"German autoworkers don't earn any US Dollars at all, they earn Euros, which are a different currency."
It's a different currency, yes, but it happens to be the currency I'm most comfortable with, as it happens to be mine one too, thanks.
"It is of course fine to use market exchange rates, but then you have to add some caveats to explain that not everything in the German economy costs the same as it does in the US"
True, but it's still quite out of scope when the real salaries are not even half that figure as will attest anyone that has first hand references from the German market instead of some biased views from news pamphlets from 4000 miles away.
"BTW, you seem to have assumed an 8-hour working day and a 12-month working year. Germans told me that they get a 1-month vacation every year, sometimes more. They also work fewer hours per year overall than the average European or American worker"
Yes, I saw it later: I wanted to show a monthly number, since in Europe is more easily understandable and I multiplied by 12 months instead of by 11.
Nevertheless for a more suited number, it's about 1500 hours/year, which still puts it at over 100K which is simply ridiculous for an assembly line blue collar worker which will be utmost happy if he reaches 35.000EUR gross / year. For the most part (like well above 90%), not even senior automotive engineers will reach 75.000 EUR/year without going into management, much less 100K.
"They do. Go and check for yourself if you don't believe it."
No, they don't... by a stupidly big margin.
You need go to a senior engineer at Audi or BMW to reach about 60.000~65.000EUR gross/year (and I happen to have some two or three friends in such positions at the VAG Group). And then you need to go into management to go over that ceiling.
A blue collar "senior" would reach around 35.000â gross/year.
Average salary in Germany is about 45.000â gross/year, which despite of being quite a substantial number is still far away from 100K. If you really think a blue collar worker at an assembly line makes not only average but more than doubles it, I have a bridge I can offer to you.
"the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits"
Sorry man, but something smells veeeery fishy there: 67.14x8=537,12; 537,12x21=11.279,52; 67,14x8x21x12=135.354,24. There's nooooooo way that a German autoworker makes north of 130K year, simply nooooo way.
Oh! and I forgot about the other critical difference: not only unions are not company-bound, but they aren't monopolist either: you can belong to a union, or another one or a third one, the one you think that best cares for your interests and all unions go to negotiations with representatives weighting as per their representees.
"One of the interesting comparisons is between American non-union jobs and union jobs in Europe, particularly Germany and Scandanavia, where salaries are about twice U.S. rates."
I have to ask your data because I find it hard to believe.
Anyway comparing US to EU unions is an apples-to-oranges exercise. In EU you don't have a union for a single company but more like a party across the country, either generalist or sector-focused. Then they don't negotiate wages and conditions on a given company but across the country, which gives an equal field for all companies in a given sector (up to the next problem which is, of course, outsourcing to other countries with lower labor conditions).
"How many clicks does it take for those of use who do not own or use PowerPoint"
Exactly that.
"Security researchers have discovered that cybercriminals have recently started using a malware downloader that installs a banking Trojan to your computer"
Does it installs into my computer or into my *windows* system? (once again)
"This is partly an unintended consequence of our social safety net. Without that net, people in, say, Flint Michigan, would face a stark choice of either move or starve"
Social, yes, safety not so sure.
Of course migrating because of labor shortage is always a hard stand (while much less so when you are migrating within your own country) but there was a time when labor shortage was a matter of one individual within a family unit so there were no synchronization problems; basically, the husband finds a job everywhere else and there the whole family goes. But now, it's usually two that need to find an agreement for the family to move, so no wonder it becomes more difficult.
"If you leave early on Friday afternoon, this surely means that you've worked less than the expected X hours per week?"
I can tell you how it works in other countries: you don't have a week hour stand (40 hours) but a yearly one (depends on your contract, somewhat around 1750 hours/year). It results that if you were 40 hours/week for roughly 48 weeks/year you end up working too many hours, so companies compensate by a combination of leaving early on Fridays and/or having a 7 hour days on summer.
"They had an offsite DR. The DR was setup wrong and did not have the latest data so when they switched to it they started seeing wrong data and had to switch it off"
In the kind of companies that outsource the hell out to save some pennies there are two and only two types of highly available systems:
1) Active/Passive. When the active goes nuts the passive fails to start for whatever reasons (tightly coupled to the fact that the system was tested exactly once, in the happy path, when given the "operational" label -and then only partly: there were minor flaws but everybody covered it up because the project was already late and they were "oh, not so important").
