said you don't see any reasonable way to hold an opinion opposite to yours. Why the defensiveness? Do you honestly believe the industry that pays your living is defensible, or are you just looking to make yourself feel better by arguing for it and then preemptively shutting down debate?
Or, to put it another way, are you trying to persuade those of us who disagree with you, or was the purpose of your comment more to persuade yourself?
Wow. I'm not arguing against your argument, I'm arguing against your argumentation. I'm arguing against your epistemology; I'm questioning the depth of your metacognition.
(1) I think (...)
(2) I think, (...)
Even if I'm wrong about (2), I think (...)
See how much you talk about yourself, as if your thoughts automatically matter when you're communicating with other people? That's what I'm looking at. Of course we all want to be listened to. Of course we all believe we have something to offer. But at a certain point you cross a line and sound self-important or self-congratulatory or self-righteous or self-something else unsavory.
If I sound defensive, it's because someone else, namely this researcher, has "gone on the offensive" against a certain set of characteristics or behaviors or choices, many of which match some of the choices and behaviors I see in myself. Naturally, if you do not fall within Zimbardo's tartgeting reticule, you would have no reason to be defensive. I do, and I do.
You're making a huge assumption here, that sounding defensive is natural or unavoidable in certain circumstances. While I'm not the target of Zimbardo's criticism, there are plenty of issues for which I am in the minority and can read articles attacking my way of life. I don't take it as a given in those cases that I'll get defensive. Nor do I think my defensiveness is defensible if that's how I react. I think I can do better than that. So can everyone else.
Now, let me be clear. Under normal circumstances, I do not go around living my life by telling people who've made different choices than me that they're wrong, or that they're wasting resources, or making problems worse, or whatever.
How you treat other people about their lifestyles is beside the point. This is about your lifestyle, your defensiveness, what you feel entitled to, and the extent to which any of these deserve respect.
These two long posts paint a picture of someone who thinks very highly of his own choices and opinions. You, however, like anyone else in the world, do not have any objective reason to believe that you have made the right decisions. In fact, the extent to which you don't choose to engage me here — but instead repeat your assertions about your fixed thoughts and your perceived entitlements — implies the kind of inflexibility of mind that keeps people from being able to make the right decisions. We have to entertain the notion that some ways of being might be worse than others. If we open ourselves up to that possibility, then we open the possibility also that we are the ones doing the wrong thing, and if that's the case, the fact that a given lifestyle is our own means nothing morally.
Who the fuck is Philip Zimbardo to tell me that my life choices are wrong?
Who are you to tell the Internet that your life choices are right? I don't mean in the legal sense, I mean in the moral sense. You sound like you have an awfully large chip on your shoulder. Why are you so convinced that your morals are defensible that you can't expose any kind of interrogation whatsoever into your reasoning that led you to your conclusions, just a metric fuckton of defensiveness?
A lot of us here have unusual life setups in one fashion or another. There's no reason for that to automatically entail defensiveness. If you can't tell that that's how your post comes off, maybe you should take a closer look at your assertion that you're "socially intelligent," and where your abnormally high level of certainty comes from.
And what's with your obsession with children, anyway? Some of us have relationships without kids, living above our means, or the risk of STDs. Maybe you should have a little more contact with those of us who don't play MMOs, so that if nothing else you don't sound like you have any idea of how people different from you actually live.
Make them get recognized as a legitimate transport service and play by the rules dammit!
The rules aren't just about those legitimate concerns you discussed. They're also about having proper insurance and not skirting IRS rules by categorizing employees as independent contractors. I'd also like to see some accountability on the part of Uber for negligent drivers — some indication that they're trying to profit off of actually improving people's lives, rather than more of that same greed you see in the taxi companies.
