Are jobs obsolete? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html <comment><USER4> _The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance._

Reminds me of this quote from Jello Biafra:

 _Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force. And if you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh!_

(Source: <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jello_Biafra>)

<comment><USER5> We spend more per student than we ever have in history. Why wasn't the country in chaos when there weren't public schools at all?

Teaching the kids that they are owed something merely because they have less than someone else? Seems to justify theft to me.

<comment><USER6> Totally agree. My kids have gone to the public high school and a large fraction (more than 20%) of the students there _could_ be getting an education but they _choose not to_.

I don't know why this is, but I know of no counter argument that supports why an individual, who gets to school, has the books and supplies provided for them, and teachers willing to help them with any issues they are having, choose not to learn. These are not kids who just don't do homework, they do no work at all. They are disruptive in class, they harass other students outside of class, why? It is not because they 'lack jobs' (which they aren't helping by not applying themselves to learning), it is not because their home situation is untenable (they could be homeless for all I know but they are at school and have all of the equipment they need to participate there).

No amount of 'money' is going to change this population of non-students. Their burdened cost is higher as other students get less done because of their antics.

<comment><USER7> The problem is pretty simple to identify in my opinion. These people live in a culture of anti-education. This is going to take _a lot_ of money to counter. The cheapest way to counter it is probably to simply pay students for good grades, starting as young as possible. Create an external motivation to learn and apply yourself where there otherwise would be none.

<comment><USER6> I guess I'm less willing to generalize than you are that the roots are an 'anti-education' culture. It hasn't been my experience that these 'slackers' (for lack of a better term) are disproportinally represented by any specifically identifiable group. They express a common 'you can't make me do this' kind of attitude but beyond that much of the correlation seems to fall off.

There is clearly a 'too cool for school' factor, but this could just be a rationalization. And there seems to be some correlation with family engagement as well. I really don't know what drives this attitude. My view of it externally is that there is no physical, mental, or equipment related barrier to their participation in the education process, they just don't. And what alarms me is that they seem to represent such a large fraction of the total population at the school.

I suppose we could come up with an experiment where we offered a cash incentive to some and none to a control group to see how it affected their participation. Something to put forward at the next PTA meeting.

<comment><USER7> Check my response to your sister comment: someone did actually do a controlled experiment. Engagement went up a great deal.

The anti-education culture definitely isn't isolated to minorities; it's spreading through the broader culture. Perhaps it was always there, its just recently it's becoming so not having a good education is a life sentence of menial dead end jobs so its getting more attention. Although I would disagree that it isn't disproportionately represented in minorities. Minorities experience it much more intensely because there aren't any competing ideals to help steer them in a positive direction.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link, I was also looking at some work that was recently published about measuring peoples ability to forego reward. There appears to be a genetic component.

This is a bit harsh I hope " its just recently it's becoming so not having a good education is a life sentence of menial dead end jobs" I certainly try to support programs that facilitate people furthering their education and 'catching up' as it were. I've heard great things about programs like Homeboy Industries [1] which try to give people a chance to take a different road.

[1] <http://homeboy-industries.org/index.php/about-us>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology. Their union negotiated a "no layoff" provision in their contract just this year. Why would you agree to that as an employer? Then there is the problem of defined benefit pensions where you end up keeping people basically on staff long after they stop working for you. The Post Office needs to go bankrupt and clear these contracts out and move forward without a union ideally. They might need to wait for Obama to leave office before doing that.

As for jobs there's always work to be done. There's an infinite amount of work in fact. In a free market involuntary unemployment should be zero because someone would always be willing to pay something for a given amount of work. I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand. I'm at home today caring for my family who are basically all sick and I'm seeing a lot of men just wandering around doing nothing. I'm going to guess that the incentive to work is absent in their life for one reason or another.

Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.

<comment><USER9> Every union "no layoff" provision I've ever seen was a case of the union choosing to forego contracted CoL raises and some various health benefits in exchange for keeping jobs. Typically it will be cost-neutral compared to layoffs and keeping benefits.

The employer wouldn't sign up to it if it was a pure money loser. They're not crazy :)

Also, Obama already suspended Saturday delivery. So not too sure what he has to do with a perceived unwillingness to shut down the post office. (He also cut taxes, stepped up immigration enforcement and didn't close gitmo).

<comment><USER10> _Obama already suspended Saturday delivery._

There was apparently a rogue delivery person four days ago, joyriding in the mail truck and asking me to sign for a delivery.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, my fault. They're going to end it soon, according to Obama's postmaster general and the legislation to do so is being filed by a democratic senator. [http://www.businessinsider.com/say-goodbye-to-saturday- mail-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/say-goodbye-to-saturday-mail- delivery-postmaster-says-2011-7)

Point still stands that "fox news said this about obama" does not correlate at all to what he's thinking or even doing. In fact you can usually assume the opposite.

<comment><USER11> > They're going to end it soon.

That isn't exactly true. The Postmaster General has been trying to get Saturday delivery canceled for a while now, but congress has not been willing to let it happen.

<comment><USER9> So, the original contention was that Socialistobama would never, ever, ever consider reduction of service.

The truth is that his appointee is actively pursuing it. Regardless of whether Congress (ironically, mostly rural district republicans in congress) are impeding him as usual.

<comment><USER12> >Socialistobama

That label and the level of discourse it represents are not welcome here. Be civil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let me see if I understand this reasoning correctly. Old, fragile and stiff huge organizations like the Post Office cannot provide the numbers of jobs they used to. The economy is changing. Therefore -- some hand-waving here -- the very idea of jobs is out-of-date.

Ouch.

But it gets better. We should pay folks not to work. After all, there's no jobs for them, so why should we expect them to do things that are impossible?

This is very reminiscent to me of all the hare-brained articles about capitalism being dead that came out right around the banking crisis. Yes, things are way screwed up, but capitalism remains. You could make any kind of wide-spread social change you wanted and capitalism would still remain. People like to trade stuff.

The crazy thing here is, like most of this tripe, there's a nugget of something useful in there. We cannot predict how the labor force will evolve. To do so is folly. The answer to this is not to announce the death of jobs, it's to create systems where new job roles which are unforeseen by us are created. To promote flexible adaptation in our businesses and governments.

What's dead is our big boxes of generic labels to stick on things -- all those labels and boxes have been stretched so far they don't work any more. Trying to continue to create policies around those labels and boxes is idiotic. We all need to adapt -- not in a lets-bring-some-academics-on-tv-to-talk-about- the-knowledge-economy sense, but in a real, live policy sense. If your terms and generalizations are bad, your conclusions and policies will never work. I understand that's frustrating and that you are out of ideas -- but a mental model with a huge impedance mismatch the reason, not that we've suddenly been thrust into a 27th century scarcity-free economy.

Take a look at the comments on this thread. Everybody gets out their favorite political pinata and beats on it. Is this a very productive type of article for this site?

<comment><USER14> > We cannot predict how the labor force will evolve. To do so is folly. The > answer to this is not to announce the death of jobs, it's to create systems > where new job roles which are unforeseen by us are created. To promote > flexible adaptation in our businesses and governments.

This is Hayek 101, and I agree with it strongly in terms of society being a 'complex system' that is difficult/impossible to do much about in a centrally controlled way.

Where I get off that train though is the idea that we should just dump the human leftovers of "creative destruction" (ok, that's not Hayek, but another Austrian, Schumpeter) into the garbage. No government support, no health care, no education, no nothing. They failed, they can go die in the streets, unless "private charities" happen to step in, but by all means let's not create a society-wide system to prop up the inevitable losers in a market-based system to minimum sustenance levels.

I much more strongly identify with Warren Buffet's way of thinking: by all means, get the government mostly out of the way and let markets do their work. But then step in and give people who didn't come out so well a helping hand to get back on their feet. That's not "central planning", that's a safety net.

> Take a look at the comments on this thread. Everybody gets out their > favorite political pinata and beats on it. Is this a very productive type of > article for this site?

Absolutely not, let's please flag it and ask the moderators to ban these kinds of articles, as they beget political discussions, where we go round and round and round: you can look up very similar sorts of discussions on usenet from the 1980ies if you do some poking.

