Sadly, I've seen this on multiple scales - "downtrodden" working class people who think it's in their best interests to make the rich richer so that a little more can trickle down to their level.
No, it's not a zero-sum game. But, the more people who have a surplus, the faster things get better for everyone - if all the wealth gets concentrated into a very few hands, you're back at feudal states - and life's not really better for anyone in that scenario, lots of contrast for the guys at the top vs the bottom, but people at the bottom today have it better than the people at the top did back then.
I think we've reached the point where goods and services shouldn't really be the target anymore. Anyone can fill their domicile floor to ceiling with "goods" purchased at big-box retailers, even on a minimum wage salary. Ideally, services should top out at a smaller percentage of the economy than they already are - if we all spend our time "serving" each other, making up false problems like insurance coding and billing, tax accounting, real-estate representation... what's the point?
The old saw of "a common goal for mankind" would be a really great thing to drive the economy - what can we all get behind and devote resources toward that really matters? Can we find something that's worth 10% of everybody's time, resources, and efforts? Not while we're busy killing each other, withholding resources from where they're needed, and competing over bank balances.
I see plenty of trash to pick up on the roadsides, landscaping that could be better tended, public spaces that could use more frequent cleaning and maintenance, infrastructure that could be better maintained, planets that need exploring and colonization... I don't think we actually lack for things to do, just the will to do them.
Didn't you hear? Corporate taxes are eeeeeevil. The vast majority of Americans just voted in a president who will abolish all of these retrograde business un-friendly practices, single handedly - right after he gets that wall built.
All things can be solved with increased transparency and oversight. People can be fully employed monitoring and regulating the corporations. If there's ever an unemployment problem, commission a project to gather data about it, think-tank the results, philosophically discuss the implications - no solution is needed, the project itself will employ the unemployed.
Copying the competition is one approach, a common one, and ultimately it limits you to being a bit-player, if you get too big doing that, the originator of the IP will come after you and sue your profits out. If the successful established company doesn't have IP protection, they'll have other forms of market protection that will make life just as painful for you (vendor lockout agreements, etc.)
I've been in a number of the "truly innovative" better mousetrap companies. The world did not beat a path to our doors, they usually fell flat on the sales front - though one did attract $80M in investment capital and now has gone IPO with a market cap of roughly 3x that. Took 11 years, and chewed through hundreds of employees before making it to the IPO stage, still has horrid turnover from what I can tell - the principal who started it all and has stuck with it looks to have aged 25 years in the last 10 - and he really didn't need a job, wife's parents were buying them expensive new cars back before the investment money came through. Interesting twist: most of the bold innovative cost saving concepts they were pushing have been watered down and homogenized to be not so different from the competition anymore.
I have special needs kids, they need aides to function in public school classrooms, so aides are provided. Not good aides, mind you, just warm bodies who help keep them from being "a problem in the (cough) learning (cough) environment." One of our kids' assigned aides worked stock at Target on the midnight to 7 shift before coming to be his aide through the school day.
So, when our kids had good aides, teachers who cared, etc. they made great progress in school - learned, advanced, became less dependent on special help. Most of the time, when we had burnt out Target stocker class aides, we were lucky if we didn't have significant backsliding, problems staying in school through the whole day, etc.
When you cheap-out on labor too much, you create problems that are far more expensive than just paying decent wages in the first place. The WalMart et.al. rise to economic dominance has been based on externalizing these problem costs while benefiting from the cheap labor.
I mean, Jesus, I use container classes that come with sort methods - choose the appropriate container for the dataset and use case, and who-the-f-cares how the efficient sort for that is actually implemented. I also use open source libraries, so if I really cared, I could dig in and see it, but in 15 years of using these libraries, I never have cared that much.
I've done plenty of algorithm optimizations, I've made PhDs look and feel stupid (which, by the way kiddies, is funny when you're their boss, tragic when they are your boss) by optimizing their algorithms that used to take all night to run on massive multicore server racks and making them run in 15 minutes on a dual core laptop. And, I've never, ever dug into the libraries to even see what kind of sorts they use on their container classes.