(It would also help your case if you showed you knew the historical reasons why taxi medallions were introduced, and the current rationales for maintaining the system apart from pure rent-seeking.)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the people who don't mind paying for things if necessary, but find the whole concept of advertising obnoxious and revel in the magic of technology to expunge them from our computers. If that screws over companies who insist on a business model that is predicated on insulting their customers, all the better! They're insisting we consent to the insult and are whining that we have the freedom to refuse while still legally consuming their product. Fuck 'em if they can't deal. No one ever apologized to me for how the new economy has made finding good jobs harder; why should I feel sorry for those who believe I have an obligation to keep their profit stream afloat? This is all fair within the logic of the free market, isn't it?
Not radical, just an insistence on seeing this in purely moralistic terms without consideration for pragmatism or the possibility of alternative moral viewpoints. That said, you're advocating something that you yourself find cruel. So I don't see how you can make a moral argument for it: Couldn't you just as easily argue that the welfare cheats deserve the right to be cruel based on some arbitrary justification that only serves to obscure the actual rationale of "because I have the power to get away with it"?
If you choose to read the site they built with their hard work, you choose to live by their business model. The same goes if you run a store and someone comes in. They can't just shoplift and say that the store's "shitty business model is not my problem." Get a clue.
One of these things is legal; the other is not. There are reasons for that. Did you know that?
You seem to have lost track of the topic of the article, which was that a CEO himself raised the wages of his lowest-paid employees. Are you saying there's something entitled about his running a business according to his values? Or do you actually have a problem with his values but are too... something (insecure? incapable?) to actually mount a coherent moral argument against them?
The housing price stuff is a related but separate issue. Lots of NIMBYs causing that issue are otherwise quite conservative. And there are at least a few on the left with supply solutions to the problem caused by demand. (Or we could of course go the route of public housing with standardized, non-market-based prices, but something tells me you wouldn't be a fan of that bit of hard-nosed realism.)
I would add to your awesome post that maternity/paternity leave compensation encourages the right people to be having kids — that is, those with the means to raise children comfortably, who are most likely to make them feel wanted and to be able to fill their lives with education and enrichment. We as a society want people to be choosing to have kids when they are best able to provide for them, which makes incentives like this even more sensible.
I guess I could be misunderstanding the semantics here, but when I saw the word "across" I assumed they were referring to a land-based, not coastal, migration. Even if that's not what they were intending to say, isn't it weird that they wouldn't make reference to the fact that the two main competing theories describe very different migration patterns, the only similarity between them being that they took advantage of the proximity of the far eastern end of Asia to modern-day Alaska?
We shouldn't feel guilty about slavery, but we ought to, I don't know, not necessarily feel guilt but at least think twice about how those of us in the middle class have benefited, and continue to benefit, from the shitstorm of not-quite-giving-equal-rights that proceeded for a hundred years after, and then for our government saying "OK! Equal rights for all! We're off the hook for any damage caused that may persist as a result of lingering racism and the past 350 years of fucking you in the ass!" right around the time we determined that Martin Luther King Jr. was a really awesome guy. Which, incidentally, roughly coincided with his getting shot in the head.
There was a government policy in the 20th century, redlining, that was really fucked up and was instituted to propagate the kind of segregation that the white majority deemed necessary after the 13th Amendment let far more black people free than they were, by and large, at all comfortable with; some of the victims of redlining are still alive today. And even if we account for the fact that most people forced into shitty, segregated neighborhoods are dead, if we have our eyes open about this shit we still have to reconcile ourselves with the connection between government-sponsored segregation and the existence of de facto black- and Hispanic-only neighborhoods today, the ones that started decaying when black people were restricted by law from getting anywhere near the same kind of income that whites got, the ones that white people suddenly decided they weren't touching with a ten-foot pole as soon as they became integrated. It was there that generational accumulation of wealth was sliced in the Achilles tendons. That's what we're still dealing with today, and the problems with criminality, drug use, broken homes, and what have you in the ghettos are inextricably tied up in the poverty that exists there. The fact that a sizable minority of blacks have pulled themselves up from that (or that African immigrants have come here from a vastly different background and social capital, and prospered) has nothing to do with the direct lineage of not giving a fuck, and then not giving much of a fuck (but more than before), about poor black Americans on the part of American society as a whole that persists to this day.
