51–60 of 145 posts
“There is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day”…except that’s not how ecology works. When a species is given a food surplus, its population grows, not the quality of life of its individuals. If you give your surplus food to an area that supports 5,000 starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of them will be around in the next generation to star…
Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products. The article doesn't mention Lanier's extensive writing on what he calls Digital Maoism: the notion that collectives always solve problems better than individuals, who should give their digital content away for free. If there were some way of monetizing this digital content th…
I honestly feel that the way our government is run by lawyers (who seem to actually believe in this silly idea of an IP-based economy) is the reason so much manufacturing has fled the country. Americans today just don't know the value of mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Germany and Switzerland didn't make this mistake. They love and value manufacturing and look where their economies are.
(And by the way kids, get off my lawn :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1] In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and servic…
It's not so impossible to believe. The objection I often hear (and I recall that this is PG's stance as well) is that as old jobs disappear new ones will take their place. For example, as the article mentioned, the former toll booth operator could now repair the automated toll booth system. So far this general idea has been true. Before computers existed as we know them, "computers" were people who did lengthy comput…
If the levels automation rise to crazy levels, and there are cheaper and greener sources to energy to drive them. Then Food, Clothing and Shelter won't be much of a problem. We will get those three things without much effort. In other words, you can survive without doing anything.
But you will still pay for Opera, a concert, you will pay to visit a art gallery. You will still pay for quality entertainment. You will continue to pay for a costly vacation in a foreign country. You will pay to find out the deepest secrets of the universe and traveling to get there. Somebody might invent an organic fruit which might taste nothing like before, and you might have to pay just to taste it. There might be narcotic drugs that take you heaven without killing you, and you might pay for it etc etc. .Our goals as a society will be different. But we will still have to work to meet them.
There will be reasons for humans to exist, but those will be very different reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The evidence flatly contradicts this. Give people contraception and reasonable financial security and the reproduction rate drops like a rock. You can argue about the why, but the what is at this point undeniable. There is no need to go around starving people to "control" the population. This suggestion is no longer a fashionably cynical stance to take in the face of hard reality, it's just evil. We are not reproduci…
…No. The evidence strongly supports this. It’s a fundamental principle of ecology that an increase in food production causes an increase in population. But what may not be intuitive is that these two increases need not happen in the same place, and often do not. Contraception is irrelevant. Our population is not growing as quickly in the developed world as it is elsewhere, but it is still assuredly growing. It always…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1] In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and servic…
- The rise of *aaS
- The mindset of maximizing profits and and minimize expense
Some of us have said a few times in the past: building software is expensive.
Some of us have also said a few times in the past that: good programmers are expensive.
Put two together and you get a recipe as to why more companies shy away from custom-development and prefer to build IT based on OOB + small tweaks.
I've been seeing a growing demand of Microsoft Office 365 + Sharepoint Online + Dynamics CRM Online as opposed to in-house installation or using Basecamp.NEXT + Backpack (yes, SP Online is equal to Basecamp.NEXT + Backpack). Some companies don't necessarily put top premium for nice UI or super simple easy and friendly software.
Open Source software is also impacted with the rise of the cloud: in certain area of software, if the cost of the commercial offering is less than installing+maintaining Open Source software, then that particular area of software for Open Source probably will die eventually (e.g.: Open Source bug tracking and project management software => Is it more expensive to install+maintain Trac vs paying GitHub/FogCreek/Atlassian to host everything?)
We might be slowly eating ourselves as well (in the context of IT). Whether we can produce something new, innovative, and exciting, faster than we can eat is yet to be seen.
PS: There are industries with unique requirements and regulations, these industries might pay for expensive custom software until one day a new software will arise and effectively kill customization in the said industry.
IMHO, USPS is more important now than ever.
"New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete."
I wasn't aware that "Google-controlled self-driving automobiles" was rendering taxicab drivers obsolete any time in the near future... call me a luddite, but we've probably got several decades of legal and social hurdles before that even approaches being a reality.
The abstraction of "jobs" from "the things we do to survive" is interesting. The only things we "need" to do are reproduce, and find food and shelter towards that end. It's crazy that we have blown past the struggle for survival so far it's almost been forgotten, like the binary code under our lovely Ruby scripts. But we still feel the flutter of our primal fears for survival, even in the abstraction, and fight to th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The evidence flatly contradicts this. Give people contraception and reasonable financial security and the reproduction rate drops like a rock. You can argue about the why, but the what is at this point undeniable. There is no need to go around starving people to "control" the population. This suggestion is no longer a fashionably cynical stance to take in the face of hard reality, it's just evil. We are not reproduci…
…No. The evidence strongly supports this. It’s a fundamental principle of ecology that an increase in food production causes an increase in population. But what may not be intuitive is that these two increases need not happen in the same place, and often do not. Contraception is irrelevant. Our population is not growing as quickly in the developed world as it is elsewhere, but it is still assuredly growing. It always…
This is inaccurate. The population across significant swaths of the developed world are no longer increasing. Take Germany, Japan or Italy - all of whose populations are in fact decreasing - even after taking into account immigration statistics. If population migrations were static, this would also hold true across most of Western Europe.
>> I am advocating that some people must starve to death because it is more humane
I'm sure you regard yourself as a bold forward thinker. You're sadly mistaken.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The evidence flatly contradicts this. Give people contraception and reasonable financial security and the reproduction rate drops like a rock. You can argue about the why, but the what is at this point undeniable. There is no need to go around starving people to "control" the population. This suggestion is no longer a fashionably cynical stance to take in the face of hard reality, it's just evil. We are not reproduci…
…No. The evidence strongly supports this. It’s a fundamental principle of ecology that an increase in food production causes an increase in population. But what may not be intuitive is that these two increases need not happen in the same place, and often do not. Contraception is irrelevant. Our population is not growing as quickly in the developed world as it is elsewhere, but it is still assuredly growing. It always…
"Fundamental principles" are still less fundamental than facts. The facts are clear. It is possible for large human populations to be both abundantly fed and reproduce at less than replacement rates, and the trend is strongly in the direction of sub-replacement growth. This is true of groups that comprise multiple billions of humans, and the connection between wealth and sub-replacement rates is pretty clear.
As I said, the why is still an interesting question.
You are simply wrong. There is no reason why we must starve anyone to death in the forseeable future.
You may note I'm not providing citations. This is because I would contend this is in the class of commonly known fact. We have periodic debates arising in the media about what to do about the fact that neither we nor many other countries can sustain our planned social spending in the face of ever-slowing reproduction rates. This is not stuff that has been hiding out on obscure corners of academic journals, it's on the evening news.
On a similar vein, this is why I don't spend much time listening to people moan about how uniquely evil humans are. Humans are the uniquely moral animal. It is in fact an ecological principle that species will reproduce to consume all available food, and it is a unique characteristic of humans that we can choose not to. (So I do understand how easy it is to make that mistake.) We are not unique in utilizing our ability to raze ecosystems, we are unique in our ability not to use abilities we have, and unique in trying to fix them up after we learn better. We are not unique in our capacity for violence, we are unique in our capacity for peace, and so on.