I trust the geeks who provide that level of the system for me, just as they trust the compiler/optimizer layer, which in-turn trusts the chipset pipelining and caching layer. It's good to have a general idea of how these various layers work - optimizing for cache misses was a key component in that 1000x speedup trick, but could I spout out an implementation of any of these lower layers from memory on a whiteboard? Not even if I had to in an Immigration interrogation.
Agreed, WalMart is just the poster child for the larger living wage problem. When I was in High School (80s), jobs like that (in my town) were 80% staffed by kids with no real income needs - just for pocket money, there would be the occasional older loser who just didn't care that they could only afford to live in a trailer park with 3 roommates in an 800 square foot tin can built 30 years ago, and once in a rare while - a true hardworking person in a tough situation who was just using the income to get by until they got something better.
Today, there are so few better opportunities out there that the demographic of who's working near minimum wage jobs has become much more diverse, and people who really want out don't have nearly as much opportunity to get out. It's not impossible, but it's much much more challenging and competitive.
~10% says it all - 10% of an insult is, actually a bigger insult.
I refused an offer for a teaching assistant position that would have paid for my PhD, plus ~$22K/yr salary, had just completed a similar gig for a Masters' degree - 2 years of indentured servitude in exchange for a dubious piece of paper was enough, thank you.
WalMart employees aren't even working toward something ostensibly valuable to their future life, they're just sharing rent in a cheap apartment, saving up to maybe buy a car someday.
Would be a trial (as in free trial). Throw a fairly standard problem at them, but not one with a simple, common place implementation. Drop them at a computer with internet access, give them a couple hours, and see what they have at the end of it.
It's not perfect, but it's probably a better way to evaluate skills.
We give potential applicants a take home programming problem and ask them to send us the result a couple of days later. We then quiz them on their work to make sure they did not get someone else to do it.
Nice thought, the quiz for authenticity can be tricky. I've typically used an easy problem as a screener and then those who pass the easy problem remotely can come in and do a live performance solving a harder related problem.
If the "friends" are always available and willing to help, then I don't care - use them, get paid.
There's an incredible resource of programming advice available through Google and the various help boards - being able to effectively leverage that resource is a skill far beyond the value of solving obscure statistical riddles about colored marbles in jars.
I've seen interviewers (one "remote work" from the Philippines comes to mind in particular) use this technique to get free work: dangle a job offer, present a thorny, nigh intractable, problem as the "interview process," get applicants to submit various solution approaches and even complete solutions - choose the best, use it yourself - never hire anyone.
Buyouts have a more predictable ROI. Do you want a company that returns an annual average 20% on investment over 30 years, but varies between -30% and +50% as it goes, or do you want a company that returns an annual average of 7% on investment year after year, varying between 5% and 9% as it goes?
Startups return between -100% and 10,000% on investment, averaging something like 25% in the big picture. It's not a game for the marginally financed, which most of us are.
It's easier, and more profitable, to throw up barriers to competition for a successful product than it is to innovate the product and make it better - especially to innovate the product and make it cost less.
If you work at a profitable company, change is dangerous. The way that things were done before led to the current profitable state, any significant change risks upsetting that magic apple cart that nobody really fully understands how to build up again in the current environment, so don't do anything that might risk my next quarterly bonus, right?
If you work at an unprofitable company, that's not sustainable, innovate all you like, without a minor miracle (which will have little or nothing to do with any "innovative idea" and everything to do with external forces beyond the company's control) you'll be getting your layoff notice soon enough.
Old manager moves on/gets promoted. New manager doesn't like black people and fires all the blacks and hires white people to replace them. Simple enough, but illegal.
And black, asian, hispanic, female, and handicapped managers never do this to members not of their race/gender/status?
