Not long ago, schoolchildren chose what they wanted to be when they grew up, and later selected the best college they could gain admission to, spent years gaining proficiency in their fields, and joined a company that had a need for their skills. Careers lasted lifetimes.
Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I [Vivek Wadhwa] expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15–20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible — just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. We will be entering an era of abundance in which we no longer have to work to have our basic needs met. And we will gain the freedom to pursue creative endeavors and do the things that we really like.
I am not kidding. Change is happening so fast that our children may not even need to learn how to drive. By the late 2020s, self-driving cars will have proven to be so much safer than human-driven ones that we will be debating whether humans should be banned from public roads; and clean energies such as solar and wind will be able to provide for 100 percent of the planet's energy needs and cost a fraction of what fossil fuel– and nuclear-based generation does today.
In other words, every industry is disruptible by technology. Presumably, banking and punditry are forever?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:10PM
Now I love Science Fiction as much as the next guy, but I don't pretend that the Culture type future the author of this article is predicting is actually going to happen.
As I read I kept thinking "Citation Needed" after nearly every paragraph.
Why would renewable energy sources be free? The infrastructure needed to generate and transmit the power won't be free, and (at least where I live) the huge companies that currently charge huge amounts of money to supply that power won't be giving up that income any time soon.
Very weird article.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:09AM
Indeed. Imagine if prices for everything were slashed to a mere 1% of current prices, but you have zero income. You can't afford anything and end up begging for pennies on the street. Those with jobs wouldn't be much better off, since there would be so much competition for each job that the employer can get away with paying a pittance. The only real winners are the CEO's.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:49AM
Indeed, however it's a fantastical situation.
Just because of, say, complete energy abundance, it doesn't mean that we get prices dropping to the extent that it's realistic. Maybe for some items, but not for all, and certainly not the majority. Imagine electricity was free tomorrow. Yes, we'd all try to change to electric cars, which would go up in price for a brief surge until we all owned one. Yes, vast amounts of products would drop in price a little because manufacturing was cheaper. But still there are resources required aside from electricity and the scarcity and difficulty of collecting them means that they aren't going to suddenly dip in price without huge expenditure elsewhere (e.g. robotics to gather them). What's happened is that value has shifted from the stuff we can all have to the stuff that we all suddenly need at the same time but there's not enough to go around.
Though it's nowhere near something that anyone can predict, the global product market is still disparate in its needs, such that unless *everything* becomes free, you're looking at generations of adjustment and then entirely new concepts providing the scarcity / luxury that society values. Hot-tubs will be in everyone's back yard, because the electricity is free, but you'll need to pay to upgrade your house electrics to cope with it all, the hot-tub industry will boom and then - well - every house has a hot-tub so the added value on your house price is zero. But now you can get product X which still only a few can afford, uses a rare material, etc. etc. etc.
Virtually nothing is a one-component product. Computer chips have a scarcity of raw materials. If you can power a datacentre with a thousand times more power, you still need to cool it and the materials to do that aren't cheap.
Though nobody can guarantee the balance will be permanent, actually it tends to work out pretty well. We all have star-trek communications devices that MUST talk to each other, we all have a multitude of cheap computing devices that were undreamt of even when we were kids, their prices have dropped significantly. But still they aren't free. And the services that run them, that's where the money has gone to. We have power to do almost anything in the home, including all having tools that a carpenter would have given his right-arm for a few generations ago. It just means we spend more time doing other things that are still difficult to do but we all have cheap, nice furniture at all while we do it.
To be honest, in our children's lifetime, running out of oil is a real possibility. That's going to have more of a knock-on effect that can't be countered just by having, say, free electricity. It will destroy the plastics industry and use of plastics overnight, not to mention the various oils, lubricants, etc. Sure, we have *some* replacements not dependent on oil, but really it's going to hit much harder than just saying "That electricity bill? Tear it up!" (which some people are capable of doing today, given home solar, wind, etc.).
(Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:57AM
But if you average everyone's salary together, it will be much higher than it is now.
And you know, a rising tide floats all boats.
Alas, there may be some holes in my analogy.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:03PM
Prices won't be slashed to 1%
If you want to get an idea how a market will change when the goods that were scarce become common or even abundant; look no further than the music/book/video/... industry.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:18PM
The only cost there ever is, is the cost to employ a human. If you trace everything back far enough, that's what it comes down to. The cost of your mobile phone is all down to the cost it was to have someone assemble the components, the cost it was to have people build the components from raw materials, the cost to have people extract those raw materials and so on. Energy is free if you the infrastructure is laid down by automated machines, which were built by automated machines and so on.
Once we dot the final i and cross the final t on the human interaction with machines, and they become totally autonomous (able to look after themselves) then yes, the cost of everything to the end user is negligible.
This, however, is a little farther off than the article suggests.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:15PM
That would only work if we either abolish capitalism or give everyone a baseline living wage. There also needs to be a change in social perception that it's perfectly okay to be unemployed.
Ideally, we tell all of the pencil-pushers to stop coming to work and hire a few thousand decent programmers to automate away all of that bureaucratic Excel spreadsheet nonsense. Boom, we've instantly rendered some 30%-60% of all jobs unnecessary.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:26PM
Isn't it sort of already here? Among younger generations, establishing a proud career for a steady employer and having a large, expensive-to-support family is no longer a necessary path in life to avoid scandalizing one's fellow citizens. Having enough money to keep a social life going might be important, but I already do that by picking up odd jobs as a freelancer. None of my friends are particularly interested where that money spent on our activities together is coming from, so if suddenly its source were replaced with a baseline wage and I no longer did work, it wouldn't make much of a difference.
Indeed. My wife once worked in an office where her workflow might have seemed complex and taken hours each day with the Windows apps that the company mandated, but it could have very easily been replaced with some Unix piped commands. Some people here might have read the The Two Cultures of Computing [pgbovine.net], a.k.a. "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?". It's funny if we might have to thank ignorance of four-decade-old computing technologies for the fact people still have jobs so far.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:39PM
Talking about Unix when everyone here loves Linux? You must be some kind of Troll.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:47AM
There are places hiring people to print things out from one computer and then type it into a second...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:46PM
Some people here might have read the The Two Cultures of Computing [pgbovine.net], a.k.a. "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?"
There's an interesting parody of that, which I can't find by others might recognize, where the author analogizes with the building trades and points out the carpenter thinks nicely cut roof trusses are artistic and interesting and are his job, whereas the average end user likes housing bubble bullshit like stainless steel appliances and granite countertops, and this is CLI vs GUI argument from that essay.
