Ever thought that the sharing of information isn't the problem, but other things the Internet enabled?
Say, you can find qualified people in other countries with lower wages and have them work for you over the Internet - thereby adding downward pressure on the very same jobs in your own country. At the same time, somewhat unsurprisingly, there doesn't seem to be downward pressure on CEO jobs - even though I'd bet you could find qualified MBAs in "cheaper labour force" countries...
Seems a narrow view - the jobs are being outsourced because underutilized resources abroad can to them more cost effectively. This benefits the overseas labor pool, bringing their poor up. If it causes temporary unemployment in the outsourcing country, those new unemployed should retrain into employable skills - which they can do much more easily than the people who the jobs got outsourced to. Bringing up incomes in populations that live on less than $3 per person per day does much more to narrow the wealth gap than hanging on to outmoded jobs in first world countries.
I believe the objective must be fundamentally self-serving for the process of excess workforce employment.
Some of the largest religions in the world believe that helping others _is_ helping (serving) yourself, the Buddhists are beginning to collect objective neuroscience that backs up their beliefs.
I think every conformist boomer knew at least one "layabout" who chose the path of recreational drugs and/or living off of the social safety net, and they despise those people for the fun they had in their youth, while the conformist was busting their ass working 3 jobs to put themselves through school, walking uphill in the snow both ways to and from work and school, and now they'll be damned if they do anything to let other people have that lifestyle that they missed the opportunity to enjoy, or even try, because it's just not fair for their broken down old self to have to see other people having fun that they never will.
So you're saying: we need more Melinda Gates in the world, driving technology (not to mention capital) toward humanitarian projects instead of, or at least in addition to, greater concentration of wealth.
Don't know whether to mod up or reply...absolutely true. Here's the World Bank, creator of debt among people who have no money, arguing that sharing information more freely will widen inequality. Though their logic may be sound if you select your samples very carefully (the richest will get richer), I can't see how the world's poorest having access to history's accumulated knowledge including up to the second latest research, more extensive and easier to access than any pre-internet library that ever was, even if you have to walk a day and wait in line for hours to get access, could be anything but good for the world's poorest people. Sure, people with better access will have more advantage, but that doesn't mean that removing access for all would in any way benefit the least fortunate.
Or just write it correctly the first time? I know it may be harder and more time consuming, but you'll get further in your career if you do.
Depends, in R&D I write an awful lot of throwaway code - maybe as much as 80% (depending...) but, at the outset, I can't tell you which 20% will be kept and used in the product and which 80% ends up being "investigatory."
Sure, you could just rewrite the 20% from scratch and "do it right," but that's not as efficient as reusing the proven test mules - which usually aren't in too bad of shape, if you trim off the FIXME: and TODO:s.
In my career, being able to show working code, quickly and easily, is important - much more concrete than sitting in a meeting and drawing bad sketches on a whiteboard while waving hands and attempting to explain things to people who all visualize verbal explanations differently.
Agreed that the "free market" is too poorly constrained to prevent boom-bust cycles with any of the current control mechanisms (and this is not in any way implying that a controlled market would be better) - we don't have a good handle on how to prevent or cure depression, though we've got some good examples of how to start one now, and one thing that seems to be "sure" to lengthen/deepen one is for everybody to clam up and spend as little as humanly possible - though, this was exactly how all 4 of my grandparents (born in the 19-teens) lived their entire lives: moving their guaranteed savings to the accounts that paid the highest interest (reading the paper for hours to find and capitalize on the last 1/8th of a percentage point), never investing in anything that might lose money, driving the cheapest car they can stand (ok, one grandmother was an exception here), turning the A/C off unless company was in the house, basic phone plan, TV antenna - never cable, cheapest food from the market, etc. etc. etc. When everybody lives that way, the economy grows slowly, if at all. But, what's worse, is when everybody lives like the go-go.com days, then gets spooked and switches overnight to severe austerity. I'm not a big fan of debt, and I believe in savings, I just need the rest of the country to get out and spend like the apocalypse is nigh so that I have a good economy to live in;-)
Some "Enterprise zones" address this in a weird sort of way, with per-head incentives. If you set up shop in the zone, for each employee who you pay at least $30K/yr (hourly, salary, incentive, whatever, as long as they report $30K+ in the year as income from your enterprise), then the "zone incentive" pays the company $5K, or whatever.
