A lot of public safety and gov't code is written in COBOL, too. When MicroFocus came out with their Object Cobol like 15+ years ago, I remember watching the change sink in. Some of the orgs we worked for slowly rewrote their code and broke it up into chunks which made rewriting it in C/C++/etc easier. But there's still lots of it out there.
Marketable skills are a good thing, certainly, but the argument you're making fails to account for the increasing capabilities of automation. The ability to automate a job derives from the degree to which it is possible to map out job tasks in a clear pattern..... In a Slashdot-friendly area, consider devops - it used to take a lot more *nix engineers to manage large installations than it does now. A few devops engineers now can manage tens or hundreds of thousands of servers using mcollective, puppet, chef, ansible, salt, et cetera. So that reduces demand for traditional SA except in corner-cases where a particular configuration needs to be debugged at a level deeper than the DevOps staff can do. Those are marketable skills which are being undermined by automation.....and they are not low-skill jobs.
We know that low-skill jobs are going to be automated - truck driving, package handling, much fast-food restaurant work, assembly work, et cetera. This is going to accelerate the reduction in demand for the average low-skill worker well beyond the labor-arbitrage-based outsourcing that they've suffered to date. The jobs will not be going elsewhere; they'll just go away. This is the logical end result of business - they want their labor expenses to be zero, or as close to zero as possible (hence the continued presence of slavery throughout the world, including the US), and if there's a way to replace a labor expense with a capital expense - a robot or automation system - business will automatically do that. Why? Because they're incentivized to - capital assets do cost money, but they depreciate and provide tax advantages and generally don't involve litigation, unless the business runs into a dispute with a vendor, which is way less risky than any labor-related litigation.
The net end goal is the reduction of jobs to as few as possible to enable the maximization of profit for business entities. This will tend to concentrate the wealth among the owners and the relatively few workers whose jobs can not be automated, which will be a fairly small subset of the population. The rest will be left to fend for themselves in an economic system where a lack of long-term employment is equivalent to extreme privation, loss of material goods, housing, access to capital, access to health care, et cetera.
There's already a lot of evidence to show what happens when the jobs go - look at the formerly industrial northeast and midwest, where plant closings have plunged communities into abject poverty overnight, killing property values, driving up foreclosures, despair, and poor behavioral choices - not least of which is blaming undocumented immigrants rather than the executives who made the decision to engage in labor arbitrage.
TL;DR: If your job can be automated, no amount of marketable skills will remain marketable. And that includes you, most SAs, unless you're lucky enough to get a senior devops position. So maybe we should consider a strong social safety net to deal with the inevitable fallout from automation rather than suffering through the chaos that it will cause....
...But they sure try to call you after hours for "just one thing."
The correct answer is "No, unless overtime is authorized in writing prior to my starting any work, and that includes answering questions on this phone call."
Yeah, the cost to employ more staff to distribute the load is higher. It's improved worker lives, but it's too expensive for the business owners, so it'll get scrapped.
It took a long time for the 8-hour baseline to become a norm. It'll take longer for it to get to 6 hours or less, and will only happen when people vote for politicians who put constituent well-being above corporate earnings reports.....
Honestly, shorter work hours offers the possibility to have more people working productively, which reduces poverty and overall improves the strength of the economy. But that costs more (or rather, costs employers more), so they don't do it, even though a larger pool of workers means better cross-training and coverage. The reduction in work-related stress from more users in the workplace with a lower expected per-worker productivity also helps with job and life satisfaction. Instead, we allow government to absorb and pay the cost of people who businesses won't hire (for reasons ranging from qualifications to outright bias), which the society as a whole bears, and which drags down both the economy and overall faith in the society.
We live in a society and an economy in which intelligence needs to matter. Doesn't matter whether you're a programmer or an attorney or a bricklayer or other tradesperson.....we need all the brains we can get, irrespective of the morphology surrounding them. To prosper in the coming economy, we need people who are smart, creative, functional, and who 'get' meritocracy. Any ideology that shuts out people as irretrievably other is wasting talent......
If we could leverage all of our people - and there are a lot of smart people who have to surmount really high odds to succeed - we'd do a lot better as a society. Part of helping them succeed is to create labor policies which incentivize having more people do fewer hours and developing greater expertise through training and time to relax and economic security.
But that won't happen until the people elect people committed to the good of the greater population, not corporate entities.
Yup. By and large, red states receive more in federal funding than they pay in taxes. The same people who voted for the GOP will get hurt most by their policies.
When the populace realizes how badly they've been fleeced - and at some point, no amount of FOX or Breitbart will be sufficient to overcome the cognitive dissonance between what FOX and Breitbart report and what the red-staters experience - anyhow, when they realize that, the GOP will be in trouble, and will split between a rich-money party, a religious party, and some form of economic populism which focuses on the ensuring rising tides for the poor and middle-class as well as the rich.....