Then it runs off the rails by mixing in a second analogy that most non-building trades people have no idea WTF is going on, so you end up with WTF pics getting circulated about comical construction projects done by amateurs that a real carpenter would do better in five minutes, but billy bob aint no carpenter and doesn't know what he doesn't know about carpentry, so he looks like an idiot to a carpenter or even a merely average craftsman.
And that is the root problem of MBA types trying to run a world being eaten by software, without understanding the basic concepts of software.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:41PM
If you really think that 30-60% of payroll can be eliminated easily by a few programmers, then do it. Get contracts. Make billions. What kind of an idiot MBA wouldn't beat down your door to reduce their employment costs by 30-60%?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:39AM
What kind of an idiot MBA wouldn't beat down your door to reduce their employment costs by 30-60%?
The idiot MBA that your program will replace.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:49AM
If he is an idiot, he would not realize it until the contract was signed. If he isn't an idiot, he will only sign a contract for others to be replaced.
There really is no way to lose...if it can be pulled off. There is no evidence that it can't be done save for the weak evidence that it has not already been done.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:10AM
The kind of MBA with even a tiny bit of political sense. Removing the jobs of thousands of people is not how you make friends, especially when those people depend on that job to feed their family. No amount of sugar coating will protect you from half your working class, more or less, coming to remove your head from your body.
If we took care of that problem by making it possible for those people to feed their family without a job and remove any existing social stigma from being unemployed, by all means I will try to answer your challenge.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:03AM
I think you are equivocating MBA's with politicians. MBA's sole purpose is to make money. That's it. They don't care about making friends and no one has ever had the hordes of people they layoff en masse every day come back and cut their head off.
You are asking for a world changing event where your hypothesis wont be necessary anymore before you are willing to test if it is even possible. It could make you so very rich right now if you speak the truth that you could be the change you want to see.
Honestly that saving-face gesture of making your willingness to try conditional is very easy to see through.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:31AM
Its already happened in many companies. Now its all about making the drones generate custom meaningless completely unactionable reports that no one reads, but as long as the empire grows and the number of reports increases for status reasons because meaningless manipulated numbers increase, its all good for everyone.
Not that I'm bitter or speaking from personal experience, LOL.
Numbers can be tracked, graphed, analyzed, and competed with other divisions, but if they're gamed, meaningless, and unactionable, its just empire building.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:48AM
That would only work if we either abolish capitalism or give everyone a baseline living wage. There also needs to be a change in social perception that it's perfectly okay to be unemployed.
What's supposed to be perfectly ok about being unemployed? Who is paying for this baseline living wage? And what are you doing either to deserve this baseline wage or make it happen?
I see yet again a lot of talk about what we should be doing, but not a lot of talk about how to make it work. Capitalism for all its faults just works. Even if we were to accept the claim that capitalism leaves a lot to be desired, that still leaves the equivalent of an ancient but reliable mainframe that is kept running because it does the job while no one can be certain that a modern replacement would. So we're supposed to abandon a working system for something new that hasn't even been tried yet.
There's plenty of horror stories about huge upgrades failing in the real world. We need a demonstration that this works and is affordable.
Ideally, we tell all of the pencil-pushers to stop coming to work and hire a few thousand decent programmers to automate away all of that bureaucratic Excel spreadsheet nonsense.
I'll note here that the spreadsheet nonsense has already resulted in a vast increase in productivity. For example, I work at Yellowstone National Park as an auditor for a concessionaire. Back in the 80s, the two largest hotels in the park used to employ about a dozen to fifteen people each for comptrolling, mostly to handle money and manually shuffle paper. Now, they employ about five each with greatly reduced money handling and paper shuffling. A significant part of that reduced load is your spreadsheet nonsense, translating data between computer systems (that weren't in use in the 80s) that don't talk to each other via putting sales and audit data into spreadsheets and having those spreadsheets pass the data around.
Sure, a few good programmers in the right places could moot a lot of the current work load (I suppose, if you combine that with elimination of cash and a few other things, you could push the staff down to say two people - I think you would still need some level of comptroller coverage), but the low lying fruit has already been taken. There isn't a lot of jobs left to eliminate here. The new jobs that were created in the company are more analytical. Those won't magically go away just because we have more data, more efficiently delivered, to analyze.
Boom, we've instantly rendered some 30%-60% of all jobs unnecessary.
And create a bunch of new jobs in the process. No one has yet discerned what's supposed to be different this time than the last half a millennium. Devons paradox and comparative advantage still apply.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:56AM
The new jobs that were created in the company are more analytical.
There's a seedcorn / bootstrap issue here. You used to have a culture, a country, where 15 people were employed, admittedly in low end paper pushing, but they were employed. And their property taxes paid the school system to generate a spectrum of kids, where apparently 2 to 5 of the next generation are smart enough to be analytical enough to operate a dramatically more complex, yet more efficient, system. Now there is a side effect that only employing 2 people in a village of 15 people means 13 unemployed people. Maybe a couple can get McJobs in fast food, lets face it, they're the bottom cognitive 13/15ths of the population they're not going to be scientists and 13/15ths of the population can't be entrepreneurs or CEOs under the existing system. So the village turns into Detroit. The kids school teacher only gets 2/15ths of her previous salary because only 2 of 15 are still employed, so she quits or moves elsewhere. The next generation after that, they need two of the fifteen grandkids who aced math to become employees and F the poor they can bootstrap like us rich kids did... whoops, when the culture turned into Detroit now 0 out of 15 got the education and parenting to ace math and become one of the very few remaining employees. Whoops. Well you could put any random village idiot into an advanced math position, but that'll fail. Ever wonder why failed states and failed cities seem to be run and staffed by morons? Its because they are. Everyone who could leave, because they were smart enough, did. What happens when you can't leave anymore because there's nowhere to leave to, uprisings, riots, civil disorder...
The problem with sweeping people under the rug is eventually you get an elephant sized pile of (pissed off slightly inferior) humanity. Another way to look at it, is it seems "natural" and "normal" to us to have a culture that only rewards the top richest people and the cognitive elite and the top entertainers and F the poor prosperity gospel style because that's what we've had for so long. However, looking at history, those societies usually end up militarily wiped out by a better run society or end with guillotines. So "F the poor" is a nice strategy that works great until it doesn't, and then someone elses troops are marching down main street or the village square is full of chopping sounds. So that seems to inevitably be our future.
