Brandon Sanderson has posted his view on Google+ and I think it's insightful and well thought-out. His novella "Perfect State" was included in the slates of both the Sad Puppies, which he found out about before the nominations were submitted, and the Rabid Puppies, which he didn't hear about until after. Last year, he asked the Sad Puppies to remove him from their slate, but this year he decided that although he disagrees with bloc nominations and some of the methods of the Sad Puppies, he feels their hearts are in the right place and they're nominating works they really feel are good. However, if he'd known he was on the Rabid Puppies' slate, he'd have asked to be removed, and he has seriously considered withdrawing his book from the award entirely merely because the Rabid Puppies put him forward. He's decided not to do that, though, because if many authors remove their works for being put forward by this group of trolls, that gives the trolls too much power.
So how many of you so-called geniuses ( Wiley Coyote ) have even begun to look at cryptology and math, and started to try to develop a few methods not of the usual sort?
Wrong approach. If you want to improve the state of crypto, you need to start by learning to break crypto. Anyone can invent an encryption method, but unless you have invested a serious amount of time and skull-sweat into breaking ciphers, whatever you create will suck, terribly.
Maybe if a few hundred new encrypton algorithms were to suddenly pop-up, the governments would be a bit behind the curve of breaking them.
Your plan would make the government's job much, much easier, because the methods that people tend to come up with are mostly very closely related, and tend to all be based on independent reinvention of old ideas for which well-known cracking methods exist. In addition, you're solving a non-problem. We already have very good encryption algorithms, with zero evidence that the government can break them. Snowden's data actually confirms that if you use modern encryption algorithms correctly and manage the keys well, the NSA can't read your data.
What we need is more research into ways to make encryption easier to use correctly, not another gazillion crappy ciphers.
You should read that Wikipedia link you gave, because Mercantilism wasn't what you described it as. The intention (apparent or real) had nothing to do with protecting consumers
You misunderstood what I wrote.I didn't say mercantilism had anything to do with protecting consumers. I'm saying that our current government system passes laws & regulations under the claim of protecting consumers when the reality is that it protects big business by shielding them from competition.
Yes, I understood what you said. I also understood that you called it Mercantilism, which is a different thing, as I explained. The Corporatism label that the poster you responded to is the correct one for what you're describing.
I think the better term for this is Mercantilism, which is pretty much what Adam Smith argued against in The Wealth of Nations. The government makes laws & regulations which appear to be for the purpose of protecting consumers, but actually make it more difficult for other actors to enter the market, thereby reducing freedom of economic choices.
You should read that Wikipedia link you gave, because Mercantilism wasn't what you described it as. The intention (apparent or real) had nothing to do with protecting consumers, it was about using government policy to increase the nation's economic output and squash that of rival nations. It attempted to create local surpluses of high-value goods which could be traded to other countries for gold and silver, while reducing or even banning purchase of goods from other countries, to keep the balance of trade as one-sided as possible in order to accumulate large reserves of bullion, at the expense of economic efficiency.
The current economic structure has basically nothing in common with Mercantilism.
Ah, right. I'd forgotten about that old use of "bluing". I've also come across sentences like "Her lips blued from the cold", but I'm not sure if that's poetic license or uncommon usage.
I was referring to the mention of 60 hour work weeks.
I know very few people at Google who work 60-hour weeks, and those few do it because they want to, not because anyone expects it. Most people probably work more than 40 hours per week, but that's common industry-wide. I'd say the norm is about 45 for software engineers, which is pretty typical of the industry.
Many common color words can be used as verbs. In addition to green and brown:
Ed's cheeks purpled.
He had put on weight and grayed somewhat.
The paint yellowed with age.
We use "redden", rather than "red", probably because of the potential for confusion with "read". "Black" is often verbed as "blacken", but I've also seen it used as a verb without the "en" suffix, or alternatively as "blacking". "Blue" is less common as a verb, except in reference to the bluing of metal, but it's not so rare as to be considered incorrect.
There's definitely nothing wrong or unusual about "greened".
right now, smartphone security is still arguably an oxymoron
If true, then computer security is an oxymoron, because mobile OSes are much more secure than common desktop OSes. There's a lot more noise about mobile security vulnerabilities, but not so much actual compromise. Take, for example, the much-publicized Stagefright vulnerabilities for Android. In spite of the kilobarrels of real and virtual ink spilled about them, we have zero reports of actual exploitation. The same is definitely not true of Windows, OS X or Linux 0days which are exploited at scale, all the time. On mobile OSes the only real problems arise from users who deliberately circumvent the controls to install malicious apps... and in most cases said malicious apps are still sandboxed and limited by the mobile OS and can do only what the user allows (of course, the user typically allows whatever the app asks).