The article says there's scholarly agreement about the most important migration being across the Bering land bridge, which is completely bogus if we're talking about the current century: see Wikipedia for a briefing on the contemporary debate. Fuckin' amateurs.
Why are you talking about the economics of advertising? I wasn't talking about economics. I was talking about how we determine what benefits society or not, or to put it another way how we decide what we value. Trade, pricing, and all those other economic variables reflect the value that we assign via other means (as well as that which is impacted by economic factors).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you are thinking that you can reduce all questions of societal value to economic equations. If that's the case, where the hell did you get this idea and why are you assuming other people agree with it?
His belief system is based on the notion that the government rules and fuck individualism.
If you have to stoop to telling people that their belief system is some absurd caricature of the politics you disagree with, most people will usually interpret that to mean that you don't know how to form a coherent argument. There are lots of free-market cases against government regulation. Why don't you go learn about them before you continue commenting about politics?
Or they can use Uber/Lyft, because we have laws that say that if you get to have a business and make profits, you don't get to cherry-pick as to who you provide service to, even if you have to spend some money to do so.
Or, using your logic, we can just as easily deny Uber and Lyft the right to do business. Users of said services are not the center of the universe. What did they do before Uber/Lyft came along? They can keep doing the same thing.
It is pretty much the only way to fund "free" services of all kinds that have large reach but no direct income. Radio, TV, and most websites would not exist but for it (...)
Even if we take this as a given, why are you then taking it as a given that it's ultimately beneficial to have free commercial media but also have advertising? Not just the media and ads you deem good, but the entire system we're describing. There's nothing inherently worthy about these products — they're just means of making money which may or may not be beneficial to society. And of course that's not counting the possibility of commercial media that's funded in ways other than advertising, or non-commercial media funded by government or a charitable foundation or what have you.
You're acting as though reality as it exists now is the only form in which it could exist. The whole point of having discussions about the world we live in is so that we can decide what, if any, changes might make a better world. And you can bet that advertisers and media companies are already trying to do just that! What do you have against exploring options? Are you afraid that you might not be able to defend the status quo if we didn't assume it's the way things have to be?
Speaking of correlation, has anyone else noticed that Randall shows on those maps that Vermont has a disproportionate number of fans of furry porn? (And maybe also Austin? And a random patch of desert in southern Arizona?)
Ha! You are reminding me that I've been on the West Coast for too goddamn long... this native New Yorker (by birth, at least) is quite eager to be moving to Boston next month but is still in the process of mental recalibration.
The reason I haven't put forth a cohesive position is that I don't have one. This whole issue is too tied in with my field of study that I'm only just starting to delve into. Honestly, the beast that we call global capitalism, that by turns ennobles us and enslaves us, is too fucking complicated for me at this point to have much of an opinion on whatsoever. Even if I see all the good it's done for the world and acknowledge the absence of any real alternative as a global system (individual states' macroeconomic policies being another thing entirely) that doesn't excuse all the fucked-up things that have been done in the name of profit with the complicity of those who should have known better. And the weird-ass morality you hear from some people about what the market dictates we should or shouldn't do or value, I don't even know where to start with that. The free market is a tool, it's something we created to allow economic freedom and bring wealth within reach of the middle class, it's not something that in itself creates meaning in our lives. This whole argument that presumes that productivity and wealth ought to be something other than means to an end ignores, in my view, part of what liberal democracy was created for, to enable us to decide more fully for ourselves individually what we are living for.
But in any case, I'm coming at this from an academic, not political, angle, so I don't know how much more I have to say here. The article was an interesting analysis from that perspective, and I can't sympathize with the overwhelming reaction on here — both in support of it and in denial of it — of a politicized nature. Fuck that. Let's not waste the benefits of the intellectual world that the fall of the aristocracy enabled us in the Third Estate to enter. There will be time to take action, and there are plenty of people champing at the bit to do so. Let's give ourselves the opportunity to explore our options thoroughly first.
