per-se. It's only a problem if you let it be. The solution the bean counters are using is to break tasks down into something simple enough to train in a matter of weeks. It means you need a _lot_ more people, but when people are cheap that's not a problem either. The advantages that come with not having a single truly indispensable employee are huge. You can switch to contractors and stop paying benefits, unemployment insurance and all the other routine costs that go with happy employees. From there you can start gradually ratcheting up the hours worked. Hell hourly employees are often happy to work the extra hours for the extra pay; they don't put it together that they've had their wages slashed and that's why they're working those hours:(...
as people retire I'm seeing companies replace them with outsourcing. This way they can quietly outsource the jobs without the bad press from the layoffs. I'm guessing that's a big part of this 0% job growth. That and our lack of manufacturing. We make a lot of stuff but we don't use very many people to do it. A lot of EEs and engineers in general used to work at factories, but you just don't need that many of them. It's part of the general increases of productivity that we're seeing everywhere. That plus the shift away from 40 hour work weeks that started with classifying white collar folks as exempt...
you hit nail on head. It's not so much about racism as it is about having an underclass to look down on. I remember finding this out in a college history course. Slavery was important to the south because poor white southerners were kept in check by comparing their living conditions to black slaves. It's something every culture does: People don't measure your quality of life objectively. For most people it's subjective. This is also why India has a cast system and Britain a Class system. I'm sure I could find other examples without too much effort.
It's not some grand conspiracy per se, it's just that if you're a member of the 1% you need strategies to control the other 99%. This is one of the most effective. If a ruling class didn't come up with stuff like this it doesn't stay a ruling class for very long. Survival bias sets in and you start seeing the same patterns emerging. It's all pretty well known to Historians but it's not as cool or sexy as talking about wars so you're lucky if you get a paragraph devoted to it. Plus these days talking about it gets you shouted down as a politically correct feminazi or some such. Another thing the ruling class is good at is recognizing threats...
google pulled $100 million dollars in funding and _that_ destroyed the project. A few (easily undone if you're so inclined) UI tweaks didn't do that. It's just the part that gets the most nerd rage because it's the most visible.
the game style games mostly flopped and the studios either went out of business or switched to consoles/pcs. Squae-Enix doesn't really count. If you take away the ports of their mainline games (Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy) they didn't really make any money on their traditional efforts. Folks who want traditional games want a game controller, not a touch screen. That problem hasn't been solved. Take a look at Ground Ponders. It's a very well made hex based strategy game that's almost unplayable because the complex game mechanics are locked behind an awkward touch screen interface. It got so-so reviews and didn't sell well:(.
If you don't have a built in fan base actively looking for your games mobile is DOA. The reason it makes so much money is it replaced an existing industry: The Arcades. Well, not the Arcades per-se, but the coin-ops that were still making billions right up until 2009 or so. Betcha didn't know that coin-op arcade was a multi-billion dollar industry right up until then, didcha:)? There's an article floating around about it somewhere.
Then there's the Whales (google F2P and "Whale" if you haven't heard the term). Mobile gaming is mostly the domain of a few obsessive compulsives and people killing time at the laundromat. The results are predictably less than stellar:(. Unless there's a demographic switch I don't see much changing...
We have a global ruling class who forms powerful international organizations to protect their interests. Who knew? Can we working class shlubs _please_ stop fighting among ourselves long enough to notice?
I think it was who said that one failed terrorist attack and we all have to take our shoes off before boarding a plane but 31 shootings later still no new gun laws. This country has it's priorities completely backwards:(...
that's at issue, it's the possibility that laws will be passed banning municipal broadband. Ted Cruz has already said he favors such laws, though to be fair he's a fringe candidate. The Republican lead House/Senate have toyed with such laws but right now it would almost certainly see a Presidential Veto. It's very likely that a Republican President wouldn't veto a law. That's why the Prez election matters. There's a whole lot of nasty stuff that's been held back by gridlock these last 8 years. A Republican win means the end of that gridlock.
if the Republican's take the Whitehouse. AFAIK all of the candidates oppose Municipal Broadband. Certainly all the serious contenders do. Whatever other complaints I have against Hilary (and there are many) that's not one of them...