In 1972, when all the managers (of the high paying professions in the US) were white males, it was a problem that needed addressing - 45 years later, it seems like the pendulum has swung past center.
We will always have death panels, there will always be a fabulously expensive treatment for a barely curable disease, and as long as some people have 1000x the resources of others, those with the resources will get those treatments while others don't.
The development that worries me the most is the consolidation of insurance companies and health care providers, where the insurer pays these insane rates to the provider because it's just shuffling money from one pocket to the other. I keep hoping that it will all crash down some day like the Tokyo real-estate market, but a funny thing happens to the value of money when you are on death's door, and the U.S. healthcare industry is getting better and better at arbitrage in that market.
Some Sci-Fi author picked up on it after the global warming scare just started to hit - he wrote about how we suppressed our CO2 output and wham: ice down to I-80.
I've got some of that "old" property on a river in Florida - 18 to 30' above sea level, but nobody seems interested in it, they're still all waving their dollars at the beachfront.
Oh, I've seen Al Gore's film - before he invented the internet, he noticed runaway CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, when he was in college.
Most (read >51%) of the college profs I had in the 1980s were average people, no brighter or better informed than anyone else - some were super sharp, but they were exceptions rather than the rule.
Many of these profs liked to throw out thought provoking concepts, whether they had real basis in fact or not. There's solid evidence of the ice ages, and there's a real possibility that one will return - in the 1970s, we weren't as sure of our climate (or any other) science as we seem to be today, not surprising if some of them grabbed onto the concept of "what if the ice sheets cover Canada again?" Something to think about, hmmm??? Most of these guys would have had a harder time wrapping their head around the concept of rising sea levels, cooling in Europe due to shutdown of the North Atlantic conveyor, etc. Easier to point at frozen Mastodons and glacial scree. In fact, any Ice Age talk I've ever heard more or less neglected the whole topic of sea level drop.... that would be an interesting twist: lots of new beachfront property.
I thought the claim was that a handful of bonehead college profs were all in a titty twist about how the ice age was coming back, they read it in Time Magazine, it must be true, and said profs spewed this tepid cup of disinformation to literally thousands of undergrads in the 1970s, one of which just spouted it back at you 50 years later.
Sounds more like a Zeitgeist problem to me than anything to do with "real" peer reviewed science.
Time Magazine article quoting a fucking law professor somehow constitutes an expansive statement on the view of climatologists in 1970?
No, but _any_ Time Magazine article from 1970 is a valid representation of the Zeitgeist... there weren't many media outlets in 1970, if you got past the editors at a major publication like Time in 1970, you were being allowed to form the opinions of the audience.
Oh, don't get me started - our latest round of blood tests: billed to insurance: $1365, negotiated down to $90, patient responsibility $60, insurance pays $30. My wife went self-insured (aka no insurance) when her then individual (not member of a large group) policy got "rated" up $1000 per month the month after insurance paid $30K for a birth related hospital stay. Thank you, we'll put the $1400 per month in the bank and pay our own bills. But, as you say, they've got you there: we did pay for one simple procedure: $7K, and the office "generously" reduced the cost since we were self-pay to $6,300. BxBs rate for the same procedure was under $1000. Still cheaper than paying the uprated premiums. That was almost 20 years ago and it's only gotten worse.
We need transparency, we need the god-damned rates published where everyone sees what everyone pays for everything, and there needs to be some semblence of "fair" in the system. I know that fair is a fairy tale for children, but these grown up medical billing practices are worse than the fairy tale dragons. If there were a simple 2x cap - the highest paying patient pays no more than 2x the amount for the same procedure as the lowest paying patient, that would go a long long way toward bringing the system back to earth - it's in some kind of twisted fantasyland right now.
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Sadly, I've seen this on multiple scales - "downtrodden" working class people who think it's in their best interests to make the rich richer so that a little more can trickle down to their level.
