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On September 09 2017 11:43 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2017 11:33 Plansix wrote:On September 09 2017 11:28 WolfintheSheep wrote:On September 09 2017 11:20 Plansix wrote:On September 09 2017 11:12 WolfintheSheep wrote:On September 09 2017 10:56 kollin wrote:On September 09 2017 10:51 WolfintheSheep wrote:
The music industry enjoyed a giant 10 year mountain of revenue growth purely on the back of CDs. Which are, you know, also technology.
There is, more or less, more music and better distribution than ever. Just that nothing can come close to the stupidly high profit margins of CDs. The music industry was smaller in 2013 than it was in 1973. CDs undoubtedly drove the profit margins way up, but the extent to which the industry has shrunk in even just the last 10 years can't be over exaggerated. Given that you're using 1973 and 2013 as your data points, I'm guessing you're referring to this graph? https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/msuicmarket1973-2013.jpgThose are purely recorded media sales, which is shrinking as a proportion of music-based revenue in general. On September 09 2017 10:58 Plansix wrote:On September 09 2017 10:40 WolfintheSheep wrote:On September 09 2017 10:19 Plansix wrote:On September 09 2017 10:11 KwarK wrote:On September 09 2017 09:59 Plansix wrote:
[quote]
But that is how we measure productively and how much faster it happens. How much more than one person do. Computers are great and have increased productivity. But they are the telephone or the assembly line. They will not beat the mass market automobile or electrical grid. Computers have improved some aspects of many industries, but some has just changed. I work in a field that is almost untouched by technology, beyond that we struggle to clean up after it most of the time. I still use a type writer and fax machines. I'll give an example. Spreadsheets predate the invention of MS Excel. Walmart would call up a spreadsheet company and commission one. They would then collect all of their data and a team of people would manually process and enter it all onto a giant sheet of paper which would be mailed back a month later. Despite how laborious the process was spreadsheets still existed because the information on the spreadsheet was worth the thousands of manhours involved in assembling it. You were happy to pay $50,000 for the single spreadsheet because the information on it was worth $100,000 to you. Now they take seconds, data that would have cost millions of dollars to collect and compile is automatically fed into a system that can be queried at will, with new spreadsheets for whatever variables you feel like changing. That entire industry should, in theory, no longer exist. But it still does, and in fact more labour is being performed in it than ever. What changed is the output. Where previously you'd have fifty employees working for a week on a spreadsheet, now you have fifty employees working for a week on a hundred thousand spreadsheets. And where previously the added value of the spreadsheet was $50,000 over the costs involved, now it's many many times more because the barrier for entry is so low that queries that represent marginal increases in value are still being resolved. People still do the job, but the output is incomparable. Imagine what you'd get for engaging an architect for 40 hours thirty years ago. Now imagine what you'd get from them today for the same money and time commitment. You're still paying them, but you're not paying for the same thing. We're getting far, far more for our money. Yes, but you are not measuring all the systemic errors created by these faster system. I work at the back end of the real estate end of that system, cleaning up the mess created by two of those 50 people fucking up on their work. But because they can work 100 times faster, they made 100 times more errors before anyone caught it. I am not convinced that its a net gain at all. I look at the financial industry and see that speed only breeds stupidity and the ability to hide errors. So, honest question here... Is it actually that people have gotten sloppier or that there are more mistakes? Or is it that the mistakes are actually being caught because of the tools and the systems? Because for every "back in my day people got things right the first time" story I tend to hear, there seems to be just as many "back in my day we got away with a whole lot more shit" tales. And Dunning-Kruger and all, I'd believe the stories of the people admitting to fucking around more. Both. The metrics for success is number of deals made. More deals, more success. Faster sales means more deals. But care is needed to make sure deals are done correctly. So the company is careful with the sales and makes sure they are done correctly. Until someone else does it faster and they are not longer offered to handle sales. Then they must go faster and do it cheaper. But then they notice other companies are also going faster and making errors. But they can't get permission to correct those errors. That would slow down the sales. So they pass them along to the next buyer, selling it as is. They