during the.com boom. Better software is killing those consulting gigs. Used to be a company needed a consultant 20 hours a week to keep a 20 computer NT domain going. Now you wouldn't bother with that for less than 200.
There's jobs for data scientists because that's high end math. Not a lot of folks can do that. There's very few grunt work jobs created in that space because, well, it's mostly being done by AI scientists, you know, the kind that are automating all the jobs away...
Did you know 86% of the US manufacturing jobs lost in the last 20 years were to automation, not outsourcing? You're not going to see a bunch of new hardware installs here. Also, materials have gotten better. Car engines that died at 60k miles go 200k+. And those are ICE engines. God help the auto repair industry when electrics take over. The can seriously hit 1 million without breaking a sweat.
It's not just automation, it's better tech all around. We just don't need all these people anymore. Maybe in 100 years some tech we can't imagine, like the internet, will exist.
Support all the retraining programs you want, they won't work. There aren't any jobs you can retrain these folks for. Again, they're not going to go off and be data scientists. If they had the capacity to do that they already would. Retraining programs are a cop out. They're a dodge. It's like handing a bum a dollar bill. It might make you feel better in that moment but it doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't do any good to teach a man in a desert to fish.
and the oil companies got their pipeline. After it was built the Military Industrial Complex wouldn't let us leave because, hey, free money.
Oil drives just about all of US foreign policy, especially in the middle east. You don't honestly think we're sanctioning Venezuela for "freedom" do you? But Chromsky doesn't really blame everything on oil. At the end of the day it's the relentless pursuit of profit by oligarchs that he harps on. He'll be happy to talk about the crap we did for Dole Fruit company if you care to ask him.
when you've got a government staffed with pro-corporate politicians from top to bottom. Start showing up to your primaries folks if you want any of this to change. And start demanding politicians who refuse corporate PAC money, like these.
that's painfully obvious. Netflix can stop password sharing anytime they want. They don't do it because they're smart enough to know it means a loss of subscribers.
some kind of superman who the world depends on. Well, not everybody, but enough to swing elections.
There's an old phrase: "The problem with the American poor is that they don't see themselves as an oppressed working class but as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires". It's Puritanism, and it's pounded into your skill from the time you can understand speech.
You're up against ideas put into folks heads before they could think critically. It'll be tough to break them out of that bubble....
feel fulfilled by dull, repetitive tasks (*cough*World of Warcraft*cough*, excuse me).
There's a puritanical idea, hammered into your head from the day you can understand speech, that the only value you have as a person is the work that you do. In the 50s, 60s and 70s there was pushback on this idea with folks looking forward to a time when we work 4 hours a week if that ("Meet George Jetson!") but that all fell apart in the 80s with the rise of neo-Conservatism.
I remember a photo op Bush Jr did with a 60 (70?) year old women who was working 2 minimum wage jobs to just barely get by. Bush was visibly uncomfortable because he knew what was being done to her was wrong, but she was proud as fuck. That's 30-40% of America in a nutshell right there.
are being replaced with low paid service sector jobs. That can't keep up. People won't have the money to shop at those service industries.
More importantly those low skill jobs (cashier, driver, data entry, back office worker, etc) are what's being automated. So there's going to be nowhere left to go.
and got stuck with Clinton because the ruling class shoved her down my throat.
Say what you will about Clinton but she's a classic "Goldwater Girl" (look it up). As pure conservative as there every was. And I mean a _real_ conservative. She'd have kept everything the same, resisting change every step along the way. Trump's the radical, it just so happens he's a radical for mega corporations instead of working class Americans.
if they're that inept they won't understand that they're automating their jobs away. Meanwhile the software they eventually write will be so bad you'll probably need an entire department to support it. Finally they'll get a promotion to VP over that department with a huge raise.
it was a movement started by textile workers put out of work by automation. Their aversion to industry was because they didn't get anything out of it except unemployment.
