Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starry seems to charge $50 per month for 0.2 Gbit/second speeds. OP is claiming 50x faster speed at a lower price
Starry actually has way better speeds
Source? (Are you sure you aren’t confusing Mbps and Gbps?)
Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
381–390 of 603 posts
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fastest way of learning something is to have a professional teach you. Not even the Internet can beat that. Because of cut backs to education, we have fewer good mentors. Because of loss in manufacturing in N. America there are fewer skilled professionals to pass on their knowledge.
Plenty of professionals are out there teaching on youtube. I can fix my car, my plumbing, my electrical, I can frame an addition to my house, I can setup an irrigation system. Rebuild a chainsaw, build my own furniture, refinish my floor, fix my drywall, concrete flatwork. These are all things I've done in the past year. The proliferation of digital video, high quality cameras, microphones and editing software has ma…
There are a lot of how to guides. Anything requiring a longer attention span or curated lesson is not promoted by the algorithm or facilitated well online. I mentor developers on a regular basis. Unless they need a book to get foundational knowledge or a recipe on how to make something very specific, I teach it myself because there's no adequate YouTube tutorial.
There's also no YouTube tutorial to tell you something like "don't mix types of metals for you gas plumbing or you'll kill your family" because there's no professional watching you make stupid mistakes.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consumption is directly related to production. If I was willing to live on the minimum I could have retired after only a couple years. People retire at 65 now like before, but with a lot more stuff their additional productivity gave them. People seem to like it, so the argument that they shouldn't have so much junk is a bit flat.
Is all that extra stuff making them happier? Or are they just acquiring it to keep up with their neighbours? Maybe someone who retired early on the minimum would genuinely be less happy, but only because of seeing how much "better off" everyone else was.
I don't have a huge amount of evidence for this (I suspect you do not for your claim either), but I would guess that yes, it does make people happier.
The stuff I own is not keeping up with the neighbours, it's stuff that is meaningful to my hobbies. I have a cupboard full of board games because that makes me happy. My friend has a cupboard full of kitchen equipment because that makes them happy. My other friend has a basement with a home gym, my other friend has a mountain of books, and another friend has lovely furniture.
Which all implies that we're not really trying to keep up with each other, because if we were, we'd now be competing in completely different races. And even when I meet people with a similar interest to me (e.g. board games), the wealth and variety of the medium means that we'll probably still have very different interests within the world of board gaming.
So it logically seems to me that, if anything, the era of social competition is waning because people are more willing to accept that they want different things to their neighbours.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#384Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you missed a turn, god help you. People had lots and lots of paper maps. Every gas station had a rack of them. You'd probably have had a good spiral-bound one of your entire region in your car. Wrong turn? Just check the map and save God's help for later.
Eh, everyone I knew got lost and then tried to figure out where on the paper map they were while trying to not get into an accident. GPS, you just wait a second for it to update and you barely miss a beat.
This sounds like poor navigation skills to me. You should be able to find out roughly where on the map you are purely by dead reckoning.
So maybe if we by "productivity" mean "can get away without acquiring useful skills" then sure, "productivity" has definitely gone up.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your 22 Outlander won't last as long as your 1995 car. There's just too much tech in it that will go wrong, or be unsupported in 10 years. No one will know how to fix it. We are adding complexity where we should not be, but then cars are designed to be sold, not to be used for more than 3 years.
Completely wrong, in aggregate. Vehicle longevity and reliability have significantly increased over that time period. However, when an unproven new car is compared to an old car that has already survived for a long time, it’s possible you may be right.
The same new cars that need the entire transmission replaced if any one thing goes wrong in it? Compared to those poorly built old cars where you could blow a gasket and just put a new one in?
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly agree, though I think there are differences you'd notice rather quickly (but nothing as big as moving from 1890 to 1950) If you removed all the screens you'd probably first notice what's missing as opposed to what's different. In many of today's homes you wouldn't see things like tape / record players, stereos, VCRs, telephones, books, maps, yellow pages, rolodexes, calendars - all of these having a digital…
Much of that is consumption, though. I don't want to knock consumption, but it's not productivity.
What things do you do at home that you would count as productivity? I'd say dishwasher and microwave would be much more common today than in the 80s. Clothes washing machine probably not more common but today's would be brighter, beepier, more economical on power and water and with better chemical detergents. Power Showers compared to waiting for an immersion heater to heat a hot water tank, maybe, high power transistors seem to be more of a thing than in the past. Portable Li-Ion power tools could improve DIY productivity for people who do that kind of thing. Battery portable vacuum cleaners and Roombas?
Is that about it? You can't "productivity" sleeping or oven baking or raising children or relaxing or socialising or a lot of household living experiences. You can productivity your paper work, insurance, banking, but that's screen based. Once you've got clothes from a hand wash to a machine there isn't much pressure for it to be very fast compared to kinda slow, since you aren't hanging around waiting.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points. Still, there are imperfections in the argument: safety, availability (very few could afford that flight in 1936, if I understand correctly), range (NY to LA or London would be entirely different, etc.).
The range question was addressed by 1960. Costs fell markedly from 1930 -- 1970. Far less so since. It's popular to point to how much airline ticket prices have fallen since dregulation (under Democratic president Carter) in 1979, without also noting that 1979 was a local price peak driven by the Iranian oil embargo of the same year. Safety has increased, of course. That's largely been a continuous function from the…
There's also quite a bit more people who travel by airplane today than in the 1930s. This adds complexity in trafficking, which works to slow things down, rather than speed things up. The fact that overall trip times are marginally faster, despite added traffic volume & complexity, largely explains things here.
But despite this, I mostly agree with the broader premise.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 years ago in order to navigate somewhere you had to ask someone for directions and write down notes. If you missed a turn, god help you. We fundamentally move through the world vastly differently thanks to digital maps. Many people (and in a few years, the majority) are doing so in cars that use electric motors instead of internal combustion engines. One way to tell whether you're in an 80s house would be to look…
> If you missed a turn, god help you. People had lots and lots of paper maps. Every gas station had a rack of them. You'd probably have had a good spiral-bound one of your entire region in your car. Wrong turn? Just check the map and save God's help for later.
Everybody should keep a spiral bound atlas in their car. The dependence we are all discussion on GPS will be _really_ painful in the event of a crisis when your cell service stops working and you can't find your way home from 2 miles away.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something. A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least.
> A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least. Yes, absolutely true. Given "hundreds of filing cabinets" though, how many of those leads can or will even be contacted…
> how many of those leads can or will even be contacted in the salesperson/company's lifetime?
that's why you also have software to do it more efficiently - may be even automated ways of contacting the lead. AKA, spam.
But it does increase sales.