From a practical matter I don't think there's anything terribly ethical or moral about designing a society to screw over all its members except the richest and smartest. In other words I don't feel much pity for a crappy design that produces pragmatically bad results. The true believers in capitalism don't realize it doesn't work with corruptible humans, most people in it have to be losers for it to work and they're going to be pissed off. They sound as bad as the true believers in communism. "Well in theory it works great, even if in practice it always failed"... was that a quote about the commies or the crony capitalists?
If something like a military swept in, "red dawn" style and said "we're gonna take all you own, and all your jobs, and you're all gonna go back to being poor uneducated feudal peasants" then there would be a mass uprising. So the PTB have been implementing it piecemeal, say 5% to 10% of the middle class per decade gets wiped out. So far they've been pretty successful at implementing it. Its hard to have an uprising when only 5% of the population is being screwed over and I'm sure if I'm a good quisling and vote for it, they'll never screw me over or I'll be the last. However, the whole point of recent stories is its gonna happen to like 50% of the population all within one decade for unregulated technological reasons blah blah. "Its OK to screw people over as long as its a tiny minority" sells pretty well when 5% of the population is screwed over per decade, but doesn't sell too well when its 50% over five years. So may as well start stockpiling guns and investing in guillotine manufacturing companies, gonna be an exciting time coming up.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:21PM
Now there is a side effect that only employing 2 people in a village of 15 people means 13 unemployed people.
This side effect hasn't manifested in half a millennium. What's special about now? I really don't see the point to the rest of your post since there's no indication that we're building up a pile of unemployable people.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:05PM
there's no indication that we're building up a pile of unemployable people.
Yeah we're certainly in a vibrant economy, LOL. Technically you started it, with replacing a large number of lower level people with a small number of higher level people. I agree thats a great idea for that small little department. Its a disaster at civilization level. Like many things, something thats good for a very few is often a disaster if everyone does it. I'm just scaling your small example up to an entire country.
That works great for one department at one site, but doesn't scale civilization wide unless you engage in ruthless genetic engineering to boost "everyone", or at least enough, to a higher level of performance and intelligence, so they can get a job elsewhere in the new "only smart people now get jobs" economy. Assuming there is enough economic activity after all that firing for there to be any jobs at all, surely they're only going to be jobs for, say, IQ > 120, where the criteria only ruthlessly increases each year. And the point is that we're not putting any effort into fixing the population at all, and even if we were, human biological generations are an order of magnitude too slow to keep up with the economic changes on the way. If people live for a century, and the economy is kicking out absolutely everyone with an IQ below 140 out in a decade or so, genetic engineering isn't going to save us. Now if we downsized all the dumb people in a century instead of a decade, we'd stand a chance if we actually went thru with the genetic engineering project, which doesn't exist and is just a pipe dream anyway.
Here's a new theoretical discussion model. Lets get all the politics and theories out of the way. Lets talk about supermarkets. So the shelves are all different heights, but for the sake of argument, due to flooding caused by global warming, we're going to stop using the lower shelves. Flood water ruins little debbie snack cakes, after all. In fact we'll have the feds set a legal lower food store shelf height above ground level, and adjust that upward with coal burning and global warming, because we're not gonna stop, or more accurately trying to stop will cause more net systemic damage than the floods. Agreeing to the above for the sake of argument... Well at first its no big deal. Midgets can't buy twinkies anymore, oh well. Then the bottom shelf gets higher and five foot people start having trouble reaching food. Sucks to be them, according to prosperity gospel if they donated to the right church god would make them taller so F those heretics. Eventually only, lets say, 5% of the population can reach the shelf thats seven feet in the air. Well technology blah blah it hasn't been a problem for past years so it'll never be a problem in the future, send them back to tech school for ladder climbing and ladder manufacturing class... Eventually the bread riots start when the bottom shelf gets too far in the air for "most" of the population to ever get food. You can tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps all you want, but when they're too poor and hungry to build a ladder to get up there, out some the guillotines and the revolution is on. Some things just don't scale, like assuming human primates have an infinite capacity for height (or intelligence, or training), or that they will accept arbitrary criteria for the rich to get richer while they and their families starve to death in a land of supposed (average) plenty.
On average, one multi billionaire in a gated community in a 3rd world slum of 100K starving citizens has great average financial stats, although on average its also a pretty bad place to live, at least until the revolution. This is the economic model the USA idealizes, and is headed toward as quickly as possible. Its gonna suck. The road to hell being paved with good intentions, its going to be a continuous stream of "shoulda gone to college" "shoulda got more training" "shoulda had med insurance before getting sick" "shoulda worked harder" every step of the way, right up to the pitchforks molotovs and guillotines.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2015, @12:15AM
Yeah we're certainly in a vibrant economy, LOL.
You treat it as a joke, but that is a true observation.
Technically you started it, with replacing a large number of lower level people with a small number of higher level people.
And then creating new lower level jobs.
In fact we'll have the feds set a legal lower food store shelf height above ground level, and adjust that upward with coal burning and global warming, because we're not gonna stop, or more accurately trying to stop will cause more net systemic damage than the floods.
Interesting model. The problem here is federal regulation strongly interfering with the ability of grocery stores to provide for their customers. That matches well the developed world's approach to unemployment, including the usual blaming of the problem on climate change rather than spectacularly bad government policy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:54PM
Starting about 1980, after every recession, employment comes back to "normal" levels SLOWER each cycle. It takes ever longer to return to normal. If the trend continues, then the ramp up span will last longer than span itself between recessions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @12:34AM
Starting about 1980, after every recession, employment comes back to "normal" levels SLOWER each cycle.
That is coupled with massive disincentives to employ people. China and India don't have those problems.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:46PM
If something like a military swept in, "red dawn" style and said "we're gonna take all you own, and all your jobs, and you're all gonna go back to being poor uneducated feudal peasants" then there would be a mass uprising.
Hah... you and what army? All the guns in your safe that they so 'graciously' let you keep because of the 2nd amendment? Good luck with your leadpopper against a predator drone hovering over your house armed with a hellfire missile. Same thing with your assault rifle against an abrams tank.
You people are a bit too optimistic about this whole 'mass uprising' and 'overthrowing the tyranny with the help of our guns'.
If they sweep in 'red dawn' style then you will be dead. You will be dead before you even knew it was happening. You know why? Because you've been on a list for years, you've been monitored for years. Heck they even know where you are in real time because you tagged yourself with an ankle-brace... woops, I mean cell phone.
Face it buster, you lost!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:01PM
Capitalism for all its faults just works
...until it completely falls on its face--which it does about every 80 years.
Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.
