How do you know that we all have consciousness? What if you're the only one, and it's your mental model that assigns what you call consciousness to the rest of us, based on our highly complex but unconscious actions?
First, both participation and payment need to be optional.
If we're going to do a universal health care offering, everyone needs to pay into that safety net, because everyone will likely need it at some point. It's like not getting life insurance until you think you're going to die. That's not how insurance works. You pay into it in case you need it. And unless your company guarantees health insurance as retirement benefit until you die, you're going to need it when you're probably at the most expensive part of your medical life, outside of maybe birth or a terrible accident. I think we'd all want everyone paying in due to that alone.
you have to ask why you expect a GSE to offer better products than any random insurance company. I don't see any reason to expect that.
I don't either. What I do expect is that the products will be cheaper.
Having worked with a number of large businesses, one thing that I've learned is that the agile, efficient free market most often isn't. All of them have been plagued by inefficient processes and staff who needed to be fired, stupid bureaucratic quirks that most people wouldn't expect out of a private company, and a host of other issues that we generally associate with government inefficiency. On top of that, they still needed to make a profit, and are, in fact, required by shareholders to make an ever increasing profit.
That is not conducive to keeping costs for the customer down. While competition should in theory offset this, it hasn't in practice. I'm personally at the point where I think we can just call the private insurance scam for what it is, and move to a demonstratively better alternate.
There's a reason that most developed countries have equal or better care for less money. When you have organizations who need to make increasingly more money involved in health care, they find creative ways to do it. (Like bribing politicians, for one very giant example.)
I do agree about the difficulty in setting a minimum level of care. Ideally, it should be done by a non-political, educated, non-partisan panel. In practice I suspect that what you warn of is likely to happen:
So politicians are always going to press for more and more coverage, again crowding out any possibility of private insurance.
I'm not sure it will crowd out the possibility of private insurance, however, for one reason. Even if it covers nearly 100% of things, people are still going to want optional or cutting edge treatments, and they're going to want them now.
If a company can offer either more innovative or faster treatment plans, that will be attractive even if the government one offers pretty much everything. And if not, so what? That's a lot less overhead for a company to have to worry about, and there are plenty of other ways to offer benefits that will keep employees there. Like just giving them some of the money you'd have used on health insurance, for one.
And as someone astutely pointed out above: legacy devices.
Not only do you have the cost of skilled IT workers, you have the cost of having everything largely upgraded at all times, with no exceptions. No old fax/printer/copier sitting in some office somewhere, no old label printer, no headless box that hasn't been updated in 10 years that's running something critical, no cheap chinese security cameras with no firmware updates ever, no two decade old security card system, no xp machine running the envelope stuffer, etc., etc., etc.
Thinking about the places I've worked, the sheer cost of replacing all of the outdated, shitty old electronics would have been more cost-prohibitive than the staff needed to set it a no-trust system up. Not to mention the herculean task of re-training staff and redesigning workflows to use the new equipment in the new system.
Not even an executive being inconvenienced is needed, in my experience. Just enough noisy whiners complaining that they can't do their job is often enough. Once the rabble gets loud enough to be heard outside the executive bathroom, it gets fixed.
No-trust in practice is going to mean that about 100% of employees are going to not be able to do their job, or do it as they're used to doing it. I can't see retrofitting this onto any mid-sized business or larger. I think it would only work if you built it from the ground up, employees never knew another way, and the CEO (and potentially board) were adamant that no exceptions be made to the point of firing anyone who violated policy.
And that's never going to happen, because at some point, there's going to be something that someone thinks is an emergency, and the first exception will be made. Then it's all downhill.
Personally, I wouldn't make that wish. I'd wish for a universal single-payer option. Medicare for all. Why? Because if an employer wants to offer a better health insurance program, they definitely should be able to as an incentive. But if they don't or can't, (or if the employee is no longer employed) the employee shouldn't be penalized with no health insurance.
Forcing the uninsured to either forgo preventive care or use the ER as their doctor costs far more than it would to just give them insurance. ER visits are generally at least 10x the cost of a regular visit, and forgoing preventative medicine costs even more than that.