<comment><USER15> _Where I get off that train though is the idea that we should just dump the human leftovers of "creative destruction" (ok, that's not Hayek, but another Austrian, Schumpeter) into the garbage. No government support, no health care, no education, no nothing._

That isn't Hayek either, though. Some Hayekians, yes, but Hayek himself was in favor of safety nets, and even argued positively for them in a number of places. He grouped basic healthcare along with fire protection and a police service as the minimal services a state should provide, and also supported a subsistence-level guaranteed minimum income (as a direct transfer payment, rather than as some complex combination of food stamps, rent control, housing subsidy, unemployment insurance, etc., etc.). One of his arguments was that a background safety net promotes individual freedom by lessening tribalist instincts--- if there's no safety net, people will cling to things like their church or ethnic group for a safety net, out of fear of being left out in the cold.

<comment><USER14> Sure, good points, I was speaking of "that train" to mean the hard-core "no government" people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a fact that computers/automation are going to continue to obsolete human jobs. Nothing short of a technological apocalypse is going to reverse that. And I agree that we shouldn't really lament the reality that a trucker who used to spend 50 hours a week vacuously staring at the highway no longer has to do that. But that's a triumph. One more human mind freed up for greater accomplishments.

That said, I'm dubious of his suggestion that we all turn to purely creative pursuits. At least, it will be a very, very long time before automation gets us to that point. I'm more interested in what we do in the meantime. What are we supposed to do with hordes of workers that are freed up in the coming decades as menial jobs disappear at an exceeding clip?

My guess is that this is a problem the labor markets will solve on their own. That is, the solution to a disappearing amount of work is that, on average, we all simply work less. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)? Of course, we're going to need to reduce per employee costs/benefits to make this work, but that's a good idea no matter what. Making the employer responsible for health care and retirement caused more problems than it solved anyway.

<comment><USER17> Without some regulation , why would the work week become shorter ? for many people , working a 40 hour work week barely covers their expenses. why would they want to work less ?

<comment><USER18> I've always thought that a 30 hr work week _should_ be regulated, forcing employees to demand higher wages in order to survive, forcing employers to raise wages, and _forcing CEOs to be paid less_ , thus reducing the income gap.

<comment><USER19> If that sort of thing was effective, income inequality would have dropped over the past 60 years as government regulations raised the minimum wage and shortened the work week. Instead, it dramatically increased.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg)

<comment><USER7> The problem is that minimum wage has never overtaken inflation. So in fact the minimum wage has effectively fallen over the last 60 years. Plus, the gains in production due to automation has worked to concentrate wealth at the top. The point is we can't say regulation wouldn't be effective considering trends of income distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article skips discussing one reason why jobs are in a sense ends to themselves: the feeling of being useful. Retired people often complain that they don't know what to do with themselves after leaving the workforce, so they go do things like volunteering. A friend of mine recently took 2 months off between jobs and nearing the end of that time, she started becoming very depressed and realized it was because she wasn't contributing to society or to herself. I think most people work not only to pay the bills or to acquire luxury items, but to have a sense of self-worth.

<comment><USER21> It might not be "feeling useful" so much as the social stimulation. The days when I work from home and don't talk to anyone at the office are soul- crushingly lonely, sometimes, even if I'm very active over IM.

<comment><USER22> Very much agree its a social thing. "The West" looks down on people that don't work does they feel bad and usless. All these people that will not have to work for money anymore have more time and they should be encouraged do good things. Take care of your parents, look after there children, study a new field, go out and talk to people about politics ....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As time goes on, and technological abilities improve, more and more jobs will fall to "robots" or computerized replacements for real jobs. There will always be need for creative jobs, engineers, etc, but the non-skilled labor jobs will be less and less. I don't see how anyone could disagree that there is already a problem here, and in the future, there will be an even bigger problem. The only people able to get jobs will be educated/skilled. The lower class will grow lower and lower. Aside from that, in the "old days" women stayed at home and took care of the family. "Nowadays" women are going to work, and I think that is absolutely great! However, that is more people working, therefore less jobs available.

I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. Although I think the first step is admitting there is a problem. Innovation will come, it will just take time.

Imagine a self-sufficient world far more advanced than ours. Imagine a world that practically runs itself and leaves us to care for each other and blossom with nature. The only problem is, this imagination world would never be allowed by multinational corporations and big business. Wealth would be more evenly distributed, they can't have that.

<comment><USER24> 'Aside from that, in the "old days" women stayed at home and took care of the family. "Nowadays" women are going to work, and I think that is absolutely great!'

Another way of looking at this is, "in the old days, a household could be supported by one parent's work and the other could raise children. Now, both have to work to pay the bills, and children get less time with parents and more time in institutions."

<comment><USER25> > Now, both have to work to pay the bills, and children get less time with > parents and more time in institutions.

I guess I'm not the only one upset by this trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Policy adjustments for maintaining capitalism in the post-employment era: provide a minimum guaranteed income to all citizens and abolish minimum wage. This was Milton Friedman's idea.

This would create a massive market for a standard "life package": a combination of food, shelter, and healthcare for one person with cost equal to the minimum income. We could even have cities organized around the concept. Then, people can go to work in creation spaces where they get micro-paid exactly what their contribution is worth. Getting $5 for a blog post I write sounds great if I enjoy doing it and am not hungry.

<comment><USER27> This is also Marshall Brain's idea:

<http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm>

IIRC, he advocates a 25k stipend for all americans, which incidentally, given ~300M people would cost 7.5 trillion. That's approximately double the entire federal budget for 2012. Factoring in state/local spending gets you to near 6 trillion. Given that fact and our current political climate, I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that it'll be a quite a while before adopt such a solution. ;)

Brain suggests lots of ways of raising the money (some rather implausible) here:

<http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm>

<comment><USER26> A guaranteed minimum income is not the same thing as a stipend. If the guaranteed minimum income is 25k, and your personal income is over 25k, the government doesn't owe you anything. You would owe the government something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My introduction to Rushkoff was Cyberia [1].

He's much more temperate now than he was in Cyberia. He has a great point, though. Restated, it's as follows: _If we have abundance, why are we working for more, instead of sending the abundance to those who need it?_

He seems to fall down in the mechanisms of distribution though in this article and hand-wave through it.

[1] [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberia_(book...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberia_\(book\))

<comment><USER29> I very much like how you restated his point. I felt myself agreeing, nodding my head when he was following that thought, then I had the image of Rushkoff tripping and falling flat on his face once he tried to figure out how. I think it would've been a much stronger article had he ended with "I don't know how to make this happen, only that it needs to happen." As it stands, he's just suggesting a different job for these unemployed toll collectors to take up, as opposed to toll machine repair.

<comment><USER30> Except those people wouldn't be burdened by having a "job" because in Rushkoff's world "food and shelter are basic human rights."

That's where people will get tripped up; in our current economic system we don't believe such an idea is true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace._

And, more to the point, a toll collector isn't necessarily bright enough to be a toll robot technician. Sometimes progress flows the other way; now the supermarket checker doesn't have to calculate your bill anymore or even know how to make change, so he can be completely innumerate. But for the most part, we're replacing less skilled jobs with more skilled jobs. We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them.

<comment><USER32> > We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or > in many cases the ability to gain them.

Separation of concerns is our current solution to that problem.

In software development, for example, good developers are hard to find, so we split the job up to add a designer role into the mix. Still finding it hard to find good people, we're now seeing the UX role come in. By giving each person less to do, the knowledge required to the job is reduced. You don't have to be a genius to be a part of the team.

In agriculture, another industry I am close to, you have the same thing. One person drives the tractor, one person tends to the animals, one person repairs the equipment, etc. because it is hard to find a good farmhand that can do it all.

We will eventually see the same shift for robotics as they become more and more prevalent. You'll have one person to diagnose the problem, one person to replace the part, etc. as the labour needs dictate.

<comment><USER31> If you push separation of concerns far enough, you start finding roles that can be played by computers and robots rather than humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs."

Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business.

After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspapers.

Should we feel bad about it? Hell no. Are we marginally worse off? Maybe?

<comment><USER34> I think part of what Rushkoff is saying is that the transition from classified ads to Craigslist should be a win for society without caveats.

People placing ads are better off -- they don't have to pay to place the ads, and their ads are more widely seen. People responding to ads are also better off -- they don't have to buy newspapers, and have much better search and scan capabilities, et cetera.

But thousands of people have lost their jobs in the newspaper industry, and thus are worse off. Yet the Craigslist transition has not taken anything away from society. Those that lost their jobs are not now contributing less to society -- their jobs would be glorified make-work in a post-Craigslist society. It should now be easier for society to feed, clothe, house & entertain these people than it was before, yet they are not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained as well as they were before. It's also hard to argue that they do not deserve to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.