The reason for the difference is that mobile OSes take a defense in depth strategy, with stronger app isolation, mandatory access controls (e.g. SELinux / TrustedBSD), verified boot systems, including top-to-bottom software signing, and perhaps most importantly, vetted app distribution channels. This doesn't mean they're invulnerable by any means, but mobile OSes are by far the most secure general-purpose consumer OSes we've yet built (ChromeOS is probably more secure, but it arguably isn't general-purpose). That doesn't necessarily contradict your claim, but it does mean that if you're right, then you should avoid computers entirely for the foreseeable future.
I interviewed at Google and was appalled at their system. I was told that for my 3rd and fourth interview I needed to go watch about 20 hours of Youtube Videos and study some cruft they wanted me to study.
Huh? I've never, ever heard of anything like that in my five years at Google. What sort of position were you interviewing for?
Google Real Estate on Maps (for 1 example) _could_ have been quite profitable - AFAICT, no tool compares to it still. Things at Google tend to get shut down before they've had time to succeed (they never really advertised the real estate side of Maps).
Google never really advertised *anything*, until fairly recently. That was one of the implicit criteria for success... a project had to be good enough to succeed without advertising.
That said, I actually agree with you that Google projects often get shut down before they've had time to succeed. Other companies would stick with them for longer, but Google demands explosive success. I also agree that Google needs to support its APIs better and longer. I think a lot of that API instability is spillover from the internal culture of rapid change. The joke inside Google is that every time you need to do something you find there are two internal APIs that solve your problem: one of them deprecated and the other not quite finished.
Google isn't the only one, it happens when any tech company starts being run by bean counters who don't understand the intangible value of trust.
Wrong mechanism, in Google's case. Google isn't run by bean counters, in fact they have hardly any say at all. Instead, it's run by engineers who live on weekly release cycles and to whom two or three years is an eternity. I think the solution is to add more product management oversight, but there's a significant cost to that as well. Polish and stability are at odds with moving quickly and experimenting with new ideas. The problem is that people expect a company of Google's size to provide the former, but the company's culture is focused on the latter. That's gradually changing, but it's a tectonic shift that brings layers of bureaucracy and overhead.
For some reason I thought they were always monetised with ads. A rather successful side project in that case!
According to "In the Plex" by Steven Levy, even after Google moved off of the Stanford campus it wasn't monetized at all for the first year or two. It was supported by capital investments, and operated on a shoestring budget to keep those low. Page and Brin knew they needed to find a way to make it profitable, but had a hard time finding an approach they liked. They were strongly opposed to advertising, mostly because they found the dominant model of web advertising at the time (banner ads) to be really obnoxious.
It took the combination of a few key ideas to make advertising as a business model acceptable to them. One was the idea that ads could be chosen that were related to the terms being searched for, hopefully making the ads useful to the users, and to rank the ads based on quality (measured by click-through rate, primarily). Another was to require the ads to be small, unobtrusive and text-only, so that users would have to look for them, rather than be blasted by them, and to maintain the clean, simple appearance of the search engine. A third was to charge only for clicks, rather than impressions, and to set the price with a real-time auction among relevant ads, essentially incorporating the advertisers' bids into the ranking system. That way the advertisers themselves which was conceptually cool, logistically convenient and ensured that advertisers would only pay what a click was actually worth to them. I don't know if Page and Brin understood it at the time, but they were solving a core problem advertisers have had since the dawn of advertising: to figure out exactly how effective their advertising budget was. With Google's system they paid only for the clicks that actually brought a visitor, and they could determine precisely how many of those visits converted to sales.
The resulting system seemed to Page and Brin like a win for users, who got unobtrusive and possibly-useful ads, for advertisers, who got visitors who were highly likely to be interested in buying and got them for a reasonable cost, and for Google, who got a funding source that would allow the search engine to grow -- and eventually to do other things.