There's a damn good reason that we pay far more for health care in the US and get far less. We handle it almost as stupidly as possible with as much potential for people to profit off of other people's health and well-being as possible.
This isn't google. If you don't know something, you type it up in the box at the top of the page, and your answer is delivered to you almost instantly. We call that the internet. HTH. HAND.
While I appreciate your sentiment, the tradition here for the last, oh I don't know, maybe 2 decades has not been to feed the trolls. And that's a well known troll account, as should be evident by the username alone.
Physics works pretty well for things you can do experiments on. It doesn't work very well for things you can't. But then how could it?
It can because it can draw a pretty tight box around those things.
Your examples, dark matter/energy, are great examples of this. Due to physics, we know with near 100% what these things aren't. And that covers something like 99.99% of the possibilities. We know that dark matter isn't made up of protons, neutrons, electrons, or neutrinos. We know that it's not some sort of weird energy. It's either some sort of matter we aren't familiar with, or something with it's properties represents the error in our understanding of general relativity.
Regardless, it's pretty well boxed in. Sure, we can't do experiments on it, but we've indirectly ruled pretty much everything else that exists in the universe out of a possible candidate. Not bad for not being able to experiments on it.
Inequality like we already have is unsustainable, and as a country you basically end up either going the social-democracy route like a lot of Europe with high taxes on the wealthy to support a good society for all, or you go police state like a lot of "democratic" dictatorships around the world. I am guessing we are headed for the latter, and are closer than most care to admit.
I'm not sure I share your pessimism. Propaganda like Fox News only works for so long. And the old, white audience they cater to is not going to be a political force for that much longer.
My republican relatives are largely giving up on Fox at this point, because they're not idiots. While the message plays to their biases, they have memories, and when very large percentages of what they see turn out to be flat wrong, they start to distrust the message. The insane ramp-up of crazy over there during the Obama years really pushed them away. "Obama's going to take your guns" on repeat doesn't work if there are 0 anti-gun laws over the course of 8 years. Likewise, the insanity around Clinton blew their minds. Fox News burned them out. Now they don't really have a place for news, so they pick at snippets from all the channels.
So not only can that propaganda backfire and fizzle, the Fox News audience is also very busy dying off. White babies are now a minority in this country. Over the next 20 years, the voting base is going to change dramatically. And sure, maybe a new network will pop up trying to do the same thing, but ultimately, we're going to have a majority of the people voting looking nothing like the 1% controlling all the wealth. And propaganda and the purchase of legislators can only hold off the inevitable for so long.
My guess is that significant democratic change will happen, with a large amount of wealth distribution. In my area, I'm already seeing a backlash against military policing, and that's happening in a lot of places around the US. Community policing is becoming more common, demilitarization is happening in some places, and deescalation training is much more common than it used to be. Without a militarized police force to keep the peons down, the wealthy lose a very powerful tool in keeping their hoarded wealth. When you can't force people to bend to the will of the government, ultimately, the government will have to bend to the will of the people.
I loved SW:ANH as a child and as a young adult. Now that I am older, I can see how cheesy the dialog was and how campy the good vs. evil aspect of the film was.
Really? Because now the good vs evil aspect is crazy complicated compared to what it seemed back then.
Obi Wan dismembered and disfigured Luke's father and left him for dead, then lied to Luke and told him that Darth Vader had killed his dad. He spent years brainwashing Luke to hate the Empire, and training him to fight against it. And this included fighting against his own father, unbeknownst to Luke.
To turn this diabolical plot up to 11, Obi Wan lets Darth Vader kill him to further fuel Luke's hatred for his father, and then comes back from beyond the grave to continue to push Luke to kill his father. Luke didn't get much of a choice of this insane plot. All Obi Wan's fucking machinations.
Oh, yeah, he also gives Luke his dad's murder-stick, which he took from his dad after hacking his limbs off. He left out those little details now, didn't he?
Obi Wan back then looked like a saint. These days he looks like a psychopath.