Screw the boom-and-bust cycle and the accompanying bailouts.
abandon a working system for something new that hasn't even been tried yet.
The new thing (and it isn't all that new) -has- been tried and it works GREAT.
Mondragon: Successful Socialism since 1956 (aka Democracy in the workplace).
Yes, there is an alternative to capitalism: Mondragon shows the way [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [rdwolff.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:28PM
...until it completely falls on its face--which it does about every 80 years.
It falls on its face more often than that. That's part of what makes it work so well. The instability removes inefficient parts of the economy.
Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.
The process you describe is by definition not capitalist.
The new thing (and it isn't all that new) -has- been tried and it works GREAT. Mondragon: Successful Socialism since 1956 (aka Democracy in the workplace).
Two things to note. First Mondragon is immersed in a capitalist society. Second, it falls flat on its face too as it did during the latest economic downturn. I can't yet tell whether that is more or less often than 80 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:49PM
Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.
The process you describe is by definition not capitalist.
I disagree, you seem to think that capitalism and fascism are mutually exclusive. Sadly they are not.
The fascist capitalists are handing money to themselves to keep the status quo.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:49PM
you seem to think that capitalism and fascism are mutually exclusive
There's an obvious reason I disagree. What does private ownership of capital mean in a fascist society? Whatever the glorious leaders feel it means. A capitalist society protects private ownership. You don't have that in a fascist society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:48PM
Top lel. How can you be so sure that capitalism "just works" (too bad about those pesky externalities, time to invest in house boats) if it's not being implemented anywhere?
Except maybe Somalia, where things like roads and police forces are maintained by rational self-interest. [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @12:31AM
How can you be so sure that capitalism "just works" (too bad about those pesky externalities, time to invest in house boats) if it's not being implemented anywhere?
It's being implemented in plenty of places. The logical fail is to assume that a number of situations where you are precisely breaking capitalism is somehow a fault of capitalism. Let's look at the sentence that kicked this off.
Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.
Screw the boom-and-bust cycle and the accompanying bailouts.
Fundamentally, the problem, "bail outs" described here is that people with power are taking stuff from people without power. That's a universal problem with all human societies, not just capitalist ones. The question shouldn't be whether capitalism has this problem, but whether the problem is worse than other approaches. I would argue that capitalism performs relatively good and has a number of advantages in addition.
Second, the fundamental characteristic of capitalism is private ownership of capital. If I'm taxing your ability to acquire capital for the frivolous purpose of bailing out my fail buddies, then I'm breaking that characteristic. What other economic or political system is attacked on the basis that when you deliberately break it (sometimes with considerable effort), it doesn't work quite as well?
It's also worth noting that most of the breaking has nothing to do with capitalism. For example, the majority of federal level spending is entitlements for the masses and the military. Eminent domain was a top down approach for public works which turned out to be very graft friendly. And there's a long history of anti-capitalist ploys used to keep people from getting drunk or high. All of these things provide opportunities for enrichment at public expense. Once again it is demonstrated that private companies which focus on a particular thing (be it making something useful or milking the public teat) succeed better than some top down managers who don't have a clue what they're doing. Good though not very capitalist intentions have morphed into crony capitalism and fascism.
The complaints about capitalism are remarkable understated as well. After many decades of these anti-capitalist shenanigans in the US, we have slightly worse income and wealth equality? Maybe slightly worse employment rates? What other system can meet this sort of high expectation and still perform well?
And unlike a lot of fantasy systems, capitalism is implemented to some degree everywhere with considerable success. We don't have to like China's or India's implementation of it to see that it has helped hundreds of millions in each country escape poverty. Capitalism has a powerful resilience and adaptability. Perhaps, we should fix what is broken rather than continue to break capitalism more while complaining that it's not working like it should.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday July 30 2015, @05:10AM
The 2010 US Census found that the overall poverty rate in the US is 15.1%. In 2007, the top 1% owned 40% of wealth. Yep, just works. Resources are being distributed fairly. All hail economics! All hail capitalism!
I'd like to extend this quote: If the automobile had followed the same development as capitalism, a Rolls-Royce would be constructed entirely of tinfoil, except the hood decoration, which would be made of pure platinum and encrusted with the highest quality gemstones. The car would drive automatically, perfectly safely, for ten minutes at a time, before spontaneously combusting and driving into the nearest streetlamp. After inserting a credit card and charging $1000 dollars to a central account, the car will extinguish itself and again be ready for ten minutes of safe driving.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @12:38AM
The 2010 US Census found that the overall poverty rate in the US is 15.1%. In 2007, the top 1% owned 40% of wealth. Yep, just works. Resources are being distributed fairly. All hail economics! All hail capitalism!
US capitalism is growing further impaired by a bunch of anti-capitalist policies and ideologies, frequently implemented by the very people who claim to be concerned about income inequality. Further, the US is competing with the developing world, which has vastly lower labor costs. The poor's wealth is in their labor while the rich's wealth is in capital. One would expect, no matter the system, that the poor would fare worse under that situation.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:04AM
My employer uses a third party payroll service, which makes a lot of mistakes. If you can automate that for us, improving reliability and undercutting the current system, you can has money.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:28PM
There also needs to be a change in social perception that it's perfectly okay to be unemployed.
It mostly already is.
Kids, retired people, students. All perfectly OK. Used to be socially acceptable to be a wife, then more specifically a mom, then a mom of young children... Still kinda OK somewheres in some peoples opinions. In the old days when I was a kid it was assumed college students like me had a part time grunt labor gig, which I did, which darn near paid my way, but illegals and student loans got rid of economic model so students mostly sit around and play video games now. Soldiers are kinda in between. When I wasn't deployed in the field we had nothing to do so we consumed donuts and coffee and sweat it out in PT and didn't really "do" anything. I suppose having soldiers do nothing is generally a net societal good and doing nothing while getting paid for it is a pretty good description of unemployment LOL.
This is before we get wanna be jobs. In middle america, in most of the country, most part time minimum wage bartenders, waitresses, real estate agents, salespeople in general are liberal arts degree holders, education degree holders, etc. For them its the closest thing to a real job they'll ever have, even if it is just a grown-ups version of a teens McJob. HOWEVER in LA those jobs are held by wanna be actors, wanna be screenwriters, wanna be whatevers in the greater hollywood coprosperity sphere. I predict the growth of wannabe. "Well, yeah, technically I work for the county picking up roadkill corpses from the side of the road for three hours a week at minimum wage, but what I REALLY am is a high frequency trading algorithm designer, its just I'm starting out and trying to break into the industry, ya know, get my big break." You also see this with artists, particularly crafty touristy crap where they don't really try to make a living off it but they carve bird decoys in front of the TV all day and then try to sell them to tourists at the farmers market, but they're not really artists, or more accurately they're not really good, but they don't really care and it doesn't matter so its all good. The world of the future is gonna have a metric shit ton of painted plywood cutouts of a fat woman bending over in her garden for sale, probably online. I actually saw one of those once on a drive thru the country. "I'm an artist!" Uh sure.