It's worth pointing out, though, that Page and Brin saw advertising as an engineering solution to a business problem, how to generate revenue from the highly-successful search engine. They weren't ad men, never became ad men and never turned their company over to ad men. When it came time to hire a CEO, they hired an engineer from an engineering company, and they continued building out a technology-focused and engineer-heavy company culture, consistently ensuring that at least half of the employees were engineers and that nearly all of the management were engineers, at all levels and especially in the engineering departments. To date, Alphabet remains a technology company which is primarily funded by advertising technology, not an advertising company. Many might think that's a distinction without a difference, but it's not, because advertisers and engineers have fundamentally different views of the world and the problems they set out to solve.
(Disclosure/disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer. I read "In the Plex" five years ago just after I joined the company and the historical info above is from memory and may contain significant errors. Corrections appreciated.)
In the Boulder, Colorado Google office we took a different approach: We built a couple of bars in the office, right next to the cubes. Yes, they are schedulable meeting rooms, as are the teepee and the VW micro bus. I think the bars got scheduled a lot more than the other "non-traditional" meeting rooms, though.
AREA_120 ->(project builds a small user base)-> AREA_404_NOT_FOUND
FTFY. If the user base in question is measured in hundreds of millions, it stays and grows. If it's small, and it becomes clear it's not going to grow, and it isn't profitable at the small scale, and it doesn't have any strong internal champions (which generally becomes the case if it's small, not growing and not profitable), it gets shut down, generally with a generous lead time, plenty of opportunity for users to extract their data and only after all contractual commitments (if any) are fulfilled.
Of course, Google's definition of "small" is different from that of many other companies. It's definition of "profitable" is pretty standard for a large corporation, though.
But all too often when you see someone in a technical role in their 50's it's because they couldn't move up or because their attitudes had them shuffled from job to job and they couldn't build relationships and network they way they should have.
Keep in mind that this is context-dependent. Some (mostly larger) companies have sufficient need for senior technical people that there opportunities for people to have full, purely-technical careers without ever moving into management. In other cases, senior engineers that don't want to manage go independent.
I'm nearly 50, and have no intention of ever leaving a technical role. At my current employer (Google) there's no need for me to ever make that move. I hear you, though, I've run into my share of people who've just chosen to vegetate in place. They can be hard for management to dislodge.
I work circles around these people. One of them has spent, literally, the last 14 months trying to decide what the right tool is for our department. I got sick of waiting on him and implemented a collection of open sources tools with some glue code just so I could get some damned work done.
I just want to mention that this part of your story isn't very convincing to me. I don't know what sort of tool you're talking about, but depending on what it is and how it fits in, it may very well be fully worth taking two years to select something, and your hacked-together assemblage of components may be a really bad idea. What I'm saying is that the other guy may be right and you may be wrong, and his greater perspective is what allows him to see that your approach isn't good.
Or maybe not. I'm not judging, just pointing out that it's not impossible that you're misjudging.
If you and I have an extra $10,000 to bid on a house, guess what? The price of the house simply goes up, absorbing the UBI and negating its utility everywhere else.
Not really. You're ignoring the facts that the supply of housing is not fixed and that the cash available to the buyers is far from the only factor that impacts the price. You're also ignoring the fact that the additional $10K you have to bid would be coming from the pockets of some other (wealthier) person, who would now has less to bid on a house, so to whatever degree there's upward pressure on the housing you're trying to buy, there's downward pressure on higher-end house prices.
In macroeconomic terms, simply increasing the amount of money in the hands of buyers doesn't cause or increase inflation unless it actually increases the money supply. Moving money from one portion of society to another has complex effects on the prices of various kinds of goods and services, but it doesn't cause general inflation. However, moving money from people who will hold it to those who will spend it may increase the velocity of money (the rate at which it changes hands) which creates an effective increase in the money supply. On the third hand, money supply can be and is managed by central banks by changing interest rates.
Some of them do. Take a look at your example, and assume that the worldwide demand for turbochargers hadn't increased. The factory wouldn't still have had 100 workers. It also wouldn't have had 100 / 10000 = 0.01 workers, but automation would have reduced the workforce. Automation will generally results in some increase in effective demand, because automation lowers cost and brings the product within the reach of more people. That's a big part of the reason that the demand for turbochargers increased so dramatically. But there are limits to those increases, and so there *will* be a net loss of jobs that need doing. In addition, as in your story, the nature of the jobs changed, and I'm sure that left many of the original workers -- who were less adaptable and farsighted than your grandfather -- unemployed. Not everyone can be, or is willing to be, retrained.