What new jobs? Be specific? How will anyone buy the things those new jobs product if they don't have money from jobs now? It doesn't take much to get humans to stop progressing. Remember the Dark Ages? 1200 years of no progress and abject poverty for 99% of the population.
It won't be apocalyptic. The world isn't coming to an end. But we're going to have anywhere from 50-100 years of mass unemployment, poverty, social strife and war. This is exactly what happened the last time we had a major industrial revolution. Eventually new tech caught up and employed people, but in the meantime folks suffered. We have history. We know this happened and we know it's happening now. Why not do something about it?
Put another way: When in your life has the solution to a complex problem (mass technology unemployment) been to ignore it and hope for the best (laissez faire)? Because right now that's all I see us doing.
folks who can do cryptography, AI math, complex mechanical and electrical engineering, etc.
The key here is these are highly skilled and creative people. They're not just workers, they're creators. When you've got people literally making new things for your business yeah, they're gonna be worth while.
This is not to say you can't make money off good employees. But you're going to run into margins at some point. Like the classic pizza example of economics. That first slice is great, and second might even be better, by the third you're pretty much done and you're probably not gonna make it to the crust on #4. Diminishing returns.
The key here is your good employees are "doers". They aren't making new things for you and opening up new markets, they're just servicing the existing markets.
Most of us are "Doers". Some of them are even very, very good at it. But there just aren't that many "creators". Especially in STEM fields. If there were we'd already have flying electric cars and no disease. You're expectations are too high, which sadly is pretty common among small business employers. You want the world, but you don't want to have to pay for it.
I keep hearing that the only solution is to come up with new jobs for them, but there doesn't seem to be much of anything. When I was a kid it was coding and then the H1-Bs and outsourcing took those jobs. Then it was biotech, but those jobs never really materialized in mass (and you need a 4-6 year degree to get them).
I keep saying this on Automation threads, but there was close to 80 years of strife and unemployment following the industrial revolution before WWI & II came alone (the largest government backed guaranteed jobs programs in history, which I could take the credit for that observation but it was Rob Reich who made it). We blew up most of Europe & Asia and killed tens of millions of working age males. The 20th century equivalent of Aztec sacrifice to cull the population.
Are we gonna do that gain? If not what are we doing to do with all these people? Look at the American Indian reservations before the Casinos if you want to see what life is like for people who aren't needed by anyone. Do we want large masses living like that? If not do we have a solution besides "Wait 80 years for a technological revolution to employ everyone"?
Age related cognitive decline is a thing and we're all susceptible to it. It worries me that there might come a day when I morph into a Trump supporter out of fear and confusion. e.g. there'll come a time when I can't tell a crook from an honest man because my critical thinking facilities are toast.
There was the WWII propaganda, but you could excuse that with the war. The lost a bit of control with Vietnam, but look at the coverage of the Iraq war. I'm too out of it to go dig up more/better examples, but go find Norm Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent for a comprehensive look at it.
Our media has served corporate masters for decades, probably centuries.
which, for debts under $100k, is the case (thanks Bush Jr!).
For those who don't know the Southern United States has brought back debtor's prisons. The way it works is the judge orders you to pay and if you can't you're in contempt of court. Off to jail you go, and better hope your family can get the money. If not you can work for 50 cents/hr in the prison's work camps^X^X work programs.
Yes, this is really happening... What drives me nuts is nobody noticed when Credit Card debt became secure debt and debtor's prisons came back...
because that's how you teach critical thinking to people who don't get math. The rich don't teach these things to their kids because they're rich, they teach them because they know it'll teach them to think critically and make them less likely to be taken advantage of.
The trouble with trying to teach critical thinking with math is there's no value in being 50% right.
and, well, do you really want vast numbers of people with maybe a useful skill but no ability to think critically or, say, recognize a demagogue?
It's a surplus of cheese made in America, not a surplus of "American" Cheese....
