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ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

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Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#511

Post by WalterBright »

wwweston wrote: post #507
WalterBright wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No country has ever raised up poor people by eviscerating the wealthy.

The Nordic model does a great job of providing a poor-raising floor (which also launches entrepreneurs at a higher success rate than in the US). And Norway in particular seems to have figured out how to take commons resources and turn them into common wealth while industry retains profit incentives. No one is “eviscerated.” And it’s disingenuous to use that term for any proposal that has even the slightest public tra…

The Nordic model depends on sitting on an ocean of oil.

> No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy.

See Bernie Sanders!

Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#512

Post by Cpoll »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #443
Cpoll wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A third of them were made redundant If I'm reading this correctly, the interpretation should be that a third of them were transferred to new branches. 0.66 (two thirds retention) * 1.4 (40% more branches) = 0.84, so we only expect ~16% were made redundant.

.66 * 1.4 = .92, so it's even less.

Whoops, not sure how I made that mistake. Thanks for the correction.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#513

Post by idiotsecant »

thegrimmest wrote: post #289
IgorPartola wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a society where one person produces all the value. Their job is to do highly technical maintenance on a single machine that is basically the Star Trek replicator: it produces all the food, clothing, housing, energy, etc. that is enough for every human in this society and the surplus is stored away in case the machine is down for maintenance, which happens occasionally. Maintaining the machine takes very speci…

For something to be deserved, it must be earned. What do these people do to distinguish themselves from The Engineer’s pets? If they are wholly dependant on him for their subsistence, what distinguishes him from their god? To derive an alternate system you need alternate axioms. The axioms of our liberal society are moral equality and peaceful coexistence. Among such equals, no one person, group, or majority has the…

Hey, dude. How does someone earn value once automation does all the work? Earning the right to a share of the resources when resources are derived from automated labor is such a thoroughly pathological concept that I'm not sure we're communicating on the same planet.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#514

Post by sarchertech »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #454
bluefirebrand wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect your family was not as middle class as you think it was. You're describing a very similar childhood to what I had in the late 80s, but we were lower class for sure I'm not saying that middle class families flew all the time in the 80s, but they absolutely could afford to if they wanted to make it a priority A cursory google search seems to bear this out. Cheap flights in north america started in 1978 with s…

GP claims their family was lower middle class not properly middle class. My family mostly traveled like kelnos family did at the time. Also gas prices in the 80s-90s were so cheap that it rarely made sense to fly over driving. We flew as a family twice as a kid because we were an immigrant family and we saved up to visit the country of origin but it was ridiculously expensive to take the whole family, so dad stayed h…

They said solid middle class not lower.

My family was working class not even lower middle class.

And even we flew a few times in the late 80s early 90s, and we had a (probably used) Tandy computer that hooked up to the living room TV.

People have different priorities. We certainly couldn’t have afforded a current generation top of the line computer, and we couldn’t have flown every year. But an older computer and the occasional flight were firmly attainable to anyone with stable job if they really wanted them.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#515

Post by user_7832 »

danielbln wrote: post #113
havaloc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My boomer dad does more things on his phone than I do and I'm Gen X. It's actually astonishing how much he does on his iPhone. I'm dragging out the laptop and he's on his iPhone happy as a clam.

I've heard that GenX/Millenials are in a sort of PC goldilocks zone. People older than that cohort don't know computers and therefore use phones for everything, people younger don't know computers and also use phones for everything.

This depends a lot on too many factors. I'm not of your target age group, but not only me but most of my friends are similarly technically minded. Many of us were rooting our phones back in school, even though it wasn't needed of course.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#516

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

lchengify wrote: post #196

Two anecdotes I'll share: First: Most people believe it was Netflix that killed Blockbuster, but that's not strictly correct. It was the combination of Netflix and Redbox that really sealed the deal for Blockbuster (and video rental generally). It normally takes not one, but at least two things to really fill the full functionality of a old paradigm. Also it's human nature to focus heavily on one thing (Blockbuster w…

I have a hard time believing that Redbox had much of an impact on Blockbuster, and they certainly weren't changing the video rental paradigm.