In terms of a pothole filling contract, if the award is for $75M, it could be broken down as $25M for capital equipment and materials, plus a max of $50K/head. To get the last $50M in the contract, at least 1000 people will have to report $50K income tax - divide as you like: $25K over 2000 heads, etc. but, no individual reported taxes greater than $50K will be counted toward reimbursement on that project. So, you could "hire" your entire family of 100 at $50K/head to do nothing and siphon $5M off the top of the contract, but that kind of graft is pretty easy to find in an audit.
Spoken like a true Depression survivor's child... And, if anyone recalls any history at all, how did we manage our way out of the Depression? (Hint: It wasn't by sticking our remaining money in a locked vault.)
You want the potholes fixed? Great idea, let's do that. Hell, let's give infrastructure a boost back up to 3% of the federal budget, from the 2.5% where it's currently at, but not at the expense of shutting NASA down. Pushing NASA back up from 0.5% to 1% of the budget, and education up from 6% to 8%, and energy and environmental up from 3% to 4%, while reducing military spending from 54% to 50% would seem to be a good way to make this country stronger, long term.
...If you run them hotter, they become much more energy efficient because more of the light is at visible wavelengths, and at wavelengths our eyes are more sensitive to, but that makes the filament material sublime faster, reducing lifespan. The reason halogen lamps are more efficient than conventional incandescent lamps is because the halogen improves filament lifespan enough that it's practical to run them at hotter, more efficient temperatures.
And, so, the nano-mirrors are a (bad) analogy to halogen... making the bulbs more efficient without having to run at hotter temperatures - maybe there's hope for their longevity after all.
As others have mentioned: color, not actual heat produced.
One thing that LEDs aren't emulating (yet) is the nature of a dimming incandescent where the color gets more yellow-red as you dim the light. LEDs will pick a "color temperature" and that's it, regardless of dimming.
Not necessarily true. I recently bought some dimmable LED bulbs that feature getting redder as you dim them. I assume they do this by monitoring the incoming waveform and tweaking the power to different colored elements inside.
I didn't even notice the feature on the package until after I got them home, but I tried one in a dimmable fixture to test it out, and it worked better than I expected (although the bulb still couldn't be dimmed down quite as far as a real incandescent before dropping to zero output).
Had to happen, eventually - I haven't seen those yet. We've got probably too many lights in our house (PO installed 4 ceiling cans in each bedroom, 12 in the kitchen), so we tend to run our dimmers way down - and that's kinda funky looking with the un-changing color bulbs.
Back when bulbs cost more than the labor to change them, that made some sense overall. It is a great example of "free enterprise" gone wrong in today's world.
Keep buying those Wal-Mart bulbs and tell me how your actual lifetime performance works out. The cheap CFLs burned out almost as fast as incandescents, while still costing 4-20x as much (yeah, $3.50 is cheap for an LED bulb, but try equating that to the 8 for $1 cheap incandescents...)
As others have mentioned: color, not actual heat produced.
One thing that LEDs aren't emulating (yet) is the nature of a dimming incandescent where the color gets more yellow-red as you dim the light. LEDs will pick a "color temperature" and that's it, regardless of dimming. I think this nano-enhanced incandescent will probably do the color shift with dimming thing. Now, can they make it last a couple of years and cost less than LED bulbs?
The reason you are changing the bulbs so frequently is because the factories have engineered them to fail. When they were selling the bulbs for 0.25 a-piece, making them last 100 years would have been financial suicide.
Filament bulbs can last 5+ years, if you engineer them to, especially at the "warmer feeling" lower temperatures.
simultaneously, nor do we have the fuel, nor do we have the money.