are also making errors, because they are not careful. And because this is all on computers and over the internet, physical documents rarely pass through peoples hands. This cycle continues forever until the errors becomes so great that they will literally get fucking sued if they sell this thing. Or they can't get title insurance. Or they discharged a mortgage in error because they discharged like 400 of them on a holiday weekend they shouldn't have because someone was working 70 hours in a week. Or they encumber the wrong land with the mortgage they gave to this family for a plot of land that does not exist. And when that happens, it comes to use and we just put our hands in our head and debate how we will explain this to the judge. Speed is what matters. Time lines are what they care about. They have time lines for time lines. Because they can go fast and no one has figured out what is the fastest. Nothing is physical, so its just fast moving ether. That sounds like a management problem. Which is happening in a lot of fields, where they just want everything reduced to numbers. Sure technology enabled that kind of attitude and micromanagement, but ultimately your life may have gotten worse, but obviously those "numbers" are getting better (in the eyes of your bosses). We have a lot of attorneys who worked in the field in the 1990s. My firm has been around since then. In the 1990s we handled a hand full of mortgages that were discharges in error over 10 years. We handle close to 70-100 in the last 2 years. All the errors have this systemic nature, where one fuck up is pushed on forever. It is industry wide and caused by the way technology has impacted the industry. Again, sounds like a management problem more than anything. How many fuck-ups does it take before it outweighs the gain from pushing things out faster? Answer is probably quite a lot. Tech has definitely enabled that kind of attitude and number crunching, but it's still people pushing those standards within the companies. I was always talking about enabling mistakes. Or simply hiding them. That was my whole discussion with Kwark. The same thing that allows him to do 50 times more work allows these folks to cover up 50 times more errors. Or they go unnoticed forever because they are buried work that is moving 50 times faster. That I questioned if the tech is a net positive for all industries. If it wasn't they couldn't justify paying you to fix the mistakes.
This gets into the risk assessments of bundled mortgages and block sales of properties. They can do a lot of weird stuff of how they account for mortgages, especially if they are federally backed. Like account for them as fully paid right after they are originated. If is no where near as clean cut you make it out to be.
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On September 09 2017 10:35 warding wrote:
It's intuitively true that technology has allowed workers to do much more. At the same time productivity hasn't shot up as you'd expect it too, neither has the median wage and we're not working much fewer hours. There seems to be a paradox here. My favorite hypothesis is that we're using all that free time technoloty has given us to browse Facebook and tl.net while at work.
What? The productivity exists. It's just going to the business owners and share holders. Even the Heritage Institute couldn't manage to show that wages grew at anything more than around 75% the rate of productivity.
http://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/~/media/images/reports/2013/07/bg 2825/bgproductivityandcompensationappendixchart1825.jpg
And I'm pretty sure they didn't account for how unpaid overtime reduces what a salaried employee is actually earning per hour of work.
My favorite hypothesis is that employers have leveraged the need for less workers to accomplish the same amount of work and a growing labor pool to drive wages down.
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if you missed what this was about, some churches are suing the government because they aren't eligible for FEMA aide
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Give up tax free status and solve this problem.
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just followed this storm news on the side but am I reading it right that over 5 million people have been ordered to evacuate, that's crazy.
They should sue Limbaugh or whoever told people that the hurricane is 'fake news',he's probably going to get people killed with that stuff
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On September 09 2017 12:07 Nevuk wrote:
if you missed what this was about, some churches are suing the government because they aren't eligible for FEMA aide
Is this a logical extension of the recent Trinity Lutheran v Comer Supreme Court decision? If a church and a non-church nonprofit do the same thing, the government can't refuse to pay the church because it's a church while paying the other nonprofit.
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On September 09 2017 12:15 Nyxisto wrote:
just followed this storm news on the side but am I reading it right that over 5 million people have been ordered to evacuate, that's crazy.