It is a failure of capitalism. Markets are about the distribution of scarce goods, but do not work so well when the goods are not scarce. Capitalism is still better than every other system we're aware of, but I believe that there is a better system out there yet to be found, and Rushkoff is one of those helping to search for it.

<comment><USER35> >Those that lost their jobs are not now contributing less to society -- their jobs would be glorified make-work in a post-Craigslist society. It should now be easier for society to feed, clothe, house & entertain these people than it was before, yet they are not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained as well as they were before. It's also hard to argue that they do not deserve to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.

>It is a failure of capitalism.

I don't see how that can be considered a failure of capitalism. On the contrary, this is capitalism functioning the way it's supposed to function. These people aren't "not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained" on a long-term basis. They need to find jobs doing something the rest of us are willing to pay for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is."

This is more ground for the fact that we _might not_ be in a bubble with major financial crash risk like the .com bubble. The fact is that engineers who are building and inventing new technologies are building a societal system (possibly unintentionally) that puts technology, rather than people, at the top of the game (especially in terms of efficiency & profitability).

While we may, as the tech industry, be relatively safe in the foreseeable future, this article really makes me question what we, as engineers, designers & general tech lovers, can invent/build that will allow future society to not only take advantage of our technologies (as end-users), but also allow individuals to make money in an increasingly digital and on-demand world.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why is this being upvoted? This article begins with a questionable premise and then descends straight into misinformation.

The problems in the USPS did not begin with email. They began with a highly questionable requirement that the USPS fund a plan to fully cover the estimated future health care costs of all current employees. _They are the only government institution required to do this, and it has crippled their ability to remain profitable:_

* [http://www.plansponsor.com/Post_Office_Says_PreFunding_Retir...](http://www.plansponsor.com/Post_Office_Says_PreFunding_Retiree_Health_Care_is_Reason_for_Loss.aspx)

* Read First Few Pages Here -> <http://www.uspsoig.gov/foia_files/RARC-WP-10-001.pdf>

* <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/us/23postal.html>

They have overpaid this fund by billions of dollars, but they are not able to use this money to address their current financial shortcomings.

Somehow the author of this piece is able to extrapolate from the fiscal problems of the USPS to the overall job market. The extrapolation is misguided at best.

There are so many things wrong in this article that I will not take the time to address them all. (Most of Europe was thriving in the Middle Ages? Really? The author needs to define the word thrive.) I just want to say that I find it interesting that there is so much hand-wringing in these comments about jobs being displaced by technology.

In economics, we like to call this creative destruction. Old jobs go away and new jobs take their place. This is a natural process, and their is nothing so magically different about the technological revolution that it will somehow "make jobs obsolete".

Just as The Luddites protested against the loss of jobs brought on by the technological progress of the Industrial Revolution, now some individuals protest against the loss of jobs brought on by the technological progress of the "Technological Revolution". Then, as now, it was all hand-wringing and nail-biting with no serious economic analysis.

The critics say this time is different, this time there will be no new jobs, and we should urge people to find something other to do than working. The critics are wrong. Don't worry people. Employment is here to stay.

Side Note: The author engages in some navel gazing when he says America has all that it needs. I'm not sure if the author has noticed it or not, but there is a such thing as globalization and the global needs for goods and services will increase as developing countries close the ground with developed nations.

This global recession is just another business cycle, eventually the world will have another upswing, and then we will revert to mean again. There is no magic here, just the march of time. I would not put too much stock into those who believe that a single recession merits the reevaluation of the entire modern economic system.

 _Edit: Trying to trim the size. Eventually, I will learn the art of not making posts into walls of text._

<comment><USER38> > _The critics say this time is different, this time there will be no new > jobs, and we should urge people to find something other to do than working. > The critics are wrong. Don't worry people. Employment is here to stay._

I mean this is hand-waving as well. You havent actually provided any substantive counter-argument other than bring up the Luddites.

I think the basic argument that at some point, possibly already past, the productive activity required for basic human survival will be virtually entirely automated and require 0 human labor input. How do we allocate productive output in a society that requires no labor input? The notion of the "job" as described in the article may very well be obsolete.

<comment><USER39> I personally think the much bigger question is how do we allocate the profits.

As it could rapidly go very wrong with a miniscule few controlling the vast majority of the income. And a massive income gap developing.

Kinda like what's already happening...

<comment><USER40> That was a risk in the early 80s. It's pretty much an undisputed reality today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Most people work to get money to spend on stuff people are making.

Full employment 40+ hours a week is obsolete. Consumerism is obsolete. We should all be working 10hrs/week or less and have/consume 1/10 to 1/4 of what we have/consume today.

That's not gonna happen easily, but it's gonna happen _. Perhaps not in my lifetime.

_ I'm making guess that space exploitation will not ramp up in time, it might though.

<comment><USER42> Are you suggesting that 3/4th - 9/10th of spending is on luxury goods?

<comment><USER15> It really depends on what you consider a luxury good. For example, some amount of housing is a "necessity", some amount is "nice to have", and some is "luxury", but I doubt people agree on the boundaries. The bar of what people consider a necessity seems to rise with income, so people recategorize what they would've once seen as luxury as non-luxury.

I was recently adding up what it would take to live in a cheap-ish place like Pittsburgh: 1) frugally; and 2) modestly but comfortably; and the numbers are absurdly low if you really stick to necessities. YMMV elsewhere.

<comment><USER43> Yes. My very average house today is a huge luxury compared to the very average house my grandparents bought in the 60s.

I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those.

I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air conditioning, a higher health insurance bill to pay for drastically better health care, an extra car insurance policy.

That's in addition to all the extra stuff I have lying around. 2 cars, not one, both of which are vastly superior and more expensive than what my grandparents had. Superior home appliances. And 1 metric tonne of electronics.

I have so much more material wealth than all but the very richest did just 50 years ago. How could I complain that I'm not better off?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Thanks for sharing! Great article, reminded me of a great speech I read recently that Paul Graham gave in 2005:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html>

The jist is the same as Rushkoff's, and Lanier's conclusion-- that people perform better when they do something they care about enough to do it for free. The paradox with the digital age is that consumers have grown accustomed to not paying for digital goods -- and artists have grown accustomed to settling for any attention they can get, which means marketing gimmicks, and settling for the lowest common denominator far too often for authors of original content. Lanier covers this well, for sure:

<http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip>

</comment><comment><USER45> At first I thought this was going to be a conservative 'the modern world is killing everything good', but I was pleased to the argument come down to "computers are killing jobs, and this is a good thing".

Though I don't believe it's accurate to say that Europe thrived under the feudal system. Many people did the same meaningless jobs all the time. The author also claims that the Industrial Age & Corporations were some massive scam to get the rich more.

<comment><USER46> The thriving middle age Europe stuff is really misinformed. Almost all the people at that time worked in agriculture, and most of them (this varied by place, but in general) worked for somebody else: The landlord. They were usually free to organize the work, but a percentage of the produce was for the lord. And the land was his, not theirs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Oh fuck all of you capitalist scum. I really hate how much of this community is based on this really fucked up reappropriation of the hacker ethos into some sort of pro-capitalist thing.

Capitalism is an inherently authoritarian economic system. ([http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/The_Anarchist_FAQ_Editor...](http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/The_Anarchist_FAQ_Editorial_Collective__An_Anarchist_FAQ__07_17_.html)) And don't give me this bullshit about communism being authoritarian and then pointing to the USSR - the USSR had nothing to do with communism, and communism is not the only alternative to capitalism nor are they even the opposite of each other.

</comment><comment><USER48> Britain, the Low Countries, France and the German States all went through this process in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Historians call it pauperization. The only good solution seems to be keeping people from starving to death (the above named societies often did not, incidentally) and wait for/encourage the economy to find a way to suck up the surplus labor.

</comment><comment><USER49> Too bad what he suggests requires skills that most people don't have, at least not yet. To achieve this utopic vision we need to drastically change our education from being job-driven towards being production-driven (e.g. teaching more practical programming to younger audiences, encouraging self-motivated thinking rather than homework burn-out). This is not an easy task.

I like his vision but I fail to see how it can work out. The reality is that people are lazy. While making stuff because you want to is awesome, most people would rather sit on the couch and consume. Its because they have to feed themselves and buy nice TVs that they go to work in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER50> This was such an intriguing article until he posited that our citizens who formerly worked in manufacturing could replace their aspirations of long-term employment in a stable economy with some generic digital goods production that was never elaborated on in the article. I have to assume he meant they should all make doll clothes in Second Life.