So I predict that socially everyone will be studying (for some small, slow, half way value of study) on free internet classes to become a computer programmer aka they're "students", or they'll have a wanna be trade or craft which they may or may not be any good at and may or may not spend any time at but it will be their identity none the less, and if they look young and glamorous enough they'll have part time minimum wage wannabe "press the flesh" jobs like receptionist at a hospital or whatever.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:28PM
This is completely sci-fi. The part about automation rendering jobs obsolete is true, the part about basic necessities having negligible cost is fantasy. Energy isn't cheap, and it's getting more expensive. Gasoline is only going to get more expensive, and even if we manage to convert to cheap renewables in time, housing isn't getting any cheaper either. These days, housing is turning out to be the lion's share of people's living expenses. And of course, healthcare isn't getting cheaper either. We've managed to spread out the costs more with ObamaCare, but that isn't making the actual cost of care cheaper.
How are people going to afford to pay these expenses without gainful employment?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:54PM
The "inputs" (energy, raw material, and in some sense land) aren't really an issue. Land is the only one that really is intractable until Standard Western Culture kicks in everywhere and women start having babies at below replacement rates. Once populations stabilize and then start to decline, as they inevitably do, the intrinsic aspects of the land shortage problems start going away. What we are left with are problems directly related to how our society has chosen to allow purchasing power (money) be distributed. Since those are choices we make, we can simply choose to make different choices--if we find the will. People really have no idea just how bad things have gotten in the last 60 years. It's something you have to visualize because most humans can't intuitively grasp raw numbers at that scale. Thankfully there's an excellent visualization on Youtube. [youtube.com]
When I say "how we have chosen" to allocate purchasing power, I mean exactly that. We've decided through complacency, willful ignorance, and credulity, that hoarding wealth is permissible in our society. This isn't just carrying a decent bank balance or having a nest egg for retirement; it's truly staggering, obscene, pointless, harmful, levels of wealth aggregation.
There's good news and bad news. The good news is that this won't go on forever, it can't because once someone has nothing you can't take anything away from them anymore. You can drive them into debt but that's only useful as a tool to keep taking from them what little they have left. Once they're in debt, can't pay, have nothing else to take, and no income, the game is over. Once you do that to enough people, they come and kill you. We either find a way to slow down this train peacefully, or stomp the accelerator until we run out of track.
That's the bad news: the latter looks more likely.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:20AM
Do you really believe that people who literally have nothing will be able to lead your revolution for you? Because that's what you're talking about here, wishful thinker. You want a revolution, but you want to sit on your stupid lazy ass while someone else starts it for you. You really, really need to read about the history of revolutions and learn to understand that every successful revolution has been funded by very rich people.
Go die in a fucking hole, you armchair revolutionary moron.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:52AM
There was one guy, his name is practically synonymous with violent revolution that ended up spurring several rounds of just what you say never happened. His name: Karl Marx.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:14PM
While I understand what your going for, just wanted to point out that Karl Marx was actually quite rich. Not top 1% rich or super wealthy like the GP; but rich none the less. That doesn't invalidate your point about the revolutions his mindwork started as he was long dead before those happened :).
(Score: 2) by K_benzoate on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:55AM
I think you completely mis-parsed that sentence, friend. I'm at least going to charitably interpret your rage as thus misplaced and try to make my point more clearly.
When millions of people become impoverished and begin to starve, they will riot and break things. Some of that violence will be directed at rich people. If I'm part of that unlucky class known as the "not rich" I'll be out in the streets throwing bottles of gasoline at banks with everyone else. It's my hope that things don't have to come to that. I don't want a violent revolution because everyone loses. Just having a great big potlatch might reset the board but it leaves everyone worse off.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:44PM
Congratulations, you just put yourself on The List which will - ironically - prevent you from doing what you would be attempting to do.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:47AM
People really have no idea just how bad things have gotten in the last 60 years. It's something you have to visualize because most humans can't intuitively grasp raw numbers at that scale.
Let us keep in mind that 95% of the world's population doesn't live in the US and two thirds of the world's population has seen a considerable increase [voxeu.org] in their wealth (with a decline in global wealth inequality as a direct result). We should be asking why the US isn't fully sharing in this boon rather than hand-wringing over a modest stagnation that didn't happen outside of the US and a few other developed world countries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:51PM
You mean to say there are things outside of the US? I was told there were dragons there...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:02PM
Please provide citations not backed by a think tank.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:40PM
Please provide citations not backed by a think tank.
I don't feel like it. The flimsy basis of your rejection doesn't indicate to me that there's much to be gained from searching for more evidence.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:54PM
How are people going to afford to pay these expenses without gainful employment?
Are they supposed to? Does anyone wonder today how the inhabitants of Brazilian favelas manage to pay for top notch medical services, best organic food and healthy living?
I fully agree that there will never be a society where anything material is free. Imagine such a society, and I immediately request to build me a planet-wide palace a mile wide. Even leaving alone the issue of materials, this palace is bound to intrude on other humans - what to do then? It appears that though materials and energy might be cheap enough, there are many resources that will remain rationed - and you will have to buy them. We have already seen such a transition when certain resources got too cheap to meter - like computing resources. The resource named "CPU time" is no longer rationed (unless you need a supercomputer,) but plenty more remain. Generally, anything that requires human labor will be rationed. Hell, the world government wants me to pay for the carbon dioxide exhaust of the power plant that powers my computer. That's an example of something that was free before, but artful scammers managed to make it into a product and force everyone to buy it!