Good call! I wonder if there's any way to figure out if the study authors knew that correlation does not imply causation and tried to account for it before beating that dead horse in the comments somewhere.
When I was young, the US was the place to be. Everything was better in America.
And even if that wasn't true, you had no way to figure that out.
I think that's the real issue for teens. They now have 24hr access to watch the best stuff in the world being enjoyed by people who aren't them. That's a harsh place to be spending your time, especially in your formative years. Growing up, I didn't really know what I didn't have. I conceptually knew there were rich people in the world, and kids who had things I didn't have, but our worlds never crossed.
If you look at the instagram and youtube stars, large numbers of them are flaunting their wealth. And ironically, making more money by doing so. It's a strange world these days, where in the past spending lavishly made you poorer, and now doing so can make you richer if you instagram yourself doing it.
So teens now spend their time obsessively watching people having things they won't ever have. Wealth, power, popularity, a voice that reaches millions. A big question I have is whether or not they draw an accurate understanding of the rarity of that, or have a distorted view of the world because of it. I'd bet the latter.
But yeah, that's got to be depressing. It's one thing to figure that out when you're an adult, but a whole different thing when you're in your formative years. That said, I wonder how much of a problem it really is. As the GP here noted, maybe if they grow up in the harsh light of reality, they'll be more likely to push for positive change in the world.
Perhaps the world has moved on and that's no longer a problem? I sure hope so.
Not that I'm aware of. But if moving to Libre Office would force the insane practice of running a business on the back of someone's pet Excel macros, not backed up, obtuse to everyone else, fragile, and prone to compatibility issues to die, I think we'd all be better off moving to Libre Office.
Hire a damn developer to write some functional code with comments residing in a CVS that's backed up. That would be far safer and more reasonable than letting the financial folks continue with the macro shenanigans.
I think 3 is more insidious than you give it credit for. "We didn't take it seriously 20-30 years ago and now you're asking me to spend more money than I used to on "best practice"?"
There is a perverse logic to, "It's never bitten us in the ass before, why should we start worrying now?" That's doubly so when success before was predicated on not giving a shit about security, and beating someone else to the market who did.
This works very, very well, up until the point it doesn't. The problem is that the data points build up supporting this flawed logic every time it's a successful gamble.
And then, what if it's not a gamble? Looking at Windows, it's spent 20+ years as a multi-billion dollar making piece of swiss cheese. From a manager's standpoint, it's hard to point at that sort of success and say, "We should have held back some versions another 6 months to a year and fixed some of the bugs."
It's not a corporate culture issue as much as it is a dollars and sense argument. If an early flawed release is going to make you more dollars than a later secure one, it makes sense to release your software early, holes and all. Over time, this may become corporate culture, but I'd argue that once it stopped making financial sense that most companies would revisit this habit.
While it's true that a lot of people aren't cut out to be receptionists, I think it's a moot point, given that one "finding" of the underlying report was that we'd need more of them! Thus allowing for the reskilling that you so accurately point out won't really work anyway.
Interestingly, they also noted that we'd need less personal assistance in the same job family, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that a lot of receptionists at a lot of places fill some of that role as well. The predictions they're making for the jobs we're going to both lose and need more of are rather baffling. That's outside of the entire fiction of reskilling, as you so rightly point out.
They're not suggesting to retrain toilet cleaners into robot repairmen. What they're suggesting is even dumber, because the jobs they want people to train for are also going away.
They're picking families of jobs, predicting the ebb and flow of jobs within that family, magically finding that they come out even, and saying thus reskilling is what we need.
As I noted below, they think that we're going to need less data entry people and more receptionists. Since they're both in the Office and Administrative family, we'll just reskill the data entry people into receptionists, thus solving the problem once and for all.
