Mine does nearly the same thing, through their fitness/wellness program.
Earn a few points (mostly by wasting some time on lunch breaks clicking through online presentations about allegedly healthy lifestyle topics), spend them on free movie passes, Amazon gift cards, or whatever else available via the program's website.
That said, there could be a new jump in productivity as better technologies are developed. What if we counteracted smartphones with a drug or a widget that could make you focus?
We have that. I just have to pretend to have an attention disorder of some type in a manner convincing enough for a medical professional to hand me a slip of paper that tells another person in a white coat at another location that I'm allowed to purchase a limited quantity of it.
People under 21 are forbidden to enter bars. So what should people do if they want to watch the game with their kids, such as the parent of a high school student whose older brother's school is in the ESPN-exclusive College Football Playoff?
I've seen plenty of children at every sports bar I have ever visited, largely due to the fact that many of them are also restaurants. Buffalo Wild Wings would be an example of one such fairly large and widespread establishment in the US.
Whether one views said establishment's menu as actual food fit for human consumption is a different issue...
Sorry, Uber is a cab company, no matter what they say.
I'm not a fan of Uber but I'm not certain this is true, in my understanding a typical cab will drive around looking for random people to wave it down and potentially wait at certain high pickup locations.
An Uber (or Lyft) vehicle will only respond to a request from the webapp, it strikes me as more analogous to a Limo service or other hired vehicle. Are those considered taxis? (not rhetorical, I'm actually curious. For tax purposes it appears they are).
I live in a city in the Midwest, and have traveled for work to many other cities in the Midwest. Nigh universally, there is no such thing as a taxi that drives around looking for fares. You call a taxi company, or use their website, to request a taxi be dispatched to your location.
Rarely, in some cities, there are designated areas called "taxi stands" located in or near neighborhoods with a high density of bars. Taxis can sometimes be found idling there, waiting for inebriated folks to stumble their way. This is far from a ubiquitous practice, and even where the taxi stands exist, generally only contain taxis on Friday and Saturday nights.
Perhaps taxis continually circle or wait around high-traffic locations in very large cities. However, even on my trips to Chicago, I've seen only the dispatch request model.
Companies where the open office approach succeeded had something in common: the population of the office chose it for themselves, early on. They had an open office environment because that's how they wanted to work, and because the dynamic that existed between the employees was compatible with it. Then later, a lot of other companies had executives look at both the success of those companies and the lower real estate costs that the model uses, and decided they would "choose" it for their own staff. And that's not quite how it works. It's rather like deciding that your goldfish would be better off in a salt water tank because of how big the fish were in some other tank you saw, and then finding yourself confused as to why the fish all died. Not all cultures are the same, and you can't change the culture by imposing something upon it that is toxic.
Exactly this, yes. The company I work for recently decided that "open, collaborative spaces" would be better for every team and department, regardless of the nature of their work or where they were located - which resulted in people working with financial data adjacent to and nigh surrounded by call centers, and other such "improvements".
Shortly after this went into effect, they started experimenting with work-from-home programs, as many of us clamored for it. Oddly enough, productivity went up in many cases from the open office baseline, more cases than you'd expect for the potential distractions working from home can cause for the less-focused. It was almost as though moving to the open office plans had actually decreased productivity more than just closing the office entirely and having everyone telecommute.
Your argument is... what, exactly? That skilled jobs in engineering, accountancy, nursing, medicine, architecture, law, and even trades like plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, mechanics, etc are somehow being automated away and are less secure than minimum wage jobs at McDonald's? For real?
Just look at accounting. One accounting department for one decently-sized company once involved dozens or more employees, all maintaining spreadsheets and doing calculations. Then came Excel (and similar such programs). One accounting department is now perhaps 3-4 people, doing what used to take dozens of numerate professionals.
Automation of jobs is not restricted to blue-collar or low-skill work.
People say it doesn't do that, but there's a whole lot less service jobs than we used to have.
There's a slightly deeper question as to why service jobs are vanishing: once the capability exists to reliably automate a job, is there any wage at which you ultimately will not automate it? Alternatively, if you can convince your existing customers (I'm sorry, "consumers" is the term now) to do work for themselves for free which you used to have as a cost center, is there any wage at which you will not do so?
I'd eventually expect a fast food restaurant to require only enough employees to ensure the cooking and assembly robots are stocked and loaded, and maybe to hand orders across the counter / out the window.