Similarly, the author writes "the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible — just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today." Obviously the author didn't buy his own cell phone plan, as they can cost you a pretty penny. But besides, the cost of anything is not defined by the cost of production - it is defined by what the market will bear. As production of food and energy is necessarily monopolized by those "guilds," they can just dictate their prices. What will a city slicker do in protest - stop eating? Will he be planting his own potatoes in a flower pot? If a doctor's office is taxed through the gills, the doctor will charge $300 for a visit - and what will you then do if you need a prescription?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:07AM
No, we haven't, that's not possible. If CPU time were free, then Bitcoin would have no value. Bitcoin is the future, man, the future.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 30 2015, @02:06AM
There's two things which are not free and are not likely to ever be free: real estate and energy. We're certainly getting to the point where a lot of manufactured goods are extremely cheap because of efficiency and automation, but cheap is still not free, and making and transporting things requires energy. Even if we had free energy somehow (not likely), real estate is not free. Personally, I want a house in Hawaii near the beach and surrounded by jungle with no neighbors for miles around. I'm sure I'm not the only person who would like a place like that, but obviously there's only so much land available which meets those requirements, certainly not remotely enough for all the people who want it. With the human population continuing to grow, and the planet staying the same size, this situation isn't going to get much better; bigger/taller buildings help, but only so much. Most people don't want to live like sardines.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:52AM
Healthcare can get cheaper, if it's based on generic nanobots repairing damage and fighting disease in the body continuously. The intermediate personalized health care based on genomic medicine will be somewhat effective, especially for certain disorders, but prohibitively expensive for most.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:46PM
But there's no money in that... who would develop such a thing?
Hey everybody, look at this pulsating artery in my neck here... watch me stab it!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:24PM
the part about basic necessities having negligible cost is fantasy
Binary thinking malfunction. It doesn't have to be zero or full cost. It can be so dang cheap its not worth charging.
My bachelor pad had "free" water, "free" heating... rolled into the rent because its too expensive to charge individually. Not freezing to death in winter and not dehydrating are rather basic needs. It turns out the insane cost of installing 28 separate meters and 28 separate monthly account billings just isn't worth in when the std deviation between us renters was incredibly low (Yes if you live in SFO there's a huge difference in heating an uninsulated apartment from 60 degrees to 65 or 75 degrees, but in the frozen north the relative difference between heating from -20 to 68 or -20 to 72 is a rounding error).
Now that I think back, ye olde student dorms had "everything" free but food! All the water you can drink, all the heat you want, infinite free electricity (well, technically we had 2 fifteen amp circuits)... This is pretty much the future. There were private dorms for the rich kids with "free" all you can eat food, which I never participated in, although I had a girlfriend living in an apartment dorm like that for a little while.
My point is at some point you round the cost down to nothing and file it under some other expense. Probably rent.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 30 2015, @01:55AM
The part that you're missing is that your bachelor pad wasn't free at all: you still had to pay rent. They just rolled everything into it because it's a better value that way, plus they probably use that as a selling point when competing against similar places; who wants to deal with paying a bunch of separate utility bills when you could just have one bill for the month?
Same thing goes for dorms. They aren't that cheap to live in these days. They just roll everything into one bill.
What you're talking about before is people living for free. There's no way to do that. Not without having some kind of welfare system, basic income, or similar. Real estate is a limited resource, as is energy. No one's going to give them away for free.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:32PM
In other words, every industry is disruptible by technology. Presumably, banking and punditry are forever?
I thought it was generally well known that all political discourse was replaced by spambots years ago who are fed talking points and propaganda instead of the typical arguments of porn sites and cheap PiL1z. As for banking, I'm convinced that we're back into the era of the Oracle decerning the future from smoke and mind altering drugs.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ken_g6 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:34PM
...is here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/07/27/a-love-of-learning-will-guarantee-todays-students-succeed-in-the-jobless-future/ [washingtonpost.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Non Sequor on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:40PM
Some of these predictions are undermined by pressure release valves, others are undermined by pressures he's ignoring.
One is thing to keep in mind is that it is entirely possible for significant numbers of households to transition from being two-income households to being one-income households. The labor participation rate may have peaked. Two-income households have a harder time moving to take advantage of new job opportunities, so there's some economic give and take as far as which is a more advantageous arrangement. These kinds of changes round out social changes in the types of work available.
Ramping up capacity through automation exacerbates resource shortages, which actually creates job opportunities related to obtaining more of or conserving a critical resource. This is actually also why Malthusians are wrong. You're always dealing with this year's resource constraints. This year's resource constraints are different from last year's and they will be different from next year's, but it's always going to be something.
Unskilled labor may be a much less scarce resource soon, but assuming responsibility for a task remains in finite supply. Human workflows implicitly include work which is done for the sake of maintaining chains of accountability. Verifying that a job is done properly, is itself work, and currently having a person on the hook for some adverse outcome is a kind of currency for this work.
I'm also kind of wondering if there's going to be another world war in my lifetime. I wonder if levels of botched international cooperation are starting to approach what they were at the end of the 19th century.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:15AM
Only slaves and indentured servants move to get a job.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:02PM
Only slaves and indentured servants move to get a job.
Pretty sure slaves and indentured servants are the only ones who can't move to get a new job.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:10AM
Maybe after that world war there will be some countries (white ones) where men can marry girl children?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:54AM
Don't fight wishful thinking with even more wishful thinking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:32PM
I'm confused about the requirement on "white ones". Are you saying that an African tribal warlord authorizing marriage to young girls within his tribe is worse than a white supremacist creating a whites-only commune where marriage to young girls is authorized?
Perhaps you're saying that a non-white community authorizing marriage to young girls is of no benefit to you because you are white and you wouldn't be invited?
Or are you saying that you don't find young non-white girls attractive, and can't imagine that anyone else would?
What reason would you give for why white racial purity is a prerequisite for marrying young girls to be acceptable? I'd think that those two things would be orthogonal; success in one shouldn't depend on success in the other.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:38PM
I wonder if levels of botched international cooperation
WWI was based around the Ottoman and Austrian empires dying and unless they were broken up evenly, whoever got more of the scraps would rule europe and/or the world, so it made sense to try and grab as much as possible or die trying. I'm still kinda surprised we didn't get a WWIII out of the collapse of Russia. We may yet get one out of the collapse of the USA. Arguably its not even how it was broken up, but just the fact that Black Sea ports were up for grabs meant a mandatory continent wide blood bath. "Failed States not Failing" would seem to be a pretty good strategy to avoid WWIII. God only knows what would have happened in Africa if we were doing just a little more imperialism during their famine eras a few decades ago, that could have been WWIII without foreign food aid if we also still officially did colonialism...