I skimmed the article to find out, and came up with this gem:
According to this forecast, only one job family—Production—will experience an overall net job decline. However, both Production and Office and Administrative roles are set to experience a significant employment decline. Unlike Production, however, the Office and Administrative job family is forecast to experience sufficient new job gains as well in roles like Billing, Cost and Rate Clerks, Receptionists and Information Clerks, and Customer Service Representatives to counter-balance the shrinking of other occupational categories, such as Data Entry Keyers, File Clerks, Mail Clerks, and Administrative Assistants
So one of their super amazing findings is that data entry people will reskill into receptionists, and we'll need a lot more of those.
It seems to me that they don't have any idea what they're talking about. If you have less jobs under the Office and Administrative category from losing data based ones, you don't need more billing people and receptionists. And how is billing not going to see a similar reduction?
They seem to miss the fundamental issue here, which is that we're quickly getting to the point of being able to replace all of the jobs they think that we'll need more of that we could fill with the people already being made redundant. Some how their magic math shows that we can just retrain people for existing jobs and then we'll suddenly need lots more people in those positions. If that doesn't happen, a lot of the article falls apart. If those jobs also start going away, they're arguing for exactly the wrong approach.
I don't know about everyone else's office, but around here we're not hiring more receptionists and customer service reps. The trend is in the opposite direction, actually. Overall, just a rather fantastical article that seems detached from reality. It sounds good, and if you're selling retraining services, I bet it sounds even better.
That's what we ended up doing for a decade or more. Our own private server. Anyone who wasn't fun got banned. Anyone who was fun was engaged with, treated with respect, and generally welcomed. We had plenty of children lose their minds with the first warning, and plenty of script kiddies spam and threaten us after they got banned.
Whatever. We were there to have fun, and it was our sandbox. Fuck off if you don't like it. Made online gaming sooooo much more fun than it ever was playing with the general public on someone else's unmanaged server.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know that we all have consciousness? What if you're the only one, and it's your mental model that assigns what you call consciousness to the rest of us, based on our highly complex but unconscious actions?
First, both participation and payment need to be optional.
If we're going to do a universal health care offering, everyone needs to pay into that safety net, because everyone will likely need it at some point. It's like not getting life insurance until you think you're going to die. That's not how insurance works. You pay into it in case you need it. And unless your company guarantees health insurance as retirement benefit until you die, you're going to need it when you're probably at the most expensive part of your medical life, outside of maybe birth or a terrible accident. I think we'd all want everyone paying in due to that alone.
you have to ask why you expect a GSE to offer better products than any random insurance company. I don't see any reason to expect that.
I don't either. What I do expect is that the products will be cheaper.
Having worked with a number of large businesses, one thing that I've learned is that the agile, efficient free market most often isn't. All of them have been plagued by inefficient processes and staff who needed to be fired, stupid bureaucratic quirks that most people wouldn't expect out of a private company, and a host of other issues that we generally associate with government inefficiency. On top of that, they still needed to make a profit, and are, in fact, required by shareholders to make an ever increasing profit.
That is not conducive to keeping costs for the customer down. While competition should in theory offset this, it hasn't in practice. I'm personally at the point where I think we can just call the private insurance scam for what it is, and move to a demonstratively better alternate.
There's a reason that most developed countries have equal or better care for less money. When you have organizations who need to make increasingly more money involved in health care, they find creative ways to do it. (Like bribing politicians, for one very giant example.)
I do agree about the difficulty in setting a minimum level of care. Ideally, it should be done by a non-political, educated, non-partisan panel. In practice I suspect that what you warn of is likely to happen:
So politicians are always going to press for more and more coverage, again crowding out any possibility of private insurance.
I'm not sure it will crowd out the possibility of private insurance, however, for one reason. Even if it covers nearly 100% of things, people are still going to want optional or cutting edge treatments, and they're going to want them now.
If a company can offer either more innovative or faster treatment plans, that will be attractive even if the government one offers pretty much everything. And if not, so what? That's a lot less overhead for a company to have to worry about, and there are plenty of other ways to offer benefits that will keep employees there. Like just giving them some of the money you'd have used on health insurance, for one.
And as someone astutely pointed out above: legacy devices.