Doesn't really matter much to me. The Tarrifs OTOH help protect local business and when there is no local business fund my gov't. I read somewhere that a bunch of well-to-do kids from the ivy league were surveyed about their thoughts on the economy and what came out was they were only concerned with growing the economy. They weren't evil or anything. They were just completely focused on growing the economy. If they did good in the process bully for me, if they did bad oh well. They weren't immoral, they were amoral.
In a lot of ways that's worse. It tells me that they're focused completely on the share of that growth they get. There's a name for that, rent seeking. There's a less cheerful name for it too, parasites...
To driverless cars. They'll be a driver with the minimal amount of training needed to handle an emergency and the rest gets home by computer. In 30 years the computer will be better at handling the emergencies and the driver will get the boot. My question is what are we gonna do with all the out of work truck drivers. Your not gonna retrain them, there's only so much they can do.
assuming your stats are correct then people are cycling in and out of the top 10%. If that's true it means they do well when they're young and then everything goes to shit. At least I can't think of any reason why they'd drop out. In other words, after they're used up their quality of life goes down
Now, the real ruling class is just that: A Class. You don't drop out of that. That's why golden parachutes exist. You don't spill the blood of kings. They take care of their own. Stop kidding yourself. Google "Upward Mobility In America" sometime. When the top 3 results stop being about how it's a myth we'll talk.
and I've been reading/. for years. The 1% will benefit handsomely from a crashing environment. The value of what resources are left will skyrocket, and as always they skim off the top. No matter how bad things get they always come out ahead. That's the definition of a ruling class. They're not going to leave and there isn't going to be a WWIII. They won't allow either of those things to happen.
"Starve the Beast" is a political strategy where you cut taxes, borrow money to make up for your short falls and then demand cuts in government to solve the debt problem.
We've been yanking funding to infrastructure since about the 80s. folks who've been talking about the consequences of that got ignored. I'm just shocked (and a little elated) to see somebody doing something in a situation like this. The increases were relatively small but obviously significant. 40,50 years ago we'd have just waited until the brain damage was done and if we were lucky something might be done about it after the fact...
Seriously. From what I can tell what we haven't eliminated outright we've defunded to the point where it doesn't exist anymore. It's not really a law if nobody enforces it. It's like complaining to the labor board in Arizona. There isn't one. It wasn't staffed.
You see it on MSNBC's commentary shows. Fox does it during their news shows. They were actually sued for this. It's not legal to pass commentary off as news. They successfully defended themselves by declaring they were not in fact a News Channel and were an entertainment network.
Class action was the last thing we had to defend our rights. Right now with Unions dead there isn't really anything else that brings together enough of the American working class to stand up to a large corporation.
the one that made it worthwhile? Sure, most if not all of these were post Alibaba, but after a payout like that who can blame them for trying again. The funny part is that their illustrious CEO sold off 7 billion of Alibaba before it went crazy and they still made 30 billion after the little 'Oops'. Funny to watch the shareholders circling them like sharks though.
and cancers, asthmas and other diseases it causes. How about our wars for oil fought to support the car industry (which couldn't exist without cheap gas) and the horrors wrought to support it. How about the death of public transportation and the stress and misery caused when those masses are forced to struggle to obtain costly transportation better suited for an idle rich? How about fuck you Henry Ford. You were an asshole and I want my clean air and cheap transportation back.
because people working in the factories kept getting sick and started acting crazy? Kinda like how they found out nitrates are carcinogenic: a farmer's cows kept dying of liver cancer and they traced it back to massive amounts of canned herring he was feeding them because he got it cheap from a factory after it couldn't be sold.
The trouble is that Internet has a crazy 97% profit margin. Google is already moving in to lay fiber. So is AT&T. AT&T did just buy direct tv so they might go the data cap route, but most of DTVs profit is from sports packages and pay TV, so they might not care as much about the caps if it means getting that money. Now, this does probably mean $100/mo for no caps, which will suck (99% profit margin anybody? Can I _please_ have municiple internet?). Then there's the possibility of 5G pushing people to mobile broadband, but that's a long shot.
Internet service has a 97% profit margin, so they could drop the prices massively and still be profitable. IIRC the same is not true for TV because the content providers have a lot of power. People basically want sports, Disney and a few drama shows. The rest is just filler. But the filler's cheap. It's there to add value. If you just paid $5 bucks a month for the stuff you want you'd get more subscribers but you couldn't pay the content providers what they're demanding.