And you can largely thank our government for having a consistent food supply. The government heavily regulates what's grown and how it's grown via those subsidies. Before that we had over farming and farmers growing too much of the same, profitable crops until they market saturated and collapsed....
that made the programming easier. Right now AAA games cost a fortune and they're kind of simplistic. Compare any modern game to Deus Ex. The stupid complexity of modern graphics are a big part of that. Having to hand code shaders for every little look and effect gets really pricey really fast....
it's currently killing frame rates. Like in half. Cards that can do ray tracing at 60 fps are $1000+. The $700 Nvidia cards that can do ray tracing are hitting 35-50 depending on workload. If I drop a grand on a video card I want 60 fps...
is so you don't have to upgrade. There's videos on youtube of folks benchmarking 7 year old flagships and still hitting 60fps. So spend $700 now and pay $100/yr for a card or $300 every 2-3 years and hit somewhere around $800-$900. Plus the flagships tend to hold their value better, so you'll probably get $200 for it in 7 years when you sell it.
Also if you replace it with something just as power hungry that kinda defeats the point...
Thing is, if I keep a card 4 years (which I usually do) and save $15/yr on power (little less since I buy lower mid-range, $180-$230) that's $60 bucks gone. If I take that $60 and put it into a GPU it gets me into the upper mid range ($290-$300). That means anything AMD puts out has to outperform Nvidia by a big margin or it has to offer some other advantage (better image quality, better features, etc).
I think AMD was starting to kill it with cheap Freesync monitors, but as usual Nvidia noticed and responded, making their cards work with Freesync.
Vega was a bit cheaper because of stiff competition from Nvidia, but Nvidia isn't all that competitive right now except in power utilization.
That's what's got me interested. There's reviews of the 590 where folks found it was throttling on a 500 watt power supply and they had to put a 600 watt in to fix it. As an adult I pay for all that power and it does add up. So for me the question is are the competitive with Nvidia on power consumption now?
Oh, and DMC at 4k/60fps? It's a beat'em'up/spectacle brawler ala God of War I/II. How badly have PC game port optimizations gotten that running that kind of game at max settings is a big deal? I'd be more impressed to see Fallout 4 or even The Division 2 pushing those kinds of frame rates.
that's a bit off topic, but I'm fed up with seeing politicians gutting public institutions.
No less than Joe Biden is going around telling folks we should means test Social Security to keep it solvent (instead of just raising the limit on how much can be taxed due to inflation). He's being clever about it too, saying the "rich don't need SSI". Next it'll be the "Well to do" and then the "working class" and finally the program gets shut down and they pocket the money I paid in.
I don't know what's worse, the fact that they think they can sneak this past us or the fact that Joe Biden just did...
Your friend's Grandma either doesn't exist or (just as likely) really _is_ too old for treatment. I don't mean "we're gonna let old people die" old I mean "the treatment will kill you quicker than the cancer".
My mom died of Lung cancer. The treatment didn't stop the cancer, but it did make her last 4 years of life hell. Doctors have gotten a lot better at understanding what treatments are worthwhile. Me? I have no intention of going through that if I'm ever diagnosed.
Here's a more benign example: My dental hygienist started trying to sell me braces until the dentist came in and shut it down because, well, I'm 41 years old and it would be kind of silly at this point.
Meanwhile in America we get "Wallet Biopsies". Every time you go see a doctor somewhere in the back of their mind is "Can this person's insurance pay me for this"? A close family member of mine was on a steroid and now has screwed up bones because a doctor should have ordered an MRI to check for bone problems steroids can cause but didn't.
I found out later the reason was likely because when doctors order tests the insurance companies won't pay for them if the come up blank. What this means is that unless your very, very well off then your doctor is likely to avoid ordering tests until it's painfully obvious you're suffering symptoms. This means a lot of diseases won't be caught until it's too late.