Given that the Ukraine situation has just given the world an example of what nuclear-capable allies do when a nuclear-capable country invades a country without that capability (which is essentially to finger-wag and frown at the invader), could anyone really blame Japan if they did opt to arm themselves?
The company I work for actually did almost exactly this. On the same lot as our corporate building is a Marriott, guests of which share the use of our employee parking garage. The execs have normal-sized offices in the corporate building which they are almost never in, and the sky fairy of your choice alone knows how many visitors have been put up in the Marriott on our company's dime.
As the entire lot was developed expressly for us, I'm inclined to believe it was planned out to be as you say.
The problem is, the politicians don't actually care if they're re-elected. If you take a look at the pension plan for any senator, including one who serves a single term, they get close to their full salary for life. All they lose when they lose the next election are the extras: "misallocated" campaign funding, kickbacks, having some degree of power...
They're already set for life the moment we put them in office, they can vote themselves a pay raise at any time, and we let them get away with that. Maybe if they actually had something to lose, they might CARE what voters think.
Let's suppose the concept of "free trade" is put into play without restrictions. Almost immediately, steel, lumber, dram, and all sorts of other products begin being funnelled into the U.S. at prices far lower than their domestic equivalents, whether this is due to government subsidies, cheaper labor costs, more efficient manufacturing, or what have you. The U.S. corporations cannot hope to compete with this, as they have certain costs that cannot be arbitrarily lowered: the average U.S. citizen demands more monetary compensation for their work than the citizens of less-industrialized societies, and the employer bears responsibility for health care, retirement, and other such expenses under the current system. (There are most likely quite a few other concerns, but those two I can see immediately.) The U.S. corporations are then faced with inevitable extinction if they continue to operate as usual, and must then consider options.
They could automate, spending millions, even billions, of dollars to bring every aspect of their processes up to the very cutting edge to try and stay competitive by cranking out more product in less time. They could also export labor by moving production centers to countries where labor is cheaper per hour, and concepts such as "health care" are unheard of. The problem with these approaches is that they result in fewer domestic jobs, meaning a greater percentage of the U.S. populace just became unemployed. This may not seem like a problem to the average American/. techie-type, but consider the present government systems in place: fewer people working means fewer people able to pay taxes, which means less money in the governmental coffers. Simultaneously, the government is shelling out welfare funding to individuals who are not employed, whether via disability, ignorance, or laziness; these masses are also highly encouraged to have copious amounts of children, as the government gives them more money for each child. This presents a bit of a problem. On top of that, there's also the possibility that the corporations might decide their more technical departments might also benefit by being moved outside the borders...
Alternatively, corporations might choose to lower costs by paying their employees less and cutting benefits. I'm certain none of us would mind taking a 10% reduction in pay and the loss of our bennies for the good of the economy, right? Right?
Corporations could also start petitioning the government for subsidies here, as well. Of course, this results in them not making a profit, which results in them not paying taxes, which gives the government less captial to subsidize them and perform its other functions. This also falls under the realm of Not Good.
Basically, the whole system is flawed, especially in regards to "free trade." Without a thorough redesign, there isn't any way to realistically implement such a thing without looking to be self-serving. Of course, the system as a whole has been developed and put in place by wiser minds than mine (at least, their degrees and titles say so!).
Hear, hear. My company presently supports a few SCO systems; we just spent about three days restoring one of them from a SCO patch...for a SCO printer patch that broke it to begin with! Not to mention the nightmare of trying to get SMP to work on OpenServer 5.0.6. for a customer that paid for the extra processor licensing and is very displeased that their system won't so much as recognize the second CPU.
If code is that crappy, I don't see why anyone would go through the humiliation of trying to defend supposed infringements upon it in court. Although that could be their strategy, hoping IBM will just settle out of court to nix any rumors that they might have stolen such drek...
Other than to state my personal opinion that this guy really needs to get a life (or at least a thesis topic that could be applicable to the real world), there's the one glaring hole I saw in the movie: at one point, Morpheus states that the source of "food" for the human race was having its own dead liquefied and injected via IV. How, exactly, is one species of beings capable of surviving only feeding on itself? One would think simple entropy would whittle down the amount of resources available to such a contained system. (Yes, I know, the ship magically manifested some weird synthetic proteins, but that wasn't mentioned when the machines feeding the humans was brought up.)
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Mine does nearly the same thing, through their fitness/wellness program. Earn a few points (mostly by wasting some time on lunch breaks clicking through online presentations about allegedly healthy lifestyle topics), spend them on free movie passes, Amazon gift cards, or whatever else available via the program's website.