No, it's not a zero-sum game. But, the more people who have a surplus, the faster things get better for everyone - if all the wealth gets concentrated into a very few hands, you're back at feudal states - and life's not really better for anyone in that scenario, lots of contrast for the guys at the top vs the bottom, but people at the bottom today have it better than the people at the top did back then.
I think we've reached the point where goods and services shouldn't really be the target anymore. Anyone can fill their domicile floor to ceiling with "goods" purchased at big-box retailers, even on a minimum wage salary. Ideally, services should top out at a smaller percentage of the economy than they already are - if we all spend our time "serving" each other, making up false problems like insurance coding and billing, tax accounting, real-estate representation... what's the point?
The old saw of "a common goal for mankind" would be a really great thing to drive the economy - what can we all get behind and devote resources toward that really matters? Can we find something that's worth 10% of everybody's time, resources, and efforts? Not while we're busy killing each other, withholding resources from where they're needed, and competing over bank balances.
I see plenty of trash to pick up on the roadsides, landscaping that could be better tended, public spaces that could use more frequent cleaning and maintenance, infrastructure that could be better maintained, planets that need exploring and colonization... I don't think we actually lack for things to do, just the will to do them.
Didn't you hear? Corporate taxes are eeeeeevil. The vast majority of Americans just voted in a president who will abolish all of these retrograde business un-friendly practices, single handedly - right after he gets that wall built.
All things can be solved with increased transparency and oversight. People can be fully employed monitoring and regulating the corporations. If there's ever an unemployment problem, commission a project to gather data about it, think-tank the results, philosophically discuss the implications - no solution is needed, the project itself will employ the unemployed.
Copying the competition is one approach, a common one, and ultimately it limits you to being a bit-player, if you get too big doing that, the originator of the IP will come after you and sue your profits out. If the successful established company doesn't have IP protection, they'll have other forms of market protection that will make life just as painful for you (vendor lockout agreements, etc.)
I've been in a number of the "truly innovative" better mousetrap companies. The world did not beat a path to our doors, they usually fell flat on the sales front - though one did attract $80M in investment capital and now has gone IPO with a market cap of roughly 3x that. Took 11 years, and chewed through hundreds of employees before making it to the IPO stage, still has horrid turnover from what I can tell - the principal who started it all and has stuck with it looks to have aged 25 years in the last 10 - and he really didn't need a job, wife's parents were buying them expensive new cars back before the investment money came through. Interesting twist: most of the bold innovative cost saving concepts they were pushing have been watered down and homogenized to be not so different from the competition anymore.
I have special needs kids, they need aides to function in public school classrooms, so aides are provided. Not good aides, mind you, just warm bodies who help keep them from being "a problem in the (cough) learning (cough) environment." One of our kids' assigned aides worked stock at Target on the midnight to 7 shift before coming to be his aide through the school day.
So, when our kids had good aides, teachers who cared, etc. they made great progress in school - learned, advanced, became less dependent on special help. Most of the time, when we had burnt out Target stocker class aides, we were lucky if we didn't have significant backsliding, problems staying in school through the whole day, etc.
When you cheap-out on labor too much, you create problems that are far more expensive than just paying decent wages in the first place. The WalMart et.al. rise to economic dominance has been based on externalizing these problem costs while benefiting from the cheap labor.
I mean, Jesus, I use container classes that come with sort methods - choose the appropriate container for the dataset and use case, and who-the-f-cares how the efficient sort for that is actually implemented. I also use open source libraries, so if I really cared, I could dig in and see it, but in 15 years of using these libraries, I never have cared that much.
I've done plenty of algorithm optimizations, I've made PhDs look and feel stupid (which, by the way kiddies, is funny when you're their boss, tragic when they are your boss) by optimizing their algorithms that used to take all night to run on massive multicore server racks and making them run in 15 minutes on a dual core laptop. And, I've never, ever dug into the libraries to even see what kind of sorts they use on their container classes.