<comment><USER51> Yeah he lost me there as well. Some of these people being displaced I feel probably won't have the motivation to be independent and produce said digital goods. That's why they are being displaced in the first place because they don't have new skills and their old skills are no longer needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pulling out a specific nit:

 _"America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working."_

And from an old college textbook on the definition of economics - <USER2> is the study of how society manages its scarce resources._

Here it the hard nut in the thesis, what mechanism, process, or theory, could manage determining who works and who doesn't in a society?

We currently have a system where the wealthiest tax payers pay a grossly disproportionate share of the total tax receipts. Some fraction of those receipts are used to fund the lives of the least wealthy individuals. It doesn't seem to work as well as we would like.

Consider a more communist flavored theory, if Bob's education, skills, and work ethic allow him to generate gross domestic product which would support 5 average citizens. Do we make Bob and his four comrades equal consumers of the GDP that Bob has generated? Would Bob continue to produce at that rate?

Enlightened self interest is a powerful thing. But taking away the 'fruits of one's labor' to redistribute it amongst the less fortunate doesn't motivate the high performers or the low performers to higher economic output.

I am always interested in systems which might replace capitalism as an organizing principle. But until we have such a system we won't be able to manage the disparity of productivity in a socially acceptable way.

<comment><USER52> A major nitpick as a middle American a disproportionate percentage of _MY_ salary is used to support the poor relative to rich people. The vast majority of wealth redistribution in this country is though SS which the wealthy get to opt out from. When you consider that I pay more in SS as a percentage of my income than Warren Buffet's entire tax bill there is something wrong with this picture. (In theory I might see some of that money back but even I nothing changes and I live to see 120 I would still be far worse off with SS than without.)

PS: Some people think of corporate taxes as double taxation on the wealthy but nothing in the US tax code says you need to invest in US companies and if you actually look at taxes paid by large companies it's vary low relative to the stated tax rate.

<comment><USER53> > a disproportionate percentage of MY salary is used to support the poor > relative to rich people.

The operative word there is "salary". Buffet had such a low (as a %) tax bill because most of his income isn't salary but cap gains.

Let's raise cap gains tax to 50% you say? Sounds great until you sell your house in a few years.

<comment><USER52> There is a huge difference between taxing cap gains at 15% vs 50%. IMO, treat it as any other income source if I am going to work and pay ~40+% of my income in taxes why on earth should I pay _MORE_ so people making 100 times what I do get a discount.

However, I also pay a higher percentage though many other regressive taxes. Consider, I own a reasonably nice car and pay taxes on it, but if I make ten times as much I don't suddenly buy a car that costs ten times as much.

<comment><USER53> > IMO, treat it as any other income source

You mean treat it like salary? It wouldn't matter. People with that much cap gains would leave investments where they are and take out low-interest loans against it. That's what they do today. Actually, lots of middle class people do (or have done) the same thing with HELOCs. Rather than selling their house for a profit (and paying cap gains), buying a cheaper house, and using the profit to upgrade the cheaper house, they took out a loan against their equity.

> why on earth should I pay MORE so people making 100 times what I do get a > discount.

You imply a causal relationship where none exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Mr. Rushkoff wants to "organize society around employment", but he ought to reflect that it's going to be organized around _something_. There is going to be a distribution of power, it's an inevitable feature of society. Do we wanted organized around what each of us can do for the benefit of others, as measured freely by those others? Or do we want it organized around what everyone else thinks of us? I can do a lot more about my worries about getting a job than I can about worries about the opinion of my local commissar.

</comment><comment><USER55> Next on CNN:

 _Food: Why you probably don't need it_

 _Exercise: Less of it could mean more healthcare jobs_

 _Transportation: Could rising oil prices make it impossible to go anywhere?_

 _Safety: Could banning non-Christians from entering the country make us safer?_

 _9/11: What about the bright side?_

 _Culture: Is Lil Wayne the music genius of the decade?_

<comment><USER56> Right on about food. Isn't that another fear, global food scarcities, green revolution not keeping up, fields poisoned by industrial fertilizers... Let's get used to having less, unless we get back on the farm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> If we go all the way to a technological singularity in which not even "knowledge workers" are needed... we'll need a new way to distribute wealth.

Between 1960 and 2009, employment in IT in the US rose by a factor of 1.6, while the population grew by a factor of 1.7

<http://lumma.org/microwave/#2010.10.17>

and many women entered the workforce, so the labor pool expanded by more than 1.7.

</comment><comment><USER58> Don't have much mercy when I read these kinds of stories. I went to a job interview back in 2000 for a 28,000 a year job. Knew 6 computer languages and significantly more than the interviewee and all this colleges employees. (in my opinion) this was a small college in Michigan. They never called me back. A few weeks later I started a small company. Today I make upwards of 250k a year. No college education. They (college people) can all go starving on the street like they would have left me and my two new born twins. No help from the "establishment" for me no matter how smart I was. Let em all lose their jib and starve.. Let em be in college debt. I smirk at the barrages who would have let me go homeless every time I read stories like this.

No quarter wad given to me. Now that theyre expected to oroduce. Now thier college means diddle it is my turn to watch from the sidelines.

I know that if I don't make money MYSELF nobody ----especially "college" people will help..

Posted from an iPad I never would have had if I let the establishment guide my life..

</comment><comment><USER59> "I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? ... on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working."

This belies a gross misunderstanding of how national socio-economies work.

Yes, we could. One of my blogs is "A Buck A Plate" <http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com> featuring sufficient meals for $1/person/meal. A favorite study is "tiny homes" <http://tinyhouseblog.com> where nice cozy accomodations can be had for $10,000/person. Beyond that, I've figured one "could probably shelter, feed, educate and even provide health care for its entire population" for just $10/day.

Are you ready to live on $10/day? is anybody?

Long story short, it would take about $1T/yr to pay everyone in the USA a "living income" of a paltry $10/day. Note that current federal revenue is about $2T ($4.5T including state revenues), with federal spending about twice that.

Of a culture where the vast majority decide to vote themselves monies from the treasury, John Adams wrote "The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."

Enjoying the comforts of a culture wallowing in the height of luxury, Rushkoff opines in effect that the source of that comfort be eliminated on the absurd theory that enough will be produced when there is no carrot nor stick incentiveizing people to work.

No, Mr. Rushkoff, people need not work when confiscating the hard-earned wealth of others is enough. Problem is, those who produce will not be appreciated, but reviled, and their incentive to produce taken away. Despite the symbolic official $1 salary of its CEO, Apple was driven by _profit_, and its products available only to those who in turn sought _profit_ in other endeavors. Take away the profit motive by confiscating incomes to supply the idle, and few of the idle will use the opportunity for lofty endeavors; nay, most will cultivate dissatisfaction and demand more be confiscated for their gain.

As an ancient writer opined, "if any would not work, neither should he eat."

</comment><comment><USER60> Metapoint: Headlines phrased as a question are almost always best answered "no."

Try it!

<comment><USER61> Actually, I'm writing an article about it: "Are headlines phrased as questions always best answered 'No'?"

<comment><USER62> If only you'd said "usually"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> So let's start picking apart this article. And the other article that talks about the end of capitalism. And then the next 50, 100, 1000 articles that prey on our confused notion that capitalism is the end-game for eternity.

Watch as self-driving vehicles takeover all modes of goods transport. And robotics and information systems remove 90% of the health care workforce. And construction. And education. Keep telling yourself that your vision of capitalism is exact and free from evolution.

Eventually, a grounded theory that revolutionizes capitalism will emerge. Do we know what the evolution will be or how it will work? I certainly don't. But I do believe in evolution and evolution in markets.

Defending capitalism like it dragged you out of a flaming building is self- serving, not logical. Capitalism is an ideology. It can and will change, with or without consent.

</comment><comment><USER64> There's a really good book on this topic called Creating You & Co.[1] that is all about how it's not jobs that are important—that's an overspecialization—but work. And work can be done in any number of ways: automation, out-sourcing, crowd-sourcing, etc. The book is quite old so it only really talks about alternative human-based work delivery but it's still arguing for a new worldview on work and employment that is well ahead of its time.

I have to remind myself every time I watch the news—particularly those interviews with "experts"—that job losses aren't quite the gloomy picture they seem to be. And the solution isn't necessarily to manufacture more positions for people.

