I thought it was normal for a 2x4 to actually measure 1.5x3.5 because of the planing that happens or somesuch.
Indeed. If a 2x4 was actually 2"x4" that would be deceptive, because it would not be a standard 2x4 and would not fit in standard framing. If I buy a 2x4, I want it to be 1.5x3.5, nothing more, nothing less.
Wall street is the only part of the country that would cheer the loss of jobs.
Everybody should cheer. The purpose of economic activity is to create goods and services, not "keeping people busy". If the same number of burgers can be delivered with less labor, that is a GOOD THING.
As the cost of production is reduced, some combination of the customers, franchisees, and shareholders will have more money to spend on other things, generating jobs elsewhere in the economy. For more insight on why pointless make-work jobs are NOT "good for the economy", you can read The Parable of the Broken Window.
Sorry, I meant he wants his business to make money, and tried to point out that this documentary isn't going to have a negative effect on that. No one is going to buy less coal.
Eventually we'll do ourselves in here; living someplace else too means we can can come back when everything stops glowing.
That makes no sense. If there is a nuclear war here, it would be way way way cheaper to survive in a fallout shelter with a HEPA filter for ventilation than to go to Mars. Everything you need to survive, including oxygen, clean water, food, warmth, electrical power, would be WAY harder to obtain on Mars. It would even be more radioactive, since there is no magnetic field. There would be zero advantages to going there.
OR you could realize the futility of changing the will of billions of selfish humans and escape.
You should read The Population Bomb. Paul Ehrlich, the author, believed as you do, and felt the future of humanity was hopeless. He laid out many scenarios for the future, from worst case (human extinction) to best case (massive die offs from famine in the 1980s followed by stabilization).
None of his predictions came true. Instead, humanity's collective behavior and progress was far better than he, or the "educated" consensus believed. People are not as stupid or as selfish as you think they are. Despite some occasional backsliding, we are collectively making good progress on all the major problems facing humanity. Solutions won't be perfect, and will take time, but we'll muddle through.
How do we improve things when Americans continue to vote congenital idiots in Congress and the White House ?
The first thing to do is to stop expecting politicians to solve your problems. Change will come from technological improvements, not political speeches.
Maybe I'm missing it, but has Tesla perfected it's auto business?
Mostly yes. Nothing is "perfect" but by many measures, Tesla is doing better than any other automaker. They have the highest customer satisfaction, the best safety qualifications, etc.
Should it be branching out already?
Why not? How hard is it to slap together a streaming service? By running it on their own servers, they can control bandwidth and collect monetizable data.
I don't think he'll have much of a problem with Streisand Effects.
The original Streisand effect was a result of Barbara being an ass while trying to get people to leave her alone, which backfired. But Robert Murray isn't trying to get people to leave him alone, he is trying to make money, and no one is going to buy less of his coal because they don't like him.
The obvious answer is to keep the test corpus a secret
Security by obscurity would provide an incentive for corrupt government employees to either leak the test details, or cheat by misreporting the results, since independent verification would be impossible.
many tasks in programming get automated and will be further automated
This has already happened. Programming is way more automated today than it was 40 years ago. Yet the number of programmers employed has increased by orders of magnitude.
thus reducing the necessary work hours to complete a given project.
No. Projects will just expand in scope and complexity. This has also already happened.
While programmers will be needed in the foreseeable future, their number might be much less than today.
More likely it will be much more than today.
Jevon's Paradox applies to programmers. As they become more efficient and productive, it becomes more profitable to employ them, and demand goes UP.
Programming is not going to be automated away by computers until those computers are capable of "Strong AI", which at this point is pure science fiction. If that happens, we will have reached the singularity, and the world will be so profoundly different that anything you conjecture about "jobs" or anything else is just silly.
it seems strange that anyone would prefer purchasing something from eBay at the same price
I don't see why anyone would. Amazon is quick and reliable. eBay is slow and flakey, but sometimes cheap. There is no way I would buy from eBay over Amazon unless eBay offered a significantly lower price.
I'd love to see malware that can attack a punch card deck.
Did you ever use card decks? It was a common joke to insert malware cards into someone's deck while they were using the restroom. The best counter-measure was to use a marker pen to make a big X on the edges of your deck, so you could visually see if it had been tampered with.
Indeed. Any system, even if airgapped can be penetrated, especially if there are insiders that can be bribed or blackmailed. It all comes down to deciding who you can trust. Do you trust your hardware? Do you trust the people that wrote Linux?
The scenario described in TFA is silly. Using a computer as a firewall does not work as well as using a firewall as a firewall. A computer-as-firewall running a general purpose OS is going to have a much larger attack surface. If you aren't going to airgap, then get a real dedicated firewall, and then disable ALL the ports. Then use port knocking to open specific ports to encrypted communication with only pre-verified clients.
