Except that Microsoft spends more on R&D than most other companies combined and often enters markets long before anyone else. (See Smart Phone, MP3 Players, Tablets etc...)
I just went to an event yesterday sponsored by Monster Energy. I imagine the profit margins on a $5 can of non-carbonated pop is *at least* 500%.
There is a *LOT* of room for manufacturing inefficiency in such a product. But the marketing which produced literally thousands of people paying money to wear a hat or sweater emblazoned with your logo is by far the greater accomplishment than the product.
It's a product that tastes like shit, is grossly over priced and really only exists because of its successful marketing campaign and lifestyle association.
You're completely ignoring the point of both the parent and GP posts. In the future Amazon doesn't employ anyone anymore. It's automated. And all these other new companies that are springing up also don't employ people. We're rapidly approaching the point where the number of jobs available is less than the number of people to be served.
If for example one person could raise all of the crops in the united states hypothetically it doesn't stand to reason that the cost of food would necessarily drop. It takes resources to construct a car. It doesn't necessarily take *people* to construct a car.
Technology has historically opened up new avenues for people to work since people are intelligent and we have always needed human intelligence to operate machines. But machine intelligence is increasing to the point (from the perspective of labor) that one person programming 100 slave machines is 'smart enough'.
As Amazon increases its efficiency it requires less and less people. Eventually that number can reach effectively 0. And Amazon, or companies like it, are going to handle a significant portion of our commerce in the not too distant future.
I think the previous Slashdot article hit the nail on the head. The problem is that most people can't understand any of the subjects being discussed so they have to take it on faith that so-and-so is telling the truth. So if one blog says one thing and another blog says another they just go with the one that also says all the other stuff they agree with as equally valid.
Stop whining about me lighting your house on fire. Houses have burned before in this area and houses will burn again. None of it had anything to do with humans. Sure I poured gasoline on all the bushes around your house and threw a match into the mix... but it's not like "a burning bush" is a new phenomenon--we even have documentation of this in biblical times. Relax!
But what if "surviving and adapting" means employing 3 people but consuming the what amounts to 100 people's median annual incomes?
"But wait!" you say, "The owner of that person who owns this 3 person company that takes in 100 people's incomes in revenue will spend it back in the market."
1) Only if the operating expenses are for items which weren't also produced by 3 to 100 employee companies.
2) The business owner having found a marvelously labor efficient business will probably start a similar business with said money. (See #1)
So you get into this cycle where a huge boost in efficiency. Profits a few but has no tangible benefit to the many. Eventually our future factory owner will be able to reduce everyone except for himself. He will be wildly profitable but have no customers.
This is the point Jessie Jackson Jr was trying to make: efficiency for efficiency's sake isn't inherently bad--but if as a result we don't protect those who are no longer needed then we can create an unstable economy where only a few profit and the many suffer.
Sometimes it's better to be a little less efficient when it results in a healthier population. After all the point of government is to look after the interests of the people--not it's GDP. If we doubled our GDP but halved the average wage... didn't the 'economy' improve? What if the GDP stagnated but the median income rose? Which of those scenarios would most people view as an improved economy?
Honestly I don't give a shit if the GDP rose but my wages fell. I would consider that an economy that got worse--my economy.
We have rightfully viewed the need to 'change and adapt' for thousands of years. But not only is the speed at which we have to change and adapt rapidly accelerating (faster than some can manage) but we're also reaching an unprecedented point in history where machines can not only do--but think. And when machines can think then you start replacing humans in the work force for good.
EVERY employer discriminates. We test our employees and if they fail the tests we don't hire them. We demand them to demonstrate their talent, intelligence and efficacy. You can absolutely discriminate based on someone not meeting a minimum IQ.
What you can't do is apply different skill tests to different races. You couldn't for instance require all white people have a 100 IQ but all black people 110. That would be an arbitrary discrimination irrelevant to the work.
The root of the problem is that machine intelligence is eating away at jobs by IQ. Sure the high level strategy jobs are secure for some time since AI isn't very good at inventing a new product but manufacturing automation has certainly reduced our need for manufacturing.