1: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-You-Co-Learn- Career/dp/0738...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-You-Co-Learn- Career/dp/0738200328/)

</comment><comment><USER65> There is a nugget of useful discussion in there, in that corporations aren't as necessary as they used to be. Better communication technology lowers coordination costs and we don't need big organization and bureaucracy to get big things done anymore.

But the whole "technology is destroying jobs" meme is just horseshit. What's destroying jobs in the US is lack of demand. Other counties (no, not all of them, but many) are doing just fine, thank you, despite technology.

I wonder if this kind of thing is a result of the high and accelerating pace of technological change we're experiencing. We expect change to be so fast that we don't even try to predict the future based on the past and present, we just throw our hands up and declare _everything_ to be a fundamental paradigm shift, rather than a cyclical or temporary phenomenon.

<comment><USER25> You're right: Technology doesn't kill jobs.

It kills demand.

Who wants to send paper mail, or a landline phone, or to take out traditional classified ads? The alternatives are too appealing and the demand for the old versions is never coming back.

<comment><USER65> Ugh. No. The financial crisis killed demand.

<comment><USER25> The financial crisis did not make people buy mobile phones instead of landlines, Hulu and Netflix instead of cable TV, or Craigslist instead of local newspaper ads, or ebooks instead of paper books. It might have accelerated the shift, because the new technology was cheaper, but people naturally gravitate to the better product.

These technologies split, reorganized, transferred, concentrated or decentralized demand. Call it what you will, but people _want_ the new stuff over the old stuff. And if they want it, they'll buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great! All we have to do is convince poor people to be happy living at a subsistence level, and convince rich people to be happy supporting them!

Seriously, I agree with his point that, say, building bridges in order to create jobs is backwards. But his plan seems to require changing basic human motivations.

<comment><USER66> Well, you can avoid changing basic human motivations by using an alternative solution.

Jay Gould is attributed to have said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. "

<comment><USER67> The current version is more akin to hiring half the working class to guard the other imprisoned half. It's more sustainable that way.

<http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't think anyone would want to pay for the art I can make. I don't want to pay for anyone else's either. Given how much music piracy there is, and the vast skill disparity between casual amateurs and dedicated professionals, and the near-zero cost of replicating the bits composed by someone better than me or any of my immediate peers, I can't believe the author thinks that trading bits is a possible outcome. Why would I want my dad to educate me when I could watch OpenCourseware? Why would I want my friend's painting when I could get something much better over deviantArt? Why would I bother getting recipes from my mom if I can get them from a 4 star Michelin chef instead?

<comment><USER68> You might not want your friend's art, but there's plenty of excellent art not on DeviantArt. Especially if you custom made: Kickstart and other escrow services can fund stuff that doesn't exist yet (and therefore can't be pirated).

Similar to what's done with TV shows (a pilot is made, then if there's interest by any network, they fund the rest of the season), but with artists directly proposing their 'pilots' (a first chapter of a book, a trailer of a movie, a single song) directly to the audience and letting them fund the rest.

<comment><USER21> So if you're willing to grant the point that not everyone is going to be capable of creating good art, then what do the non-producers do? Just sit back and consume? The problem is that we use productive output as a heuristic for determining how much stuff to give back to a given member of society. If the standard changes from "making widgets" to "making art," most people are still going to starve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> In a related video that CNN linked in, it was being questioned if companies that aren't hiring are being unpatriotic. Union leader James Hoffa was saying that Apple is being unpatriotic by not hiring here in the US.

But, I don't quite understand James Hoffa saying that Apple isn't hiring- they are hiring both retail and corporate jobs.

<http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/>

Yes, they employ and sub-contract a lot of people overseas, but that's just the way things work in 2011. How many people are going to pay $10,000 for a laptop or $1,400 for an iPhone? That's probably the difference in price that it would require for Apple to make their products 100% here.

</comment><comment><USER70> A similar model is being followed in Europe where the unemployed, disabled, recent mothers and the poorer people are provided some sort of basic support by the state. The higher earning people have extra cash to live more comfortably.

<comment><USER71> Unfortunately you have to support not only people who are just going through some tough times, but those who just want to leech off society. Plus those people who go out and have kids, then waste the money they are given to feed them on crap so their child is either starving or lives off a terrible diet.

It's really not an easy problem to solve. Ideally everyone should be guaranteed that they get enough food and a place to live, with anything extra being their own responsibility. But this is hard to implement in practice.

<comment><USER72> I think this is an irrational fear. I don't think that leeching lies in human nature. People naturally want to take part in society as long as they are healthy. Just think about what you would do if you wouldn't have to work. Would you stay in bed all day? I would most certainly write programs to help other people, just as I do now.

<comment><USER73> Have you ever run any kind of business where you are giving away something for free? People will eventually take more and more until you go out of business.

"I don't think that leeching lies in human nature"

I think many thousands of years of human history proves this statement false. Leeching is one of the core components of human nature. Businesses (or governments) that take this into account will be successful. The ones that don't will fail miserably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Is there some statistics that proves there are less people worldwide doing work / employed today than say 50 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER75> I still think we're headed towards an era of "glocalization". I haven't heard this term since college geography courses, but we're headed back to an age where we are all local blacksmiths and silversmiths. We'll all be working for ourselves, but instead of being forced to sell to people in town, we can sell globally. Probably most of the people on this board fit into this categorization, but a much larger percent of the population will migrate towards this lifestyle over the next few years.

<comment><USER76> Your comment reminded me of this article: [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/a-jobs-p...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/a-jobs- plan-for-the-post-cubicle-economy/244549/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I am going to get downvoted for criticizing an ideology - <USER3> capitalism, which I would consider HN the best place for. We'll see.

These technological evolutions are not lightyears away. They are around the corner and they are coming fast. Also, remember that with each branch of technological evolution comes a whole subset of mashup-ability. There are countless jobs to be had by these innovations.

Of all communities, you'd think HN would be the highest order witness to the fall of capitalism since many of the startups and weekend projects seek to automate, or otherwise kill off manual intervention (read: jobs). Take a few of your favorite properties, YC or otherwise, then take a look back 20 years and compare the industry they represent today.

What if Airbnb became a household name, do you think that will increase the employment at Best Western? Or an open MLS system. Increase real estate agents?

Internet businesses, in general, seek to destroy inconvenience and under the best intentions. Just as I am sure capitalism works under the best intentions, despite child labour and deforestation.

50 years is not so ridiculous to plan for. We're giving our parents and grandparents flack for not taking care of our planet - "Where was your foresight!", we say. And here we are doing no better. We've already rolled into the same comfy cognitive dissonance.

</comment><comment><USER77> I only heard about self-driving cars last month. They're not putting taxi drivers out of business any time soon.

It's a concept I've considered as well, jobs are actually bad, it means that there's something someone wants that isn't done. This guy is just a bit early, try back in 50 years.

</comment><comment><USER46> Technology rising productivity (and so needing less people to create the same products) is at the base of our wealth. The real problem is that the pace of technology innovation (and jobs transfer overseas, and other changes) can be too fast for people to keep up with those changes. Public action to both slow down some changes, and to help in adapting, can become a necessity in those times.

But right now too many people believe the ideology that the market will fix everything itself, even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. It is just too good an excuse to just mind your own business, and everyone else be damned, I guess...

</comment><comment><USER35> >Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

It's a little more complicated than that. The economy is a huge, complicated machine. The reason we have enough stuff is it mostly works to convince people go get up when the alarm goes off and go do something they'd rather not do instead of fishing or playing video games. If we start just giving people money because we can afford it we will quickly be unable to afford it.

</comment><comment><USER78> reminded me of RA Wilson's RICH economy

<http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/rawilson.html>

<comment><USER79> You know that Wilson and Rushkoff were friends, yes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I highly agree that the conventional 'job' is becoming obsolete. Technology is enabling us to live in a bottom-up world where we can add value individually. We don't have to to work for a company to add value. Imagine all the commerce that could be happening in a 5 mile radius from where you live - all the needs you could address to add value. And when you add value, you are rewarded financially. There is no recession.

</comment><comment><USER81> > We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work > we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff > that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This is a nice thought but it seems impossible to move forward until food and shelter are givens for everyone world wide - not just givens for those in the USA.

</comment><comment><USER30> Long term, technology can lead to our society being more peaceful and enjoyable than ever before. The short term is the problem though as there are so many people without the skills to work in the future that the transition may be too painful for society to make it to the long term.

</comment><comment><USER82> "As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products."

This right here is my favorite piece of unintentional irony out of the whole article.