If that isn't enough, then you can also wrap your computer in tin foil.
... and the one who thinks it is worth the least makes the sale.
Each of those inputs, including labor, are priced on a market.
Traditionally, this has been "Land, Labor, and Capital", where land includes minerals and other natural resources. But modern goods have less and less value from "land" and capital. For instance, the "land" value of the raw materials to make an iPhone is less than 1% of its value. Apple uses no capital to make it, since contracting manufacturing is cheaper and is less than 5% of the value. By far the biggest shares of the value are the labor of the engineers to design the phone, write the software, and build the intellectual property.
The most valuable corporations in the world are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. None of them rely significantly on land, or natural resources. They are all "capital-lite" other than racks of computers. Their value is in the people they employ and the IP that those employees create.
Increasing the population by importing migrants disrupts the cycle, especially when the migrants are unskilled.
Historically, that has self-corrected as well. When the 2008 great recession hit, and demand for unskilled labor dropped, plenty of Mexicans returned home. The same thing happened in Britain when unemployed "Polish plumbers" took Ryan Air back to Warsaw, to ride out the recession where the cost of living is lower.
One problem with improved border security is that it makes it harder for workers to move back and forth across the border, incentivising them to stay in America, and bring their families here, rather than going home when times are tough.
Agreed. So, where will all these people with ready cash for buying the products get their cash from?
I dunno. But in the past, no one predicted that people displaced by farm and factory automation would become pizza deliverers, system admins, and graphic artists.
How will a significant portion of the 99% be able to make purchases when we reach this "next level" of which you speak?
Most likely they will still have jobs. Plenty of jobs would require full "strong AI" to automate, and that isn't going to happen based on current technology.
Even if a job CAN be done by a machine, doesn't mean it will be. Near my house is an automated "sushi boat" restaurant. There are no waitresses. A little boat brings the meal to my table. These restaurants have been common for decades, but besides sushi, they have not caught on. People want to be waited on by other real people, and automation isn't going to change that. Likewise with hairdressers, masseuses, bartenders, etc. That is millions of jobs.
Go look at seekingarangements.com. This is a site where you can buy and sell companionship. Now plenty of them include "intimacy" in the deal, but many of them explicitly say that they don't. You can pay a pretty girl to have dinner with you. She isn't going to be replaced with a robot.
Karl Marx was wrong about almost everything, but the Labor Theory of Value was pretty much correct. The value of something is more-or-less the cost of the labor needed to replace it. So if future goods and services require very little human labor to produce, they will therefore be very cheap. So people won't need to work much to buy what they need.
even if it is a trade war instead of a shooting war.
That is not how trade wars work. In a trade war, countries cut export prices, while raising tariffs to keep imports out. In a trade war, you can still buy whatever you need, you just can't sell what you have.
60% of steel produced in America is recycled from scrap, not forged.
If international trade in steel stops, that will hurt China far more than it will hurt the US.
If we answer the phone then we have to do things like help our customers and solve problems.
Phone calls are a poor medium for "solving problems". An emailed inquiry with specific information, maybe including a screenshot, is far superior. Then I can send a reply with specific instructions, a photo of the solution, and links for more information. When I hire tech-support people, they almost always ask if they will have to do phone support, and if they are good, I will hire them anyway. So the dreg employees staff the phones, where they recite the manual to idiots too lazy to read it for themselves.
There are some good tech support phone calls, such as this: "I have a critical problem, and just emailed you a detailed description. Please read it and respond ASAP!". But other than that, I don't think so.
Do we a) see people finding new work or b) see massive unemployment and as the plant owners get rich while everyone else becomes homeless?
In this particular case it is a) and not b). The steel mill is heavily subsidized, and may still be losing money. No one is getting rich. Meanwhile, Austrian unemployment is at 5.7%, which is low by European standards, and Donawitz is in easy commuting distance of plenty of opportunities. Or people can move to Vienna, which is 90 minutes away.
Both arguments get made regularly on Slashdot.
Those arguments are about widespread changes throughout an economy, not a single isolated factory. Of course there will be other jobs if one factory automates. But what happens when they ALL automate?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was normal for a 2x4 to actually measure 1.5x3.5 because of the planing that happens or somesuch.
Indeed. If a 2x4 was actually 2"x4" that would be deceptive, because it would not be a standard 2x4 and would not fit in standard framing. If I buy a 2x4, I want it to be 1.5x3.5, nothing more, nothing less.
Your argument hinges on those jobs being 'pointless,'
If you can be replaced with a kiosk, your job is pointless.