I trust the geeks who provide that level of the system for me, just as they trust the compiler/optimizer layer, which in-turn trusts the chipset pipelining and caching layer. It's good to have a general idea of how these various layers work - optimizing for cache misses was a key component in that 1000x speedup trick, but could I spout out an implementation of any of these lower layers from memory on a whiteboard? Not even if I had to in an Immigration interrogation.
Agreed, WalMart is just the poster child for the larger living wage problem. When I was in High School (80s), jobs like that (in my town) were 80% staffed by kids with no real income needs - just for pocket money, there would be the occasional older loser who just didn't care that they could only afford to live in a trailer park with 3 roommates in an 800 square foot tin can built 30 years ago, and once in a rare while - a true hardworking person in a tough situation who was just using the income to get by until they got something better.
Today, there are so few better opportunities out there that the demographic of who's working near minimum wage jobs has become much more diverse, and people who really want out don't have nearly as much opportunity to get out. It's not impossible, but it's much much more challenging and competitive.
~10% says it all - 10% of an insult is, actually a bigger insult.
I refused an offer for a teaching assistant position that would have paid for my PhD, plus ~$22K/yr salary, had just completed a similar gig for a Masters' degree - 2 years of indentured servitude in exchange for a dubious piece of paper was enough, thank you.
WalMart employees aren't even working toward something ostensibly valuable to their future life, they're just sharing rent in a cheap apartment, saving up to maybe buy a car someday.
Agreed, it's about communication - problem solving ability, not a checkbox yes or no solved it correctly? That's the right way to do it, in person.
Then there are the online "pre-screen" interview tests which most assuredly are judging candidates by yes or no solved it correctly?
So, what's the climate like in Wellington - are they always wearing their Wellies? Looks less pleasant than Auckland, by a longshot.
Would be a trial (as in free trial). Throw a fairly standard problem at them, but not one with a simple, common place implementation. Drop them at a computer with internet access, give them a couple hours, and see what they have at the end of it.
It's not perfect, but it's probably a better way to evaluate skills.
We give potential applicants a take home programming problem and ask them to send us the result a couple of days later. We then quiz them on their work to make sure they did not get someone else to do it.
Nice thought, the quiz for authenticity can be tricky. I've typically used an easy problem as a screener and then those who pass the easy problem remotely can come in and do a live performance solving a harder related problem.
If the "friends" are always available and willing to help, then I don't care - use them, get paid.
There's an incredible resource of programming advice available through Google and the various help boards - being able to effectively leverage that resource is a skill far beyond the value of solving obscure statistical riddles about colored marbles in jars.
I've seen interviewers (one "remote work" from the Philippines comes to mind in particular) use this technique to get free work: dangle a job offer, present a thorny, nigh intractable, problem as the "interview process," get applicants to submit various solution approaches and even complete solutions - choose the best, use it yourself - never hire anyone.
Buyouts have a more predictable ROI. Do you want a company that returns an annual average 20% on investment over 30 years, but varies between -30% and +50% as it goes, or do you want a company that returns an annual average of 7% on investment year after year, varying between 5% and 9% as it goes?
Startups return between -100% and 10,000% on investment, averaging something like 25% in the big picture. It's not a game for the marginally financed, which most of us are.
Kodak, the newspaper industry, public pay phones, buggy whips, etc.
It's easier, and more profitable, to throw up barriers to competition for a successful product than it is to innovate the product and make it better - especially to innovate the product and make it cost less.
If you work at a profitable company, change is dangerous. The way that things were done before led to the current profitable state, any significant change risks upsetting that magic apple cart that nobody really fully understands how to build up again in the current environment, so don't do anything that might risk my next quarterly bonus, right?
If you work at an unprofitable company, that's not sustainable, innovate all you like, without a minor miracle (which will have little or nothing to do with any "innovative idea" and everything to do with external forces beyond the company's control) you'll be getting your layoff notice soon enough.
Old manager moves on/gets promoted.