Unless you're willing to go back into fields and harvest wheat by hand... I don't want to hear this luddite shit.
Man, it's weird as shit to see this huge-ass reply that is not only responding to a point of view that I don't hold... but is responding to a post that lacks any point of view on these matters entirely! WTF?!
I mean, I get that you seem to want to soapbox, and I guess that's part of what Slashdot's for, but am I right in thinking that you're trying to argue against me in particular? I think you've got the wrong guy. I'm not getting into my views on inequality or opportunity right now. And I'm straining to work out any consistent, widely held viewpoint it might be that you're arguing against.
But since you have taken the time to reply to me, may I suggest that you chill out a little? Maybe try reading some modern historians on the left (not suggesting anything too far left, just the left end of those in favor of free markets here) to get to know a little better an actual argument in opposition to yours. I don't think the more common ones are as antithetical to your perspective as you think they are. And I certainly don't disagree with you as much as you seem to think I do, but you're not doing yourself or your allies any favors huffing and puffing like this.
Some forms didn't last 500 years.
To which I would say that some forms of economic systems haven't lasted 500 years, either. This idea that we (Who's this "we", anyway? The West? The industrialized world?) have been doing things more or less the same way for 500 years is absurd. I mean, just to pick one example, one-sixth of the entire wealth of the United States 155 years ago was legally owned human beings! We've had to keep changing things, thank God. And when you do that, you change how labor is divided and compensated. The change has been continuous — the more closely you analyze it, the more this solid trend line looks fuzzy and jagged-edged.
I'm not challenging the notion that we've had continuous economic growth on a worldwide basis for centuries, nor am I challenging the concomitant drastic increase in standard of living that's accompanied it, even in the poorest places (well, some of them, at least). I agree fully on that point, as well as on that many countries have shot themselves in the feet. And if we're going to talk about faith in the future, I have enormous faith in humanity and the ability of us to come together and work our way out of the messes we've been dragging ourselves into lately.
But that's not relevant to any discussion about what we can and can't know, which is what I came into this discussion to bring up. I'm just saying that this notion that wage labor is going to continue functioning in the same manner as in the last 150 years until kingdom come is patently absurd. And what goes along with that notion is that the changes that this future system will bring are unknowable. The best we can do is observe any changes from previous trends, which is precisely what the authors of the linked study have done. I don't see how prognosticating on the basis of that study would be useful, but nor do I see how assuming that this doesn't indicate a change in labor distribution, full stop, is productive or reasonable either.
There are ways to be positive about the future of business without relentless optimism about the labor systems we have in place. If anything, I personally welcome a world with greater automation, in the hopes that it will accelerate the pace of change in macroeconomic policy and make for a more equitable world. But again, that's just a bit of faith on my part. None of us can claim to know with any certainty — certainly economists are no exception!
I know this to be true for several reasons. First of all, countries that have more tech get more jobs, not the other way around, in the long term.
This is in the present. You don't know what will happen in the future. Your certainty is what I'm saying is unsupportable.
Second of all, most of what I wrote is not simplistic logic it is instead obvious facts.
Obvious to whom?
The basic problem is that you think there are X jobs available.
I don't recall saying a damn thing about what I believe; I was just telling you that your argument didn't hold water and was simplistic. Facile. Based on stating personal beliefs as "facts" and then telling me they're "obvious" when I challenge the whole epistemic basis of your assertions.
I know that (...)
How do you know anything beyond your own inherently limited personal experience? You haven't formed a cogent argument yet based on empirical evidence.
There are ways to make arguments that work. You aren't using them. That's my point.
We may end up all working for the government on government funding terraforming jobs (except for a few people owning robot based businesses), but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.
And that wouldn't be within the scope of current normative capitalism, which doesn't plot out a course as to how to do that. You're going off into unknown territory here! Once you're willing to entertain the notion of a world operating under different worlds from this one, you're being inconsistent if you refuse to entertain other notions about how economic rules might change.