As an example, consider that in the United States there are currently about four million people employed as truck drivers. At least 80% of those jobs will disappear completely, and there's no obvious place within the trucking industry where those drivers can go.
And the kinds of people who are used to taking home $1500 or more every week would undoubtedly stick with the jobs they have already, and treat the basic-income grant as "mad money" to spend on something fun.
No, those people would just give it all back in taxes.
You're assuming that humanity will still be around then and have the technology to relocate planets to a different solar system. Very unlikely.
If humanity is still around and has continued learning for four billion years, I think it's very likely that they'll be able to protect the Earth. Relocating the planet is only one way of doing it.
San Francisco Adopts Law Requiring Solar Panels On All New Buildings
What about heat pollution?
What a silly question.
1. Solar panels don't increase local heat, they decrease it, relative to dark roofs or dirt. They convert energy that would turn into heat into electricity. In a building, that electricity is likely converted back into heat somewhere in the building... but that conversion of electricity to heat would happen anyway. Without the solar panels it would be derived from, say, heat created elsewhere by burning coal.
2. Have you ever been to San Francisco? A little heat pollution would make the city more comfortable.
You can debate what portion of corporate taxes are paid by customers, what part by shareholders, what part by employees and what part by suppliers, but you cannot argue that it all doesn't get shared out, nor that it doesn't ultimately fall on individuals.
The fact that it's so hard to figure out exactly where the corporate tax burden lands is precisely the reason that corporate taxes are evil. Taxes are necessary, but it's important that taxpayers have visibility into how much tax they're paying, so they can evaluate the cost against the benefits. Corporate taxation is a way to hide taxes from the taxpayers, making the taxes invisible to the voters, and that's wrong.
Corporate taxes should be abolished, not raised. Woz is a good guy, and a smart guy, but he's wrong here.
Slashdot Mirror
Brandon Sanderson has posted his view on Google+ and I think it's insightful and well thought-out. His novella "Perfect State" was included in the slates of both the Sad Puppies, which he found out about before the nominations were submitted, and the Rabid Puppies, which he didn't hear about until after. Last year, he asked the Sad Puppies to remove him from their slate, but this year he decided that although he disagrees with bloc nominations and some of the methods of the Sad Puppies, he feels their hearts are in the right place and they're nominating works they really feel are good. However, if he'd known he was on the Rabid Puppies' slate, he'd have asked to be removed, and he has seriously considered withdrawing his book from the award entirely merely because the Rabid Puppies put him forward. He's decided not to do that, though, because if many authors remove their works for being put forward by this group of trolls, that gives the trolls too much power.
So how many of you so-called geniuses ( Wiley Coyote ) have even begun to look at cryptology and math, and started to try to develop a few methods not of the usual sort?
Wrong approach. If you want to improve the state of crypto, you need to start by learning to break crypto. Anyone can invent an encryption method, but unless you have invested a serious amount of time and skull-sweat into breaking ciphers, whatever you create will suck, terribly.
Maybe if a few hundred new encrypton algorithms were to suddenly pop-up, the governments would be a bit behind the curve of breaking them.
Your plan would make the government's job much, much easier, because the methods that people tend to come up with are mostly very closely related, and tend to all be based on independent reinvention of old ideas for which well-known cracking methods exist. In addition, you're solving a non-problem. We already have very good encryption algorithms, with zero evidence that the government can break them. Snowden's data actually confirms that if you use modern encryption algorithms correctly and manage the keys well, the NSA can't read your data.
What we need is more research into ways to make encryption easier to use correctly, not another gazillion crappy ciphers.
You should read that Wikipedia link you gave, because Mercantilism wasn't what you described it as. The intention (apparent or real) had nothing to do with protecting consumers
You misunderstood what I wrote.I didn't say mercantilism had anything to do with protecting consumers. I'm saying that our current government system passes laws & regulations under the claim of protecting consumers when the reality is that it protects big business by shielding them from competition.
Yes, I understood what you said. I also understood that you called it Mercantilism, which is a different thing, as I explained. The Corporatism label that the poster you responded to is the correct one for what you're describing.
What we have is corporatism, not capitalism.
I think the better term for this is Mercantilism, which is pretty much what Adam Smith argued against in The Wealth of Nations. The government makes laws & regulations which appear to be for the purpose of protecting consumers, but actually make it more difficult for other actors to enter the market, thereby reducing freedom of economic choices.