Web services are displacing many service based jobs. For most of the population that might have used an H&R block or such their website is far more useful and efficient and I doubt the website employs as many people as the thousands of tax professionals.
I buy almost everything on Amazon now. Amazon has a few thousand employees but they can offer lower priced goods because they require less employees. As the politician said it takes less workers to run a datacenter than it does to staff thousands of stores across the nation.
Every industry is becoming more efficient through use of technology. Eventually there'll only be a handful of positions which can't be done better through software. And I'm sure the people who manage and write that software will be handsomely payed. But what do we do about the rest? If we had 75% unemployment but a larger GDP we still have a problem. Even if the net GDP is greater than now but only 25% can enjoy that luxury while the 75% starve then you have a broken society. We're going to face this problem in the not too distant future. Most jobs aren't terribly difficult and most jobs can be displaced completely by Artificial Intelligence.
Look at the last recession. Our GDP is higher now than before the recession... and we have less jobs. Welcome to the Future, it's only going to get worse. Software is going to get better. And unemployment is only going to go up. You can cut taxes all you want but it's not going to drive up unemployment since these companies simply will realize they don't need very many employees anymore.
I'll give an example from my own industry: advertising. As companies consolidate they need less marketing. If you have 4 companies which consolidate into 2 companies they'll probably cut their advertising since you can only air so many commercials per day. It might not be linear but they'll gain efficiency since they don't need multiple agencies anymore.
And you can reach far more people now with far less effort. You don't need 100 different book stores in a city. Amazon is good enough. You don't need 100 gamestops--you have steam. That's not a case where one industry is supplanting another. You can't retrain these employees from working in gamestop to work in VRShop. The demand for low-skill labor is simply evaporating. And energy increasing in price will simply further increase the demand for efficiency. It's more efficient to stock an Amazon warehouse than it is 100 different shops. It might shift to the customer going to a neighborhood pick-up center instead of using Fed-Ex but that pick-up center could scan a credit card and automatically dispense your package.
My final example is RedBox. RedBox displaces an entire Blockbuster store. I think about the jobs I applied to highschool:
Call Center, Blockbuster and Bookstore. Future IBM Watson, Red Box and Amazon.
The future is massive unemployment and Welfare or Make-Work jobs. It's time to start thinking about these things.
This is *NOT* a broken window fallacy. The Broken Window Fallacy assumes that it's a waste because the resources could have been spent on something else.
But he is actually making an excellent point and the reactionaries are those who are attempting to dismiss it as a straw-man.
If we were simply looking at the publishing industry yes there would be no problem. The Horse and Carriage industry is gone true. But that's not analogous to the modern shifts. We aren't becoming more efficient while shifting jobs to new sectors--we're becoming more efficient and shifting resources to no-where.
The Publishing industry in this case is a single example of a wider market shift where more is being done with less people. The inevitable outcome of this is that we'll be able to do everything with almost no workforce. A Lights-Out factory will produce robots to work in lights-out factories which will be delivered with driverless trucks created from ore mined in miner-less mines and smelted in worker-less foundries.
I've seen this. I wrote an application which increased the productivity of one person by several dozen times. I essentially put 12 people out of work. Sure those people are now 'free' and the client is now free to spend those resources on other priorities but more likely they won't hire more people than they need.
Sure there is more 'potential' for people to be authors now--but writing a book is incredibly hard and honestly the reason most books are unsuccessful isn't because they didn't get a publishing deal--it's because they suck. For every author there is probably 100 people or more who make their living off of publishing an author's work. If we have a pure author workforce then we'll have 99% unemployment. Now 99% unemployment isn't a bad thing. But when we inevitably get to the point where we simply don't need very many workers anymore we're going to need to shift our views on compensation so that those who simply are useless don't suffer.
The broken window fallacy assumes there is other jobs to be had and other work to be done. But if nobody in the town is employed and there is no work to be done then breaking a few windows will re-distribute the wealth from the shop owner to the unemployed--who hopefully will spend it in the shop. The alternate is for the shop-owner to have food he bought from the robots while the rest of the townsfolk go hungry, or to tax the shop keeper and feed the hungry unemployed masses for doing nothing. Personally I think a few inefficient and useless services are preferable to charity.