Slashdot Mirror
during the .com boom. Better software is killing those consulting gigs. Used to be a company needed a consultant 20 hours a week to keep a 20 computer NT domain going. Now you wouldn't bother with that for less than 200.
There's jobs for data scientists because that's high end math. Not a lot of folks can do that. There's very few grunt work jobs created in that space because, well, it's mostly being done by AI scientists, you know, the kind that are automating all the jobs away...
Did you know 86% of the US manufacturing jobs lost in the last 20 years were to automation, not outsourcing? You're not going to see a bunch of new hardware installs here. Also, materials have gotten better. Car engines that died at 60k miles go 200k+. And those are ICE engines. God help the auto repair industry when electrics take over. The can seriously hit 1 million without breaking a sweat.
It's not just automation, it's better tech all around. We just don't need all these people anymore. Maybe in 100 years some tech we can't imagine, like the internet, will exist.
Support all the retraining programs you want, they won't work. There aren't any jobs you can retrain these folks for. Again, they're not going to go off and be data scientists. If they had the capacity to do that they already would. Retraining programs are a cop out. They're a dodge. It's like handing a bum a dollar bill. It might make you feel better in that moment but it doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't do any good to teach a man in a desert to fish.
and the oil companies got their pipeline. After it was built the Military Industrial Complex wouldn't let us leave because, hey, free money.
Oil drives just about all of US foreign policy, especially in the middle east. You don't honestly think we're sanctioning Venezuela for "freedom" do you? But Chromsky doesn't really blame everything on oil. At the end of the day it's the relentless pursuit of profit by oligarchs that he harps on. He'll be happy to talk about the crap we did for Dole Fruit company if you care to ask him.
when you've got a government staffed with pro-corporate politicians from top to bottom. Start showing up to your primaries folks if you want any of this to change. And start demanding politicians who refuse corporate PAC money, like these.
that's painfully obvious. Netflix can stop password sharing anytime they want. They don't do it because they're smart enough to know it means a loss of subscribers.
some kind of superman who the world depends on. Well, not everybody, but enough to swing elections.
There's an old phrase: "The problem with the American poor is that they don't see themselves as an oppressed working class but as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires". It's Puritanism, and it's pounded into your skill from the time you can understand speech.
You're up against ideas put into folks heads before they could think critically. It'll be tough to break them out of that bubble....
feel fulfilled by dull, repetitive tasks (*cough*World of Warcraft*cough*, excuse me).
There's a puritanical idea, hammered into your head from the day you can understand speech, that the only value you have as a person is the work that you do. In the 50s, 60s and 70s there was pushback on this idea with folks looking forward to a time when we work 4 hours a week if that ("Meet George Jetson!") but that all fell apart in the 80s with the rise of neo-Conservatism.
I remember a photo op Bush Jr did with a 60 (70?) year old women who was working 2 minimum wage jobs to just barely get by. Bush was visibly uncomfortable because he knew what was being done to her was wrong, but she was proud as fuck. That's 30-40% of America in a nutshell right there.
are being replaced with low paid service sector jobs. That can't keep up. People won't have the money to shop at those service industries.
More importantly those low skill jobs (cashier, driver, data entry, back office worker, etc) are what's being automated. So there's going to be nowhere left to go.
and got stuck with Clinton because the ruling class shoved her down my throat.
Say what you will about Clinton but she's a classic "Goldwater Girl" (look it up). As pure conservative as there every was. And I mean a _real_ conservative. She'd have kept everything the same, resisting change every step along the way. Trump's the radical, it just so happens he's a radical for mega corporations instead of working class Americans.
if they're that inept they won't understand that they're automating their jobs away. Meanwhile the software they eventually write will be so bad you'll probably need an entire department to support it. Finally they'll get a promotion to VP over that department with a huge raise.
it was a movement started by textile workers put out of work by automation. Their aversion to industry was because they didn't get anything out of it except unemployment.