That said, there could be a new jump in productivity as better technologies are developed. What if we counteracted smartphones with a drug or a widget that could make you focus?
We have that. I just have to pretend to have an attention disorder of some type in a manner convincing enough for a medical professional to hand me a slip of paper that tells another person in a white coat at another location that I'm allowed to purchase a limited quantity of it.
We call it Adderall.
People under 21 are forbidden to enter bars. So what should people do if they want to watch the game with their kids, such as the parent of a high school student whose older brother's school is in the ESPN-exclusive College Football Playoff?
I've seen plenty of children at every sports bar I have ever visited, largely due to the fact that many of them are also restaurants. Buffalo Wild Wings would be an example of one such fairly large and widespread establishment in the US.
Whether one views said establishment's menu as actual food fit for human consumption is a different issue...
Sorry, Uber is a cab company, no matter what they say.
I'm not a fan of Uber but I'm not certain this is true, in my understanding a typical cab will drive around looking for random people to wave it down and potentially wait at certain high pickup locations.
An Uber (or Lyft) vehicle will only respond to a request from the webapp, it strikes me as more analogous to a Limo service or other hired vehicle. Are those considered taxis? (not rhetorical, I'm actually curious. For tax purposes it appears they are).
I live in a city in the Midwest, and have traveled for work to many other cities in the Midwest. Nigh universally, there is no such thing as a taxi that drives around looking for fares. You call a taxi company, or use their website, to request a taxi be dispatched to your location.
Rarely, in some cities, there are designated areas called "taxi stands" located in or near neighborhoods with a high density of bars. Taxis can sometimes be found idling there, waiting for inebriated folks to stumble their way. This is far from a ubiquitous practice, and even where the taxi stands exist, generally only contain taxis on Friday and Saturday nights.
Perhaps taxis continually circle or wait around high-traffic locations in very large cities. However, even on my trips to Chicago, I've seen only the dispatch request model.
Companies where the open office approach succeeded had something in common: the population of the office chose it for themselves, early on. They had an open office environment because that's how they wanted to work, and because the dynamic that existed between the employees was compatible with it. Then later, a lot of other companies had executives look at both the success of those companies and the lower real estate costs that the model uses, and decided they would "choose" it for their own staff. And that's not quite how it works. It's rather like deciding that your goldfish would be better off in a salt water tank because of how big the fish were in some other tank you saw, and then finding yourself confused as to why the fish all died. Not all cultures are the same, and you can't change the culture by imposing something upon it that is toxic.
Exactly this, yes. The company I work for recently decided that "open, collaborative spaces" would be better for every team and department, regardless of the nature of their work or where they were located - which resulted in people working with financial data adjacent to and nigh surrounded by call centers, and other such "improvements".
Shortly after this went into effect, they started experimenting with work-from-home programs, as many of us clamored for it. Oddly enough, productivity went up in many cases from the open office baseline, more cases than you'd expect for the potential distractions working from home can cause for the less-focused. It was almost as though moving to the open office plans had actually decreased productivity more than just closing the office entirely and having everyone telecommute.
Your argument is... what, exactly? That skilled jobs in engineering, accountancy, nursing, medicine, architecture, law, and even trades like plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, mechanics, etc are somehow being automated away and are less secure than minimum wage jobs at McDonald's? For real?
Just look at accounting. One accounting department for one decently-sized company once involved dozens or more employees, all maintaining spreadsheets and doing calculations. Then came Excel (and similar such programs). One accounting department is now perhaps 3-4 people, doing what used to take dozens of numerate professionals.
Automation of jobs is not restricted to blue-collar or low-skill work.
People say it doesn't do that, but there's a whole lot less service jobs than we used to have.
There's a slightly deeper question as to why service jobs are vanishing: once the capability exists to reliably automate a job, is there any wage at which you ultimately will not automate it? Alternatively, if you can convince your existing customers (I'm sorry, "consumers" is the term now) to do work for themselves for free which you used to have as a cost center, is there any wage at which you will not do so?
I'd eventually expect a fast food restaurant to require only enough employees to ensure the cooking and assembly robots are stocked and loaded, and maybe to hand orders across the counter / out the window.
Given that the Ukraine situation has just given the world an example of what nuclear-capable allies do when a nuclear-capable country invades a country without that capability (which is essentially to finger-wag and frown at the invader), could anyone really blame Japan if they did opt to arm themselves?
The trouble with devices that claim to track your steps is they're so easily hoaxed by waving your arms around.