But... if we had followed in the French's footsteps, starting in the 1980s, we'd have more than enough power and fuel to be 100% fission breeder fed by now. It's a political problem, not a technological or economic one.
Even if we start today, all new power generation projects replaced with breeder reactors, followed up with a mandatory shutdown of the most carbon polluting 5% of existing generation capacity every year, we'd be able to do that easier and cheaper, worldwide, than Gulf War II.
So, breeder reactors for Iran and North Korea in 2025, who's with me?
I don't know what kind of jobs you work in, but mine simply "don't work" at 10 hours a week. If you wait tables, or bag groceries, yeah, sure, your hours are fungible - anybody can do your job. My jobs (since graduating) have always involved working in teams - whether internal to the company or across multiple companies - where interdependence and communication would break down terribly if "key people" become unavailable for long periods of time.
Many fortune 500 companies have "job sharing" where 2 people share one job and each work 20 hours per week. It does require some communication but it does seem to work. More to the point though, if your whole team is working 3 days a week then the "key players" are still available the same time everyone else is. You do hint at another problem though. If I'm a software company that works 5 days/week, I can outbid any competitor that only works 3 days/week as I can promise to deliver quicker than my competitor with the shorter work week.
It is more efficient to pay one person to devote their whole life to a task than it is to pay 4 to do it part time and chat with each other incessantly about what is going on (of course with exceptions, such as fungible jobs mentioned above, and especially when you can get the government to subsidize your workers' cost of living and only pay them part-time with no benefits.) So, I think that's a lot of what we're seeing in the U.S. today, people overworked at one end of the payscale in the name of competitiveness/efficiency, and people underutilized / subsidized at the other end.
Let's see, in at 9, warmed up and logged in by 9:30, meeting or coffee at 10, grab lunch and go for a run from 12-1, recovered and logged in again by 1:30, afternoon smoke or water cooler break around 3-3:30, wrapping up by 4:30... Light to moderate scattered meetings throughout the week.
Know anyone like that? If you read between the breaks, are there even 4 productive hours in a day like that? I think a lot of today's "presenteeism" is behind the continued "long work weeks" - not quite what the Japanese salarymen do with their after work parties, but it's leaning in that direction.
The ones I know who do it are doing it because their "qualifications" lock them into lower rates of pay, so their employers allow them to make more money through more hours - artificial and wrong, but common.
Oh, we certainly _could_ slack off from the "in by 9, stay 'til 5" routine - and I know many who have, though they generally "repay" the favor by being available electronically for extended hours. But, if you work in an unfortunately common scenario wherein multiple daily meetings are the norm, it becomes difficult a) to get anything done between the meetings, and b) to keep up with the "groupthink" that changes daily in the meetings - fall out of sync and you are no longer an effective contributor to the group goal.
So, get a cheap hobby. If you can live vicariously, the internet is a window on the world (and a fuzzier window on the universe). Gardening and building things can be cheap hobbies with a little bit of infrastructure (land / workshop). Building/growing things for fun is a whole lot less demanding than building them for the market - sell 'em cheap, give them away if you want, it's a hobby.
I don't know what kind of jobs you work in, but mine simply "don't work" at 10 hours a week. If you wait tables, or bag groceries, yeah, sure, your hours are fungible - anybody can do your job. My jobs (since graduating) have always involved working in teams - whether internal to the company or across multiple companies - where interdependence and communication would break down terribly if "key people" become unavailable for long periods of time.
Actually, I'm working with a potential "partner company" right now that's failing on this front - they bought a company that makes a relatively simple technology which has true value in its entrenched place in the market, but the new owners can't get their _stuff_ together to make the tech available to new customers - everything from technical knowledge to business models. It's a month between conference calls, and each new conference call makes the same promises and failure to deliver as the previous one. We'd like to pay them $500K over the next 5 years to use their tech, estimates run about $150K/year to develop and support the same kind of thing in-house - plus, theirs is more attractive because of its established position - but their lack of availability is seriously impacting their chances of landing the contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Privatize everything, then we can go back to donkey trails between private estates and market centers.