New manager doesn't like black people and fires all the blacks and hires white people to replace them.
Simple enough, but illegal.
And black, asian, hispanic, female, and handicapped managers never do this to members not of their race/gender/status?
In 1972, when all the managers (of the high paying professions in the US) were white males, it was a problem that needed addressing - 45 years later, it seems like the pendulum has swung past center.
We will always have death panels, there will always be a fabulously expensive treatment for a barely curable disease, and as long as some people have 1000x the resources of others, those with the resources will get those treatments while others don't.
The development that worries me the most is the consolidation of insurance companies and health care providers, where the insurer pays these insane rates to the provider because it's just shuffling money from one pocket to the other. I keep hoping that it will all crash down some day like the Tokyo real-estate market, but a funny thing happens to the value of money when you are on death's door, and the U.S. healthcare industry is getting better and better at arbitrage in that market.
Some Sci-Fi author picked up on it after the global warming scare just started to hit - he wrote about how we suppressed our CO2 output and wham: ice down to I-80.
I've got some of that "old" property on a river in Florida - 18 to 30' above sea level, but nobody seems interested in it, they're still all waving their dollars at the beachfront.
Oh, I've seen Al Gore's film - before he invented the internet, he noticed runaway CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, when he was in college.
Most (read >51%) of the college profs I had in the 1980s were average people, no brighter or better informed than anyone else - some were super sharp, but they were exceptions rather than the rule.
Many of these profs liked to throw out thought provoking concepts, whether they had real basis in fact or not. There's solid evidence of the ice ages, and there's a real possibility that one will return - in the 1970s, we weren't as sure of our climate (or any other) science as we seem to be today, not surprising if some of them grabbed onto the concept of "what if the ice sheets cover Canada again?" Something to think about, hmmm??? Most of these guys would have had a harder time wrapping their head around the concept of rising sea levels, cooling in Europe due to shutdown of the North Atlantic conveyor, etc. Easier to point at frozen Mastodons and glacial scree. In fact, any Ice Age talk I've ever heard more or less neglected the whole topic of sea level drop.... that would be an interesting twist: lots of new beachfront property.
I thought the claim was that a handful of bonehead college profs were all in a titty twist about how the ice age was coming back, they read it in Time Magazine, it must be true, and said profs spewed this tepid cup of disinformation to literally thousands of undergrads in the 1970s, one of which just spouted it back at you 50 years later.
Sounds more like a Zeitgeist problem to me than anything to do with "real" peer reviewed science.
Time Magazine article quoting a fucking law professor somehow constitutes an expansive statement on the view of climatologists in 1970?
No, but _any_ Time Magazine article from 1970 is a valid representation of the Zeitgeist... there weren't many media outlets in 1970, if you got past the editors at a major publication like Time in 1970, you were being allowed to form the opinions of the audience.
Oh, don't get me started - our latest round of blood tests: billed to insurance: $1365, negotiated down to $90, patient responsibility $60, insurance pays $30. My wife went self-insured (aka no insurance) when her then individual (not member of a large group) policy got "rated" up $1000 per month the month after insurance paid $30K for a birth related hospital stay. Thank you, we'll put the $1400 per month in the bank and pay our own bills. But, as you say, they've got you there: we did pay for one simple procedure: $7K, and the office "generously" reduced the cost since we were self-pay to $6,300. BxBs rate for the same procedure was under $1000. Still cheaper than paying the uprated premiums. That was almost 20 years ago and it's only gotten worse.
We need transparency, we need the god-damned rates published where everyone sees what everyone pays for everything, and there needs to be some semblence of "fair" in the system. I know that fair is a fairy tale for children, but these grown up medical billing practices are worse than the fairy tale dragons. If there were a simple 2x cap - the highest paying patient pays no more than 2x the amount for the same procedure as the lowest paying patient, that would go a long long way toward bringing the system back to earth - it's in some kind of twisted fantasyland right now.