They should sue Limbaugh or whoever told people that the hurricane is 'fake news',he's probably going to get people killed with that stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_401
The busiest highway in North America carries maybe 500k cars a day, granted it's not always packed to the gills, but there is literally no way to get that many people out fast enough. At best they can get away from the Category 4 areas hopefully to the category 1-2 areas, and hopefully come out okay.
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On September 09 2017 12:39 Buckyman wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2017 12:07 Nevuk wrote:
if you missed what this was about, some churches are suing the government because they aren't eligible for FEMA aide Is this a logical extension of the recent Trinity Lutheran v Comer Supreme Court decision? If a church and a non-church nonprofit do the same thing, the government can't refuse to pay the church because it's a church while paying the other nonprofit.
Looks like it.
According to the lawsuit filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Houston, the churches claim FEMA unconstitutionally denies those funds to places of worship in violation of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause because FEMA treats them differently than other non-profits.
The church plaintiffs at issue are the Hi-Way Tabernacle, the Harvest Family Church and the Rockport First Assembly of God. Their suit reads:
FEMA policy explicitly denies equal access to FEMA disaster relief grants for houses of worship solely because of their religious status. If FEMA applies its policy to Hurricane Harvey, as it did to Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship will be denied equal access to FEMA relief. For houses of worship, FEMA’s policy is “simple: No churches need apply.”
The quoted phrase above is taken from Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, a recent Supreme Court decision which held that otherwise available public benefits cannot be withheld from religious entities simply due to their status as religious entities–and that attempts to withhold such benefits are a violation of the Free Exercise Clause. This Supreme Court decision is the basis for the churches’ legal argument.
The churches claim that FEMA’s Policy Guide contains a “categorical ban” against providing disaster relief funds under the agency’s Public Assistance (PA) Program and that but for this categorical ban, they would qualify for disaster relief funds due to their provision of services to community members.
According to the lawsuit, Hi-Way Tabernacle, “is currently in use as a shelter for dozens of evacuees, a warehouse for disaster relief supplies, a distribution center for thousands of emergency meals, and a base to provide medical services.” The lawsuit does not mention similar activities performed by the Harvest Family Church or the Rockport First Assembly of God, but cites some of the damage their buildings have suffered due to Hurricane Harvey.
Due to the nature of the damage, the plaintiffs are seeking expedited relief. lawnewz.com
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On September 09 2017 12:39 Buckyman wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2017 12:07 Nevuk wrote:
if you missed what this was about, some churches are suing the government because they aren't eligible for FEMA aide Is this a logical extension of the recent Trinity Lutheran v Comer Supreme Court decision? If a church and a non-church nonprofit do the same thing, the government can't refuse to pay the church because it's a church while paying the other nonprofit.
Pretty much. The separation of church and state will continue to erode as they ask for more and more tax payer money. Soon we will be funding religious charter schools and prohibit the teaching of evolution. Of course only Christian charter schools.
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Wasn't the warning zone already "Florida"?
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
As with many other industries (including photography with the famous Kodak example), the advent of the internet led to a situation where the customer base expanded immensely, but margins went down severely. The music industry leadership was one of the worst at adapting to it, thinking that they could use lawsuits and intellectual property controls to stem the tides of the coming of a new business reality. That's on them, not on the internet.