</comment><comment><USER83> how are jobs obsolete when 91% of the working-aged population (in the US) have one?

<comment><USER67> The last number I heard was more like 56% for the US (can't find the source back, percentage of adults working is a surprisingly hard to find number).

Working people number ain't number of working age people minus number of job seeking people.

It's number of working age people minus (job seeking people, people on disabilities and not looking for a job, people in jail, stay at home parents, people who retired early...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Jobs becoming obsolete?

Yes surely just as we have never recovered from the loss of shoe cobbling jobs or manual labor farming jobs due to the industrial revolution the internet and technology will be the death of us all!

</comment><comment><USER85> All this technology should be lowering the cost of living. Instead, constant inflation in the money supply, via the money multiplier effect, quantitative easing and continuously falling interest rates, eats up all the benefits of increased technology and transfers them to the financial sector and their clients. If there wasn't this huge parasite of debt , which is getting paid to somebody, somewhere who doesn't have to work, thank you very much, it would be dirt cheap to live and people would be able to get by very easily with most of the population not having to work.

</comment><comment><USER86> _We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful._

So...nobody creates value (or performs work, for that matter) growing the food or building the shelters, right? Riiiiight...

Magical thinking at it's best.

</comment><comment><USER87> Sadly, the premise going forward is that everyone should get a basic income. I don't think the monkeys will agree until it's far too late.

</comment><comment><USER88> Strikes and gutters, ups and downs.

</comment><comment><USER89> They are great Chairmen

</comment><comment><USER90> Oh, for Christ's sake, does _everything_ have to be the End of History nowadays?

</comment><comment><USER91> so… the future != the past?

</comment><comment><USER92> My theory from before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769>

\- In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet.

\- 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via service or thievery. They will be the new middle class. They can afford the sometimes luxury.

\- the other 5.5% will be specialized knowledge workers. They will be the one maintaining the software/hardware to make sure nothing goes wrong. They can afford lots of luxury, but will be taxed heavily, as they are the only workhorse left in the society.

\- 0.1% will be entertainers. They will make sure that people are entertained well enough not to riot.

\- and the 0.4% will rule everyone.

<comment><USER93> I don't mean to sound condescending (although I'm sure I will), but your theory about the future has already happened, and collapsed, in other countries: USSR and China being two prominent recent examples.

<comment><USER94> China didn't collapses, only USSR did. China learnt from USSR collapse and now showing the world how to grow while maintaining control.

Chaillete's future seems a possibility. Provide a basic level of necessities but beyond that you will need to earn your way. Isn't that's what Chinese are doing?

Whether communism or capitalisms, both extremes are bad as both results in concentration of power in the hands of a few

<comment><USER93> China's structure of wealth absolutely _did_ collapse. Now people who were in charge of vast sections of China are no longer in charge, and although still technically communist in spirit, they move farther from it every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I think he has a great point that the value a person creates is not easily compensated in an information economy. Right now the information economy makes up less than 5% of the total in the U.S.

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9632169/EconomicCensus2007.html>

from

[http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFEconFacts?_event=&#...</a><p>So advertising for the other sectors in the economy works well to support most of the information sector right now. What happens as those other sectors become more automated though? The smaller and smaller amount of people in charge of those sectors will become disproportionately compensated for the value they create. This is already happening in Wall Street for example. So we're going to need to find some way to compensate people for their digital contributions to things like open source, online communities like this, and other informational public goods or we'll be left relying on the government and/or super rich to distribute the abundance of wealth. Neither of which sound very appealing to me.

</comment><comment><USER96> money is no longer necessary, our current economic systems dont work and do not reflect the abundance we create. I propose that everything is made free instead, everyone just take as much as they need.

</comment><comment><USER97> Amazing. Just amazing. I like!

</comment><comment><USER98> What a bunch of hippy bullshit.

<comment><USER28> You are being downvoted because your statement was not a constructive comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Ridiculous. If we had our priorities straight, there would be low unemployment.

Our infrastructure is crumbling beneath us, yet we won't spend any money to fix it. Instead we're fighting a handful of wars abroad that doesn't help us at all.

We need better roads, public transportation, and faster internet.</comment>


Google's R Style Guide - <AUTHOR> http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/google-r-style.html <comment><USER2> > Do not place spaces around code in parentheses or square brackets

The violation of this rule in Mono code is probably 60% of the reason I'd never want to contribute to it. I simply can't stand the abomination of looking at method calls like:

        foo.bar( baz );

Ugh.

<comment><USER3> I used to be like this, but I have recently warmed to this idea. foo.bar( baz ) is a little "verbose looking", but when you generalize to arbitrary expressions:

       foo.bar( baz => quux, gorch => 42 );

it starts looking a lot nicer. The foo.bar(baz) is really the outlier, and for the sake of consistency, you might as well add a space.

(That said, sometimes I don't, and I would never "care" one way or the other. If you are writing good code, where the spaces are is of little importance.)

<comment><USER4> foo.bar(baz => quux, gorch => 42); looks pretty good too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The other style guides are worth a look too: <http://code.google.com/p/google- styleguide/>

Does anyone know if Google has a Java style guide?

<comment><USER6> Huh, they changed their Python style guide to be essentially Pep8 - it used to be two spaces, all CamelCase, very nasty. Anybody know when they did that?

[http://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.ht...](http://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.html)

EDIT: Hurr, source control. Looks like in July.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > # Line Length

> The maximum line length is 80 characters.

Ah, I remember programming on terminals.

edit: Most places I've worked/people I've talked to prefer 100-120 chars.

<comment><USER8> I still do.

Ok, virtual terminals (though I did use a VT220 for a good while). But I do still stick to an 80x24 screen. My theory is that if my code is too complicated for me to understand without expanding the screen, then it needs to be refactored or reorganized.

<comment><USER2> 120x43 for me, thanks. 120 is a nice width, and I inherited 43 from the old EGA mode, and together they make a reasonable aspect ratio for cascading on the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one that dislikes <\- based assignment in languages used for mathematical computation?

if(x<-10) print("oops");

<comment><USER10>
      if(x < -10) print("whee");

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to Zed (who from my understanding has programmed in R a fair amount), these are some of the worst style guidelines ever: <http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/3690822968>.

<comment><USER12> Zed Shaw trades on being loud & opinionated, so he pretty much has to say something :) On some points he's correct, but a lot of these are definitely found in R books, and R code in general. Periods certainly predominate in variable names everywhere, the reason being (as I understand it) that the underscore is synonymous with the assignment operator <\- in S-Plus--pretty hideous. Verbing and camelcasing your function names is a bit outta left field, most functions tend to look like variables (indeed, technically they are.) Maybe it's not such a bad thing to distinguish them. kConstantName I definitely don't like, reminds me too much of Hungarian notation and CONSTANT just makes more sense and is more common. Almost no one uses = in place of <-, which is a shame because there is no <\- key on the my keyboard :)

<comment><USER13> I know in a lot of Smalltalks _ was the assignment operator, because in an old prerelease version of ASCII the symbol in that position was ←. I suppose it's possible S had this confusion too, although it's pretty obscure.</comment></comment></comment>


The new tax havens - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7360932n <comment><USER2> There is a lot of loaded language in that report, and I got the feeling that the reporter should have taken an economics class before doing it. It was like watching a ignorant economics student get lectured about reality and she not wanting to accept any of it.

So, instead of pulling down a bunch of theory from the shelf and going over it, I'll just point out the obvious flaw: she believes that the country "owns" all the businesses inside of it and that by the companies acting in their own best interest, somehow they are cheating the rest of us. Most folks who have really thought about this realize that everybody acts in their own self interest and that government's role is to set things up so they grow and that a reasonable amount of money can be harvested to help fund things. At times it sounded to me like she wanted the country to be a prison: set up shop here and you can never go abroad. Paying a tax lawyer to make the best moves for your company was cheating. Etc.

I am deeply troubled that people are using mental models of business that look at businesses like the corner shopkeeper when business doesn't work like that anymore. _Business is increasingly location-independent_. Ranting about how unfair all of this is? It's not going to change that fact. It's 2011. I can live in Aruba, have corporate offices in Switzerland, have officers scattered around the world, make things in a dozen countries, market on the net, and sell in a hundred countries. You're using a mental model that doesn't match up to reality. You'll never make progress like that.