Or better still, "They are an increasingly unregulated bloated bureaucracy that can't survive without statutory advantages which allow them to gouge from consumers who don't understand that telco regulation exists for a reason, and it's not to stifle innovation, it's to restrict disadvantaging the customers in a very slanted business environment"
Even Passport is ridiculously overpriced for what it offers. I spent a month in northern Europe earlier this year and the AT&T Passport service was a PITA - overpriced, slow, and prone to exceptions which allow them to overcharge even more.
But given the current deregulatory environment, prices will only go up....
Sometimes people do go from homed to homeless in one step. Sometimes it happens in steps. The fact that this occupies a continuum rather than a binary status makes it more difficult to classify homeless vs homed as well as provide and (more importantly) justify services to them. There's a whole contingent of people who think that sleeping in a room under a roof == homed. Sleeping indoors in a situation where a person lacks stability and can be un-homed again at someone else's desire is not homed....not necessarily homeless, either.
There are multiple issues. Housing supply Housing cost Housing stability/security.
I tend to think that public studios, like a small version of UK Council Housing, would help at least get people roofs over their heads for a sliding-scale cost, looking at it as a public good (e.g., homelessness is bad for many reasons, at least one of which involves epidemiological and other public health concerns). Once people have at least some stability, they can start building something - but lots of mentally ill homeless are too fragile to do that.
That capital gains taxes are so low is a sign of significant malaise, at best, casuistry in our tax argument. Capital gains taxes being low incentivizes rent-seeking behavior, and that is not good for anyone but the rent-seeker. It contributes *nothing* to the country as a whole, and sucks value out of the economy where it becomes static - it's not being spent - which further slows down the economy.
We call it 'currency' for a reason - it flows in currents, and when it doesn't, trust in it fades.
The tax codes have become insanely complicated, mostly due to the codes being used for a social engineering carrot and stick, and if this doesn't get fixed, things will get ugly and it will be uglyist for those on unearned entitlements.
The tax codes have become insanely complicated, mostly due to the codes being adjusted to allow the rich to retain income at the expense of the common good, and abandoning progressive taxation because 'fuck you, I've got mine' is the rich's motto.
They're already talking about throwing it into the house, where the GOP will put Mr. Kasich in - and he is no less moderate than Mr. Trump, just better behaved. This will happen despite the fact that Ms. Clinton has a very clear popular vote lead of some 2.5MM votes, because partisan behavior is essentially not possible to overcome.
Do you have any substantive critique, or is name-calling the sole piece of your debate repertoire?
Net-net, even if factories come back, automation will be doing most of the work, and the people who will work in those factories will (by and large) be hands-on technical people, not grunt labor. That is NOT coming back. And if you're in denial of that, well, you'll find yourself in a difficult position when your job is replaced by a robot, bc traditionally, the powers that be have not looked kindly on the backlash Luddism you're implying you espouse.
Ah, Wikipedia is apparently infallible when it supports your opinions.
You're so rabidly opposed to the idea that civilizations have different periods, some enlightened and some not, that you're willing to ignore factual information. Doesn't bode well for whatever society you're a member of.
During the middle ages, they did preserve a hell of a lot of documents - and they created a number of mathematical concepts which are core today, like algebra and the very concept of 0 as a mathematical symbol.
Are they still preservers of culture? Not now; I think that it's clear that the current extremist Islamist religious movements have entirely abandoned the concept of knowledge acquisition as a way to improve the world.
But whatever they are now, they preserved information during the dark ages that would otherwise have been lost. And a lot of what they preserved is core Western philosophy - Hellenic philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, Thales of Milesius, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and a host of others. And we'd all be poorer for the loss of those texts.
In Anathem,, ancient history is better known than the technologically advanced period leading up to the cataclysm called "The Terrible Events" in the book, presumably because the storage media of that time is more ephemeral and less durable than the records of earlier ages.
I guess if paper or papyrus etc can be left and are kept reasonably dry etc, knowledge is easily preserved in an accessible state. Data on magentic tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc, all require industrial infrastructure - electrical power generation, sufficient technical ability to read them, an understanding of the technologies required to read them - and hence a lot of what we currently have is not easily accessed by a non-technical civiliation, whereas paper books, however, inefficient, are.
Slashdot Mirror
Gorsuch was suggested to the GOP by the Federalist Society, which is decidedly NOT a Democratic organization.
Merrick Garland was an olive branch from the Democrats to the Republicans, and it was roundly rejected.
A lot of public safety and gov't code is written in COBOL, too.
When MicroFocus came out with their Object Cobol like 15+ years ago, I remember watching the change sink in.