Since we can only ever *prove* that we exist in some form (self proving since self-reflective thought would be impossible with out some 'self') everything is subject to error. Sort of the matrix principle. We could theoretically live in the matrix and be the only living thing in existence having caused ourselves to forget creating the matrix for ourselves.
Science acknowledges this but then promptly and necessarily ignores it since without any testable or empirical basis is judged to be equally likely as the exact opposite.
My revision would be that Science doesn't attempt to "eliminate" faith. It attempts to "minimize" it. Like mathematical proofs--science is always built on previous proofs and there is no way to get around eventually having to make some assumptions. But one thing science does do very well (physicists and meta-physicists) is that they *state* their assumptions and those assumptions are then subject to equal scrutiny as anything else. For example I can't prove the property of addition. But once I define whole numbers as an assumed reality then I can proceed to use it.
So yes I take it on faith that there are whole numbers. But if whole numbers are brought into question then science is really good about starting the cascading revisions to adapt to one of its foundations being removed. Good theology is built the same way--but that's not faith either. It's just metaphysics.
Science and religion aren't incompatible. But many religions are incompatible with science. And most people's religion isn't very scientific.
Which is why we need to teach metaphysics and philosophy. The problem is that it's nice and happy to say.
"I believe in Evolution and Physics created by God!" And then they stop without doing the philosophical analysis of that belief.
If there is a God and he created physics and evolution through a deterministic system then he designed a horrendously immoral system seemingly designed to cause pain and suffering. A deterministic system means that everything that has happened--happened according to his plan. And if this is his plan then I want nothing to do with him (which was also part of his plan).
The problem really extends far beyond "science" to the fact that most people are either genetically, environmentally or 'willfully' stupid. They don't understand science and they also don't understand religion so they just decide to believe whatever they please. Which is fine... until they're required to make a decision that has real world ramifications. It's also a bit of a loss to humanity since they are evidently incapable or unwilling of having consistent and rational thought.
Problem is even if you have faith in revealed knowledge you can't rationally and in good faith arbitrarily choose one revealed knowledge over another. So the scientific method might be faith, but it's at least self consistent logic based on sound metaphysics. Believing in arbitrary revealed faith means you have no metaphysical basis for your beliefs and I can logically say that it's a weaker belief.
We can't prove anything, but if we can't assign varying levels of proof then nothing can claim anything and we're all stuck with "I think therefore I am."
Which is a long way of saying not only are most people horrendously ignorant of science they're even ignorant of philosophy.
I've been told that about sound and video drivers ever since 1998.
I still have a half broken linux distro partition from last year. Do you mean like... in the last 2 months it's all finally straightened out and I won't have one app that wants Red Hat and another that seems to only work on Suse and another that only seems to work in...?
So I guess the desktop never really was a good product for the consumer market.
Not really, no. How many people outside of the slashdot crowd really want a general-purpose computer? They want Applications: a messaging application, a game application, a web-browsing application, a Facebook application...etc. A tablet is just a computer that can switch from one application to the other at the touch of a (virtual) button.
Which is completely different from a desktop which is just a general purpose computer that switches between... no wait...
The internet can route around meddling. My connection to the internet on the other hand is beholden to a single router at the ISP. I suppose I could route around it to my neighbor's connection.. but they also throttle the same routes so it would be exchanging one bad route for another.
The only way this wouldn't be a problem is if the entire internet was distributed and peer-to-peer from client to host.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I think this image sums it up pretty nicely:
http://www.lejournaldelamobilite.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/iphone4-vs-galaxy-s-head.jpg
I don't think Apple should win (especially on the hardware front) but I can definitely support them in giving Samsung the finger in court.
Well these were released in like 2005:
http://www.tabletkiosk.com/products/sahara/i400s_pp.asp
Not exactly the same as an ipad but pretty close.
I don't think inflation has been 10% over the last year.
Except that Microsoft spends more on R&D than most other companies combined and often enters markets long before anyone else. (See Smart Phone, MP3 Players, Tablets etc...)