Never once did she mention that the United States double-taxes income where no other country in the world does - a critical part of the entire discussion. That omission alone should tell you how well-researched and thoughtful the piece was.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your view of what the realities are. But I don't see why should applaud them: What happens if a country like Switzerland or Singapore has a sustainable competitive advantage over the USA or Germany, that simply cannot be overcome? They can achieve some efficiencies by "freeloading" that bigger countries cannot match, for example Switzerland doesn't train enough doctors at their own universities but relies heavily on hiring doctors from Germany.

If companies cannot compete, in the long term they goe bankrupt and disappear. But how would a country disappear? It's not like every citizen could simply move somewhere else.

Also the correlation/causality is not entirely clear to me. Possibly countries are more succesful, because they have lower taxes. But at some point it could also be true that only countries that are already succesful are able to lower their rax rates so much.

<comment><USER4> _They can achieve some efficiencies by "freeloading" that bigger countries cannot match, for example Switzerland doesn't train enough doctors at their own universities but relies heavily on hiring doctors from Germany._

How is this "freeloading"? Medical schools located in Germany train doctors, who then pay the medical school. People in Switzerland pay the doctors for services.

Is Germany also freeloading on Switzerland if they purchase Swiss chocolates or watches? Is the US freeloading off India because the US buys BPO services from India?

<comment><USER3> Not entirely comparable. Most universities don't have tuition fees in Germany, the highest fees are 1000€/year, while it is estimated that the costs of educating a medical student are at least 30,000€ / year. Basically the education is heavily subsidized by the German taxpayer, so if a huge number of doctors later work and pay taxes in Switzerland it is somewhat suboptimal.

<comment><USER4> Ok, so the real problem is that Germany is forcing it's citizens to subsidize doctors and the Swiss, rather than that the Swiss are freeloading.

The obvious solution (for Germany's citizens, if not their politicians) would be to charge market rates for medical education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is such US-centric thinking.

Foreign companies never even started in the US, so there is no question of them "leaving" or "paying their fair share". If US companies are going to be competitive, they have to get out. Otherwise, investors will just choose non- US companies. It's better to set up overseas to begin with, and save the trouble.

Same thing with the US taxing citizens living abroad (unlike other countries). And so the IRS sticks its nose into every single financial transaction in the world in order to get money it doesn't deserve.

The US government should just stop being so greedy and entitled.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well there's a few things here.

1\. Company directors have a duty to maximise profits.

2\. Companies have no obligation to maximise, and every right to minimise, their taxes.

3\. The USA has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, including double taxation of repatriated earnings.

Is it any wonder companies are voting with their feet?

The more you rely on US exceptionalism, the more you place it at risk. If you tie taxes to residency of officers, they'll start moving to the Bahamas, Europe, Australia, Singapore and the like. You'll turn yourselves into a branch office. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER7> Regarding 3: The US also has a bunch of tax breaks and loopholes which most other countries do not have, leaving the _effective_ tax rate about the same as other industrialized countries.

Which leads to US companies as being the best in how to avoid paying taxes. That's how GE managed to pay no US corporate taxes last year on $5.1 billion of US profit. (Rather, 7.4 percent but those are stored overseas and won't be taxed until "repatriated." And odds are they are holding out for another tax holiday where they can repatriate for free.)

<comment><USER6> Mate, let me tell you, the USA does not have a monopoly on rent-seeking behaviour.

That said, you have weak party discipline in Congress, which makes horse- trading inevitable. That and the separation of powers means that there is no incentive to run a sensible budget and every incentive to pork-barrel.

I don't blame Americans. The US Constitution was state of the art when it was written. Australia has been lucky in that we got to see how it worked in practice before we wrote ours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"Almost everybody is in Ireland," Sullivan said. "All the pharmaceutical companies, all the high tech companies. You're stupid if you're not in Ireland," he replied._

And this is why it doesn't change These big companies are telling everyone, the US public, the Irish public, the Irish government that the low tax rate _works_. The goal of the low Irish corportion tax is exactly this. Create job in Ireland, bring companies to Ireland.

(Ireland is currently almost bankrupt and needs an IMF/ECB loan. Everything is on the budgetry chopping board, income tax, vat, new property taxes, reductions in capital spending, reducing number of teachers per student, delaying the age at which children start school. Everything. Except the 12.5% corporate tax rate, the government parties (a centre left and centre right) view it as that important.)

<comment><USER4> It sounds like the Irish government is behaving quite responsibly.

Many other governments would be tempted to try to take a bigger piece of the pie from their corporations in order to get reelected, not realizing that they might be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. It sounds like the Irish have their collective heads on straight.

<comment><USER9> I would strongly suggest learning more about the Irish financial crisis:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Irish_financi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Irish_financial_crisis)

[http://www.amazon.com/Ship-Fools-Stupidity-Corruption- Celtic...](http://www.amazon.com/Ship-Fools-Stupidity-Corruption- Celtic/dp/1586488813)

There were staggering levels of corruption and mismanagement both in the Irish government and within the Irish financial industry.

I don't think you can look at the corporate tax rate independently from all of the other utterly crazy things that were going on there.

<comment><USER8> _There were staggering levels of corruption and mismanagement both in the Irish government and within the Irish financial industry._

Agreed. There was clearly very little banking regulation, and many private banks were let run wild, combine that with a massive property bubble (prices have falled nationwide by 50% since 2007), and a strong societal urge to get on the property market, and Ireland is in massive financial trouble.

<comment><USER8> And to give you an idea of how massive the property bubble group think was, here's a video of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister/leader of government) saying in July 2007 that people who talk down the economy are so stupid that they should commit suicide <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfjGSfuSQpA>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Accompanying text: <http://www.cbsnews.com/2102-18560_162-20046867.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> Serious question; What's the difference between price fixing and tax harmonisation?

<comment><USER12> Since governments make the laws, lots of things prohibited to private entities turn out to be legal when governments do them.

<comment><USER11> So, one is legal and one is not. Is that really the extent of it? This sounds like a pretty clear example of something that should probably be closed to all parties, gov included.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of course Google, Microsoft et al were telling Ireland the other month that they couldnt raise their rates or they would leave. There is too much power here. Aligning tax rates globally will be necessary, like the EU did in Europe.

On the other hand if GE is paying 3.6% then some loopholes need closing. Remove the ways to avoid tax and you can cut the basic rate. That was the plan for the abortive Reagan tax simplification.

Governments are too weak for all the pork barrelling loophole generation and then get screwed by this type of evasion. Drastic tax simplification should be back on the agenda, but is as unlikely as ever.

<comment><USER6> > Aligning tax rates globally will be necessary

Yes. The US should lower its rates, not the other way around. The US can only get away with 35% because it's the largest economy in the world.

edit: to downvoters, I'd prefer you gave a reply than just metaphorically shaking your head.

<comment><USER14> I wonder why the government needs to impose 35% tax on companies. Could it have something to do with inefficiency?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Speaking of low taxes, I think US companies are overlooking Turkey and the advantages it offers to tech companies.

1) no corporate tax 2) no income tax for employees

All that is required is for the project to be approved as an R&D project. There is an incredible talent pool, solid infrastructre and a beautiful city waiting...I am just saying...:-)

</comment><comment><USER16> I think this 'tax amnesty' borders on extortion. So all these companies used every loophole they could find to pay lower taxes, and now they want to bring the booty back, and it has to be for free. Assuming this happens, what prevents them from doing the same thing again?</comment>


Ask HN: Techniques for relaxing before an interview - <AUTHOR> Hi All,
I've got a terrible penchant for getting all worked up and nervous before important meetings.
For instance, i have an interview in half an hour and my hands are getting sweaty, im feeling hot and uncomfortable and then that makes me more nervous as to whether it will come across in the interview.
It probably has a lot to do with my nature as an introvert.
Do any of you have techniques that you use to calm yourself before a big meeting/interview? <comment><USER2> Remember that you're interviewing _them_ as well. You have to decide if this company meets your standards. When you look at it that way, they should be the ones who are nervous! Don't be afraid to ask them questions as well (e.g. "What systems do you have in place for code review and production pushes?" or "What is your preferred framework for PHP development, and why did you choose it?"). I'm impressed when people I interview have such thoughtful questions, and usually at that point the interview turns into a conversation instead of a cross-examination.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remind myself that I'm more competent than I give myself credit for, and that "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer. As an introvert, I've found that most interviewers don't mind if you take the time to think over a question before answering it, instead of snapping out the first answer that comes to mind.

Beyond that, it's just deep breaths. Don't worry, you'll do fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you - "Remember to breathe" is a good one.

i often find myself holding my breathe for no reason other than im anxious

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can manipulate your body language to calm interview neuroses – try it out.