Again, I repeat the basic concept - that you may think is simple - but is obviously true to me and most of the rest of the world.
The rest of the world. Really.
Human beings are greedy sons of bitches
Speak for yourself!
(Not saying that greed doesn't exist, just that your posts are full of so many assertions that the world works just the way you say it does and that most people agree with you. It's as if you've never entertained the notion that your personal experiences and common sense could ever have led you to an understanding of the world that's inaccurate!)
The industrial revolution is the period in which many, many tasks formally done be humans began to be done by machine. And the standard of living improved by an order of magnitude.
The Industrial Revolution started what, 200 years ago? History didn't end after that. There were changes that led up to the outbreak of automation, and society has been changing continuously since then. There's no reason to believe there won't be another revolution that will again change a bunch of the rules we've so audaciously set forth.
You mention price elasticity, an economics term? Consider that that discipline was first brought into being in the 18th century. And then consider how long civilization existed before then and how many times before then people thought they had everything more or less figured out. (Well, to be fair, that whole mindset seems to have gotten a lot more prevalent from the 19th century on, but people regardless didn't perceive themselves as profoundly ignorant of the way society worked.) These understandings we've built are predicated on global markets functioning in roughly the manner they function now. Our economic models break otherwise because we've never had global markets on this scale before so we've got no alternate method birthed from a different economic milieu with which to compare our existing understanding of how employment and trade work. And that's not even getting into macroeconomics...
People have been profoundly certain of the inevitability and absoluteness of many, many things over the ages. Many times they've been wrong. It's a little premature to state with such confidence that our wage system isn't going to wind up alongside the shattered statue of Ozymandias, half-buried under the desert sands (enlarged by climate change, naturally).
We have no reason to believe that capitalism will endure until the human race ceases to exist as a species. We also have to acknowledge that if humanity will eventually stop being capitalist in the way that we understand it today, that capitalist economics contains no way to predict its own demise. And as a result, we can't use orthodox capitalist theory to prove the continued validity of the orthodox system it both describes and espouses. That's circular! The future is mired in uncertainty. We have every reason to expect that many fundamental rules of economics will be broken at some point — it's just a question of when.
The past five centuries of human history.
You skipped over, or didn't respond to, the part of my post that already responded to that:
all the models we have to predict future behavior are entirely based on what has happened in the past and by definition can't account for events in the future that defy current models
History doesn't repeat itself, even if certain parts have an awful lot of (usually superficial) similarities. And I should add that the Roman Empire lasted, in one form or another, a hell of a lot longer than 500 years. Agriculture was the primary form of wealth generation for the most powerful nations of the world even longer than any one empire. And yet both of these are long since consigned to the history books.
Or to put it another way: While we might not be able to know definitively that anything is changing permanently right now, there's certainly no cause for this certainty that it's going to stay the same.
and I'll say it again - technology INCREASES jobs, never decreases it - over the long term.
What do you have to back up that assertion (especially that bold "never" part)? Is it just that you know this is true and the whole world is supposed to trust you? Even though all the models we have to predict future behavior are entirely based on what has happened in the past and by definition can't account for events in the future that defy current models? What about your apparently trenchant knowledge of "the nature of mankind"? How could you possibly be able to support any kind of summation of what human beings are like independent of the societies in which they live — never mind that you yourself are the product of a society that has some pretty set ideologies on work, value, wealth, social class, innovation, and so on which undoubtedly influence the range of human behavioral difference you have been able to observe regarding these things that you are making claims about!
Come on, man! I know this is Slashdot and you were trying to post early, but your analysis is just SO simplistic!
Once your personal collection busts a couple hundred gigs you hardly know what you have anyway.
I understand your sentiment here, but if you lose track of what you have after only a couple hundred gigs I can't help thinking you might be doing it wrong.
But it's two-year-old level childish thinking at it's finest to think you can get all the free and subsidized stuff out here in the world without the advertising that pays for it.