Slashdot Mirror
per-se. It's only a problem if you let it be. The solution the bean counters are using is to break tasks down into something simple enough to train in a matter of weeks. It means you need a _lot_ more people, but when people are cheap that's not a problem either. The advantages that come with not having a single truly indispensable employee are huge. You can switch to contractors and stop paying benefits, unemployment insurance and all the other routine costs that go with happy employees. From there you can start gradually ratcheting up the hours worked. Hell hourly employees are often happy to work the extra hours for the extra pay; they don't put it together that they've had their wages slashed and that's why they're working those hours :(...
as people retire I'm seeing companies replace them with outsourcing. This way they can quietly outsource the jobs without the bad press from the layoffs. I'm guessing that's a big part of this 0% job growth. That and our lack of manufacturing. We make a lot of stuff but we don't use very many people to do it. A lot of EEs and engineers in general used to work at factories, but you just don't need that many of them. It's part of the general increases of productivity that we're seeing everywhere. That plus the shift away from 40 hour work weeks that started with classifying white collar folks as exempt...
you hit nail on head. It's not so much about racism as it is about having an underclass to look down on. I remember finding this out in a college history course. Slavery was important to the south because poor white southerners were kept in check by comparing their living conditions to black slaves. It's something every culture does: People don't measure your quality of life objectively. For most people it's subjective. This is also why India has a cast system and Britain a Class system. I'm sure I could find other examples without too much effort.
It's not some grand conspiracy per se, it's just that if you're a member of the 1% you need strategies to control the other 99%. This is one of the most effective. If a ruling class didn't come up with stuff like this it doesn't stay a ruling class for very long. Survival bias sets in and you start seeing the same patterns emerging. It's all pretty well known to Historians but it's not as cool or sexy as talking about wars so you're lucky if you get a paragraph devoted to it. Plus these days talking about it gets you shouted down as a politically correct feminazi or some such. Another thing the ruling class is good at is recognizing threats...
google pulled $100 million dollars in funding and _that_ destroyed the project. A few (easily undone if you're so inclined) UI tweaks didn't do that. It's just the part that gets the most nerd rage because it's the most visible.
the game style games mostly flopped and the studios either went out of business or switched to consoles/pcs. Squae-Enix doesn't really count. If you take away the ports of their mainline games (Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy) they didn't really make any money on their traditional efforts. Folks who want traditional games want a game controller, not a touch screen. That problem hasn't been solved. Take a look at Ground Ponders. It's a very well made hex based strategy game that's almost unplayable because the complex game mechanics are locked behind an awkward touch screen interface. It got so-so reviews and didn't sell well :(.
:)? There's an article floating around about it somewhere.
:(. Unless there's a demographic switch I don't see much changing...
If you don't have a built in fan base actively looking for your games mobile is DOA. The reason it makes so much money is it replaced an existing industry: The Arcades. Well, not the Arcades per-se, but the coin-ops that were still making billions right up until 2009 or so. Betcha didn't know that coin-op arcade was a multi-billion dollar industry right up until then, didcha
Then there's the Whales (google F2P and "Whale" if you haven't heard the term). Mobile gaming is mostly the domain of a few obsessive compulsives and people killing time at the laundromat. The results are predictably less than stellar
We have a global ruling class who forms powerful international organizations to protect their interests. Who knew? Can we working class shlubs _please_ stop fighting among ourselves long enough to notice?
I think it was who said that one failed terrorist attack and we all have to take our shoes off before boarding a plane but 31 shootings later still no new gun laws. This country has it's priorities completely backwards :(...
that's at issue, it's the possibility that laws will be passed banning municipal broadband. Ted Cruz has already said he favors such laws, though to be fair he's a fringe candidate. The Republican lead House/Senate have toyed with such laws but right now it would almost certainly see a Presidential Veto. It's very likely that a Republican President wouldn't veto a law. That's why the Prez election matters. There's a whole lot of nasty stuff that's been held back by gridlock these last 8 years. A Republican win means the end of that gridlock.
if the Republican's take the Whitehouse. AFAIK all of the candidates oppose Municipal Broadband. Certainly all the serious contenders do. Whatever other complaints I have against Hilary (and there are many) that's not one of them...
that we won't do that. We can always let those people stave. Most countries do :(...