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On September 09 2017 10:14 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2017 09:59 warding wrote:On September 09 2017 09:46 kollin wrote:On September 09 2017 09:40 warding wrote:On September 09 2017 09:26 kollin wrote:On September 09 2017 09:17 KwarK wrote:On September 09 2017 09:08 kollin wrote:On September 09 2017 09:07 sc-darkness wrote:On September 09 2017 09:05 kollin wrote:On September 09 2017 09:01 sc-darkness wrote:
[quote]
Note I work in the tech industry so I could be biased. However, I think the IT industry has truly brought innovation - computers are everywhere to help people. What can't this be acknowledged? If you don't believe that IT has brought high level of innovation, then PLEASE specify another field where innovation is at a high level. I'm OK with that. I'm not OK with "blah blah IT tech industry is overrated". Of course the tech industry has produced a lot of innovation. I still think, as a whole, it is placed on too high a pedestal by some people and there's a culture of worship by some around it that I think is excessive. Especially when I look at the 'leaders' in tech eg Musk, the Google guys etc, I can't help but feel people idolise them far too much. Well, maybe. I don't follow them as much so I don't know. I suppose it's refreshing and exciting for some people to get new technology. I find astronomy impressive though. That has also brought some nice innovation and research.  I'm a bigggg space nerd so I definitely understand what you mean. I think Plansix is more talking about Silicon Valley types that really aren't providing THAT much to society while calling themselves 'Leaders in Innovation' or whatever. If you trust the market they're providing an awful lot to society. I think the value of the information age is difficult to really properly quantify. Take my field. The vast, vast majority of all accounting work that was done a few decades ago is now done by software, and on a far greater scale than could possibly have been imagined back then. Technology has created an army of hundreds of millions of virtual skilled accountants that have been mobilized productively. The amount of economic activity attributable directly to tech is breathtaking. I'd very easily believe that economic productivity attributable solely to tech from the last 20 years is greater than the entire economic productivity that preexisted it, that we've successfully leveraged our labour at a greater than 2:1 ratio. Oh undoubtedly it's an amazing asset economically (even if none of the companies seem to pay taxes or ensure workers at their supply shops are paid properly). I more just wonder if Silicon Valley gives people a lot of things that they clearly want (the value of some companies attest to this), even if they aren't that beneficial to society. Uber and Deliveroo are some examples that come to mind. I've seen a study showing Uber to be vastly more efficient than taxis (much higher % of time and of miles driven with a passenger). That's clearly beneficial to society over the previous status quo. It's easy to see how Airbnb is also incredibly beneficial - opening up an industry from concentrated hotel chains into hundreds of thousands (millions?) of home owners, all the while driving down prices. There are thousands upon thousands of similar examples with varying degrres of magnitude of impact. sc-darkness thereare promising technologies coming up in those fields but they really haven't changed the industries all that much. Do note that four medical I'm only referring to digital technologies. Uber has also brought about a fairly shitty age of gig economy jobs. Arguably these always existed through cash in hand jobs, Craigslist and whatever, but I still have the gut feeling that Uber had legitimised the gig economy like nothing before it. Maybe the gig economy is more a symptom of problems in society, but nevertheless I think if you look at companies like Uber from a different angle the value they provide to society is less clear. The gig economy is actually tiny in the grand scheme of things and not that nefarious. When autonomous driving comes there won't be any more salient examples of it left and it won't be an issue anymore. Edit: I generally agree with Kwark, we live in an exciting age technology wise. I also agree with Plansix, until technology gets us rid of lawyers it really hasn't fully delivered on its promise. That's the thing though, it doesn't get rid of jobs because we don't say "we can now do the same work for 10% of the hours, 90% of humans can go home now". Instead we say "awesome, now we can all do 10x as much, back to work folks". We had lawyers thirty years ago and lawyers today. But thirty years ago you wouldn't expect the law firm you hired to have highly educated individuals read and understand a hundred thousand internal letters sent within a company. Now you would absolutely expect their software to read the emails and sort them for the kind of content you were after in, for example, a sexual harassment case. We still have lawyers, but they're doing more lawyering than ever before. edit: Uber/Snap/Twitter etc are not the face of the tech revolution, it's stuff like enterprise management software where the real magic happens imo.
Well at least ideally that would happen, however that trend seems to be breaking. It's true that overall employment in the US (and i think the EU as well) is now similar/slightly higher than before the 2008 crisis. However the if you zoom in slightly more you see that there has been a loss of some 10% of 'middle' skilled jobs which have been replaced by a small amount of very high skilled jobs and a large amount of very low skilled jobs. I forget the breakdown, i think it was something like 20/80 high skill low skill. Basically a growing number of people who previously led middle class lives now work taking out laundry, flipping burgers, etc. And if they are here in california there is a decent chance they are doing it out of their car because they can no longer afford an apartment. And across the US real median incomes have fallen this century ( https://www.ft.com/content/695bfa18-1797-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e )
I mean I agree that technological progress is a good thing, but I also think we have to think very seriously about how the fruits of that progress are being distributed. And simply saying that new jobs will appear and old ones will be upgraded and all (or even most) shall prosper is not enough, because most are not prospering. At least not relative to 20 years ago.
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On September 09 2017 16:34 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2017 10:14 KwarK wrote:On September 09 2017 09:59 warding wrote:On September 09 2017 09:46 kollin wrote:On September 09 2017 09:40 warding wrote:On September 09 2017 09:26 kollin wrote:On September 09 2017 09:17 KwarK wrote:On September 09 2017 09:08 kollin wrote:On September 09 2017 09:07 sc-darkness wrote:On September 09 2017 09:05 kollin wrote:
[quote]
Of course the tech industry has produced a lot of innovation. I still think, as a whole, it is placed on too high a pedestal by some people and there's a culture of worship by some around it that I think is excessive. Especially when I look at the 'leaders' in tech eg Musk, the Google guys etc, I can't help but feel people idolise them far too much. Well, maybe. I don't follow them as much so I don't know. I suppose it's refreshing and exciting for some people to get new technology. I find astronomy impressive though. That has also brought some nice innovation and research. I'm a bigggg space nerd so I definitely understand what you mean. I think Plansix is more talking about Silicon Valley types that really aren't providing THAT much to society while calling themselves 'Leaders in Innovation' or whatever. If you trust the market they're providing an awful lot to society. I think the value of the information age is difficult to really properly quantify. Take my field. The vast, vast majority of all accounting work that was done a few decades ago is now done by software, and on a far greater scale than could possibly have been imagined back then. Technology has created an army of hundreds of millions of virtual skilled accountants that have been mobilized productively. The amount of economic activity attributable directly to tech is breathtaking. I'd very easily believe that economic productivity attributable solely to tech from the last 20 years is greater than the entire economic productivity that preexisted it, that we've successfully leveraged our labour at a greater than 2:1 ratio. Oh undoubtedly it's an amazing asset economically (even if none of the companies seem to pay taxes or ensure workers at their supply shops are paid properly). I more just wonder if Silicon Valley gives people a lot of things that they clearly want (the value of some companies attest to this), even if they aren't that beneficial to society. Uber and Deliveroo are some examples that come to mind. I've seen a study showing Uber to be vastly more efficient than taxis (much higher % of time and of miles driven with a passenger). That's clearly beneficial to society over the previous status quo. It's easy to see how Airbnb is also incredibly beneficial - opening up an industry from concentrated hotel chains into hundreds of thousands (millions?) of home owners, all the while driving down prices. There are thousands upon thousands of similar examples with varying degrres of magnitude of impact. sc-darkness thereare promising technologies coming up in those fields but they really haven't changed the industries all that much. Do note that four medical I'm only referring to digital technologies. Uber has also brought about a fairly shitty age of gig economy jobs. Arguably these always existed through cash in hand jobs, Craigslist and whatever, but I still have the gut feeling that Uber had legitimised the gig economy like nothing before it. Maybe the gig economy is more a symptom of problems in society, but nevertheless I think if you look at companies like Uber from a different angle the value they provide to society is less clear. The gig economy is actually tiny in the grand scheme of things and not that nefarious. When autonomous driving comes there won't be any more salient examples of it left and it won't be an issue anymore. Edit: I generally agree with Kwark, we live in an exciting age technology wise. I also agree with Plansix, until technology gets us rid of lawyers it really hasn't fully delivered on its promise. That's the thing though, it doesn't get rid of jobs because we don't say "we can now do the same work for 10% of the hours, 90% of humans can go home now". Instead we say "awesome, now we can all do 10x as much, back to work folks". We had lawyers thirty years ago and lawyers today. But thirty years ago you wouldn't expect the law firm you hired to have highly educated individuals read and understand a hundred thousand internal letters sent within a company. Now you would absolutely expect their software to read the emails and sort them for the kind of content you were after in, for example, a sexual harassment case. We still have lawyers, but they're doing more lawyering than ever before. edit: Uber/Snap/Twitter etc are not the face of the tech revolution, it's stuff like enterprise management software where the real magic happens imo. Well at