Ever thought that the sharing of information isn't the problem, but other things the Internet enabled?
Say, you can find qualified people in other countries with lower wages and have them work for you over the Internet - thereby adding downward pressure on the very same jobs in your own country. At the same time, somewhat unsurprisingly, there doesn't seem to be downward pressure on CEO jobs - even though I'd bet you could find qualified MBAs in "cheaper labour force" countries...
Seems a narrow view - the jobs are being outsourced because underutilized resources abroad can to them more cost effectively. This benefits the overseas labor pool, bringing their poor up. If it causes temporary unemployment in the outsourcing country, those new unemployed should retrain into employable skills - which they can do much more easily than the people who the jobs got outsourced to. Bringing up incomes in populations that live on less than $3 per person per day does much more to narrow the wealth gap than hanging on to outmoded jobs in first world countries.
Not humanitarian projects.
I believe the objective must be fundamentally self-serving for the process of excess workforce employment.
Some of the largest religions in the world believe that helping others _is_ helping (serving) yourself, the Buddhists are beginning to collect objective neuroscience that backs up their beliefs.
I think every conformist boomer knew at least one "layabout" who chose the path of recreational drugs and/or living off of the social safety net, and they despise those people for the fun they had in their youth, while the conformist was busting their ass working 3 jobs to put themselves through school, walking uphill in the snow both ways to and from work and school, and now they'll be damned if they do anything to let other people have that lifestyle that they missed the opportunity to enjoy, or even try, because it's just not fair for their broken down old self to have to see other people having fun that they never will.
So you're saying: we need more Melinda Gates in the world, driving technology (not to mention capital) toward humanitarian projects instead of, or at least in addition to, greater concentration of wealth.
The same argument could be made for reading.
Don't know whether to mod up or reply...absolutely true. Here's the World Bank, creator of debt among people who have no money, arguing that sharing information more freely will widen inequality. Though their logic may be sound if you select your samples very carefully (the richest will get richer), I can't see how the world's poorest having access to history's accumulated knowledge including up to the second latest research, more extensive and easier to access than any pre-internet library that ever was, even if you have to walk a day and wait in line for hours to get access, could be anything but good for the world's poorest people. Sure, people with better access will have more advantage, but that doesn't mean that removing access for all would in any way benefit the least fortunate.
Or just write it correctly the first time? I know it may be harder and more time consuming, but you'll get further in your career if you do.
Depends, in R&D I write an awful lot of throwaway code - maybe as much as 80% (depending...) but, at the outset, I can't tell you which 20% will be kept and used in the product and which 80% ends up being "investigatory."
Sure, you could just rewrite the 20% from scratch and "do it right," but that's not as efficient as reusing the proven test mules - which usually aren't in too bad of shape, if you trim off the FIXME: and TODO:s.
In my career, being able to show working code, quickly and easily, is important - much more concrete than sitting in a meeting and drawing bad sketches on a whiteboard while waving hands and attempting to explain things to people who all visualize verbal explanations differently.
Agreed that the "free market" is too poorly constrained to prevent boom-bust cycles with any of the current control mechanisms (and this is not in any way implying that a controlled market would be better) - we don't have a good handle on how to prevent or cure depression, though we've got some good examples of how to start one now, and one thing that seems to be "sure" to lengthen/deepen one is for everybody to clam up and spend as little as humanly possible - though, this was exactly how all 4 of my grandparents (born in the 19-teens) lived their entire lives: moving their guaranteed savings to the accounts that paid the highest interest (reading the paper for hours to find and capitalize on the last 1/8th of a percentage point), never investing in anything that might lose money, driving the cheapest car they can stand (ok, one grandmother was an exception here), turning the A/C off unless company was in the house, basic phone plan, TV antenna - never cable, cheapest food from the market, etc. etc. etc. When everybody lives that way, the economy grows slowly, if at all. But, what's worse, is when everybody lives like the go-go .com days, then gets spooked and switches overnight to severe austerity. I'm not a big fan of debt, and I believe in savings, I just need the rest of the country to get out and spend like the apocalypse is nigh so that I have a good economy to live in ;-)
Some "Enterprise zones" address this in a weird sort of way, with per-head incentives. If you set up shop in the zone, for each employee who you pay at least $30K/yr (hourly, salary, incentive, whatever, as long as they report $30K+ in the year as income from your enterprise), then the "zone incentive" pays the company $5K, or whatever.