Doesn't really matter much to me. The Tarrifs OTOH help protect local business and when there is no local business fund my gov't. I read somewhere that a bunch of well-to-do kids from the ivy league were surveyed about their thoughts on the economy and what came out was they were only concerned with growing the economy. They weren't evil or anything. They were just completely focused on growing the economy. If they did good in the process bully for me, if they did bad oh well. They weren't immoral, they were amoral.
In a lot of ways that's worse. It tells me that they're focused completely on the share of that growth they get. There's a name for that, rent seeking. There's a less cheerful name for it too, parasites...
To driverless cars. They'll be a driver with the minimal amount of training needed to handle an emergency and the rest gets home by computer. In 30 years the computer will be better at handling the emergencies and the driver will get the boot. My question is what are we gonna do with all the out of work truck drivers. Your not gonna retrain them, there's only so much they can do.
assuming your stats are correct then people are cycling in and out of the top 10%. If that's true it means they do well when they're young and then everything goes to shit. At least I can't think of any reason why they'd drop out. In other words, after they're used up their quality of life goes down
Now, the real ruling class is just that: A Class. You don't drop out of that. That's why golden parachutes exist. You don't spill the blood of kings. They take care of their own. Stop kidding yourself. Google "Upward Mobility In America" sometime. When the top 3 results stop being about how it's a myth we'll talk.
and I've been reading /. for years. The 1% will benefit handsomely from a crashing environment. The value of what resources are left will skyrocket, and as always they skim off the top. No matter how bad things get they always come out ahead. That's the definition of a ruling class. They're not going to leave and there isn't going to be a WWIII. They won't allow either of those things to happen.
"Starve the Beast" is a political strategy where you cut taxes, borrow money to make up for your short falls and then demand cuts in government to solve the debt problem.
We've been yanking funding to infrastructure since about the 80s. folks who've been talking about the consequences of that got ignored. I'm just shocked (and a little elated) to see somebody doing something in a situation like this. The increases were relatively small but obviously significant. 40,50 years ago we'd have just waited until the brain damage was done and if we were lucky something might be done about it after the fact...
Seriously. From what I can tell what we haven't eliminated outright we've defunded to the point where it doesn't exist anymore. It's not really a law if nobody enforces it. It's like complaining to the labor board in Arizona. There isn't one. It wasn't staffed.
You see it on MSNBC's commentary shows. Fox does it during their news shows. They were actually sued for this. It's not legal to pass commentary off as news. They successfully defended themselves by declaring they were not in fact a News Channel and were an entertainment network.
Class action was the last thing we had to defend our rights. Right now with Unions dead there isn't really anything else that brings together enough of the American working class to stand up to a large corporation.
explain this? The summary doesn't make it clear what Philips is blocking and the site's /.ed.
the one that made it worthwhile? Sure, most if not all of these were post Alibaba, but after a payout like that who can blame them for trying again. The funny part is that their illustrious CEO sold off 7 billion of Alibaba before it went crazy and they still made 30 billion after the little 'Oops'. Funny to watch the shareholders circling them like sharks though.
and cancers, asthmas and other diseases it causes. How about our wars for oil fought to support the car industry (which couldn't exist without cheap gas) and the horrors wrought to support it. How about the death of public transportation and the stress and misery caused when those masses are forced to struggle to obtain costly transportation better suited for an idle rich? How about fuck you Henry Ford. You were an asshole and I want my clean air and cheap transportation back.
because people working in the factories kept getting sick and started acting crazy? Kinda like how they found out nitrates are carcinogenic: a farmer's cows kept dying of liver cancer and they traced it back to massive amounts of canned herring he was feeding them because he got it cheap from a factory after it couldn't be sold.
The trouble is that Internet has a crazy 97% profit margin. Google is already moving in to lay fiber. So is AT&T. AT&T did just buy direct tv so they might go the data cap route, but most of DTVs profit is from sports packages and pay TV, so they might not care as much about the caps if it means getting that money. Now, this does probably mean $100/mo for no caps, which will suck (99% profit margin anybody? Can I _please_ have municiple internet?). Then there's the possibility of 5G pushing people to mobile broadband, but that's a long shot.
Internet service has a 97% profit margin, so they could drop the prices massively and still be profitable. IIRC the same is not true for TV because the content providers have a lot of power. People basically want sports, Disney and a few drama shows. The rest is just filler. But the filler's cheap. It's there to add value. If you just paid $5 bucks a month for the stuff you want you'd get more subscribers but you couldn't pay the content providers what they're demanding.