Not only do you have the cost of skilled IT workers, you have the cost of having everything largely upgraded at all times, with no exceptions. No old fax/printer/copier sitting in some office somewhere, no old label printer, no headless box that hasn't been updated in 10 years that's running something critical, no cheap chinese security cameras with no firmware updates ever, no two decade old security card system, no xp machine running the envelope stuffer, etc., etc., etc.
Thinking about the places I've worked, the sheer cost of replacing all of the outdated, shitty old electronics would have been more cost-prohibitive than the staff needed to set it a no-trust system up. Not to mention the herculean task of re-training staff and redesigning workflows to use the new equipment in the new system.
Not even an executive being inconvenienced is needed, in my experience. Just enough noisy whiners complaining that they can't do their job is often enough. Once the rabble gets loud enough to be heard outside the executive bathroom, it gets fixed.
No-trust in practice is going to mean that about 100% of employees are going to not be able to do their job, or do it as they're used to doing it. I can't see retrofitting this onto any mid-sized business or larger. I think it would only work if you built it from the ground up, employees never knew another way, and the CEO (and potentially board) were adamant that no exceptions be made to the point of firing anyone who violated policy.
And that's never going to happen, because at some point, there's going to be something that someone thinks is an emergency, and the first exception will be made. Then it's all downhill.
Personally, I wouldn't make that wish. I'd wish for a universal single-payer option. Medicare for all. Why? Because if an employer wants to offer a better health insurance program, they definitely should be able to as an incentive. But if they don't or can't, (or if the employee is no longer employed) the employee shouldn't be penalized with no health insurance.
As an American, I'm mystified about it as well.
Forcing the uninsured to either forgo preventive care or use the ER as their doctor costs far more than it would to just give them insurance. ER visits are generally at least 10x the cost of a regular visit, and forgoing preventative medicine costs even more than that.
There's a damn good reason that we pay far more for health care in the US and get far less. We handle it almost as stupidly as possible with as much potential for people to profit off of other people's health and well-being as possible.
This isn't google. If you don't know something, you type it up in the box at the top of the page, and your answer is delivered to you almost instantly. We call that the internet. HTH. HAND.
While I appreciate your sentiment, the tradition here for the last, oh I don't know, maybe 2 decades has not been to feed the trolls. And that's a well known troll account, as should be evident by the username alone.
I half agree with you.
Physics works pretty well for things you can do experiments on. It doesn't work very well for things you can't. But then how could it?
It can because it can draw a pretty tight box around those things.
Your examples, dark matter/energy, are great examples of this. Due to physics, we know with near 100% what these things aren't. And that covers something like 99.99% of the possibilities. We know that dark matter isn't made up of protons, neutrons, electrons, or neutrinos. We know that it's not some sort of weird energy. It's either some sort of matter we aren't familiar with, or something with it's properties represents the error in our understanding of general relativity.
Regardless, it's pretty well boxed in. Sure, we can't do experiments on it, but we've indirectly ruled pretty much everything else that exists in the universe out of a possible candidate. Not bad for not being able to experiments on it.
Inequality like we already have is unsustainable, and as a country you basically end up either going the social-democracy route like a lot of Europe with high taxes on the wealthy to support a good society for all, or you go police state like a lot of "democratic" dictatorships around the world. I am guessing we are headed for the latter, and are closer than most care to admit.
I'm not sure I share your pessimism. Propaganda like Fox News only works for so long. And the old, white audience they cater to is not going to be a political force for that much longer.
My republican relatives are largely giving up on Fox at this point, because they're not idiots. While the message plays to their biases, they have memories, and when very large percentages of what they see turn out to be flat wrong, they start to distrust the message. The insane ramp-up of crazy over there during the Obama years really pushed them away. "Obama's going to take your guns" on repeat doesn't work if there are 0 anti-gun laws over the course of 8 years. Likewise, the insanity around Clinton blew their minds. Fox News burned them out. Now they don't really have a place for news, so they pick at snippets from all the channels.