Isn't the personal service a large part of why we go out to eat and drink?
Depending on the location and time of day, 50-70% of McDonald's customers use the drive-thru window. They aren't there for the human connection.
Wall street is the only part of the country that would cheer the loss of jobs.
Everybody should cheer. The purpose of economic activity is to create goods and services, not "keeping people busy". If the same number of burgers can be delivered with less labor, that is a GOOD THING.
As the cost of production is reduced, some combination of the customers, franchisees, and shareholders will have more money to spend on other things, generating jobs elsewhere in the economy. For more insight on why pointless make-work jobs are NOT "good for the economy", you can read The Parable of the Broken Window.
Seems like a lot of trouble for 229 customers
TFA doesn't say there were 229 customers. I only says that 229 of them were satisfied.
He's not looking for money in this lawsuit.
Sorry, I meant he wants his business to make money, and tried to point out that this documentary isn't going to have a negative effect on that. No one is going to buy less coal.
Eventually we'll do ourselves in here; living someplace else too means we can can come back when everything stops glowing.
That makes no sense. If there is a nuclear war here, it would be way way way cheaper to survive in a fallout shelter with a HEPA filter for ventilation than to go to Mars. Everything you need to survive, including oxygen, clean water, food, warmth, electrical power, would be WAY harder to obtain on Mars. It would even be more radioactive, since there is no magnetic field. There would be zero advantages to going there.
OR you could realize the futility of changing the will of billions of selfish humans and escape.
You should read The Population Bomb. Paul Ehrlich, the author, believed as you do, and felt the future of humanity was hopeless. He laid out many scenarios for the future, from worst case (human extinction) to best case (massive die offs from famine in the 1980s followed by stabilization).
None of his predictions came true. Instead, humanity's collective behavior and progress was far better than he, or the "educated" consensus believed. People are not as stupid or as selfish as you think they are. Despite some occasional backsliding, we are collectively making good progress on all the major problems facing humanity. Solutions won't be perfect, and will take time, but we'll muddle through.
How do we improve things when Americans continue to vote congenital idiots in Congress and the White House ?
The first thing to do is to stop expecting politicians to solve your problems. Change will come from technological improvements, not political speeches.
Maybe I'm missing it, but has Tesla perfected it's auto business?
Mostly yes. Nothing is "perfect" but by many measures, Tesla is doing better than any other automaker. They have the highest customer satisfaction, the best safety qualifications, etc.
Should it be branching out already?
Why not? How hard is it to slap together a streaming service? By running it on their own servers, they can control bandwidth and collect monetizable data.
I don't think he'll have much of a problem with Streisand Effects.
The original Streisand effect was a result of Barbara being an ass while trying to get people to leave her alone, which backfired. But Robert Murray isn't trying to get people to leave him alone, he is trying to make money, and no one is going to buy less of his coal because they don't like him.
The obvious answer is to keep the test corpus a secret
Security by obscurity would provide an incentive for corrupt government employees to either leak the test details, or cheat by misreporting the results, since independent verification would be impossible.
many tasks in programming get automated and will be further automated
This has already happened. Programming is way more automated today than it was 40 years ago. Yet the number of programmers employed has increased by orders of magnitude.
thus reducing the necessary work hours to complete a given project.
No. Projects will just expand in scope and complexity. This has also already happened.
While programmers will be needed in the foreseeable future, their number might be much less than today.
More likely it will be much more than today.
Jevon's Paradox applies to programmers. As they become more efficient and productive, it becomes more profitable to employ them, and demand goes UP.
Programmers? Yes, automated away.
Programming is not going to be automated away by computers until those computers are capable of "Strong AI", which at this point is pure science fiction. If that happens, we will have reached the singularity, and the world will be so profoundly different that anything you conjecture about "jobs" or anything else is just silly.
it seems strange that anyone would prefer purchasing something from eBay at the same price
I don't see why anyone would. Amazon is quick and reliable. eBay is slow and flakey, but sometimes cheap. There is no way I would buy from eBay over Amazon unless eBay offered a significantly lower price.
Quick! Who can lose money the fastest?!?
That is how free markets are supposed to work. Marginal surplus profit should be competed down to near zero.
I'd love to see malware that can attack a punch card deck.
Did you ever use card decks? It was a common joke to insert malware cards into someone's deck while they were using the restroom. The best counter-measure was to use a marker pen to make a big X on the edges of your deck, so you could visually see if it had been tampered with.
Indeed. Any system, even if airgapped can be penetrated, especially if there are insiders that can be bribed or blackmailed. It all comes down to deciding who you can trust. Do you trust your hardware? Do you trust the people that wrote Linux?