Netflix's original DVD-rental by mail business no doubt ate into Blockbuster's business to some degree, and with their huge inventory was more of a head-on competitor than Redbox which could only offer a vending-machine full of options - the most popular ones.

What really killed Blockbuster was streaming video, not just a way of "automating" the DVD rental business - it was the paradigm shift, similar to the mobile banking vs ATM shift that TFA describes.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#517

Post by ragebol »

Am I weird in that I don't think I ever interacted with a bank teller?

The only bank employee I ever interacted with was when getting a mortgage and maybe opening an account, but at least here in the Netherlands, I don't think there are any bank tellers left really? Old people complain of course, but am I missing something here?

EDIT: I'm pushing 40, relevant here I guess

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#518

Post by babypuncher »

alex43578 wrote: post #360
hn_acc1 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right there with you. Sure, I have gained a lot as a software engineer in the valley (I guess I'm upper-middle class now), but I'd give it up and go right back to lower-middle class (1980s) status I was raised in if it meant my kids could also aspire to a similar lower-middle class life. This suicide-pact of "either AI goes crazy and 100 people rule the world with 99% of the world's wealth" or "AI fails badly and eve…

You can easily live a “lower middle class 1980s life” on minimum wage today. Find a 1980s apartment, an early 2000s used car, and don’t bother paying for TV, Starbucks, a cellphone, etc.

this is straight up not even true, and even if it was, you're ignoring the fact that things like cell phone and internet are required to function in modern society.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#519

Post by dh2022 »

WalterBright wrote: post #511
wwweston wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nordic model does a great job of providing a poor-raising floor (which also launches entrepreneurs at a higher success rate than in the US). And Norway in particular seems to have figured out how to take commons resources and turn them into common wealth while industry retains profit incentives. No one is “eviscerated.” And it’s disingenuous to use that term for any proposal that has even the slightest public tra…

The Nordic model depends on sitting on an ocean of oil. > No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. See Bernie Sanders! Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).

Maybe you should choose your words more carefully, Walter Bright. To eviscerate means to disembowel. Nobody is pushing to physically hurt the rich. But people are upset that their standards of living are declining while every opportunity to give more money to the rich is executed.

Bernie Sanders asked for taxing the rich and the corporations. Taxing someone does not mean disembowel.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#520

Post by wwweston »

WalterBright wrote: post #511
wwweston wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nordic model does a great job of providing a poor-raising floor (which also launches entrepreneurs at a higher success rate than in the US). And Norway in particular seems to have figured out how to take commons resources and turn them into common wealth while industry retains profit incentives. No one is “eviscerated.” And it’s disingenuous to use that term for any proposal that has even the slightest public tra…

The Nordic model depends on sitting on an ocean of oil. > No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. See Bernie Sanders! Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).

The "Nordic model" refers to the socioeconomics common in Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), not just to Norway.

It's about how you approach commons and common wealth. Any commons will do. It does not rely on oil resources per se.

Let's say for the sake of argument it does depend on oil wealth, though.

The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does (>200 billion barrels vs ~7 billion). It has already produced at least 200billion barrels since the 1850s. What if the US had treated the wealth from past oil production the way Norway has? What if it treated the next 200 billion that way?

And oil is only one of many commons resources to choose from.

> See Bernie Sanders!

Yes, I addressed Sanders proposal in my earlier comment: "single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy."

A single digit wealth tax is unlikely to fully offset even conventional yearly returns, hence the "might not have impact beyond stabilizing" the wealth of those subject to it.

Even if we assume no yearly returns though -- simply a 5% bite out of net worth -- a wealth tax will not make anyone in that economic strata unwealthy (there's a billions-floor beneath which it wouldn't apply, leaving the worst case still radically prosperous).

There's no reasonable basis to characterize that as "evisceration."

But repeating loaded terms like that as part of an ideological rosary is a common religious and rhetorical strategy.

> Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).

My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.

Having dynastic wealth flows limited over a few million dollars is also not reasonably described as "evisceration" (especially with all the other vehicles for transferring wealth).

May as well complain to God that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.

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