So not only can that propaganda backfire and fizzle, the Fox News audience is also very busy dying off. White babies are now a minority in this country. Over the next 20 years, the voting base is going to change dramatically. And sure, maybe a new network will pop up trying to do the same thing, but ultimately, we're going to have a majority of the people voting looking nothing like the 1% controlling all the wealth. And propaganda and the purchase of legislators can only hold off the inevitable for so long.
My guess is that significant democratic change will happen, with a large amount of wealth distribution. In my area, I'm already seeing a backlash against military policing, and that's happening in a lot of places around the US. Community policing is becoming more common, demilitarization is happening in some places, and deescalation training is much more common than it used to be. Without a militarized police force to keep the peons down, the wealthy lose a very powerful tool in keeping their hoarded wealth. When you can't force people to bend to the will of the government, ultimately, the government will have to bend to the will of the people.
I loved SW:ANH as a child and as a young adult. Now that I am older, I can see how cheesy the dialog was and how campy the good vs. evil aspect of the film was.
Really? Because now the good vs evil aspect is crazy complicated compared to what it seemed back then.
Obi Wan dismembered and disfigured Luke's father and left him for dead, then lied to Luke and told him that Darth Vader had killed his dad. He spent years brainwashing Luke to hate the Empire, and training him to fight against it. And this included fighting against his own father, unbeknownst to Luke.
To turn this diabolical plot up to 11, Obi Wan lets Darth Vader kill him to further fuel Luke's hatred for his father, and then comes back from beyond the grave to continue to push Luke to kill his father. Luke didn't get much of a choice of this insane plot. All Obi Wan's fucking machinations.
Oh, yeah, he also gives Luke his dad's murder-stick, which he took from his dad after hacking his limbs off. He left out those little details now, didn't he?
Obi Wan back then looked like a saint. These days he looks like a psychopath.
That idea makes my stomach churn.
Thus helping complete the cycle.
I'm not tall and handsome, and the lack of those genes definitely shaped who I am. Not getting an extra chromosome also shaped who I am.
Oh, this is just poorly rehashing nature vs nurture? Carry on.
Good call! I wonder if there's any way to figure out if the study authors knew that correlation does not imply causation and tried to account for it before beating that dead horse in the comments somewhere.
Guess we'll never know, huh?
When I was young, the US was the place to be. Everything was better in America.
And even if that wasn't true, you had no way to figure that out.
I think that's the real issue for teens. They now have 24hr access to watch the best stuff in the world being enjoyed by people who aren't them. That's a harsh place to be spending your time, especially in your formative years. Growing up, I didn't really know what I didn't have. I conceptually knew there were rich people in the world, and kids who had things I didn't have, but our worlds never crossed.
If you look at the instagram and youtube stars, large numbers of them are flaunting their wealth. And ironically, making more money by doing so. It's a strange world these days, where in the past spending lavishly made you poorer, and now doing so can make you richer if you instagram yourself doing it.
So teens now spend their time obsessively watching people having things they won't ever have. Wealth, power, popularity, a voice that reaches millions. A big question I have is whether or not they draw an accurate understanding of the rarity of that, or have a distorted view of the world because of it. I'd bet the latter.
But yeah, that's got to be depressing. It's one thing to figure that out when you're an adult, but a whole different thing when you're in your formative years. That said, I wonder how much of a problem it really is. As the GP here noted, maybe if they grow up in the harsh light of reality, they'll be more likely to push for positive change in the world.
No, I think they're steering most of the time. Avoiding moose and cows and such.
Perhaps the world has moved on and that's no longer a problem? I sure hope so.
Not that I'm aware of. But if moving to Libre Office would force the insane practice of running a business on the back of someone's pet Excel macros, not backed up, obtuse to everyone else, fragile, and prone to compatibility issues to die, I think we'd all be better off moving to Libre Office.
Hire a damn developer to write some functional code with comments residing in a CVS that's backed up. That would be far safer and more reasonable than letting the financial folks continue with the macro shenanigans.
I think 3 is more insidious than you give it credit for. "We didn't take it seriously 20-30 years ago and now you're asking me to spend more money than I used to on "best practice"?"
