I'm in the US, and when I was fresh out of school in my first IT job I was asked to be on call with no pay, and no OT. I was underpaid at the time, because I had moved up a position and "due to budgetary reasons" they weren't immediately able to give me the appropriate pay raise. The work was far more interesting, so I was happy to be making less than I should while doing fun work, but they still owed me about a 30% pay increase.
Given that, I laughed at them when they asked me to be on call every night. "But you probably won't need to come in more than a couple of times a month". I said no, a co-worker said yes, and he ended up paying the price for that.
That was a really good lesson to me to set ground rules with employers before taking jobs. It's gotten easier as I've gotten older, and now I'm very much in the position where if someone wants to hire me, we work out the expectations and compensation well ahead of time. A couple of companies I work with as a customer have put out feelers, but both abuse their staff so badly that the compensation I'd need to suffer that is far more than they're willing to pay. I know one engineer who spent his last family vacation in the hotel room working while his family tried to have a vacation without him. If that's your expectation for your employees, I'm going to need a solid 2-3x my current pay to be interested.
If you ever actually got a job in the real world, you'd find out that the answer is "just about all of them", and MS is doing as well as they always have.
There is a limit to human utility, even if we could give everyone private tuition and a place at a top university. Humans also require large amounts of natural resources to run, and break down after about 30 years of operation. Robots are not constrained by these things.
And making another human worker takes about two decades, while making another robot can be done in a few days, or weeks at worst. Training humans takes a long time, while you can just upload the training to a robot in a matter of seconds. And humans break down often during those 30 years too. They call in sick, have funerals, weddings, too many drinks on a Wednesday night, car problems, etc. Robots work through the night and don't leave.
A lot of the things humans are good at right now have been designed to be things we are good at. The same end goal can likely be accomplished faster and/or more efficiently by robots, but they way they will get there will be different. A good example is 3-D printing. Humans have been making parts for millennia by taking a source piece of material and hacking off the bits they don't need to make a part they want. Now robots do the opposite - adding material to make that same part. (How many years into 3-D printing are we now? Current state-of-the-art includes printing spacecraft parts including tanks and rocket engines.)
As automation and AI become cheaper, more and more businesses will be redesigning how they function to leverage these technologies. While in their relative infancy in terms of economic impact today, I wouldn't be surprised to see them exploding in the next decade or so. As you note, that bodes poorly for developing and developed nations alike.
There is no clear solution.....The most balanced solution would probably be a tax on the value of assets, in particularly land, but this is now politically impossible because of the way monetary expansion has been directed at middle class homeowners over the last twenty years.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. A major issue in the US is the inability to culturally break from strong independence and the "god rewards the good and punishes the bad" worldview. Poor people are poor because they fucked up, not because we've set up an economic system that systematically (and sometimes randomly) screws people over, with no mechanisms for them to recover.
Until we can fix that worldview, voters aren't going to be electing people who are willing to address our massive and growing wealth inequality. And with only the rich likely to benefit from AI and increased automation, we're going to run into increasing social unrest. The good news is that AI can probably figure it out for us. We will have to strongly suggest that the solution not be to kill all humans, however.
Yeah, it was the last half of 2017 where I switched mostly to LEDs. That's when I started to run into LED replacement bulbs for absolutely everything - appliances, bathroom globes, candelabra, etc.
I did a survey a couple of weeks ago - we've got about 12 CFLs left in the house, and that's it. Everything else is LED except for the fridge and oven bulbs, and the giant fluorescent lights in the kitchen and laundry.
It's mindblowing to me that LEDs are drawing an order of magnitude less power than the bulbs I was using a decade ago. Now, if manufacturers would only stop sticking ultra-bright always-on ones in fucking everything, we might be able to reduce power even further.
Social media conditions users to need to respond, because that's how you demonstrate your worth in that medium. Your worth is the number of followers, likes, reposts, etc. How do you not respond in that case?
Personally, I find myself canceling half the posts I write, on average. I see that bullshit, type a response to it, think about it, and half the time decide that it's not worth arguing with that person. Either they're obviously trying very hard not to get it, obviously trolling, or generally seem incapable of critical thinking. Sometimes I consider if the response would be worth having others read and post it anyway, but sometimes it doesn't seem like a valuable pursuit.
I see more value in a small number of good posts than a metric fuckton of shitposts.
Of course there would need to be a literal shit-ton of legislation to incentivize businesses to manufacture here, not including robots.
Well, that's not going to happen. In fact, companies are already coming back to the US to build robotic factories. Low tax on raw materials coming in, low salary overhead, it's a win-win for everyone except people in the US who need jobs.