You should read that Wikipedia link you gave, because Mercantilism wasn't what you described it as. The intention (apparent or real) had nothing to do with protecting consumers, it was about using government policy to increase the nation's economic output and squash that of rival nations. It attempted to create local surpluses of high-value goods which could be traded to other countries for gold and silver, while reducing or even banning purchase of goods from other countries, to keep the balance of trade as one-sided as possible in order to accumulate large reserves of bullion, at the expense of economic efficiency.
The current economic structure has basically nothing in common with Mercantilism.
Ah, right. I'd forgotten about that old use of "bluing". I've also come across sentences like "Her lips blued from the cold", but I'm not sure if that's poetic license or uncommon usage.
I was referring to the mention of 60 hour work weeks.
I know very few people at Google who work 60-hour weeks, and those few do it because they want to, not because anyone expects it. Most people probably work more than 40 hours per week, but that's common industry-wide. I'd say the norm is about 45 for software engineers, which is pretty typical of the industry.
The dictionary lists 'green' as a verb as well, so that seems to be an old usage (consider also, "browning" as a term used while cooking).
Many common color words can be used as verbs. In addition to green and brown:
Ed's cheeks purpled.
He had put on weight and grayed somewhat.
The paint yellowed with age.
We use "redden", rather than "red", probably because of the potential for confusion with "read". "Black" is often verbed as "blacken", but I've also seen it used as a verb without the "en" suffix, or alternatively as "blacking". "Blue" is less common as a verb, except in reference to the bluing of metal, but it's not so rare as to be considered incorrect.
There's definitely nothing wrong or unusual about "greened".
right now, smartphone security is still arguably an oxymoron
If true, then computer security is an oxymoron, because mobile OSes are much more secure than common desktop OSes. There's a lot more noise about mobile security vulnerabilities, but not so much actual compromise. Take, for example, the much-publicized Stagefright vulnerabilities for Android. In spite of the kilobarrels of real and virtual ink spilled about them, we have zero reports of actual exploitation. The same is definitely not true of Windows, OS X or Linux 0days which are exploited at scale, all the time. On mobile OSes the only real problems arise from users who deliberately circumvent the controls to install malicious apps... and in most cases said malicious apps are still sandboxed and limited by the mobile OS and can do only what the user allows (of course, the user typically allows whatever the app asks).
The reason for the difference is that mobile OSes take a defense in depth strategy, with stronger app isolation, mandatory access controls (e.g. SELinux / TrustedBSD), verified boot systems, including top-to-bottom software signing, and perhaps most importantly, vetted app distribution channels. This doesn't mean they're invulnerable by any means, but mobile OSes are by far the most secure general-purpose consumer OSes we've yet built (ChromeOS is probably more secure, but it arguably isn't general-purpose). That doesn't necessarily contradict your claim, but it does mean that if you're right, then you should avoid computers entirely for the foreseeable future.
Disclosure/disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer.
You're a Google employee.
Yes, I'm a Google employee and I'm an engineer, so I'm a Google engineer. A Google Senior Software Engineer, to be precise.
So I must ask... what older person (with a family) could ever work there even if accepted?
Why couldn't an older person (with a family) work for Google? I'm 48, with a family, and I work for Google. What problem do you think there might be?
I interviewed at Google and was appalled at their system. I was told that for my 3rd and fourth interview I needed to go watch about 20 hours of Youtube Videos and study some cruft they wanted me to study.
Huh? I've never, ever heard of anything like that in my five years at Google. What sort of position were you interviewing for?
Google Real Estate on Maps (for 1 example) _could_ have been quite profitable - AFAICT, no tool compares to it still. Things at Google tend to get shut down before they've had time to succeed (they never really advertised the real estate side of Maps).
Google never really advertised *anything*, until fairly recently. That was one of the implicit criteria for success... a project had to be good enough to succeed without advertising.
That said, I actually agree with you that Google projects often get shut down before they've had time to succeed. Other companies would stick with them for longer, but Google demands explosive success. I also agree that Google needs to support its APIs better and longer. I think a lot of that API instability is spillover from the internal culture of rapid change. The joke inside Google is that every time you need to do something you find there are two internal APIs that solve your problem: one of them deprecated and the other not quite finished.
Google isn't the only one, it happens when any tech company starts being run by bean counters who don't understand the intangible value of trust.
Wrong mechanism, in Google's case. Google isn't run by bean counters, in fact they have hardly any say at all. Instead, it's run by engineers who live on weekly release cycles and to whom two or three years is an eternity. I think the solution is to add more product management oversight, but there's a significant cost to that as well. Polish and stability are at odds with moving quickly and experimenting with new ideas. The problem is that people expect a company of Google's size to provide the former, but the company's culture is focused on the latter. That's gradually changing, but it's a tectonic shift that brings layers of bureaucracy and overhead.
For some reason I thought they were always monetised with ads. A rather successful side project in that case!
According to "In the Plex" by Steven Levy, even after Google moved off of the Stanford campus it wasn't monetized at all for the first year or two. It was supported by capital investments, and operated on a shoestring budget to keep those low. Page and Brin knew they needed to find a way to make it profitable, but had a hard time finding an approach they liked. They were strongly opposed to advertising, mostly because they found the dominant model of web advertising at the time (banner ads) to be really obnoxious.
It took the combination of a few key ideas to make advertising as a business model acceptable to them. One was the idea that ads could be chosen that were related to the terms being searched for, hopefully making the ads useful to the users, and to rank the ads based on quality (measured by click-through rate, primarily). Another was to require the ads to be small, unobtrusive and text-only, so that users would have to look for them, rather than be blasted by them, and to maintain the clean, simple appearance of the search engine. A third was to charge only for clicks, rather than impressions, and to set the price with a real-time auction among relevant ads, essentially incorporating the advertisers' bids into the ranking system. That way the advertisers themselves which was conceptually cool, logistically convenient and ensured that advertisers would only pay what a click was actually worth to them. I don't know if Page and Brin understood it at the time, but they were solving a core problem advertisers have had since the dawn of advertising: to figure out exactly how effective their advertising budget was. With Google's system they paid only for the clicks that actually brought a visitor, and they could determine precisely how many of those visits converted to sales.
The resulting system seemed to Page and Brin like a win for users, who got unobtrusive and possibly-useful ads, for advertisers, who got visitors who were highly likely to be interested in buying and got them for a reasonable cost, and for Google, who got a funding source that would allow the search engine to grow -- and eventually to do other things.
It's worth pointing out, though, that Page and Brin saw advertising as an engineering solution to a business problem, how to generate revenue from the highly-successful search engine. They weren't ad men, never became ad men and never turned their company over to ad men. When it came time to hire a CEO, they hired an engineer from an engineering company, and they continued building out a technology-focused and engineer-heavy company culture, consistently ensuring that at least half of the employees were engineers and that nearly all of the management were engineers, at all levels and especially in the engineering departments. To date, Alphabet remains a technology company which is primarily funded by advertising technology, not an advertising company. Many might think that's a distinction without a difference, but it's not, because advertisers and engineers have fundamentally different views of the world and the problems they set out to solve.
(Disclosure/disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer. I read "In the Plex" five years ago just after I joined the company and the historical info above is from memory and may contain significant errors. Corrections appreciated.)
In the Boulder, Colorado Google office we took a different approach: We built a couple of bars in the office, right next to the cubes. Yes, they are schedulable meeting rooms, as are the teepee and the VW micro bus. I think the bars got scheduled a lot more than the other "non-traditional" meeting rooms, though.
AREA_120 ->(project builds a small user base)-> AREA_404_NOT_FOUND
FTFY. If the user base in question is measured in hundreds of millions, it stays and grows. If it's small, and it becomes clear it's not going to grow, and it isn't profitable at the small scale, and it doesn't have any strong internal champions (which generally becomes the case if it's small, not growing and not profitable), it gets shut down, generally with a generous lead time, plenty of opportunity for users to extract their data and only after all contractual commitments (if any) are fulfilled.
Of course, Google's definition of "small" is different from that of many other companies. It's definition of "profitable" is pretty standard for a large corporation, though.
Not according to Zuckerberg's statement about people over 30.
How long ago did Zuck say that?
But all too often when you see someone in a technical role in their 50's it's because they couldn't move up or because their attitudes had them shuffled from job to job and they couldn't build relationships and network they way they should have.
Keep in mind that this is context-dependent. Some (mostly larger) companies have sufficient need for senior technical people that there opportunities for people to have full, purely-technical careers without ever moving into management. In other cases, senior engineers that don't want to manage go independent.
I'm nearly 50, and have no intention of ever leaving a technical role. At my current employer (Google) there's no need for me to ever make that move. I hear you, though, I've run into my share of people who've just chosen to vegetate in place. They can be hard for management to dislodge.
I work circles around these people. One of them has spent, literally, the last 14 months trying to decide what the right tool is for our department. I got sick of waiting on him and implemented a collection of open sources tools with some glue code just so I could get some damned work done.
I just want to mention that this part of your story isn't very convincing to me. I don't know what sort of tool you're talking about, but depending on what it is and how it fits in, it may very well be fully worth taking two years to select something, and your hacked-together assemblage of components may be a really bad idea. What I'm saying is that the other guy may be right and you may be wrong, and his greater perspective is what allows him to see that your approach isn't good.
Or maybe not. I'm not judging, just pointing out that it's not impossible that you're misjudging.
If you and I have an extra $10,000 to bid on a house, guess what? The price of the house simply goes up, absorbing the UBI and negating its utility everywhere else.
Not really. You're ignoring the facts that the supply of housing is not fixed and that the cash available to the buyers is far from the only factor that impacts the price. You're also ignoring the fact that the additional $10K you have to bid would be coming from the pockets of some other (wealthier) person, who would now has less to bid on a house, so to whatever degree there's upward pressure on the housing you're trying to buy, there's downward pressure on higher-end house prices.
In macroeconomic terms, simply increasing the amount of money in the hands of buyers doesn't cause or increase inflation unless it actually increases the money supply. Moving money from one portion of society to another has complex effects on the prices of various kinds of goods and services, but it doesn't cause general inflation. However, moving money from people who will hold it to those who will spend it may increase the velocity of money (the rate at which it changes hands) which creates an effective increase in the money supply. On the third hand, money supply can be and is managed by central banks by changing interest rates.
Jobs don't disappear because of automation.
Some of them do. Take a look at your example, and assume that the worldwide demand for turbochargers hadn't increased. The factory wouldn't still have had 100 workers. It also wouldn't have had 100 / 10000 = 0.01 workers, but automation would have reduced the workforce. Automation will generally results in some increase in effective demand, because automation lowers cost and brings the product within the reach of more people. That's a big part of the reason that the demand for turbochargers increased so dramatically. But there are limits to those increases, and so there *will* be a net loss of jobs that need doing. In addition, as in your story, the nature of the jobs changed, and I'm sure that left many of the original workers -- who were less adaptable and farsighted than your grandfather -- unemployed. Not everyone can be, or is willing to be, retrained.
As an example, consider that in the United States there are currently about four million people employed as truck drivers. At least 80% of those jobs will disappear completely, and there's no obvious place within the trucking industry where those drivers can go.
Have you tried Google? If you're good they don't care about your age.
And the kinds of people who are used to taking home $1500 or more every week would undoubtedly stick with the jobs they have already, and treat the basic-income grant as "mad money" to spend on something fun.
No, those people would just give it all back in taxes.
You're assuming that humanity will still be around then and have the technology to relocate planets to a different solar system. Very unlikely.
If humanity is still around and has continued learning for four billion years, I think it's very likely that they'll be able to protect the Earth. Relocating the planet is only one way of doing it.
San Francisco Adopts Law Requiring Solar Panels On All New Buildings
What about heat pollution?
What a silly question.
1. Solar panels don't increase local heat, they decrease it, relative to dark roofs or dirt. They convert energy that would turn into heat into electricity. In a building, that electricity is likely converted back into heat somewhere in the building... but that conversion of electricity to heat would happen anyway. Without the solar panels it would be derived from, say, heat created elsewhere by burning coal.
2. Have you ever been to San Francisco? A little heat pollution would make the city more comfortable.
You can debate what portion of corporate taxes are paid by customers, what part by shareholders, what part by employees and what part by suppliers, but you cannot argue that it all doesn't get shared out, nor that it doesn't ultimately fall on individuals.
The fact that it's so hard to figure out exactly where the corporate tax burden lands is precisely the reason that corporate taxes are evil. Taxes are necessary, but it's important that taxpayers have visibility into how much tax they're paying, so they can evaluate the cost against the benefits. Corporate taxation is a way to hide taxes from the taxpayers, making the taxes invisible to the voters, and that's wrong.
Corporate taxes should be abolished, not raised. Woz is a good guy, and a smart guy, but he's wrong here.
Send me your resume.