No kidding. My girlfriend is Italian. Every time she has a conversation, her FitBit records her running a marathon.
A few lucky locations will experience both.
You've been to parts of the Ohio River Valley, I see.
The company I work for actually did almost exactly this. On the same lot as our corporate building is a Marriott, guests of which share the use of our employee parking garage. The execs have normal-sized offices in the corporate building which they are almost never in, and the sky fairy of your choice alone knows how many visitors have been put up in the Marriott on our company's dime. As the entire lot was developed expressly for us, I'm inclined to believe it was planned out to be as you say.
The problem is, the politicians don't actually care if they're re-elected. If you take a look at the pension plan for any senator, including one who serves a single term, they get close to their full salary for life. All they lose when they lose the next election are the extras: "misallocated" campaign funding, kickbacks, having some degree of power...
They're already set for life the moment we put them in office, they can vote themselves a pay raise at any time, and we let them get away with that. Maybe if they actually had something to lose, they might CARE what voters think.
Well, you've never been married.
Or maybe you have...no paycheck, AND no sex!
IANAE(conomist), but here I go anyway.
/. techie-type, but consider the present government systems in place: fewer people working means fewer people able to pay taxes, which means less money in the governmental coffers. Simultaneously, the government is shelling out welfare funding to individuals who are not employed, whether via disability, ignorance, or laziness; these masses are also highly encouraged to have copious amounts of children, as the government gives them more money for each child. This presents a bit of a problem. On top of that, there's also the possibility that the corporations might decide their more technical departments might also benefit by being moved outside the borders...
Let's suppose the concept of "free trade" is put into play without restrictions. Almost immediately, steel, lumber, dram, and all sorts of other products begin being funnelled into the U.S. at prices far lower than their domestic equivalents, whether this is due to government subsidies, cheaper labor costs, more efficient manufacturing, or what have you. The U.S. corporations cannot hope to compete with this, as they have certain costs that cannot be arbitrarily lowered: the average U.S. citizen demands more monetary compensation for their work than the citizens of less-industrialized societies, and the employer bears responsibility for health care, retirement, and other such expenses under the current system. (There are most likely quite a few other concerns, but those two I can see immediately.) The U.S. corporations are then faced with inevitable extinction if they continue to operate as usual, and must then consider options.
They could automate, spending millions, even billions, of dollars to bring every aspect of their processes up to the very cutting edge to try and stay competitive by cranking out more product in less time. They could also export labor by moving production centers to countries where labor is cheaper per hour, and concepts such as "health care" are unheard of. The problem with these approaches is that they result in fewer domestic jobs, meaning a greater percentage of the U.S. populace just became unemployed. This may not seem like a problem to the average American
Alternatively, corporations might choose to lower costs by paying their employees less and cutting benefits. I'm certain none of us would mind taking a 10% reduction in pay and the loss of our bennies for the good of the economy, right? Right?
Corporations could also start petitioning the government for subsidies here, as well. Of course, this results in them not making a profit, which results in them not paying taxes, which gives the government less captial to subsidize them and perform its other functions. This also falls under the realm of Not Good.
Basically, the whole system is flawed, especially in regards to "free trade." Without a thorough redesign, there isn't any way to realistically implement such a thing without looking to be self-serving. Of course, the system as a whole has been developed and put in place by wiser minds than mine (at least, their degrees and titles say so!).
I guess running that one press that fast explains those pesky little Pentium bugs.
Hear, hear. My company presently supports a few SCO systems; we just spent about three days restoring one of them from a SCO patch...for a SCO printer patch that broke it to begin with! Not to mention the nightmare of trying to get SMP to work on OpenServer 5.0.6. for a customer that paid for the extra processor licensing and is very displeased that their system won't so much as recognize the second CPU.
If code is that crappy, I don't see why anyone would go through the humiliation of trying to defend supposed infringements upon it in court. Although that could be their strategy, hoping IBM will just settle out of court to nix any rumors that they might have stolen such drek...
Other than to state my personal opinion that this guy really needs to get a life (or at least a thesis topic that could be applicable to the real world), there's the one glaring hole I saw in the movie: at one point, Morpheus states that the source of "food" for the human race was having its own dead liquefied and injected via IV. How, exactly, is one species of beings capable of surviving only feeding on itself? One would think simple entropy would whittle down the amount of resources available to such a contained system. (Yes, I know, the ship magically manifested some weird synthetic proteins, but that wasn't mentioned when the machines feeding the humans was brought up.)