I just went to an event yesterday sponsored by Monster Energy. I imagine the profit margins on a $5 can of non-carbonated pop is *at least* 500%.
There is a *LOT* of room for manufacturing inefficiency in such a product. But the marketing which produced literally thousands of people paying money to wear a hat or sweater emblazoned with your logo is by far the greater accomplishment than the product.
It's a product that tastes like shit, is grossly over priced and really only exists because of its successful marketing campaign and lifestyle association.
You're completely ignoring the point of both the parent and GP posts. In the future Amazon doesn't employ anyone anymore. It's automated. And all these other new companies that are springing up also don't employ people. We're rapidly approaching the point where the number of jobs available is less than the number of people to be served.
If for example one person could raise all of the crops in the united states hypothetically it doesn't stand to reason that the cost of food would necessarily drop. It takes resources to construct a car. It doesn't necessarily take *people* to construct a car.
Technology has historically opened up new avenues for people to work since people are intelligent and we have always needed human intelligence to operate machines. But machine intelligence is increasing to the point (from the perspective of labor) that one person programming 100 slave machines is 'smart enough'.
As Amazon increases its efficiency it requires less and less people. Eventually that number can reach effectively 0. And Amazon, or companies like it, are going to handle a significant portion of our commerce in the not too distant future.
I think the previous Slashdot article hit the nail on the head. The problem is that most people can't understand any of the subjects being discussed so they have to take it on faith that so-and-so is telling the truth. So if one blog says one thing and another blog says another they just go with the one that also says all the other stuff they agree with as equally valid.
Stop whining about me lighting your house on fire. Houses have burned before in this area and houses will burn again. None of it had anything to do with humans. Sure I poured gasoline on all the bushes around your house and threw a match into the mix... but it's not like "a burning bush" is a new phenomenon--we even have documentation of this in biblical times. Relax!
But what if "surviving and adapting" means employing 3 people but consuming the what amounts to 100 people's median annual incomes?
"But wait!" you say, "The owner of that person who owns this 3 person company that takes in 100 people's incomes in revenue will spend it back in the market."
1) Only if the operating expenses are for items which weren't also produced by 3 to 100 employee companies.
2) The business owner having found a marvelously labor efficient business will probably start a similar business with said money. (See #1)
So you get into this cycle where a huge boost in efficiency. Profits a few but has no tangible benefit to the many. Eventually our future factory owner will be able to reduce everyone except for himself. He will be wildly profitable but have no customers.
This is the point Jessie Jackson Jr was trying to make: efficiency for efficiency's sake isn't inherently bad--but if as a result we don't protect those who are no longer needed then we can create an unstable economy where only a few profit and the many suffer.
Sometimes it's better to be a little less efficient when it results in a healthier population. After all the point of government is to look after the interests of the people--not it's GDP. If we doubled our GDP but halved the average wage... didn't the 'economy' improve? What if the GDP stagnated but the median income rose? Which of those scenarios would most people view as an improved economy?
Honestly I don't give a shit if the GDP rose but my wages fell. I would consider that an economy that got worse--my economy.
We have rightfully viewed the need to 'change and adapt' for thousands of years. But not only is the speed at which we have to change and adapt rapidly accelerating (faster than some can manage) but we're also reaching an unprecedented point in history where machines can not only do--but think. And when machines can think then you start replacing humans in the work force for good.
Real climate change skeptics are an extremely small group.
Both Climate Change Skeptics and Creationists make up a majority of our population (and generally tend to be the same people).
EVERY employer discriminates. We test our employees and if they fail the tests we don't hire them. We demand them to demonstrate their talent, intelligence and efficacy. You can absolutely discriminate based on someone not meeting a minimum IQ.
What you can't do is apply different skill tests to different races. You couldn't for instance require all white people have a 100 IQ but all black people 110. That would be an arbitrary discrimination irrelevant to the work.
Only briefly.
The root of the problem is that machine intelligence is eating away at jobs by IQ. Sure the high level strategy jobs are secure for some time since AI isn't very good at inventing a new product but manufacturing automation has certainly reduced our need for manufacturing.