In terms of a pothole filling contract, if the award is for $75M, it could be broken down as $25M for capital equipment and materials, plus a max of $50K/head. To get the last $50M in the contract, at least 1000 people will have to report $50K income tax - divide as you like: $25K over 2000 heads, etc. but, no individual reported taxes greater than $50K will be counted toward reimbursement on that project. So, you could "hire" your entire family of 100 at $50K/head to do nothing and siphon $5M off the top of the contract, but that kind of graft is pretty easy to find in an audit.
You know, we don't exactly have a lot of money.
Spoken like a true Depression survivor's child... And, if anyone recalls any history at all, how did we manage our way out of the Depression? (Hint: It wasn't by sticking our remaining money in a locked vault.)
You want the potholes fixed? Great idea, let's do that. Hell, let's give infrastructure a boost back up to 3% of the federal budget, from the 2.5% where it's currently at, but not at the expense of shutting NASA down. Pushing NASA back up from 0.5% to 1% of the budget, and education up from 6% to 8%, and energy and environmental up from 3% to 4%, while reducing military spending from 54% to 50% would seem to be a good way to make this country stronger, long term.
As others have mentioned: color, not actual heat produced.
One thing that LEDs aren't emulating (yet) is the nature of a dimming incandescent where the color gets more yellow-red as you dim the light. LEDs will pick a "color temperature" and that's it, regardless of dimming.
Not necessarily true. I recently bought some dimmable LED bulbs that feature getting redder as you dim them. I assume they do this by monitoring the incoming waveform and tweaking the power to different colored elements inside.
I didn't even notice the feature on the package until after I got them home, but I tried one in a dimmable fixture to test it out, and it worked better than I expected (although the bulb still couldn't be dimmed down quite as far as a real incandescent before dropping to zero output).
Had to happen, eventually - I haven't seen those yet. We've got probably too many lights in our house (PO installed 4 ceiling cans in each bedroom, 12 in the kitchen), so we tend to run our dimmers way down - and that's kinda funky looking with the un-changing color bulbs.
Back when bulbs cost more than the labor to change them, that made some sense overall. It is a great example of "free enterprise" gone wrong in today's world.
Keep buying those Wal-Mart bulbs and tell me how your actual lifetime performance works out. The cheap CFLs burned out almost as fast as incandescents, while still costing 4-20x as much (yeah, $3.50 is cheap for an LED bulb, but try equating that to the 8 for $1 cheap incandescents...)
As others have mentioned: color, not actual heat produced.
One thing that LEDs aren't emulating (yet) is the nature of a dimming incandescent where the color gets more yellow-red as you dim the light. LEDs will pick a "color temperature" and that's it, regardless of dimming. I think this nano-enhanced incandescent will probably do the color shift with dimming thing. Now, can they make it last a couple of years and cost less than LED bulbs?
I've had multiple led bulbs die in under two years.
Stop buying them from the Dollar Store reject sale bin.
If you make an incan that is more efficient than LED, it will get itself unbanned quickly.
The reason you are changing the bulbs so frequently is because the factories have engineered them to fail. When they were selling the bulbs for 0.25 a-piece, making them last 100 years would have been financial suicide.
Filament bulbs can last 5+ years, if you engineer them to, especially at the "warmer feeling" lower temperatures.
simultaneously, nor do we have the fuel, nor do we have the money.