Some of the orgs we worked for slowly rewrote their code and broke it up into chunks which made rewriting it in C/C++/etc easier.
But there's still lots of it out there.
It improves quite a lot.
Marketable skills are a good thing, certainly, but the argument you're making fails to account for the increasing capabilities of automation.
The ability to automate a job derives from the degree to which it is possible to map out job tasks in a clear pattern.....
In a Slashdot-friendly area, consider devops - it used to take a lot more *nix engineers to manage large installations than it does now. A few devops engineers now can manage tens or hundreds of thousands of servers using mcollective, puppet, chef, ansible, salt, et cetera. So that reduces demand for traditional SA except in corner-cases where a particular configuration needs to be debugged at a level deeper than the DevOps staff can do. Those are marketable skills which are being undermined by automation.....and they are not low-skill jobs.
We know that low-skill jobs are going to be automated - truck driving, package handling, much fast-food restaurant work, assembly work, et cetera. This is going to accelerate the reduction in demand for the average low-skill worker well beyond the labor-arbitrage-based outsourcing that they've suffered to date. The jobs will not be going elsewhere; they'll just go away. This is the logical end result of business - they want their labor expenses to be zero, or as close to zero as possible (hence the continued presence of slavery throughout the world, including the US), and if there's a way to replace a labor expense with a capital expense - a robot or automation system - business will automatically do that. Why? Because they're incentivized to - capital assets do cost money, but they depreciate and provide tax advantages and generally don't involve litigation, unless the business runs into a dispute with a vendor, which is way less risky than any labor-related litigation.
The net end goal is the reduction of jobs to as few as possible to enable the maximization of profit for business entities. This will tend to concentrate the wealth among the owners and the relatively few workers whose jobs can not be automated, which will be a fairly small subset of the population. The rest will be left to fend for themselves in an economic system where a lack of long-term employment is equivalent to extreme privation, loss of material goods, housing, access to capital, access to health care, et cetera.
There's already a lot of evidence to show what happens when the jobs go - look at the formerly industrial northeast and midwest, where plant closings have plunged communities into abject poverty overnight, killing property values, driving up foreclosures, despair, and poor behavioral choices - not least of which is blaming undocumented immigrants rather than the executives who made the decision to engage in labor arbitrage.
TL;DR: If your job can be automated, no amount of marketable skills will remain marketable. And that includes you, most SAs, unless you're lucky enough to get a senior devops position. So maybe we should consider a strong social safety net to deal with the inevitable fallout from automation rather than suffering through the chaos that it will cause....
more so, really.
...But they sure try to call you after hours for "just one thing."
The correct answer is "No, unless overtime is authorized in writing prior to my starting any work, and that includes answering questions on this phone call."
Yeah, the cost to employ more staff to distribute the load is higher. It's improved worker lives, but it's too expensive for the business owners, so it'll get scrapped.
It took a long time for the 8-hour baseline to become a norm. It'll take longer for it to get to 6 hours or less, and will only happen when people vote for politicians who put constituent well-being above corporate earnings reports.....
Honestly, shorter work hours offers the possibility to have more people working productively, which reduces poverty and overall improves the strength of the economy. But that costs more (or rather, costs employers more), so they don't do it, even though a larger pool of workers means better cross-training and coverage. The reduction in work-related stress from more users in the workplace with a lower expected per-worker productivity also helps with job and life satisfaction. Instead, we allow government to absorb and pay the cost of people who businesses won't hire (for reasons ranging from qualifications to outright bias), which the society as a whole bears, and which drags down both the economy and overall faith in the society.
We live in a society and an economy in which intelligence needs to matter. Doesn't matter whether you're a programmer or an attorney or a bricklayer or other tradesperson.....we need all the brains we can get, irrespective of the morphology surrounding them. To prosper in the coming economy, we need people who are smart, creative, functional, and who 'get' meritocracy. Any ideology that shuts out people as irretrievably other is wasting talent......
If we could leverage all of our people - and there are a lot of smart people who have to surmount really high odds to succeed - we'd do a lot better as a society. Part of helping them succeed is to create labor policies which incentivize having more people do fewer hours and developing greater expertise through training and time to relax and economic security.
But that won't happen until the people elect people committed to the good of the greater population, not corporate entities.
Yeah, the same sicko soi-disant deity who says "Love me or I'll torture you forever."
Gaslight much? Sounds like a serial abuser to me....
Umm, this far leftist is just as outraged as you are by this.
The 100-mile constitution-free zone at borders is Not Right.
Yup. By and large, red states receive more in federal funding than they pay in taxes. The same people who voted for the GOP will get hurt most by their policies.