I bet that this is going to accelerate under these tariffs. If it's too expensive to import from China, we'll just have robots build it here.
None of what you just wrote supports the fact that gun ownership is a good thing like you first proposed. You're essentially arguing, "it's not that bad", which is a very different thing.
"The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
I find it really odd that every every time there's a debate on gun control, nobody bothers addressing the root cause of gun violence. Why, exactly, is that guy a bad guy? Well, it's most often due to inequality. Lack of opportunity, lack of education, lack of mental health services, etc.
I noted to a friend awhile back, "You generally don't get shot at 3am on a Tuesday during a fight outside of a bar if you need to be getting up at 6am to go to work."
It doesn't seem like we'll ever get anywhere on a gun control debate, because the two sides are so polarized. But maybe we could get somewhere on reducing the root cause of gun violence, making the argument less necessary to have.
Go half-way down the article, and you'll find this nugget:
Also, he admits, the machine is slower than human hands. On the other hand, it has some advantages. It can work right through the night, when berries are cooler and less fragile.
Another two years, he says, and this machine will be in the fields working for real. "There's quirks to work out, but it's getting there. We're close," he says.
While the headline makes it seem like the robot picker is far from reality, the people working on it don't think so. And it's not just a minor project:
Strawberry companies representing two-thirds of the industry are putting millions of dollars into this project.
The robots are indeed coming for our jobs. Because if they can pick strawberries, what can't they pick?*
Schlock Mercenary. 15+ years of daily comics, and still going strong. The first 5 years of art was pretty rough, but it's much better with that much practice now.
How is drive-by-malware-installation not a moral justification?
And anyone is free to display whatever parts of a website is sent to them that they like, and discard the rest. That's how the internet was designed. If you want complete control over what's on someone's screen, make an app.
I get that we'e built an economy of serving ads on the web, but it's essentially building a house on quicksand. The underlying foundation is not stable, and not wise to build on. There is no requirement that what you send someone across the internet they have to look at, even if you bundle it with things they do want to look at.
How did we get to the point where billions of dollars of income are based on people choosing to display the ads sent to them? That's insane.
Price's Law has to do with published papers in academia. And that makes sense, as you get more grants the more papers you put out, so there is a natural tendency for a lot of publications to come from a smaller number of people. In addition, larger labs tend to have one PI who's name is on everything, further supporting the top end of this trend. And all of the grad students who put out one paper and then leave academia help create that pool of "low effort" numbers.
None of that really transfers to employees in businesses.
Has your ego totally fucked your world-view, or do you just work in terrible places?
In 20 years I've never worked somewhere where a tiny percentage does all the work. Not once. What organization would piss away salary money on that sort of waste? In the places I've worked there were almost always some rockstars, but their talents were leveraged to enable everyone else to exponentially increase the amount of quality work that could be done. They weren't stuck in an office while everyone else went out drinking.
Where have you worked that only a tiny percent of people did all the work? I'm very curious, because it means I could make a competing company and eat your lunch. In my experience, your crazy example just doesn't happen in the real world.
Could you point us to where your peer reviewed article is published rebutting this research? Because if you can't, you're just talking out your ass with nothing to back those words up.
Transparent salaries aren't a problem anywhere I've worked. That includes local government, public university, and state government. And private industry, although they were a fair bit less transparent there.
In none of those cases did I find a hostile work environment related to salaries. Most of the people I've worked with have been well-adjusted, down-to-earth people, and generally wouldn't raise a stink unless there were some real shenanigans going on. And in general, there weren't any, because of the transparency.
I don't know what psychopaths you've spent your life working with, but it sounds awful. Where have you worked and in what fields? I'd like to avoid those if I can.
If your motivation for the work is the work itself, why do you care if your peers are compensated exactly the same as you are? What if one of you chooses to work harder or is more productive? I've known union techs who didn't even bother to show up, they knew it was impossible to fire them.
This is you not getting what the GP said:
Maybe it's a different mindset - Maybe what differentiates university people from industry people is that cash is not our main motivation.
Maybe you've never worked in an environment like what the GP is talking about, which is why you can't seem to get it. I've been in a couple, and they are indeed great places to work.
When everyone around you is interested in the work, when they are coming in every day to solve new problems and learn new things, it's hard to not engage with everyone at work. When the employees are self-selected to work in this environment, you don't get people not coming in because they know they won't get fired. My guess is that the GP's comment of "it's very hard to get demoted" is less about there being no accountability, and more about there being flexibility in getting people into positions that they're interested in. That was more the case in the places I've worked - if someone isn't being productive, solve the problem, don't just let them go.
