Nowadays, to win, you have to cheat. Look at Trump and his "Fake Amepika Great Again." Fish rot from the head down. So do countries. The average person is usually better, more moral, than the people in charge, who have to satisfy their owners.
The first guy in the story went for an engineering degree. With all the uproar about supposed shortages in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) that are justifying the importation of hundreds of thousands of foreign STEM workers, he should be a shoe-in. Except, of course, that there is no STEM shortage. It's just an excuse to outsource jobs to cheaper countries.
You can't compete with countries such as India, where half the population don't have a toilet and the average wage is $10/day.
The summary cut out the part of my submission that includes older people, including the fact that the teacher, after 19 years, is still part of the gig economy, having to have her contact renewed every 4 months. She makes it clear she no longer sees education being a safe investment.
Nowadays telling laid off people to get more education is clearly a gamble. The same time and money might be better off spent elsewhere, starting a business, or taking a completely unrelated job and avoiding more debt.
And yet the facts show that laptops that were under the price of netbooks but with better specs killed the netbook market. The price competition in laptops is even more fierce, and yet they're still being produced - licensing costs were not a consideration.
I remember one of my co-workers bringing his new netbook to work. After a month it stayed at home while my laptop continued to make the journey every day. Then again, my laptop had more utility - 17" display, dual hard drives, decent memory and cpu, linux. You can purchase a standard laptop with 8 gigs of ram for half what one of these pieces of shit will sell for.
As for their use case - "when you really need to type" - that use case no longer exists. Phones come with speech-to-text.
Sure I was. I pointed out that you can just get a keyboard and you have a WAY better, WAY cheaper solution than either of these pieces of under-specced crap. (Did you check out the prices? Insane!).
Or if you really don't want to carry around a keyboard, use speech-to-text. It's a thing nowadays, no keyboard needed. These over-priced way-underspec'd pieces of crap are a disgrace. Look at the picture in the summary section. They say you can use this to do spreadsheets - I say it's just proof that this will let people go blind without bothering to track down porn. The device does not exist, and its' chance of coming to fruition is not so great.
Their weasel words say they've produced a physical model - but if you read further, no guts. In other words, right now it's all show, no go. The "spec" comes with a big asterisk - that this is their goal, not their current design.
To press the point further, nobody just "goes into business for themselves" anymore, it's not that simple
Talk about bullshit. Every economic downturn, the number of self-employed goes up. Why? Because it IS easy to go into business for yourself. And if the alternative is the gig economy, where you have none of the benefits and all the risks of being self-employed anyway, might as well cut out the boss and keep his cut for yourself.
The article is based on a lie. It states that tablets killed the netbook. Cheap laptops (barely more than the price of netbooks, and eventually cheaper and better spec'ed than netbooks) killed it.
Or you can buy a tablet and a roll-up keyboard. Get the worst of both worlds. Anyone I knew who bought a netbook bought them because they were cheaper than laptops - they're a niche product whose niche is gone. Or do you really think people are going to bother toting around netbooks instead of phones and tablets? (or if they need a laptop, a phone and laptop)?
So, Africa doesn't have countries with universities and other hallmarks of an advanced country? India's classified as an advanced country - they can send probes to Mars - and yet they are a shithole with enough people without access to flush toilets (600 million and counting) to stand in line (2 feet total space for each person) from Mumbai to the Moon.
The United States is an advanced country, and yet look at the public health care system - but look fast, what there is won't be there long. Cuba and the US are pretty much tied for life expectancy - but Trump will Fake Amepika Great Again by "weeding out the weak, the old, the lame" while saving taxpayer dollars so his rich buddies can do whatever the filthy rich do.
You make it sound like that money, once spent, disappears from the economy. It doesn't.
Spend 172 bucks on imported oil. Burn the oil to keep warm. You have nothing. Somebody else, in a different country, now has your 172 bucks. The only way to make it come around is to create 172 bucks worth of goods.
Bullshit. First, there's this thing called "services." Second, maybe while you're keeping warm with that oil, you're producing goods or services that you can trade with them. Third, oil is fungible. 60% is imported down from 75%, and OPEC continues to lose market share. So if you burn 172 bucks of oil, unless you get it right off the tanker, there's no way to say it was all imported.
Someone (religionofpeas) with no imagination or foresight wrote:
once robots get so cheap that anyone can make/own one, there's not much (except human greediness) to stop communities from setting up their own robots
Except they won't. An current industrial robot can be very profitable for a big company, but it's way out of reach of ordinary consumers. And what are you going to do with a single robot ? You need a whole bunch of infrastructure and logistics around it to make it work efficiently.
You can place your prediction with these other klunkers:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
Ken Olson, founder of DEC, 1977
"the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995
"Apple is already dead."
Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, 1997
"Two years from now, spam will be solved."
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004
If I have a robot that can weed gardens, I don't need a garden - I just need to know others who have gardens that need weeding. Or maybe I have a garden. It can weed more than one garden. Same as the person who has the vegetable picker. They aren't limited to exclusively picking their own veggies. You also don't need many robot owners for the community to thrive - same as not everyone in a family from infant to grandparent has to have a job.
This is going to sound marxist, but once people own the means of production, even the need for a universal basic income goes away.
Birth rates have stopped going down in Africa, despite improvements in education. More people will be born in Africa in the next 30 years than the rest of the world combined.
Let's not forget that a large portion of those workers are in an occupation whose sole purpose is to prevent expression of legitimate grievance against those creating the situation.
Congratulations, you managed to drag President Trump and his staff into a discussion about robots:-)
We have seen what happens when you disenfranchise the local population and strip them of the bare minimum needs for survival. 1789 and 1917 give a pretty good example. That's why we outsourced that to areas where people can't simply pick up pitchforks and kill us, 'cause swimming through oceans with pitchforks is a bit unwieldy.
I call dibs on the invention of a floating pitchfork with an outboard motor. Think of the pent-up demand even today. It will be YUGE!
The obvious solution is to make sure we have a robotic police force in place before we fire all the workers.
But can you trust the soon-to-be-unemployed programmers, who have already seen other friends and family lose out) to willfully build their robotic overlords? Oh what the f*ck - of course they will. They're the same chumps who kept saying that programmers don't need unions.
You make it sound like that money, once spent, disappears from the economy. It doesn't. The poor are the ones who make the economy go round - they spend 100% of their income on goods and services, so if you want to stimulate the economy, you give the poor money to spend, not tax breaks to the rich where the money will sit in some bank account or be used to buy stocks in pre-existing businesses rather than create actual demand for goods and services.
How about just make robots so cheap that anyone can afford to go into business for themselves and be their own robotic overlord? I might make a robot that weeds vegetable gardens, you make a robot that pick the veggies, someone else makes robots that collect the chicken eggs or milk the cows, strips down old electronics for recycling, picks up the trash, washes windows, cleans gutters, diagnoses illnesses, babysits, cleans the streets, digs sewers, lays bricks, re-shingles roofs, machines parts, etc.
Once you can't make money by advertising to sell things to people, people will just have to entertain themselves - maybe by mowing lawns, walking dogs, tending their gardens, doing volunteer stuff...
Think of what a world we could have if everyone is so bored shitless that they happily volunteer to do ANYTHING to have something to do.
Hopefully, yur argumentum ad hominem isn't going to work on anyone here who was smart enough not to vote for Trump. Notice how the ones pushing against a tax on robots are the ones who will benefit the most financially from robots.
Of course, once robots get so cheap that anyone can make/own one, there's not much (except human greediness) to stop communities from setting up their own robots to compete for the production of goods for the community's consumption and benefit. Then what will the 0.01% do?
Cars with lojacks get stolen and sold overseas all the time with zero consequences. Also, a NIC doesn't broadcast unless you plug it in. And anything can be hacked. Ask the CIA and the NSA:-) Or Wikileaks...
Slashdot Mirror
Nowadays, to win, you have to cheat. Look at Trump and his "Fake Amepika Great Again." Fish rot from the head down. So do countries. The average person is usually better, more moral, than the people in charge, who have to satisfy their owners.