2) Active/Active. When part of the system fails, the surviving part can't handle the load and falls to its knees too because nobody did a proper load assessment nor capacity planning (it would have outgrown the promised costs and some manager would have looked bad).
In both cases, bonus points when they reach a split-brain situation and start killing each other left and right without ever reaching quorum.
"Inflation is caused by an increase in money supply"
That's true.
"not a redistribution of it"
That's false. Yes, just redistributing money so the ones that are refraining themselves from buying can start buying causes inflation. It might be eventually controlled (by offer increasing to meet increasing demand), or not, if demand increases on somehow inelastic or limited offer (i.e. real state market).
Of course, the case of UBI would not only increase demand but also would most probably require increasing the monetary mass too, so you would have another factor that would increase inflation.
Your other (extreme) example, just one person grabbing all money would have exactly the result you imagine: absolute deflation -but not "to the point to make up for the loss of income", it just would mean that money would stop to be a exchange mechanism and we would most probably go back to bartering (and eventually reinventing money and going back to square one). You can think what you said is just a mental experiment, but it has happen, and it has happen recently; i.e. Argentina. "El corralito" meant one "person" retaining all money (that "person" being the government) and it certainly stopped inflation and poor people went with bartering and "monopoly money".
"How about starting with not appointing idiots with zero knowledge about code as their bosses, and not letting those zero-brain idiots set the milestones and delivery dates?"
Those idiots can set the most obnoxius delivery dates, the most stupid features on the roadmap all they want; the code is not there till a programmer puts it there. Not a single second before that moment.
"It is a little known fact that programmers don't really like to ship buggy, unstable and barely tested code"
That's obviously untrue as it can be attested by basically any public tracker from any community-based open source project.
And then, it's that even less known fact, specially among programmers, that the vast majority of them could not do any better, even if their very lives were at stake.
"That's got fuck all to do with programming. That's people, processes, stupidity, resource constraints and other factors that are so far beyond the control of programmers that blaming them is total idiocy."
There's not a single comma in any program that hasn't been put there by a programmer or that could at all be there if not for the programmer deciding it was the moment to write it down.
"Yes, the world isn't fair. Didn't you learn that by the time you were 8?"
Yes. And didn't you learn the world not being fair works both ways?
Still you didn't offer any logical answer to my question: there is enough productivity in the world to sustain the population at least at survival level (that's not a question, that's a fact). Given that, what's the technical (not social) need to work for a living? Because I see no one, except "because the world is way it is" -which is open to change, if so we want it.
"You deserve nothing for free, so you must work for a living"
I deserve nothing for free, yet I get the air I breath for free.
And then, _I_ deserve nothing for free, yet others deserve what they get for free? Like, say, Bill Gates' children?
You see, people may deserve nothing for free yet get things for free.
"The interesting question is "but what will we do?""
There's already a lot of people that don't need to work for a living, from retirees to billionaires' offspring, to entire societies like affluent ancient Greek so, no, asking "but what will we do?" is not an interesting question, at all.
"It's still mindless work being automated - are are you discussing some post-singularity fantasy?"
Of course it is "mindless" in the very literal sense as no computer have a mind. On the other hand, trading shares, rating a credit risk, diagnosing patients, landing an airplane, etc. don't see to be "brute" jobs and still they are more and more done by a computer (and those are not even the worrying ones, short term, but highly qualified ones that, by its very definition are open to only a short percentage of population).
"We work to make the things we want. We always want more, so there will always be work."
An answer begging for a question, I'm afraid. My question wasn't why we work but what's the need to work *for a living*.
"The vast majority of the article can be summed as, "astroturfing.""
I'd add that it's not even astrotufing about the old two-blocks world.
The titular should be something like "Is Time Conducting a News War on Social Media?"
As the likes of Twitter, Facebook, etc. are killing the "old way" Time represents, Time, of course, counterattacks in a desperate attempt to stay relevant: in USA one of the worst things you can call somebody is "communist"; you'd better call somebody son-of-a-bitch than communist; Russia epitomizes "communist", therefore Twitter *must* be communist.
"Products can only be free if the raw material cost is zero"
Wrong. The raw materials costing zero have nothing to do with it. How much cost the raw materials of an electronic copy of a song or a film? And even then getting a free copy is considered illegal.
Products can only be free when no other is allowed to claim exclusive ownership of them.