Last, even if you're not in it for the money, everyone takes a significant morale hit if an organization has a stink of unfairness about it. Transparent salaries or at least salary classifications are a good way to prevent that. It also reduces people trying to climb over each other to make more money. Knowing that everyone in a salary classification makes within $20k of each other means that there is minimal benefit in trying to throw a coworker under a bus. That leads to a much more pleasant working environment.
I'm not sure I'm ok with a robot examining me like that. I prefer the awkward wriggling fingers of a real human, and the incredibly strained communication before and after.
the problem we have at the moment is that the software tools need to evolve to a point where they can dynamically determine the optimum number of cars to direct off a congested highway to achieve the most efficient overall flow.
So you've never met a person before in your life?
I have, and I can tell you that once the software starts doing this, someone will write software to get them to where they want to go as quickly as possible, and then everyone will use that software instead.
People fully and lovingly embrace the tragedy of the commons. That's what makes it so tragic.
A second option that they're using around here are mini traffic circles. They take every couple of suburban neighborhood intersections, widen them a little, and plant a little 10' diameter garden in the middle of the road. It makes it almost impossible for large vehicles to use the roads, and since the turn is so tight, you need to slow down to like 10 mph to get around them.
They're a bit of a pain, but I like them better than the stupid road humps.
So you haven't tried to ride a bus in a US city in a decade?
Most metro areas that are a couple hundred thousand people and up now have realtime apps for their bus systems. Buses have GPS on them, and you get to-the-minute status updates of when they will arrive. And full system maps to show you where they go.
Have you never used google maps?
You can try it right now. Navigate to a metro area, choose Directions, click your start and end locations, and select the Transit option. You'll be given all of the busing options, the fare cost, the walk time from where you are starting to the bus stop, and all the major stops along the route. You'll also be given info on whether the bus is on time, and if there are any detours in the normal route.
Your complaint is about a decade out-of-date. At minimum, 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
It's no wonder Trump is angry at Amazon now!
I'm in the US, and when I was fresh out of school in my first IT job I was asked to be on call with no pay, and no OT. I was underpaid at the time, because I had moved up a position and "due to budgetary reasons" they weren't immediately able to give me the appropriate pay raise. The work was far more interesting, so I was happy to be making less than I should while doing fun work, but they still owed me about a 30% pay increase.
Given that, I laughed at them when they asked me to be on call every night. "But you probably won't need to come in more than a couple of times a month". I said no, a co-worker said yes, and he ended up paying the price for that.
That was a really good lesson to me to set ground rules with employers before taking jobs. It's gotten easier as I've gotten older, and now I'm very much in the position where if someone wants to hire me, we work out the expectations and compensation well ahead of time. A couple of companies I work with as a customer have put out feelers, but both abuse their staff so badly that the compensation I'd need to suffer that is far more than they're willing to pay. I know one engineer who spent his last family vacation in the hotel room working while his family tried to have a vacation without him. If that's your expectation for your employees, I'm going to need a solid 2-3x my current pay to be interested.
If you ever actually got a job in the real world, you'd find out that the answer is "just about all of them", and MS is doing as well as they always have.
There is a limit to human utility, even if we could give everyone private tuition and a place at a top university. Humans also require large amounts of natural resources to run, and break down after about 30 years of operation. Robots are not constrained by these things.
And making another human worker takes about two decades, while making another robot can be done in a few days, or weeks at worst. Training humans takes a long time, while you can just upload the training to a robot in a matter of seconds. And humans break down often during those 30 years too. They call in sick, have funerals, weddings, too many drinks on a Wednesday night, car problems, etc. Robots work through the night and don't leave.
A lot of the things humans are good at right now have been designed to be things we are good at. The same end goal can likely be accomplished faster and/or more efficiently by robots, but they way they will get there will be different. A good example is 3-D printing. Humans have been making parts for millennia by taking a source piece of material and hacking off the bits they don't need to make a part they want. Now robots do the opposite - adding material to make that same part. (How many years into 3-D printing are we now? Current state-of-the-art includes printing spacecraft parts including tanks and rocket engines.)
As automation and AI become cheaper, more and more businesses will be redesigning how they function to leverage these technologies. While in their relative infancy in terms of economic impact today, I wouldn't be surprised to see them exploding in the next decade or so. As you note, that bodes poorly for developing and developed nations alike.