The scenario described in TFA is silly. Using a computer as a firewall does not work as well as using a firewall as a firewall. A computer-as-firewall running a general purpose OS is going to have a much larger attack surface. If you aren't going to airgap, then get a real dedicated firewall, and then disable ALL the ports. Then use port knocking to open specific ports to encrypted communication with only pre-verified clients.
If that isn't enough, then you can also wrap your computer in tin foil.
The one who thinks it's worth the most, gets it.
... and the one who thinks it is worth the least makes the sale.
Each of those inputs, including labor, are priced on a market.
Traditionally, this has been "Land, Labor, and Capital", where land includes minerals and other natural resources. But modern goods have
less and less value from "land" and capital. For instance, the "land" value of the raw materials to make an iPhone is less than 1% of its value. Apple uses no capital to make it, since contracting manufacturing is cheaper and is less than 5% of the value. By far the biggest shares of the value are the labor of the engineers to design the phone, write the software, and build the intellectual property.
The most valuable corporations in the world are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. None of them rely significantly on land, or natural resources. They are all "capital-lite" other than racks of computers. Their value is in the people they employ and the IP that those employees create.
Increasing the population by importing migrants disrupts the cycle, especially when the migrants are unskilled.
Historically, that has self-corrected as well. When the 2008 great recession hit, and demand for unskilled labor dropped, plenty of Mexicans returned home. The same thing happened in Britain when unemployed "Polish plumbers" took Ryan Air back to Warsaw, to ride out the recession where the cost of living is lower.
One problem with improved border security is that it makes it harder for workers to move back and forth across the border, incentivising them to stay in America, and bring their families here, rather than going home when times are tough.
Agreed. So, where will all these people with ready cash for buying the products get their cash from?
I dunno. But in the past, no one predicted that people displaced by farm and factory automation would become pizza deliverers, system admins, and graphic artists.
How will a significant portion of the 99% be able to make purchases when we reach this "next level" of which you speak?
Most likely they will still have jobs. Plenty of jobs would require full "strong AI" to automate, and that isn't going to happen based on current technology.
Even if a job CAN be done by a machine, doesn't mean it will be. Near my house is an automated "sushi boat" restaurant. There are no waitresses. A little boat brings the meal to my table. These restaurants have been common for decades, but besides sushi, they have not caught on. People want to be waited on by other real people, and automation isn't going to change that. Likewise with hairdressers, masseuses, bartenders, etc. That is millions of jobs.
Go look at seekingarangements.com. This is a site where you can buy and sell companionship. Now plenty of them include "intimacy" in the deal, but many of them explicitly say that they don't. You can pay a pretty girl to have dinner with you. She isn't going to be replaced with a robot.
Karl Marx was wrong about almost everything, but the Labor Theory of Value was pretty much correct. The value of something is more-or-less the cost of the labor needed to replace it. So if future goods and services require very little human labor to produce, they will therefore be very cheap. So people won't need to work much to buy what they need.
even if it is a trade war instead of a shooting war.
That is not how trade wars work. In a trade war, countries cut export prices, while raising tariffs to keep imports out. In a trade war, you can still buy whatever you need, you just can't sell what you have.
60% of steel produced in America is recycled from scrap, not forged.
If international trade in steel stops, that will hurt China far more than it will hurt the US.
If we answer the phone then we have to do things like help our customers and solve problems.
Phone calls are a poor medium for "solving problems". An emailed inquiry with specific information, maybe including a screenshot, is far superior. Then I can send a reply with specific instructions, a photo of the solution, and links for more information. When I hire tech-support people, they almost always ask if they will have to do phone support, and if they are good, I will hire them anyway. So the dreg employees staff the phones, where they recite the manual to idiots too lazy to read it for themselves.
There are some good tech support phone calls, such as this: "I have a critical problem, and just emailed you a detailed description. Please read it and respond ASAP!". But other than that, I don't think so.
You'll find that e.g. the US middle class is worse off than the middle class in the majority of EU countries.
Total bullcrap. Median income by country.
Do we a) see people finding new work or b) see massive unemployment and as the plant owners get rich while everyone else becomes homeless?
In this particular case it is a) and not b). The steel mill is heavily subsidized, and may still be losing money. No one is getting rich. Meanwhile, Austrian unemployment is at 5.7%, which is low by European standards, and Donawitz is in easy commuting distance of plenty of opportunities. Or people can move to Vienna, which is 90 minutes away.
Both arguments get made regularly on Slashdot.
Those arguments are about widespread changes throughout an economy, not a single isolated factory. Of course there will be other jobs if one factory automates. But what happens when they ALL automate?