When you're nervous, you pull yourself into a more compact shape. Folding your arms or keeping your legs tightly together lets your reptile brain feel nicely protected when you're anxious.

Instead, widen your stance as you sit. Spread your legs a bit, arch your arms behind your head and lean your head into them, if it feels natural enough. Those in control take up more space.

It forces you to calm down and projects a more confident image. There was even an article on HN about this a few weeks ago, I think from HBS.

When I make a conscious effort to do these things, I've found that conversations like interviews are a lot more enjoyable, so I do better even in uncertain territory.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> If you find yourself nervous during the interview, try focusing your physical attention on some object. Whatever you're taking notes will do. It can help you get out of your head and stop thinking too much.</comment>


We Have Always Been at War with UI - <AUTHOR> http://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/10/we-have-always-been-at-war-with-ui/ <comment><USER2> > Twitter recently changed "favorites" to "likes" and swapped out the star for > a heart. I'm pretty used to this from Tumblr, so I was surprised by the > amount of pushback. Until I saw someone make a brilliant point (which I > neglected to save a link to): these tiny changes bother us because they > remind us that even our very personal spaces are owned by someone else.

This is, in so many words, the main argument against the cloud and against web apps in general.

Although, with regards to things changing under your feet, even with traditional self-hosted software, a pretty big issue becomes that you must either upgrade eventually, suffer security bugs due to something being dropped from support, or (if you are using only open-source software) become a maintainer for every single piece of software you care about...

<comment><USER3> Something the desktop era didn't have to bother with. You owned the device, the software, the storage. The web is sucking the world into its cloud for reasons that seem less and less relevant.

<comment><USER2> The desktop era still required you upgrading your software often enough to patch security issues and remain inside of support. I suppose the main advantage is that you still roughly got to pick _when_ to upgrade. Also, the time between major UI shifts was long enough that by the time you absolutely needed to move from your current version, you were buying a new desktop. Rather than having the one you'd already been using randomly "mutate" from under you...

<comment><USER4> > The desktop era still required you upgrading your software often enough to > patch security issues and remain inside of support.

And sometimes people find UI issues bad enough to take the risk.

Just look at e.g. all the how-tos to downgrade Skype to version 6 or 4, just to avoid the horrible current UI.

Or the migration from Office 2003 to newer versions with the ribbon UI. If I'd give my users the choice, they'd all vote to downgrade.

<comment><USER5> Actually, that was the reason I sold one user on OpenOffice, back then. Happy user now. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good writing has similarities to good UI in that you have to relate to your audience. I'm a fan of this topic and appreciate your thoughts on it. However I found your article too long for my taste and attention span. Your complaints get lost in the enormity of it all.

<comment><USER7> He's writing for exactly the right audience: The people who appreciate this kind of long-form thing and support him via Patreon, i.e. actual money.

Your post would've been better spent by suggesting a TL;DR paragraph at the top.

<comment><USER8> Just as an aside, I checked out his Patreon page, and it looks like he earns around $850 a month for blogging. With that kind of money rolling in, you'd expect some pretty long essays. Or high quality short ones.

<comment><USER9> That kind of money? That's not enough money to live in a cardboard box and eat ramen noodles three meals a day.

<comment><USER10> Au contraire! Cardboard box: free (salvageable). 90 packs of generic ramen: $90 at most.

<comment><USER11> Malnutrition and exposure leading to chronic ill health and reduced lifespan: priceless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Aside from simple web app UI's, something that is highly overlooked in UI, is customizeability (ability to customize, yeah that word sounds better than it looks). Only a handful of apps get this right. I've been doing UI for a while now so I notice as I used different apps. Adobe apps are pretty good, with consistent icons yet distinguishable, and highly customizeable UI that you can move around and reposition. On the other side, you have Microsoft Office UI that is just shit. I want to headbutt my monitor when I spend more time looking for a command in WORD than in Eclipse, when it's supposed to be a fucking word processor! It has no consistency in how its categorized in what seems to be random grouping, very little customization, and they take the liberty of changing drastically from one version to the next with no option to go back. I imagine the UX designers at MS like the Comcast guy from South Park massaging his nipples.

Just give the user the ability to customize a lot, and don't pay teams of UX to design specific UI that will change again and again.

<comment><USER13> On the other hand: I don't think there would be a need to customize anything if the UI was actually well thought-out and executed.

Customizing, unless it is simply about making things feel more personal (like changing the background for example), feels like fixing the UI to what it should have been, basically fixing the designer's botched job.

In other words, it _shouldn 't_ be needed.

 _> Just give the user the ability to customize a lot, and don't pay teams of UX to design specific UI that will change again and again._

No. That's just offloading the complexity onto the user. Not everyone wants to have to redesign their software.

<comment><USER14> The thing this reasoning overlooks is that _apps_ are complex tools that people use in very different ways, and it doesn't make sense to force people to reinvent the wheel everytime they want a feature that your use case studies didn't predict.

How I think it should always work is:

(1) back-end layer > (2) very customizable GUI layer > (3) highly tuned sensible defaults and presets.

The great thing about this approach is that if you include analytics, the users to the UI testing for you: if you introduce an optional UI feature and see that a large portion of users do activate it, then you know you should make it the default or include it in some preset.

<comment><USER13> Well see in my opinion, they don't need to be complex tools at all.

And I would argue that 80% of users probably use the tools in more or less the same ways anyways: hence the design in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a pity that there isn't a ubiquitous way to communicate to programmers features that are at risk of being removed or at risk of causing incompatibility with other software. I don't mean some document you have to look up, I mean if you use an at-risk feature, you're given a warning many years before it actually gets removed. Programmers often discover features of APIs by trial and error, not just by reading the manual.

At-risk features should include things that may not get removed but aren't supported by every platform - like .Net classes that aren't present in Wine. Sure, MS asks you not to target non-Windows platforms but in reality, users will still try to do it.

<comment><USER16> The tendency to just remove features without so much as a word of warning to users seems pretty popular these days. I think it is most commonly seen as part of a push to remove complexity from the program. Unfortunately this mentality can also make it seem like creating and maintaining channels that warn users of upcoming changes are unnecessary pieces of process complexity.

Of course all that is accomplished by this internal simplifying is offloading that complexity to the user who will then complain and/or seek out a way to do what they want to do on their own. Users searching for undocumented features is probably a good thing and should be encouraged. In the case of developers unwilling to communicate properly, all the users can do is try to fill in the gaps themselves by guessing and speculating on what the developers are up to. This, I don't think is such a good thing, and it's somewhat embarrassing when it happens with a social media company whose main product is a communication tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't believe that changes are being made as thoughtlessly as this article portrays. Twitter employees read the same things you and I read, you can be damn sure they're aware swapping the Moments tab caused a bunch of accidental clicks.

The article ascribes the decision to ignorance, or being bad at measuring. That doesn't feel right here. Swapping tab order is going to guarantee more people look at it, and maybe the thought process is that twitter moments is a great feature so even some accidental clickers might start using it as a result of actually seeing it for the first time.

Call it hubris or not caring about your users or whatever; the point is, all of these "dumb" decisions are being made by people whose job it is to think about them.

<comment><USER18> Employees can easily experience tunnel vision even if they were happily dogfooding the product themselves:

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10926816/twitter- employee-e...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10926816/twitter-employee- experiences-harassment-on-twitter)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Rudder – receive quick feedback on upcoming decisions - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/id925570269

<comment><AUTHOR> Rudder is a free iPhone that enables users to receive quick feedback on upcoming decisions. Users create polls to send to friends for immediate feedback. It's Survey Monkey, but geared towards being social and fun.

Please let me know if you have any comments or feedback.

</comment><comment><USER2> You are asking for a phone number! Why? Why this feature will make my experience with your app better? First you ask for email or Facebook for login, then for a phone number! Total anti-UX!

<comment><AUTHOR> At first, we wondered if asking for a phone number would be a big turn off. Through some testing, we decided that people didn't seem to mind. Right now, the app connects people via phone numbers, allowing our verification process to function more smoothly. For instance, if you invite a non-user to vote on a poll, that person receives an SMS on their cell telling them to download Rudder. When that person downloads and inputs that same number they received the text on, all of the polls that were sent to that number will appear. We're currently working to overhaul this process and allow invitations to also work via email. We'll get there. Thanks for the feedback and I'm sorry the login process was overbearing. I hope you find the rest of the app to your liking.</comment></comment>