WWII boils down to you can 2015 style "Greece" the country of Greece and laugh at their suffering psycho politician style as they like so much to do, but if you try to "Greece" the Krupp Arms Works / Bavarian Motorwerkes or WTF it was all called, instead of the result being 2015 "Greece" you instead end up with tanks in Paris and Poland, eventually. So in the spirit of the doctor joke of not holding your arm up if it hurts to hold your arm up or whatever, just don't repeat doing something stupid. I still wonder if giving Greece a giant dose of shit in 2015, isn't going to "naturally" result in some sort of Alexander the Great re-enactment party in 2035. A suppose a simpler TLDR summary of WWII is you need to realize when you're playing a MAD game and then not play it. That failed pretty bad post WWI reparation treaties, and worked pretty well during the Cold War, so your mileage may vary.
Inevitably all empires and nations occasionally collapse and if whoever comes out on top, decides to F the USA over when its our turn to collapse, then we'll do the WWII thing and invade the world about one generation later. Its just human nature.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:46PM
Well let's see now. All of you idiots voted for The Bama, isn't that right? What exactly Changed? Anything? Hmm? Anything? Oh. Right. The color of Your Leader's skin Changed. WOW. That's some Change!!!
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:54AM
All of you idiots voted for The Bama, isn't that right? What exactly Changed?
You know what else hasn't changed since 2008? This meme.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:28AM
Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan.
I cringe when I think what SCOTUS would look like with a Republican in the Oval office for those years.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Interesting) by throwaway28 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:59PM
Erm . . . the title is "Love of learning is the key to success", but interpolating the title from the article, "Love of learning is the key to not being bored when unemployed", feels closer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:55AM
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:29AM
Gimme free shit for free. Right now. You faggot ass faggot. I aint' lernding shit.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:12AM
Well, I suspect lawyers will still be around, although Shakespeare was right about what we should do about them [enotes.com]. I suspect AI will not be able to completely replace them, although AI could possibly improve on their ethics. Besides, we need lawyers to make jokes about. After all, why do lawyers wear ties? It's to keep their foreskin from going over their heads. Now, how many other professions could that joke possibly work with?
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1) by Rickter on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:37PM
I haven't read that Shakespeare play, but I've heard it said that the line was spoken by somebody who hated law and justice, and wanted to get rid of the lawyers so they could crush the good guys with impunity.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday July 30 2015, @01:36AM
Apparently, from what I've read about that line, Shakespeare was referring to the dishonest lawyers. But that pretty much describes the majority of them. But then I'm prejudiced. I thoroughly dislike most lawyers.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:27AM
Seriously, at any point in history there are the pundits that predict fabulous prosperity for a large majority of people on earth. And there (usually more numerous) pundits who predict just the opposite - a bleak, bleak world for the nearly everyone except a privileged few.
Like these [henrygeorge.org] gentlemen. [buzzle.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:17PM
Henry George was a smart cookie.
One of his most brilliant ideas was to tax ONLY property that wasn't being used to produce.
You can either pay taxes on your idle field -or- find a reasonable rental rate for someone to pay to use what you aren't using.
So, which one are you going with?
He didn't call it The Multiplier Effect, but he had it figured out before other smart cookies did.
N.B. The amount of idle production capacity in the USA is currently about the same as the numbers for USAians who can't get fulltime work (about 23 percent).
Coincidence? Not hardly.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @02:53PM
One of his most brilliant ideas was to tax ONLY property that wasn't being used to produce.
How do you measure productivity of property? A fixed rate tax on assets would naturally devalue property that wasn't sufficiently productive to offset the tax.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:01PM
Empirically, "fabulous prosperity" has pretty much worked out for at least the last 200 years. It's only the last 20 years or so where things have turned around a bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:17PM
Has no one ever learned ANY History?
The Panic of 1837
The Long Depression that started in 1873 and lasted 2 decades
The Great Depression
The Bush-Obama Depression with 23 percent unemployment (and still rising)
Capitalism fails again and again and again.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @04:36PM
Has no one ever learned ANY History?
I see that you describe almost 180 years of history. So what system can fail again and again and again for that long and still be going strong?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @01:58AM
The Shakers had a system of communal living and a common ownership of the means of production aka Socialism before Marx invented the term and long before there was a USA.
There are Shakers to this day and Shaker-made goods are still prized.
(If it wasn't for the religious thing--no sex ever--the Shakers would likely be big today.)
Old enough for you?
One wonders what would have become of the Paris Commune of 1871 if the Capitalists' hired thugs hadn't come in after 78 days and murdered the Communards by the tens of thousands.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 02 2015, @04:52AM
The Shakers had a system of communal living and a common ownership of the means of production aka Socialism before Marx invented the term and long before there was a USA. There are Shakers to this day and Shaker-made goods are still prized.
The Shaker movement never had more than a few thousand people. Currently, there are something like four members according to Wikipedia. At least your Mondragon example is large enough that it could be scale to humanity.
One wonders what would have become of the Paris Commune of 1871 if the Capitalists' hired thugs hadn't come in after 78 days and murdered the Communards by the tens of thousands.
I think you just described the end state, whether they lasted three weeks or three years. The Paris Commune was never going to be a long lasting phenomena.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:29AM
The article is wrong.
Love of learning has ALWAYS been A key to success at any time in the past, present or future.
There is absolutely no point in hiring someone who is either unable, or not keen, to learn unless - quite literally - the job is mindless and drone-like. Even then, they have to learn how to do that mindless job.
School taught me things that are no longer true. Some of them weren't even true when I was being taught them. As such, without the ability to throw out old information, take in new, reformulate all your understanding, and extrapolate that to future scenarios, we would be dead in the water the day we left school with all that misinformation. Similarly, my career didn't exist when I was a kid. Computers were a one-per-school thing that didn't have central management. The thought of having hundreds of portable devices in even the lowest of schools, and needing teams of people to manage them, never occurred to anyone.
Similarly, the line about driving cars? I have a car. My dad has a car. Our first cars were VERY different things to drive. My daughters will be so automated that I won't want to drive it. Guess what her daughters will be like? My granddad? He'd never driven in his life and couldn't put a seatbelt on (it may be obvious to you nowadays, but if you've never really driven in a car, the seatbelt going diagonally over your chest isn't actually intuitive!). As such just two generations ago massive changes were made, changed every generation, and in another generation will be obsolete. My father was a lorry mechanic - that position barely existed before he started in it, certainly not to the same extent, and he's now redundant as it's all done by the manufacturer who do it with a handful of personnel for an entire range of vehicles. Though neither of us were pioneers and cars and computers existed before our times, the actual job we started with never really existed as we did it in the previous generation.