What new jobs? Be specific? How will anyone buy the things those new jobs product if they don't have money from jobs now? It doesn't take much to get humans to stop progressing. Remember the Dark Ages? 1200 years of no progress and abject poverty for 99% of the population.
It won't be apocalyptic. The world isn't coming to an end. But we're going to have anywhere from 50-100 years of mass unemployment, poverty, social strife and war. This is exactly what happened the last time we had a major industrial revolution. Eventually new tech caught up and employed people, but in the meantime folks suffered. We have history. We know this happened and we know it's happening now. Why not do something about it?
Put another way: When in your life has the solution to a complex problem (mass technology unemployment) been to ignore it and hope for the best (laissez faire)? Because right now that's all I see us doing.
folks who can do cryptography, AI math, complex mechanical and electrical engineering, etc.
The key here is these are highly skilled and creative people. They're not just workers, they're creators. When you've got people literally making new things for your business yeah, they're gonna be worth while.
This is not to say you can't make money off good employees. But you're going to run into margins at some point. Like the classic pizza example of economics. That first slice is great, and second might even be better, by the third you're pretty much done and you're probably not gonna make it to the crust on #4. Diminishing returns.
The key here is your good employees are "doers". They aren't making new things for you and opening up new markets, they're just servicing the existing markets.
Most of us are "Doers". Some of them are even very, very good at it. But there just aren't that many "creators". Especially in STEM fields. If there were we'd already have flying electric cars and no disease. You're expectations are too high, which sadly is pretty common among small business employers. You want the world, but you don't want to have to pay for it.
I keep hearing that the only solution is to come up with new jobs for them, but there doesn't seem to be much of anything. When I was a kid it was coding and then the H1-Bs and outsourcing took those jobs. Then it was biotech, but those jobs never really materialized in mass (and you need a 4-6 year degree to get them).
I keep saying this on Automation threads, but there was close to 80 years of strife and unemployment following the industrial revolution before WWI & II came alone (the largest government backed guaranteed jobs programs in history, which I could take the credit for that observation but it was Rob Reich who made it). We blew up most of Europe & Asia and killed tens of millions of working age males. The 20th century equivalent of Aztec sacrifice to cull the population.
Are we gonna do that gain? If not what are we doing to do with all these people? Look at the American Indian reservations before the Casinos if you want to see what life is like for people who aren't needed by anyone. Do we want large masses living like that? If not do we have a solution besides "Wait 80 years for a technological revolution to employ everyone"?
Age related cognitive decline is a thing and we're all susceptible to it. It worries me that there might come a day when I morph into a Trump supporter out of fear and confusion. e.g. there'll come a time when I can't tell a crook from an honest man because my critical thinking facilities are toast.
There was the WWII propaganda, but you could excuse that with the war. The lost a bit of control with Vietnam, but look at the coverage of the Iraq war. I'm too out of it to go dig up more/better examples, but go find Norm Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent for a comprehensive look at it.
Our media has served corporate masters for decades, probably centuries.
which, for debts under $100k, is the case (thanks Bush Jr!).
For those who don't know the Southern United States has brought back debtor's prisons. The way it works is the judge orders you to pay and if you can't you're in contempt of court. Off to jail you go, and better hope your family can get the money. If not you can work for 50 cents/hr in the prison's work camps^X^X work programs.
Yes, this is really happening... What drives me nuts is nobody noticed when Credit Card debt became secure debt and debtor's prisons came back...
because that's how you teach critical thinking to people who don't get math. The rich don't teach these things to their kids because they're rich, they teach them because they know it'll teach them to think critically and make them less likely to be taken advantage of.
The trouble with trying to teach critical thinking with math is there's no value in being 50% right.
and, well, do you really want vast numbers of people with maybe a useful skill but no ability to think critically or, say, recognize a demagogue?
It's a surplus of cheese made in America, not a surplus of "American" Cheese....