"The word "computer" used to universally refer to a person's job title, whereas now it universally refers to a machine [...] you could use that extra time (or money) to take a longer vacation, or have nice things."
So, how many more vacation days have USA people now than in the seventies?
"You can in fact be wealthier with less money; for a real world example of this, look at the techies that live in San Francisco. Most people outside of that area can have a better quality of life on far less income."
How that's possible? Those techies at San Francisco have access to much more "technology"... heck, they are the ones inventing it!
In case you didn't catch what I meant, you were talking about a *possible* outcome, not about that outcome to necessarily become true and, in fact, by your very examples, that your expected outcome will *not* become true.
"The money they save from other things being cheaper, thanks to automation. Just like automation has done for 400 years, and will keep doing."
I do think this time is different: first time it was about taking out people from physical work and then humankind discovered (not without a lot of pain for those involved in the meantime) that we could use all those now liberated minds for a profit. But now, the jobs that are taken out are the mental ones. Not, of course, "mental" in the PhD sense, but those that needed the superior mental faculties of a human nevertheless. Once the humankind is not competitive in the physical world (good bye, John Henry) nor in the intellectual world (good bye, Mary Jane, the nice receptionist) what else rests?
But, even given that, I consider it not to be the really important question. It might happen that I'm right, or that I'm wrong and a lot of new jobs appear due to automation and, while billions of people live miserable lives along the transition, in the end humankind as a whole rises to a better level.
I think the important question is that, quite unlike the last 400 years, and in fact, unlike to the whole human history, our species' productivity allows us to ask ourselves for the first time "what's the need to work for a living, after all?"
And, no, I don't think "because that's what we always did" to be a specially profound answer.
Are you kidding!? Barring government regulation, that's they way companies run since forever: pay the producer as little as you can get with and then ask the buyer as much as you can come with.
The only difference is how clever are they at that, but the basic fact remains.
Slashdot Mirror
"German autoworkers don't earn any US Dollars at all, they earn Euros, which are a different currency."
It's a different currency, yes, but it happens to be the currency I'm most comfortable with, as it happens to be mine one too, thanks.
"It is of course fine to use market exchange rates, but then you have to add some caveats to explain that not everything in the
German economy costs the same as it does in the US"
True, but it's still quite out of scope when the real salaries are not even half that figure as will attest anyone that has first hand references from the German market instead of some biased views from news pamphlets from 4000 miles away.
"BTW, you seem to have assumed an 8-hour working day and a 12-month working year. Germans told me that they get a 1-month vacation every year, sometimes more. They also work fewer hours per year overall than the average European or American worker"
Yes, I saw it later: I wanted to show a monthly number, since in Europe is more easily understandable and I multiplied by 12 months instead of by 11.
Nevertheless for a more suited number, it's about 1500 hours/year, which still puts it at over 100K which is simply ridiculous for an assembly line blue collar worker which will be utmost happy if he reaches 35.000EUR gross / year. For the most part (like well above 90%), not even senior automotive engineers will reach 75.000 EUR/year without going into management, much less 100K.
"They do. Go and check for yourself if you don't believe it."
No, they don't... by a stupidly big margin.
You need go to a senior engineer at Audi or BMW to reach about 60.000~65.000EUR gross/year (and I happen to have some two or three friends in such positions at the VAG Group). And then you need to go into management to go over that ceiling.
A blue collar "senior" would reach around 35.000â gross/year.
Average salary in Germany is about 45.000â gross/year, which despite of being quite a substantial number is still far away from 100K. If you really think a blue collar worker at an assembly line makes not only average but more than doubles it, I have a bridge I can offer to you.
"the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits"
Sorry man, but something smells veeeery fishy there: 67.14x8=537,12; 537,12x21=11.279,52;
67,14x8x21x12=135.354,24. There's nooooooo way that a German autoworker makes north of 130K year, simply nooooo way.
Oh! and I forgot about the other critical difference: not only unions are not company-bound, but they aren't monopolist either: you can belong to a union, or another one or a third one, the one you think that best cares for your interests and all unions go to negotiations with representatives weighting as per their representees.
"One of the interesting comparisons is between American non-union jobs and union jobs in Europe, particularly Germany and Scandanavia, where salaries are about twice U.S. rates."
I have to ask your data because I find it hard to believe.
Anyway comparing US to EU unions is an apples-to-oranges exercise. In EU you don't have a union for a single company but more like a party across the country, either generalist or sector-focused. Then they don't negotiate wages and conditions on a given company but across the country, which gives an equal field for all companies in a given sector (up to the next problem which is, of course, outsourcing to other countries with lower labor conditions).
"How many clicks does it take for those of use who do not own or use PowerPoint"
Exactly that.
"Security researchers have discovered that cybercriminals have recently started using a malware downloader that installs a banking Trojan to your computer"
Does it installs into my computer or into my *windows* system?
(once again)
"This is partly an unintended consequence of our social safety net. Without that net, people in, say, Flint Michigan, would face a stark choice of either move or starve"
Social, yes, safety not so sure.
Of course migrating because of labor shortage is always a hard stand (while much less so when you are migrating within your own country) but there was a time when labor shortage was a matter of one individual within a family unit so there were no synchronization problems; basically, the husband finds a job everywhere else and there the whole family goes. But now, it's usually two that need to find an agreement for the family to move, so no wonder it becomes more difficult.
"If you leave early on Friday afternoon, this surely means that you've worked less than the expected X hours per week?"
I can tell you how it works in other countries: you don't have a week hour stand (40 hours) but a yearly one (depends on your contract, somewhat around 1750 hours/year). It results that if you were 40 hours/week for roughly 48 weeks/year you end up working too many hours, so companies compensate by a combination of leaving early on Fridays and/or having a 7 hour days on summer.
"They had an offsite DR. The DR was setup wrong and did not have the latest data so when they switched to it they started seeing wrong data and had to switch it off"
In the kind of companies that outsource the hell out to save some pennies there are two and only two types of highly available systems:
1) Active/Passive. When the active goes nuts the passive fails to start for whatever reasons (tightly coupled to the fact that the system was tested exactly once, in the happy path, when given the "operational" label -and then only partly: there were minor flaws but everybody covered it up because the project was already late and they were "oh, not so important").
2) Active/Active. When part of the system fails, the surviving part can't handle the load and falls to its knees too because nobody did a proper load assessment nor capacity planning (it would have outgrown the promised costs and some manager would have looked bad).
In both cases, bonus points when they reach a split-brain situation and start killing each other left and right without ever reaching quorum.
...and if you give them an UBI, then everything basic skyrockets.
"Inflation is caused by an increase in money supply"
That's true.
"not a redistribution of it"
That's false. Yes, just redistributing money so the ones that are refraining themselves from buying can start buying causes inflation. It might be eventually controlled (by offer increasing to meet increasing demand), or not, if demand increases on somehow inelastic or limited offer (i.e. real state market).
Of course, the case of UBI would not only increase demand but also would most probably require increasing the monetary mass too, so you would have another factor that would increase inflation.
Your other (extreme) example, just one person grabbing all money would have exactly the result you imagine: absolute deflation -but not "to the point to make up for the loss of income", it just would mean that money would stop to be a exchange mechanism and we would most probably go back to bartering (and eventually reinventing money and going back to square one). You can think what you said is just a mental experiment, but it has happen, and it has happen recently; i.e. Argentina. "El corralito" meant one "person" retaining all money (that "person" being the government) and it certainly stopped inflation and poor people went with bartering and "monopoly money".
"How about starting with not appointing idiots with zero knowledge about code as their bosses, and not letting those zero-brain idiots set the milestones and delivery dates?"
Those idiots can set the most obnoxius delivery dates, the most stupid features on the roadmap all they want; the code is not there till a programmer puts it there. Not a single second before that moment.
"It is a little known fact that programmers don't really like to ship buggy, unstable and barely tested code"
That's obviously untrue as it can be attested by basically any public tracker from any community-based open source project.
And then, it's that even less known fact, specially among programmers, that the vast majority of them could not do any better, even if their very lives were at stake.
"That's got fuck all to do with programming. That's people, processes, stupidity, resource constraints and other factors that are so far beyond the control of programmers that blaming them is total idiocy."
There's not a single comma in any program that hasn't been put there by a programmer or that could at all be there if not for the programmer deciding it was the moment to write it down.
So, yes, I do blame them.
"Much, much simpler to just give everyone a simple cash payment" ...and let inflation eat it on the spot.
"Yes, the world isn't fair. Didn't you learn that by the time you were 8?"