There's nothing new here. Farriers had to retrain as blacksmiths or car mechanics. Gas-lamp-lighters had to figure out new-fangled electrics or become plumbers. It's always happened, and the disruption nowadays is probably much less than that caused by telling a whole industry of miners that they are out of work. Those who can learn a new trade will survive and excel. Those who can't will end up living off the state, or earning a poor living. Hell, my telephony guys have had to pick up computer networking as they are supplying the IP and wireless phones their customers demand now, so they have to learn about VLAN's, QoS and all kinds of stuff just to plug a phone in.
On a more recent note, I've just taken on an apprentice. They are young, keen, brilliant. However the reason I have them instead of any other is that they were desperate to learn. You can't keep information from them, because you can feel their disappointment. They want to know everything, and learn how to do all the stuff you do. That's a more employable person - if the employer has the time - than any amount of certifications from Microsoft, Cisco, et al. Absent such certifications, they stand out from the crowd. You can spot them on their CV. Did they sit on their butt outside of working hours? No, they were learning and testing relevant skills for themselves just for the sake of learning. The guy I took on has zero experience. But, hell, you give him a task, show him a brief demo once (if that!) and he's off and will do it to hundreds of machines if you need it done. He goes into his academic-based training (alongside his work-based apprenticeship) and he's showing the lecturer how to do stuff. On paper, he's just a kid. But you can't account for that keenness - and ability - to learn and to do so quickly.
I started the same way. I came out of university, didn't know what to do for a living. I graduated in Maths. But I have a large interest in IT and had always tinkered and played and learned. I started doing some IT for schools and - before you know it - one of them asked me to look at their server that had stopped working. Never touched server-versions of Windows before then, took one look, realised what must be wrong, fixed it. A year later, after much studying and testing, I was selling my services building networks. I had some customers for over a decade before I decided to move into full-time employment doing just that - and one of those customers then snapped me up. Which led to an entire career building and maintaining school networks, with satisfied customers, from small prep schools up to large academies. I showed them things their consultants had no idea about. I actually out-bid their consultants on stuff by building things in-house in hours that they were going to sell to us for thousands. I was pulling in technologies they'd never heard of. I was able to knock up prototypes in hours based on Linux skills that I'd never imagined I'd used professionally in their all-Windows environments. I'm still in that career now, working in a top private school - I was pulled in by word-of-mouth from a previous employer as an emergency troubleshooter after a disaster. From a guy that made a school a website because he didn't know what to do after uni, to a guy running the whole IT setup for a school with millions coming into it every year. It's the ability to learn that earns my wage, not how many times I've read the book, or what boxes I ticked on a certification test. I have zero industry certifications. Almost every employer and customer I've had tells me that they've realised those with such certs are generally a waste of money for them. Quite often a conversation just goes: "We've heard that a school has done this, we think it's cool, we want to do it, nobody else is doing this at our level" "Okay" "Do you know how to do it?" "Of course not. But give me a week". By which time I hand them back a prototype that's better than their suppliers are able to offer.
The day I stop being able to learn effectively, is the day my career stagnates and I'm stuck doing the same stuff forever. No more promotions, raises, praise, etc. I find that worrying in some ways and correct in others. I hold my staff to the same standard. You need to be able to learn, whether that's how to do things my particular way, or how to do things entirely, or just how to do the things that I find difficult and don't properly understand, or just things in a different area than I generally work in. I'm not impressed by what's on your CV if you can't learn.
(P.S. On that note, my memory is certainly fading, and I'm noticing that I mistype a lot more nowadays. Outside of IT, my memory is atrocious, but I can remember lines of code I wrote 20 years ago. Picking up new languages and skills is significantly more difficult for me if they aren't IT-related. It worries me in case the IT side of me stops being able to learn, because outside of IT my learning ability is significantly reduced. Saying that, my apprentice and I had a 40 minutes conversation about quantum mechanics the other day and I made them understand it for the very first time in their life, despite them having zero mathematical background. But... the day I notice that I'm unable to learn is the day I need to stagnate my ambitions somewhat and dial back my career to something I can stretch to retirement. I'm hoping the day never comes.)
Being able to learn is critical. Your career, your father's career, your grandfather's career, probably no longer exist - or won't quite soon - and certainly not in the same form. Your children's careers will be in areas that don't exist yet. You can't train them FOR that, as you have no idea what they are going to be (and wouldn't be able to pick them up yourself!). All you can do is teach them how to learn effectively. This is my argument about university education - it's not a waste of time, even if it's in "Art History". The difficulty set around any topic at that level means you have to be able to learn independently - a dying skill nowadays with rote-learning and limited curricula. A degree is proof that you can learn in difficult and testing and elongated situations, sometimes many years. The chances of you then suddenly stopping learning are minimal.
Teach a man to fish, and all that.
(Score: 2) by gargoyle on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:25AM
I'd say the only requirement is the ability to learn. Keenness might affect speed of learning a new skill or piece of knowledge but I don't see it as being a prerequisite.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 29 2015, @10:45AM
It seems that PhD's have one of the lowest unemployment rates. Now this cannot be because of the abundance of jobs for persons so specialized. So it must be that anyone who has the ability to learn, research, and create at the doctorate level, has the ability to apply their skill somewhere. Why? Because no one, and I mean no one, gets a PhD because of the money. In fact, PhDs make less money than Masters degree holders in all fields. So what are we to gather from this? Maybe Love of Learning is the Key to Success. 熱愛學習是成功的關鍵。再見.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:16AM
什麼時候學會說中國話？ :D (我不會說中國話)
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:57AM
:D (我不會說中國話)
Me, neither. Can type some, though.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:40PM
A science fiction story exploring this idea is Marshall Brain’s novella Manna:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
Still waiting to see what 21st century homesteading looks like over the long-term. Imagine homes w/:
- solar panels for energy (and a backup generator powered by a bicycle) w/ storage batteries
- rainwater collection and recycling and filtration systems
- composting toilets
- windows w/ a mix of aquariums for shrimp and algae and greenhouses for fruit and vegetables
- solar-powered stove
- &c.
For big cities, there’s the “arcology” concept, save we need to build enough space habitats to learn how to make them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:32PM
I really enjoyed that story. Thanks for sharing that link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:00PM
.... Now can the same person give the concrete steps by which a person can eat, drive, and sleep in their love of learning? I liked the article's optimistic tone. But a "love of learning" does NOT immediately translate into survival, as good as the idea is. Especially in a "jobless future."
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:33PM
All I know is, until the AI bots learn how to rant endlessly on the internet about things they only know a smidgen about, my job ... or at least my pastime ... is safe.
Window 8 sucks! Fuck Beta! Snowden was right! Trump is a Douche Nozzle! It was better before the WWW! Waah, get offa my lawn!
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey