351–360 of 368 posts
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I keep seeing praise for chatbots, but every single one I've interacted with has been exactly as useless as an IVR. Do you have an example of a useful chatbot?
Chatbots are only good when staffed with a competent backing crew, and only offered to the user when those agents are online. But most companies invest the minimum in the chatbot experience so it blows.
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> We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life. When I was younger and naive, I judged the Amish. As I've grown older and wiser, I realize they had the right idea all along. Family, loved ones, community first. Everything else serves those.
Regarding the Amish, I admire their approach to technology. Technology is only accepted if it benefits them without distracting them from their main duties (family & church). This inherently makes them immune to the majority of the downsides we see in today's tech such as addictive patterns, advertising or "broken by design" tools as they would just not become accepted in the community to begin with. Given the curren…
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While the adage is true, you also have to consider the quality of work. There are a LOT of people in the US right now with a college degree who can't find any jobs related to their majors, so they end up as baristas or Amazon order pickers - their education, talents, passions being wasted, their future pretty much on hold because jobs like that don't pay enough money to pay off student debt or buy a house.
In 1920 or 1950 if we'd had as many people with college degrees as we do today, we'd also have a LOT of people who can't find any jobs related to their majors. What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in (unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a college degree. IMHO we have much more "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950, it's just that the number of c…
There was probably a point in time when learning hunting was like going to college and along comes farming to make all those hunters jobless. That’s how the wheel of “progress” rolls.
The idea that going to college will make you more bucks or guarantees you a job in your field of study is very arcane at this point.
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I don't think I ever claimed that the U.S. in it's current form is a pure capitalist system (or even close to it) and I think you're deliberately taking the first sentence of my comment out of context. That being said, I don't think we're disagreeing here or at least not entirely. I'm saying that the state can't be trusted to manage the economy and distribution of wealth because it is prone to corruption and favoriti…
Except the state has always managed the economy, you have been lied to, the upper class has never applied its free market principles to itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY
Copyright and intellectual property are monopoly rights, aka things that need a state to enforce, they are entirely fictional and are government intervention in the economy.
Learn to code” is popularizing the conversion of everybody into software engineers, but actually we don’t need most SWE either, so now we have an entirely new class of useless jobs on a SWE assembly line where 99% of the work product is simply discarded, but we still use the old industrial productivity model to drive productivity by aggressive management.
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In 1920 or 1950 if we'd had as many people with college degrees as we do today, we'd also have a LOT of people who can't find any jobs related to their majors. What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in (unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a college degree. IMHO we have much more "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950, it's just that the number of c…
Potentially somewhat controversial take on this: why do college grads deserve a better job than, say, high school grads if the subject they studied in college is not particularly relevant to the society at this point(which the lack of jobs for that qualification is indicative of)? There was probably a point in time when learning hunting was like going to college and along comes farming to make all those hunters joble…
These qualities are not guaranteed but are correlated with being able to get into college and graduate - everything from conscientiousness, ability to follow arbitrary complex rules, general intelligence and also socioeconomic status (in e.g. sales and management, the social contacts of a high-SES employee and their family are very valuable in achieving business goals, and the social contacts of a low-SES employee are not). A graduate might not have these qualities, and a non-graduate might have them, but it's hard to tell so the degree is a useful proxy because it does (or did?) correlate with these qualities.
So it made all sense for businesses to prefer college graduates for certain types of jobs ("the good jobs") even if the college major was something like history or literature in a field of business where that's not relevant, and they did just that. And because of that employer preference, a college degree was a ticket to one of these good jobs.
However, if almost everyone gets a degree that means that there's no real filtering happening, and that benefit gradually becomes useless.
Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Factory floors are largely devoid of human beings. The US factory employment figures are down by more than half in that time, and that with a population that's doubled (so per-capita, factory occupations down to 25% or less or what it was). Companies move to India or China, then some move back but with none of the assembly jobs, because they don't move back un…
> automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum. Exactly. Its impact has been limited to areas where there is repetitive work on standardised, clean objects[1], in standardised environments, in product lines where volumes are sufficient to justify the investment in machinery. > Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Yes it has. The size of the needed investment has gone down a lot in activities w…
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> "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last several years, for instance. How many people worked on assembly lines in, say, 1910 vs. 2010? How about as a percentage of an average manufacturer's staff? How many people worked as social media managers in 2010? I'd bet that (adjusted for population growth) for every 100 assembly line workers in 1910 you now have 2-3 stressed out engineers plus a bunc…
Sure, but somehow the total number of jobs has still managed to increase from 1910 to 2010. Automation shifts the work humans do. So far, it hasn't replaced the need for humans to do work, or we'd have a shrinking job market, which we didn't have prior to Covid (a temporary situation).
Also we shouldn't discount the various sophistries used to manipulate the unemployment rate. Many, many people aren't counted as 'unemployed' when they probably should be, because either they aren't applying for jobs, or they get occasional casual or gig work.
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The challenge is to get people to even consider it. In reality it is not hard to pay people to follow courses, pay people to tutor/helpdesk or pay people to be available when they are needed. Imagine a gig economy where 100 employees are on call the year round, ready to jump in when you need them for as long as you need them, complete with training to make this absurd level of scaling possible. We could do a kind of…
That sounds like a terrible job for the temp employees
In stead of a skill and experience starved pool to hire from it is redefined as a national asset. We monitor its market value and print money against it.
Since we/you/one/I want to feed, house and cloth everyone anyway we may coin a separate (freely exchangeable) currency for necessities and expire it after n months.
Just discarding people the way we do now quickly turns them from profitable & productive sources of tax revenue into expensive nuances. Having your head on the chopping block the year round with the sword hovering over it inspires a kind of productivity we no longer need. In the current economic situation we need people to maintain and grow their natural ability to think and learn. Similarly, people running businesses shouldn't have to fill their head with that horror nonsense either. They have better things to do for us. (things that they are actually good at)
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It’s a question of implementation. Consider say a 10% dividend on the economy, in the US that’s 6,300$ per year per person. Which does not sound like much to live on, but historically represents a significant income. Not that the US would adopt such a system, but it could by cutting back other spending like social programs. A tiny group might try to live in it, but more would see seasonal jobs as enough. As automatio…
10% of billions of dollars is plenty enough to cause the companies to move to some tax heaven. You can fight that with tariffs, but the end game is being outproduced by orders of magnitude and losing any influence over global market.