When the populace realizes how badly they've been fleeced - and at some point, no amount of FOX or Breitbart will be sufficient to overcome the cognitive dissonance between what FOX and Breitbart report and what the red-staters experience - anyhow, when they realize that, the GOP will be in trouble, and will split between a rich-money party, a religious party, and some form of economic populism which focuses on the ensuring rising tides for the poor and middle-class as well as the rich.....
Or better still, "They are an increasingly unregulated bloated bureaucracy that can't survive without statutory advantages which allow them to gouge from consumers who don't understand that telco regulation exists for a reason, and it's not to stifle innovation, it's to restrict disadvantaging the customers in a very slanted business environment"
Even Passport is ridiculously overpriced for what it offers. I spent a month in northern Europe earlier this year and the AT&T Passport service was a PITA - overpriced, slow, and prone to exceptions which allow them to overcharge even more.
But given the current deregulatory environment, prices will only go up....
Sometimes people do go from homed to homeless in one step.
Sometimes it happens in steps.
The fact that this occupies a continuum rather than a binary status makes it more difficult to classify homeless vs homed as well as provide and (more importantly) justify services to them. There's a whole contingent of people who think that sleeping in a room under a roof == homed. Sleeping indoors in a situation where a person lacks stability and can be un-homed again at someone else's desire is not homed....not necessarily homeless, either.
There are multiple issues.
Housing supply
Housing cost
Housing stability/security.
I tend to think that public studios, like a small version of UK Council Housing, would help at least get people roofs over their heads for a sliding-scale cost, looking at it as a public good (e.g., homelessness is bad for many reasons, at least one of which involves epidemiological and other public health concerns). Once people have at least some stability, they can start building something - but lots of mentally ill homeless are too fragile to do that.
The last few weeks being an aberration, mostly ;)
(have heat on and am WFH this week and it is v cold IMO)
+1
That capital gains taxes are so low is a sign of significant malaise, at best, casuistry in our tax argument.
Capital gains taxes being low incentivizes rent-seeking behavior, and that is not good for anyone but the rent-seeker.
It contributes *nothing* to the country as a whole, and sucks value out of the economy where it becomes static - it's not being spent - which further slows down the economy.
We call it 'currency' for a reason - it flows in currents, and when it doesn't, trust in it fades.
The tax codes have become insanely complicated, mostly due to the codes being used for a social engineering carrot and stick, and if this doesn't get fixed, things will get ugly and it will be uglyist for those on unearned entitlements.
The tax codes have become insanely complicated, mostly due to the codes being adjusted to allow the rich to retain income at the expense of the common good, and abandoning progressive taxation because 'fuck you, I've got mine' is the rich's motto.
There, ftfy.
Shades of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema.....
They're already talking about throwing it into the house, where the GOP will put Mr. Kasich in - and he is no less moderate than Mr. Trump, just better behaved. This will happen despite the fact that Ms. Clinton has a very clear popular vote lead of some 2.5MM votes, because partisan behavior is essentially not possible to overcome.
Do you have any substantive critique, or is name-calling the sole piece of your debate repertoire?
Net-net, even if factories come back, automation will be doing most of the work, and the people who will work in those factories will (by and large) be hands-on technical people, not grunt labor. That is NOT coming back. And if you're in denial of that, well, you'll find yourself in a difficult position when your job is replaced by a robot, bc traditionally, the powers that be have not looked kindly on the backlash Luddism you're implying you espouse.
Ah, Wikipedia is apparently infallible when it supports your opinions.
You're so rabidly opposed to the idea that civilizations have different periods, some enlightened and some not, that you're willing to ignore factual information.
Doesn't bode well for whatever society you're a member of.
During the middle ages, they did preserve a hell of a lot of documents - and they created a number of mathematical concepts which are core today, like algebra and the very concept of 0 as a mathematical symbol.
Are they still preservers of culture? Not now; I think that it's clear that the current extremist Islamist religious movements have entirely abandoned the concept of knowledge acquisition as a way to improve the world.
But whatever they are now, they preserved information during the dark ages that would otherwise have been lost. And a lot of what they preserved is core Western philosophy - Hellenic philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, Thales of Milesius, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and a host of others. And we'd all be poorer for the loss of those texts.
I bet the Long Now Foundation has done that.....
I was just going to cite that, too.
In Anathem,, ancient history is better known than the technologically advanced period leading up to the cataclysm called "The Terrible Events" in the book, presumably because the storage media of that time is more ephemeral and less durable than the records of earlier ages.
I guess if paper or papyrus etc can be left and are kept reasonably dry etc, knowledge is easily preserved in an accessible state. Data on magentic tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc, all require industrial infrastructure - electrical power generation, sufficient technical ability to read them, an understanding of the technologies required to read them - and hence a lot of what we currently have is not easily accessed by a non-technical civiliation, whereas paper books, however, inefficient, are.
(Librarian-DW has had an effect on me).