... or can't afford to buy their homes, which are the boomer's retirement funds.
You can't compete with countries such as India, where half the population don't have a toilet and the average wage is $10/day.
Of course he doesn't care. He's a CEO - little people problems are beneath his status in life.
Many co-op opportunities are just there to exploit free or cheap labour.
Nowadays telling laid off people to get more education is clearly a gamble. The same time and money might be better off spent elsewhere, starting a business, or taking a completely unrelated job and avoiding more debt.
And yet the facts show that laptops that were under the price of netbooks but with better specs killed the netbook market. The price competition in laptops is even more fierce, and yet they're still being produced - licensing costs were not a consideration.
I remember one of my co-workers bringing his new netbook to work. After a month it stayed at home while my laptop continued to make the journey every day. Then again, my laptop had more utility - 17" display, dual hard drives, decent memory and cpu, linux. You can purchase a standard laptop with 8 gigs of ram for half what one of these pieces of shit will sell for.
As for their use case - "when you really need to type" - that use case no longer exists. Phones come with speech-to-text.
Sure I was. I pointed out that you can just get a keyboard and you have a WAY better, WAY cheaper solution than either of these pieces of under-specced crap. (Did you check out the prices? Insane!).
Or if you really don't want to carry around a keyboard, use speech-to-text. It's a thing nowadays, no keyboard needed. These over-priced way-underspec'd pieces of crap are a disgrace. Look at the picture in the summary section. They say you can use this to do spreadsheets - I say it's just proof that this will let people go blind without bothering to track down porn. The device does not exist, and its' chance of coming to fruition is not so great.
Their weasel words say they've produced a physical model - but if you read further, no guts. In other words, right now it's all show, no go. The "spec" comes with a big asterisk - that this is their goal, not their current design.
The poor have low education and weak skillsets that make their time less valuable than someone who produces things of value.
What a lie. The best indicator of future success is being born into a rich family. That takes neither making good choices nor learning skills.
To press the point further, nobody just "goes into business for themselves" anymore, it's not that simple
Talk about bullshit. Every economic downturn, the number of self-employed goes up. Why? Because it IS easy to go into business for yourself. And if the alternative is the gig economy, where you have none of the benefits and all the risks of being self-employed anyway, might as well cut out the boss and keep his cut for yourself.
Or did the gig economy, the rise of the precariat, fail to attract your attention? And the reality of education no longer being a guarantee of a job?
Which is why I said "once people own the means of production." Which implies a prior transition period during which basic income will be needed.
The article is based on a lie. It states that tablets killed the netbook. Cheap laptops (barely more than the price of netbooks, and eventually cheaper and better spec'ed than netbooks) killed it.
Or you can buy a tablet and a roll-up keyboard. Get the worst of both worlds. Anyone I knew who bought a netbook bought them because they were cheaper than laptops - they're a niche product whose niche is gone. Or do you really think people are going to bother toting around netbooks instead of phones and tablets? (or if they need a laptop, a phone and laptop)?
What - you think the Trump presidency has ANY purpose beyond distraction while the country gets raped by his owners?
So, Africa doesn't have countries with universities and other hallmarks of an advanced country? India's classified as an advanced country - they can send probes to Mars - and yet they are a shithole with enough people without access to flush toilets (600 million and counting) to stand in line (2 feet total space for each person) from Mumbai to the Moon.
The United States is an advanced country, and yet look at the public health care system - but look fast, what there is won't be there long. Cuba and the US are pretty much tied for life expectancy - but Trump will Fake Amepika Great Again by "weeding out the weak, the old, the lame" while saving taxpayer dollars so his rich buddies can do whatever the filthy rich do.
You make it sound like that money, once spent, disappears from the economy. It doesn't.
Spend 172 bucks on imported oil. Burn the oil to keep warm. You have nothing. Somebody else, in a different country, now has your 172 bucks. The only way to make it come around is to create 172 bucks worth of goods.