You had a perfectly reasonable argument up until this point, upon which you essentially said you don't see any reasonable way to hold an opinion opposite to yours. Why the defensiveness? Do you honestly believe the industry that pays your living is defensible, or are you just looking to make yourself feel better by arguing for it and then preemptively shutting down debate?
Or, to put it another way, are you trying to persuade those of us who disagree with you, or was the purpose of your comment more to persuade yourself?
Wow. I'm not arguing against your argument, I'm arguing against your argumentation. I'm arguing against your epistemology; I'm questioning the depth of your metacognition.
(1) I think (...)
(2) I think, (...)
Even if I'm wrong about (2), I think (...)
See how much you talk about yourself, as if your thoughts automatically matter when you're communicating with other people? That's what I'm looking at. Of course we all want to be listened to. Of course we all believe we have something to offer. But at a certain point you cross a line and sound self-important or self-congratulatory or self-righteous or self-something else unsavory.
If I sound defensive, it's because someone else, namely this researcher, has "gone on the offensive" against a certain set of characteristics or behaviors or choices, many of which match some of the choices and behaviors I see in myself. Naturally, if you do not fall within Zimbardo's tartgeting reticule, you would have no reason to be defensive. I do, and I do.
You're making a huge assumption here, that sounding defensive is natural or unavoidable in certain circumstances. While I'm not the target of Zimbardo's criticism, there are plenty of issues for which I am in the minority and can read articles attacking my way of life. I don't take it as a given in those cases that I'll get defensive. Nor do I think my defensiveness is defensible if that's how I react. I think I can do better than that. So can everyone else.
Now, let me be clear. Under normal circumstances, I do not go around living my life by telling people who've made different choices than me that they're wrong, or that they're wasting resources, or making problems worse, or whatever.
How you treat other people about their lifestyles is beside the point. This is about your lifestyle, your defensiveness, what you feel entitled to, and the extent to which any of these deserve respect.
These two long posts paint a picture of someone who thinks very highly of his own choices and opinions. You, however, like anyone else in the world, do not have any objective reason to believe that you have made the right decisions. In fact, the extent to which you don't choose to engage me here — but instead repeat your assertions about your fixed thoughts and your perceived entitlements — implies the kind of inflexibility of mind that keeps people from being able to make the right decisions. We have to entertain the notion that some ways of being might be worse than others. If we open ourselves up to that possibility, then we open the possibility also that we are the ones doing the wrong thing, and if that's the case, the fact that a given lifestyle is our own means nothing morally.
Who the fuck is Philip Zimbardo to tell me that my life choices are wrong?
Who are you to tell the Internet that your life choices are right? I don't mean in the legal sense, I mean in the moral sense. You sound like you have an awfully large chip on your shoulder. Why are you so convinced that your morals are defensible that you can't expose any kind of interrogation whatsoever into your reasoning that led you to your conclusions, just a metric fuckton of defensiveness?
A lot of us here have unusual life setups in one fashion or another. There's no reason for that to automatically entail defensiveness. If you can't tell that that's how your post comes off, maybe you should take a closer look at your assertion that you're "socially intelligent," and where your abnormally high level of certainty comes from.
And what's with your obsession with children, anyway? Some of us have relationships without kids, living above our means, or the risk of STDs. Maybe you should have a little more contact with those of us who don't play MMOs, so that if nothing else you don't sound like you have any idea of how people different from you actually live.
Make them get recognized as a legitimate transport service and play by the rules dammit!
The rules aren't just about those legitimate concerns you discussed. They're also about having proper insurance and not skirting IRS rules by categorizing employees as independent contractors. I'd also like to see some accountability on the part of Uber for negligent drivers — some indication that they're trying to profit off of actually improving people's lives, rather than more of that same greed you see in the taxi companies.
(It would also help your case if you showed you knew the historical reasons why taxi medallions were introduced, and the current rationales for maintaining the system apart from pure rent-seeking.)