But... if we had followed in the French's footsteps, starting in the 1980s, we'd have more than enough power and fuel to be 100% fission breeder fed by now. It's a political problem, not a technological or economic one.
Even if we start today, all new power generation projects replaced with breeder reactors, followed up with a mandatory shutdown of the most carbon polluting 5% of existing generation capacity every year, we'd be able to do that easier and cheaper, worldwide, than Gulf War II.
So, breeder reactors for Iran and North Korea in 2025, who's with me?
I don't know what kind of jobs you work in, but mine simply "don't work" at 10 hours a week. If you wait tables, or bag groceries, yeah, sure, your hours are fungible - anybody can do your job. My jobs (since graduating) have always involved working in teams - whether internal to the company or across multiple companies - where interdependence and communication would break down terribly if "key people" become unavailable for long periods of time.
Many fortune 500 companies have "job sharing" where 2 people share one job and each work 20 hours per week. It does require some communication but it does seem to work.
More to the point though, if your whole team is working 3 days a week then the "key players" are still available the same time everyone else is.
You do hint at another problem though. If I'm a software company that works 5 days/week, I can outbid any competitor that only works 3 days/week as I can promise to deliver quicker than my competitor with the shorter work week.
It is more efficient to pay one person to devote their whole life to a task than it is to pay 4 to do it part time and chat with each other incessantly about what is going on (of course with exceptions, such as fungible jobs mentioned above, and especially when you can get the government to subsidize your workers' cost of living and only pay them part-time with no benefits.) So, I think that's a lot of what we're seeing in the U.S. today, people overworked at one end of the payscale in the name of competitiveness/efficiency, and people underutilized / subsidized at the other end.
Let's see, in at 9, warmed up and logged in by 9:30, meeting or coffee at 10, grab lunch and go for a run from 12-1, recovered and logged in again by 1:30, afternoon smoke or water cooler break around 3-3:30, wrapping up by 4:30... Light to moderate scattered meetings throughout the week.
Know anyone like that? If you read between the breaks, are there even 4 productive hours in a day like that? I think a lot of today's "presenteeism" is behind the continued "long work weeks" - not quite what the Japanese salarymen do with their after work parties, but it's leaning in that direction.
The ones I know who do it are doing it because their "qualifications" lock them into lower rates of pay, so their employers allow them to make more money through more hours - artificial and wrong, but common.
Oh, we certainly _could_ slack off from the "in by 9, stay 'til 5" routine - and I know many who have, though they generally "repay" the favor by being available electronically for extended hours. But, if you work in an unfortunately common scenario wherein multiple daily meetings are the norm, it becomes difficult a) to get anything done between the meetings, and b) to keep up with the "groupthink" that changes daily in the meetings - fall out of sync and you are no longer an effective contributor to the group goal.
So, get a cheap hobby. If you can live vicariously, the internet is a window on the world (and a fuzzier window on the universe). Gardening and building things can be cheap hobbies with a little bit of infrastructure (land / workshop). Building/growing things for fun is a whole lot less demanding than building them for the market - sell 'em cheap, give them away if you want, it's a hobby.
I don't know what kind of jobs you work in, but mine simply "don't work" at 10 hours a week. If you wait tables, or bag groceries, yeah, sure, your hours are fungible - anybody can do your job. My jobs (since graduating) have always involved working in teams - whether internal to the company or across multiple companies - where interdependence and communication would break down terribly if "key people" become unavailable for long periods of time.
Actually, I'm working with a potential "partner company" right now that's failing on this front - they bought a company that makes a relatively simple technology which has true value in its entrenched place in the market, but the new owners can't get their _stuff_ together to make the tech available to new customers - everything from technical knowledge to business models. It's a month between conference calls, and each new conference call makes the same promises and failure to deliver as the previous one. We'd like to pay them $500K over the next 5 years to use their tech, estimates run about $150K/year to develop and support the same kind of thing in-house - plus, theirs is more attractive because of its established position - but their lack of availability is seriously impacting their chances of landing the contract.