There is no clear solution.....The most balanced solution would probably be a tax on the value of assets, in particularly land, but this is now politically impossible because of the way monetary expansion has been directed at middle class homeowners over the last twenty years.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. A major issue in the US is the inability to culturally break from strong independence and the "god rewards the good and punishes the bad" worldview. Poor people are poor because they fucked up, not because we've set up an economic system that systematically (and sometimes randomly) screws people over, with no mechanisms for them to recover.
Until we can fix that worldview, voters aren't going to be electing people who are willing to address our massive and growing wealth inequality. And with only the rich likely to benefit from AI and increased automation, we're going to run into increasing social unrest. The good news is that AI can probably figure it out for us. We will have to strongly suggest that the solution not be to kill all humans, however.
Yeah, it was the last half of 2017 where I switched mostly to LEDs. That's when I started to run into LED replacement bulbs for absolutely everything - appliances, bathroom globes, candelabra, etc.
I did a survey a couple of weeks ago - we've got about 12 CFLs left in the house, and that's it. Everything else is LED except for the fridge and oven bulbs, and the giant fluorescent lights in the kitchen and laundry.
It's mindblowing to me that LEDs are drawing an order of magnitude less power than the bulbs I was using a decade ago. Now, if manufacturers would only stop sticking ultra-bright always-on ones in fucking everything, we might be able to reduce power even further.
I blame social media.
Social media conditions users to need to respond, because that's how you demonstrate your worth in that medium. Your worth is the number of followers, likes, reposts, etc. How do you not respond in that case?
Personally, I find myself canceling half the posts I write, on average. I see that bullshit, type a response to it, think about it, and half the time decide that it's not worth arguing with that person. Either they're obviously trying very hard not to get it, obviously trolling, or generally seem incapable of critical thinking. Sometimes I consider if the response would be worth having others read and post it anyway, but sometimes it doesn't seem like a valuable pursuit.
I see more value in a small number of good posts than a metric fuckton of shitposts.
That's the opposite of how social media works.
Of course there would need to be a literal shit-ton of legislation to incentivize businesses to manufacture here, not including robots.
Well, that's not going to happen. In fact, companies are already coming back to the US to build robotic factories. Low tax on raw materials coming in, low salary overhead, it's a win-win for everyone except people in the US who need jobs.
I bet that this is going to accelerate under these tariffs. If it's too expensive to import from China, we'll just have robots build it here.
None of what you just wrote supports the fact that gun ownership is a good thing like you first proposed. You're essentially arguing, "it's not that bad", which is a very different thing.
Gun ownership is a good thing.
Citation very much needed. By all accounts, owning a gun makes you many times more likely to die by one than not owning one.
Is there a benefit that offsets "more likely to die" that I'm somehow unaware of?
"The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
I find it really odd that every every time there's a debate on gun control, nobody bothers addressing the root cause of gun violence. Why, exactly, is that guy a bad guy? Well, it's most often due to inequality. Lack of opportunity, lack of education, lack of mental health services, etc.
I noted to a friend awhile back, "You generally don't get shot at 3am on a Tuesday during a fight outside of a bar if you need to be getting up at 6am to go to work."
It doesn't seem like we'll ever get anywhere on a gun control debate, because the two sides are so polarized. But maybe we could get somewhere on reducing the root cause of gun violence, making the argument less necessary to have.
Since I'm too lazy to re-post a prior comment of mine, I'll just give you a link to it: https://slashdot.org/comments....
Go half-way down the article, and you'll find this nugget:
Also, he admits, the machine is slower than human hands. On the other hand, it has some advantages. It can work right through the night, when berries are cooler and less fragile.
Another two years, he says, and this machine will be in the fields working for real. "There's quirks to work out, but it's getting there. We're close," he says.
While the headline makes it seem like the robot picker is far from reality, the people working on it don't think so. And it's not just a minor project:
Strawberry companies representing two-thirds of the industry are putting millions of dollars into this project.
The robots are indeed coming for our jobs. Because if they can pick strawberries, what can't they pick?*
*Their nose.
Schlock Mercenary. 15+ years of daily comics, and still going strong. The first 5 years of art was pretty rough, but it's much better with that much practice now.
How is drive-by-malware-installation not a moral justification?
And anyone is free to display whatever parts of a website is sent to them that they like, and discard the rest. That's how the internet was designed. If you want complete control over what's on someone's screen, make an app.
I get that we'e built an economy of serving ads on the web, but it's essentially building a house on quicksand. The underlying foundation is not stable, and not wise to build on. There is no requirement that what you send someone across the internet they have to look at, even if you bundle it with things they do want to look at.
How did we get to the point where billions of dollars of income are based on people choosing to display the ads sent to them? That's insane.