Web services are displacing many service based jobs. For most of the population that might have used an H&R block or such their website is far more useful and efficient and I doubt the website employs as many people as the thousands of tax professionals.
I buy almost everything on Amazon now. Amazon has a few thousand employees but they can offer lower priced goods because they require less employees. As the politician said it takes less workers to run a datacenter than it does to staff thousands of stores across the nation.
Every industry is becoming more efficient through use of technology. Eventually there'll only be a handful of positions which can't be done better through software. And I'm sure the people who manage and write that software will be handsomely payed. But what do we do about the rest? If we had 75% unemployment but a larger GDP we still have a problem. Even if the net GDP is greater than now but only 25% can enjoy that luxury while the 75% starve then you have a broken society. We're going to face this problem in the not too distant future. Most jobs aren't terribly difficult and most jobs can be displaced completely by Artificial Intelligence.
Look at the last recession. Our GDP is higher now than before the recession... and we have less jobs. Welcome to the Future, it's only going to get worse. Software is going to get better. And unemployment is only going to go up. You can cut taxes all you want but it's not going to drive up unemployment since these companies simply will realize they don't need very many employees anymore.
I'll give an example from my own industry: advertising. As companies consolidate they need less marketing. If you have 4 companies which consolidate into 2 companies they'll probably cut their advertising since you can only air so many commercials per day. It might not be linear but they'll gain efficiency since they don't need multiple agencies anymore.
And you can reach far more people now with far less effort. You don't need 100 different book stores in a city. Amazon is good enough. You don't need 100 gamestops--you have steam. That's not a case where one industry is supplanting another. You can't retrain these employees from working in gamestop to work in VRShop. The demand for low-skill labor is simply evaporating. And energy increasing in price will simply further increase the demand for efficiency. It's more efficient to stock an Amazon warehouse than it is 100 different shops. It might shift to the customer going to a neighborhood pick-up center instead of using Fed-Ex but that pick-up center could scan a credit card and automatically dispense your package.
My final example is RedBox. RedBox displaces an entire Blockbuster store. I think about the jobs I applied to highschool:
Call Center, Blockbuster and Bookstore.
Future IBM Watson, Red Box and Amazon.
The future is massive unemployment and Welfare or Make-Work jobs. It's time to start thinking about these things.
This is *NOT* a broken window fallacy. The Broken Window Fallacy assumes that it's a waste because the resources could have been spent on something else.
But he is actually making an excellent point and the reactionaries are those who are attempting to dismiss it as a straw-man.
If we were simply looking at the publishing industry yes there would be no problem. The Horse and Carriage industry is gone true. But that's not analogous to the modern shifts. We aren't becoming more efficient while shifting jobs to new sectors--we're becoming more efficient and shifting resources to no-where.
The Publishing industry in this case is a single example of a wider market shift where more is being done with less people. The inevitable outcome of this is that we'll be able to do everything with almost no workforce. A Lights-Out factory will produce robots to work in lights-out factories which will be delivered with driverless trucks created from ore mined in miner-less mines and smelted in worker-less foundries.
I've seen this. I wrote an application which increased the productivity of one person by several dozen times. I essentially put 12 people out of work. Sure those people are now 'free' and the client is now free to spend those resources on other priorities but more likely they won't hire more people than they need.
Sure there is more 'potential' for people to be authors now--but writing a book is incredibly hard and honestly the reason most books are unsuccessful isn't because they didn't get a publishing deal--it's because they suck. For every author there is probably 100 people or more who make their living off of publishing an author's work. If we have a pure author workforce then we'll have 99% unemployment. Now 99% unemployment isn't a bad thing. But when we inevitably get to the point where we simply don't need very many workers anymore we're going to need to shift our views on compensation so that those who simply are useless don't suffer.
The broken window fallacy assumes there is other jobs to be had and other work to be done. But if nobody in the town is employed and there is no work to be done then breaking a few windows will re-distribute the wealth from the shop owner to the unemployed--who hopefully will spend it in the shop. The alternate is for the shop-owner to have food he bought from the robots while the rest of the townsfolk go hungry, or to tax the shop keeper and feed the hungry unemployed masses for doing nothing. Personally I think a few inefficient and useless services are preferable to charity.