Bullshit. First, there's this thing called "services." Second, maybe while you're keeping warm with that oil, you're producing goods or services that you can trade with them. Third, oil is fungible. 60% is imported down from 75%, and OPEC continues to lose market share. So if you burn 172 bucks of oil, unless you get it right off the tanker, there's no way to say it was all imported.
Someone (religionofpeas) with no imagination or foresight wrote:
once robots get so cheap that anyone can make/own one, there's not much (except human greediness) to stop communities from setting up their own robots
Except they won't. An current industrial robot can be very profitable for a big company, but it's way out of reach of ordinary consumers. And what are you going to do with a single robot ? You need a whole bunch of infrastructure and logistics around it to make it work efficiently.
You can place your prediction with these other klunkers:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
Ken Olson, founder of DEC, 1977
"the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995
"Apple is already dead."
Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, 1997
"Two years from now, spam will be solved."
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004
If I have a robot that can weed gardens, I don't need a garden - I just need to know others who have gardens that need weeding. Or maybe I have a garden. It can weed more than one garden. Same as the person who has the vegetable picker. They aren't limited to exclusively picking their own veggies. You also don't need many robot owners for the community to thrive - same as not everyone in a family from infant to grandparent has to have a job.
This is going to sound marxist, but once people own the means of production, even the need for a universal basic income goes away.
Birth rates have stopped going down in Africa, despite improvements in education. More people will be born in Africa in the next 30 years than the rest of the world combined.
Let's not forget that a large portion of those workers are in an occupation whose sole purpose is to prevent expression of legitimate grievance against those creating the situation.
Congratulations, you managed to drag President Trump and his staff into a discussion about robots :-)
We have seen what happens when you disenfranchise the local population and strip them of the bare minimum needs for survival. 1789 and 1917 give a pretty good example. That's why we outsourced that to areas where people can't simply pick up pitchforks and kill us, 'cause swimming through oceans with pitchforks is a bit unwieldy.
I call dibs on the invention of a floating pitchfork with an outboard motor. Think of the pent-up demand even today. It will be YUGE!
The obvious solution is to make sure we have a robotic police force in place before we fire all the workers.
But can you trust the soon-to-be-unemployed programmers, who have already seen other friends and family lose out) to willfully build their robotic overlords? Oh what the f*ck - of course they will. They're the same chumps who kept saying that programmers don't need unions.
You make it sound like that money, once spent, disappears from the economy. It doesn't. The poor are the ones who make the economy go round - they spend 100% of their income on goods and services, so if you want to stimulate the economy, you give the poor money to spend, not tax breaks to the rich where the money will sit in some bank account or be used to buy stocks in pre-existing businesses rather than create actual demand for goods and services.
How about just make robots so cheap that anyone can afford to go into business for themselves and be their own robotic overlord? I might make a robot that weeds vegetable gardens, you make a robot that pick the veggies, someone else makes robots that collect the chicken eggs or milk the cows, strips down old electronics for recycling, picks up the trash, washes windows, cleans gutters, diagnoses illnesses, babysits, cleans the streets, digs sewers, lays bricks, re-shingles roofs, machines parts, etc.
Once you can't make money by advertising to sell things to people, people will just have to entertain themselves - maybe by mowing lawns, walking dogs, tending their gardens, doing volunteer stuff ...
Think of what a world we could have if everyone is so bored shitless that they happily volunteer to do ANYTHING to have something to do.
Hopefully, yur argumentum ad hominem isn't going to work on anyone here who was smart enough not to vote for Trump. Notice how the ones pushing against a tax on robots are the ones who will benefit the most financially from robots.
Of course, once robots get so cheap that anyone can make/own one, there's not much (except human greediness) to stop communities from setting up their own robots to compete for the production of goods for the community's consumption and benefit. Then what will the 0.01% do?
Cars with lojacks get stolen and sold overseas all the time with zero consequences. Also, a NIC doesn't broadcast unless you plug it in. And anything can be hacked. Ask the CIA and the NSA :-) Or Wikileaks ...