Price's Law has to do with published papers in academia. And that makes sense, as you get more grants the more papers you put out, so there is a natural tendency for a lot of publications to come from a smaller number of people. In addition, larger labs tend to have one PI who's name is on everything, further supporting the top end of this trend. And all of the grad students who put out one paper and then leave academia help create that pool of "low effort" numbers.
None of that really transfers to employees in businesses.
Has your ego totally fucked your world-view, or do you just work in terrible places?
In 20 years I've never worked somewhere where a tiny percentage does all the work. Not once. What organization would piss away salary money on that sort of waste? In the places I've worked there were almost always some rockstars, but their talents were leveraged to enable everyone else to exponentially increase the amount of quality work that could be done. They weren't stuck in an office while everyone else went out drinking.
Where have you worked that only a tiny percent of people did all the work? I'm very curious, because it means I could make a competing company and eat your lunch. In my experience, your crazy example just doesn't happen in the real world.
Could you point us to where your peer reviewed article is published rebutting this research? Because if you can't, you're just talking out your ass with nothing to back those words up.
Well, if you can do anecdotes, so can I!
Transparent salaries aren't a problem anywhere I've worked. That includes local government, public university, and state government. And private industry, although they were a fair bit less transparent there.
In none of those cases did I find a hostile work environment related to salaries. Most of the people I've worked with have been well-adjusted, down-to-earth people, and generally wouldn't raise a stink unless there were some real shenanigans going on. And in general, there weren't any, because of the transparency.
I don't know what psychopaths you've spent your life working with, but it sounds awful. Where have you worked and in what fields? I'd like to avoid those if I can.
If your motivation for the work is the work itself, why do you care if your peers are compensated exactly the same as you are? What if one of you chooses to work harder or is more productive? I've known union techs who didn't even bother to show up, they knew it was impossible to fire them.
This is you not getting what the GP said:
Maybe it's a different mindset - Maybe what differentiates university people from industry people is that cash is not our main motivation.
Maybe you've never worked in an environment like what the GP is talking about, which is why you can't seem to get it. I've been in a couple, and they are indeed great places to work.
When everyone around you is interested in the work, when they are coming in every day to solve new problems and learn new things, it's hard to not engage with everyone at work. When the employees are self-selected to work in this environment, you don't get people not coming in because they know they won't get fired. My guess is that the GP's comment of "it's very hard to get demoted" is less about there being no accountability, and more about there being flexibility in getting people into positions that they're interested in. That was more the case in the places I've worked - if someone isn't being productive, solve the problem, don't just let them go.
Last, even if you're not in it for the money, everyone takes a significant morale hit if an organization has a stink of unfairness about it. Transparent salaries or at least salary classifications are a good way to prevent that. It also reduces people trying to climb over each other to make more money. Knowing that everyone in a salary classification makes within $20k of each other means that there is minimal benefit in trying to throw a coworker under a bus. That leads to a much more pleasant working environment.
I'm not sure I'm ok with a robot examining me like that. I prefer the awkward wriggling fingers of a real human, and the incredibly strained communication before and after.
Some things do require a human touch.
Like my prostrate.
the problem we have at the moment is that the software tools need to evolve to a point where they can dynamically determine the optimum number of cars to direct off a congested highway to achieve the most efficient overall flow.
So you've never met a person before in your life?
I have, and I can tell you that once the software starts doing this, someone will write software to get them to where they want to go as quickly as possible, and then everyone will use that software instead.
People fully and lovingly embrace the tragedy of the commons. That's what makes it so tragic.
A second option that they're using around here are mini traffic circles. They take every couple of suburban neighborhood intersections, widen them a little, and plant a little 10' diameter garden in the middle of the road. It makes it almost impossible for large vehicles to use the roads, and since the turn is so tight, you need to slow down to like 10 mph to get around them.
They're a bit of a pain, but I like them better than the stupid road humps.
So you haven't tried to ride a bus in a US city in a decade?
Most metro areas that are a couple hundred thousand people and up now have realtime apps for their bus systems. Buses have GPS on them, and you get to-the-minute status updates of when they will arrive. And full system maps to show you where they go.
Have you never used google maps?
You can try it right now. Navigate to a metro area, choose Directions, click your start and end locations, and select the Transit option. You'll be given all of the busing options, the fare cost, the walk time from where you are starting to the bus stop, and all the major stops along the route. You'll also be given info on whether the bus is on time, and if there are any detours in the normal route.
Your complaint is about a decade out-of-date. At minimum, 5 years.
Wow....you think that's the same thing? I bet you think white bread with ketchup is pizza too, eh?
Can you point to a similar thing done by Democrats where nobody raised a stink?