And you can largely thank our government for having a consistent food supply. The government heavily regulates what's grown and how it's grown via those subsidies. Before that we had over farming and farmers growing too much of the same, profitable crops until they market saturated and collapsed....
that made the programming easier. Right now AAA games cost a fortune and they're kind of simplistic. Compare any modern game to Deus Ex. The stupid complexity of modern graphics are a big part of that. Having to hand code shaders for every little look and effect gets really pricey really fast....
it's currently killing frame rates. Like in half. Cards that can do ray tracing at 60 fps are $1000+. The $700 Nvidia cards that can do ray tracing are hitting 35-50 depending on workload. If I drop a grand on a video card I want 60 fps...
is so you don't have to upgrade. There's videos on youtube of folks benchmarking 7 year old flagships and still hitting 60fps. So spend $700 now and pay $100/yr for a card or $300 every 2-3 years and hit somewhere around $800-$900. Plus the flagships tend to hold their value better, so you'll probably get $200 for it in 7 years when you sell it.
Also if you replace it with something just as power hungry that kinda defeats the point...
Thing is, if I keep a card 4 years (which I usually do) and save $15/yr on power (little less since I buy lower mid-range, $180-$230) that's $60 bucks gone. If I take that $60 and put it into a GPU it gets me into the upper mid range ($290-$300). That means anything AMD puts out has to outperform Nvidia by a big margin or it has to offer some other advantage (better image quality, better features, etc).
I think AMD was starting to kill it with cheap Freesync monitors, but as usual Nvidia noticed and responded, making their cards work with Freesync.
Vega was a bit cheaper because of stiff competition from Nvidia, but Nvidia isn't all that competitive right now except in power utilization.
That's what's got me interested. There's reviews of the 590 where folks found it was throttling on a 500 watt power supply and they had to put a 600 watt in to fix it. As an adult I pay for all that power and it does add up. So for me the question is are the competitive with Nvidia on power consumption now?
Oh, and DMC at 4k/60fps? It's a beat'em'up/spectacle brawler ala God of War I/II. How badly have PC game port optimizations gotten that running that kind of game at max settings is a big deal? I'd be more impressed to see Fallout 4 or even The Division 2 pushing those kinds of frame rates.
that's a bit off topic, but I'm fed up with seeing politicians gutting public institutions.
No less than Joe Biden is going around telling folks we should means test Social Security to keep it solvent (instead of just raising the limit on how much can be taxed due to inflation). He's being clever about it too, saying the "rich don't need SSI". Next it'll be the "Well to do" and then the "working class" and finally the program gets shut down and they pocket the money I paid in.
I don't know what's worse, the fact that they think they can sneak this past us or the fact that Joe Biden just did...
Your friend's Grandma either doesn't exist or (just as likely) really _is_ too old for treatment. I don't mean "we're gonna let old people die" old I mean "the treatment will kill you quicker than the cancer".
My mom died of Lung cancer. The treatment didn't stop the cancer, but it did make her last 4 years of life hell. Doctors have gotten a lot better at understanding what treatments are worthwhile. Me? I have no intention of going through that if I'm ever diagnosed.
Here's a more benign example: My dental hygienist started trying to sell me braces until the dentist came in and shut it down because, well, I'm 41 years old and it would be kind of silly at this point.
Meanwhile in America we get "Wallet Biopsies". Every time you go see a doctor somewhere in the back of their mind is "Can this person's insurance pay me for this"? A close family member of mine was on a steroid and now has screwed up bones because a doctor should have ordered an MRI to check for bone problems steroids can cause but didn't.
I found out later the reason was likely because when doctors order tests the insurance companies won't pay for them if the come up blank. What this means is that unless your very, very well off then your doctor is likely to avoid ordering tests until it's painfully obvious you're suffering symptoms. This means a lot of diseases won't be caught until it's too late.
They didn't go anywhere, still up to the same shenanigans.
Make Indentured Servitude Great Again.
In the meantime I'll just leave this here...