least ideally that would happen, however that trend seems to be breaking. It's true that overall employment in the US (and i think the EU as well) is now similar/slightly higher than before the 2008 crisis. However the if you zoom in slightly more you see that there has been a loss of some 10% of 'middle' skilled jobs which have been replaced by a small amount of very high skilled jobs and a large amount of very low skilled jobs. I forget the breakdown, i think it was something like 20/80 high skill low skill. Basically a growing number of people who previously led middle class lives now work taking out laundry, flipping burgers, etc. And if they are here in california there is a decent chance they are doing it out of their car because they can no longer afford an apartment. And across the US real median incomes have fallen this century ( https://www.ft.com/content/695bfa18-1797-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e ) I mean I agree that technological progress is a good thing, but I also think we have to think very seriously about how the fruits of that progress are being distributed. And simply saying that new jobs will appear and old ones will be upgraded and all (or even most) shall prosper is not enough, because most are not prospering. At least not relative to 20 years ago.
Yeah I can totally understand that. 30-40 years ago, before automation, everybody who would've worked below me needed to have a degree and experience and so on. Relatively high skill job. Company started investing in automation, and today, I get paid to spend many times my salary on equipment/systems to allow a high school graduate with the ability to read a process document to do the same job faster, more accurately, with fewer errors, and at much lower cost.
Added - a few "lower skill" technician jobs
Removed - A lot of medium skill jobs. One expensive test station does the equivalent work of dozens of well trained humans, with no human factor.
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My parents are in Tampa and literally refuse to leave unless mandatory evacuation is issued and for some reason it hasn't for their specific area. It's already basically too late anyway as they said it's almost impossible to get gas anywhere for miles. Strong cat 4 or cat 5 landfall there would bring the most devastating winds (north east of eye wall) right over south Tampa.
If you are the religious type, prayers would be great.
If you are the non religious type, prayers would be great.
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Zuck would like to maintain his approval rating with the bot demographic for his inevitable 2020 run.
On another note, my thoughts are with anyone in path of Irma or with friends/ families that are. I'm in the path but a little more inland and not sure what will happen. I've only experienced hurricanes while directly on the coast, not sure how it'll be this time.
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On September 10 2017 01:16 LuckyFool wrote:
My parents are in Tampa and literally refuse to leave unless mandatory evacuation is issued and for some reason it hasn't for their specific area. It's already basically too late anyway as they said it's almost impossible to get gas anywhere for miles. Strong cat 4 or cat 5 landfall there would bring the most devastating winds (north east of eye wall) right over south Tampa.
If you are the religious type, prayers would be great.
If you are the non religious type, prayers would be great.
I have most of my family there near Tampa and they also refused to evacuate, it pisses me off so god damned much.
Hopefully the more inland areas are at least semi okay...
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On September 10 2017 01:45 Zambrah wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2017 01:16 LuckyFool wrote:
My parents are in Tampa and literally refuse to leave unless mandatory evacuation is issued and for some reason it hasn't for their specific area. It's already basically too late anyway as they said it's almost impossible to get gas anywhere for miles. Strong cat 4 or cat 5 landfall there would bring the most devastating winds (north east of eye wall) right over south Tampa.
If you are the religious type, prayers would be great.
If you are the non religious type, prayers would be great. I have most of my family there near Tampa and they also refused to evacuate, it pisses me off so god damned much. Hopefully the more inland areas are at least semi okay...
They just decided to go stay with a friend in Orlando thankfully. Even Orlando is going to see big impacts, but at least not the roof ripping off house destroying cat 4/5 stuff.
Tampa and south of Tampa is still in the bulls eye for massive damage, anyone that is riding it out there and points south better be fully prepared.
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EPT