There is a perverse logic to, "It's never bitten us in the ass before, why should we start worrying now?" That's doubly so when success before was predicated on not giving a shit about security, and beating someone else to the market who did.
This works very, very well, up until the point it doesn't. The problem is that the data points build up supporting this flawed logic every time it's a successful gamble.
And then, what if it's not a gamble? Looking at Windows, it's spent 20+ years as a multi-billion dollar making piece of swiss cheese. From a manager's standpoint, it's hard to point at that sort of success and say, "We should have held back some versions another 6 months to a year and fixed some of the bugs."
It's not a corporate culture issue as much as it is a dollars and sense argument. If an early flawed release is going to make you more dollars than a later secure one, it makes sense to release your software early, holes and all. Over time, this may become corporate culture, but I'd argue that once it stopped making financial sense that most companies would revisit this habit.
While it's true that a lot of people aren't cut out to be receptionists, I think it's a moot point, given that one "finding" of the underlying report was that we'd need more of them! Thus allowing for the reskilling that you so accurately point out won't really work anyway.
Interestingly, they also noted that we'd need less personal assistance in the same job family, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that a lot of receptionists at a lot of places fill some of that role as well. The predictions they're making for the jobs we're going to both lose and need more of are rather baffling. That's outside of the entire fiction of reskilling, as you so rightly point out.
They're not suggesting to retrain toilet cleaners into robot repairmen. What they're suggesting is even dumber, because the jobs they want people to train for are also going away.
They're picking families of jobs, predicting the ebb and flow of jobs within that family, magically finding that they come out even, and saying thus reskilling is what we need.
As I noted below, they think that we're going to need less data entry people and more receptionists. Since they're both in the Office and Administrative family, we'll just reskill the data entry people into receptionists, thus solving the problem once and for all.
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
I skimmed the article to find out, and came up with this gem:
According to this forecast, only one job family—Production—will experience an overall net job decline. However, both Production and Office and Administrative roles are set to experience a significant employment decline. Unlike Production, however, the Office and Administrative job family is forecast to experience sufficient new job gains as well in roles like Billing, Cost and Rate Clerks, Receptionists and Information Clerks, and Customer Service Representatives to counter-balance the shrinking of other occupational categories, such as Data Entry Keyers, File Clerks, Mail Clerks, and Administrative Assistants
So one of their super amazing findings is that data entry people will reskill into receptionists, and we'll need a lot more of those.
It seems to me that they don't have any idea what they're talking about. If you have less jobs under the Office and Administrative category from losing data based ones, you don't need more billing people and receptionists. And how is billing not going to see a similar reduction?
They seem to miss the fundamental issue here, which is that we're quickly getting to the point of being able to replace all of the jobs they think that we'll need more of that we could fill with the people already being made redundant. Some how their magic math shows that we can just retrain people for existing jobs and then we'll suddenly need lots more people in those positions. If that doesn't happen, a lot of the article falls apart. If those jobs also start going away, they're arguing for exactly the wrong approach.
I don't know about everyone else's office, but around here we're not hiring more receptionists and customer service reps. The trend is in the opposite direction, actually. Overall, just a rather fantastical article that seems detached from reality. It sounds good, and if you're selling retraining services, I bet it sounds even better.
Which quite likely contains your phone number, along with a easily parsed string of text like, "and you can reach me at nnn-nnn-nnnn."
Since no one else has.....
How DaFuck did you come to the conclusion that this was a potentially dangerous asteroid that NASA should have been monitoring?
Had the trajectory and/or speed been ever-so-slightly off, the impact would have been far more, well, impactful.
And you know this how?
Anyone who follows this more closely know?
Oh. Got it.
That's what we ended up doing for a decade or more. Our own private server. Anyone who wasn't fun got banned. Anyone who was fun was engaged with, treated with respect, and generally welcomed. We had plenty of children lose their minds with the first warning, and plenty of script kiddies spam and threaten us after they got banned.
Whatever. We were there to have fun, and it was our sandbox. Fuck off if you don't like it. Made online gaming sooooo much more fun than it ever was playing with the general public on someone else's unmanaged server.