It's an advantage, but I still buy everything on Amazon and Amazon collects sales tax here.
Especially with prime. It's cheaper and more convenient than driving or walking to a store.
I would make a small revision:
Since we can only ever *prove* that we exist in some form (self proving since self-reflective thought would be impossible with out some 'self') everything is subject to error. Sort of the matrix principle. We could theoretically live in the matrix and be the only living thing in existence having caused ourselves to forget creating the matrix for ourselves.
Science acknowledges this but then promptly and necessarily ignores it since without any testable or empirical basis is judged to be equally likely as the exact opposite.
My revision would be that Science doesn't attempt to "eliminate" faith. It attempts to "minimize" it. Like mathematical proofs--science is always built on previous proofs and there is no way to get around eventually having to make some assumptions. But one thing science does do very well (physicists and meta-physicists) is that they *state* their assumptions and those assumptions are then subject to equal scrutiny as anything else. For example I can't prove the property of addition. But once I define whole numbers as an assumed reality then I can proceed to use it.
So yes I take it on faith that there are whole numbers. But if whole numbers are brought into question then science is really good about starting the cascading revisions to adapt to one of its foundations being removed. Good theology is built the same way--but that's not faith either. It's just metaphysics.
Science and religion aren't incompatible. But many religions are incompatible with science. And most people's religion isn't very scientific.
Which is why we need to teach metaphysics and philosophy. The problem is that it's nice and happy to say.
"I believe in Evolution and Physics created by God!" And then they stop without doing the philosophical analysis of that belief.
If there is a God and he created physics and evolution through a deterministic system then he designed a horrendously immoral system seemingly designed to cause pain and suffering. A deterministic system means that everything that has happened--happened according to his plan. And if this is his plan then I want nothing to do with him (which was also part of his plan).
The problem really extends far beyond "science" to the fact that most people are either genetically, environmentally or 'willfully' stupid. They don't understand science and they also don't understand religion so they just decide to believe whatever they please. Which is fine... until they're required to make a decision that has real world ramifications. It's also a bit of a loss to humanity since they are evidently incapable or unwilling of having consistent and rational thought.
Problem is even if you have faith in revealed knowledge you can't rationally and in good faith arbitrarily choose one revealed knowledge over another. So the scientific method might be faith, but it's at least self consistent logic based on sound metaphysics. Believing in arbitrary revealed faith means you have no metaphysical basis for your beliefs and I can logically say that it's a weaker belief.
We can't prove anything, but if we can't assign varying levels of proof then nothing can claim anything and we're all stuck with "I think therefore I am."
Which is a long way of saying not only are most people horrendously ignorant of science they're even ignorant of philosophy.
And disrupt most Anonymous participant's Killzone 3 evening? I think not.
Don't forget Ford Sync either. First in-car computer system to take off.
I've been told that about sound and video drivers ever since 1998.
I still have a half broken linux distro partition from last year. Do you mean like... in the last 2 months it's all finally straightened out and I won't have one app that wants Red Hat and another that seems to only work on Suse and another that only seems to work in...?
So I guess the desktop never really was a good product for the consumer market.
Not really, no. How many people outside of the slashdot crowd really want a general-purpose computer? They want Applications: a messaging application, a game application, a web-browsing application, a Facebook application...etc. A tablet is just a computer that can switch from one application to the other at the touch of a (virtual) button.
Which is completely different from a desktop which is just a general purpose computer that switches between... no wait...
Good point. Let's revise the headline:
Linux dominates glorified firmware market.
You do the exact same thing all day? Sounds dreadful.
The internet can route around meddling. My connection to the internet on the other hand is beholden to a single router at the ISP. I suppose I could route around it to my neighbor's connection.. but they also throttle the same routes so it would be exchanging one bad route for another.
The only way this wouldn't be a problem is if the entire internet was distributed and peer-to-peer from client to host.
Yeah he's failed at the big things like Gitmo while only succeeding on the small fry stuff like Health Care Reform, Don't Ask Don't Tell...