91–100 of 212 posts
Some of the improvements tied to communication require cultural changes that can be slow. Telemedicine has been possible for a long time, but the shift only picked up steam due to Covid.
This article makes me think of the woodworker's dilemma. You might start working with cutting, planing, joining and finishing wood because you want to make a chair or end table, and you like the idea of learning to do it yourself, maybe saving some money, or at least getting some extra tools out of the process, and having some pride in your work. But before you know it, you've spent 4 years accumulating tools, but mo…
This is all true. That being said, it's not completely a bad thing. We have to accept that different people are motivated by different things. To run a business, you need both people motivated by money and people motivated by building things. People only motivated by money we work in marketing and management but don't have the mindset necessary to build the stuff they want to sell. So you get people motivated by buil…
The phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs also seems highly relevant: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ If software causes soft cost savings (reducing the number of required people) the savings may not actually be realized. The internal feudalism of large enterprises protected by monopolistic moats means people resist headcount reductions. And since these large enterprises still employ the majority of people, they are ove…
> Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs > David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not base…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had a suspicion for some years that productivity increases from the addition of computers and software to an operation is very uneven, and that apparent great progress overall is because it's a 1000x improvement in select areas while being a 0.5-1.05x change in most areas, with somewhat negative change perhaps even being the norm.
Perhaps. Why though? Why aren't HR, accounting or other such tasks more productive with computers than without?
Go from paper to spreadsheet workflow? Useful step. But then what? Eliminate the typing pool? Saves money. Then what?
Diminishing returns are to be expected.
This article makes me think of the woodworker's dilemma. You might start working with cutting, planing, joining and finishing wood because you want to make a chair or end table, and you like the idea of learning to do it yourself, maybe saving some money, or at least getting some extra tools out of the process, and having some pride in your work. But before you know it, you've spent 4 years accumulating tools, but mo…
I have spent most of my career working on fielding new software systems for the intelligence community and the DoD. We can't say we haven't seen productivity gains in the form of many processes being automated to the point we can scale them much larger and process much more data. But this isn't economic productivity. 60 years ago, satellite imagery involved dropping film from the satellite on a little parachute and intercepting it before it hit the ground, developing the film, and deploying any improvements in imaging capabilities by launching a new satellite. Now we can do almost all of that with radio and software and we have virtually the entire globe covered, a near non-stop stream of imagery constantly being turned into possibly useful and actionable intelligence depending on what the interest is in knowing what is happening in that region.
But in terms of what we're doing, much of it is economically purely a sink. We're monitoring foreign ports, known locations of military units, missile silos, to maintain the strategic advantage of not being caught with our pants down if anyone out there ever decided to launch a large-scale conventional attack. A lot of people would probably argue what we're doing is pointless, fighting yesterday's wars while losing today's. Maybe. I'm not really trying to make an argument either way for whether this activity is useful or not.
But it's not increasing American economic output, and it's not intended to. But it is an incredibly expensive and enormous scale application of deployed software technologies. It's effectively a new category of cost for the world's major military powers. They now need to spend on maintaining an enormous development pipeline and operational environment for software capabilities that bring no economic gain, but just keep them from being overtaken by their enemies.
You do see some patterns like this in commercial software, especially in the real of information security. We may or may not be able to easily deploy huge force multipliers to make our workforces more productive, but then we find they have vulnerabilities in them and we've exposed ourselves to a new kind of criminal taking advantage of that and extracting some of that value. So we devote more and more resources to securing these systems, often making them less efficient and more difficult to use in the process. We have to do it, because the added security is at least some of the time ultimately worth it due to the enormous cost of a breach. But it's purely defensive spending. You're not making your system any more effective at producing whatever it is your company produces that creates economic value. Often, you're making it less effective at doing that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few nits to pick as a woodworker: 1) You never save money building it yourself (at least not in comparison to a standard consumer option, like a chair or table from your local furniture store. This may hold up if you compare what you build to high-end hardwood furniture. But with the cost of tools, you're probably still losing money if this is just a hobby) 2) 90% of my enjoyment of woodworking is just being in my…
> You never save money building it yourself This comes up in the DIY Audio community. It seems like the economic value proposition is very sensitive to what commercial segment you compare against. You absolutely can't beat low-end, mass-produced speakers on price, but it's easy to beat high-end, boutique speakers on price while getting close on quality.
This article makes me think of the woodworker's dilemma. You might start working with cutting, planing, joining and finishing wood because you want to make a chair or end table, and you like the idea of learning to do it yourself, maybe saving some money, or at least getting some extra tools out of the process, and having some pride in your work. But before you know it, you've spent 4 years accumulating tools, but mo…
A few nits to pick as a woodworker: 1) You never save money building it yourself (at least not in comparison to a standard consumer option, like a chair or table from your local furniture store. This may hold up if you compare what you build to high-end hardwood furniture. But with the cost of tools, you're probably still losing money if this is just a hobby) 2) 90% of my enjoyment of woodworking is just being in my…
For them, there is no "end" even when completing a build. There's simply just the next client to tend to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I remember Elon Musk saying, the best part is no part. Likewise, same for process. The worst thing an engineer can do is optimize to a requirement that don't need to exist.
> As I remember Elon Musk saying, the best part is no part. IIRC, the saying originates from Mikhail Koshkin who designed the T-34 tank, often extended with “...but the essential function still performed”.