Yes. And didn't you learn the world not being fair works both ways?
Still you didn't offer any logical answer to my question: there is enough productivity in the world to sustain the population at least at survival level (that's not a question, that's a fact). Given that, what's the technical (not social) need to work for a living? Because I see no one, except "because the world is way it is" -which is open to change, if so we want it.
"You deserve nothing for free, so you must work for a living"
I deserve nothing for free, yet I get the air I breath for free.
And then, _I_ deserve nothing for free, yet others deserve what they get for free? Like, say, Bill Gates' children?
You see, people may deserve nothing for free yet get things for free.
"The interesting question is "but what will we do?""
There's already a lot of people that don't need to work for a living, from retirees to billionaires' offspring, to entire societies like affluent ancient Greek so, no, asking "but what will we do?" is not an interesting question, at all.
"It's still mindless work being automated - are are you discussing some post-singularity fantasy?"
Of course it is "mindless" in the very literal sense as no computer have a mind. On the other hand, trading shares, rating a credit risk, diagnosing patients, landing an airplane, etc. don't see to be "brute" jobs and still they are more and more done by a computer (and those are not even the worrying ones, short term, but highly qualified ones that, by its very definition are open to only a short percentage of population).
"We work to make the things we want. We always want more, so there will always be work."
An answer begging for a question, I'm afraid. My question wasn't why we work but what's the need to work *for a living*.
"The vast majority of the article can be summed as, "astroturfing.""
I'd add that it's not even astrotufing about the old two-blocks world.
The titular should be something like "Is Time Conducting a News War on Social Media?"
As the likes of Twitter, Facebook, etc. are killing the "old way" Time represents, Time, of course, counterattacks in a desperate attempt to stay relevant: in USA one of the worst things you can call somebody is "communist"; you'd better call somebody son-of-a-bitch than communist; Russia epitomizes "communist", therefore Twitter *must* be communist.
"Products can only be free if the raw material cost is zero"
Wrong. The raw materials costing zero have nothing to do with it. How much cost the raw materials of an electronic copy of a song or a film? And even then getting a free copy is considered illegal.
Products can only be free when no other is allowed to claim exclusive ownership of them.
"What so afraid of the future? Robots will eventually build robots for only raw materials cost"
And what makes you think that the owner of those robots is going to give you one of them?
Heck, even the "owner" of a song will fight nail and teeth against having you a copy of it for free even when the cost of replication is zero!
"The word "computer" used to universally refer to a person's job title, whereas now it universally refers to a machine [...] you could use that extra time (or money) to take a longer vacation, or have nice things."
So, how many more vacation days have USA people now than in the seventies?
"You can in fact be wealthier with less money; for a real world example of this, look at the techies that live in San Francisco. Most people outside of that area can have a better quality of life on far less income."
How that's possible? Those techies at San Francisco have access to much more "technology"... heck, they are the ones inventing it!
In case you didn't catch what I meant, you were talking about a *possible* outcome, not about that outcome to necessarily become true and, in fact, by your very examples, that your expected outcome will *not* become true.
"The money they save from other things being cheaper, thanks to automation. Just like automation has done for 400 years, and will keep doing."
I do think this time is different: first time it was about taking out people from physical work and then humankind discovered (not without a lot of pain for those involved in the meantime) that we could use all those now liberated minds for a profit. But now, the jobs that are taken out are the mental ones. Not, of course, "mental" in the PhD sense, but those that needed the superior mental faculties of a human nevertheless. Once the humankind is not competitive in the physical world (good bye, John Henry) nor in the intellectual world (good bye, Mary Jane, the nice receptionist) what else rests?
But, even given that, I consider it not to be the really important question. It might happen that I'm right, or that I'm wrong and a lot of new jobs appear due to automation and, while billions of people live miserable lives along the transition, in the end humankind as a whole rises to a better level.
I think the important question is that, quite unlike the last 400 years, and in fact, unlike to the whole human history, our species' productivity allows us to ask ourselves for the first time "what's the need to work for a living, after all?"
And, no, I don't think "because that's what we always did" to be a specially profound answer.
"Other companies will adopt this as well"
Are you kidding!? Barring government regulation, that's they way companies run since forever: pay the producer as little as you can get with and then ask the buyer as much as you can come with.
The only difference is how clever are they at that, but the basic fact remains.
I for one welcome our ourselves overlords!