[Cog]

LOL

Embrace the suck which is the future. Together we will forge a future of conflict and bitter battles until one of is dead.

I'm good with that.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Techtopian nonsense. Siri and her friends at Apple are the end of the techie-revolution. There will be no household robots, no AI, no autonomous anything, no more computer revolution. That notebook gathering dust in the corner is the end of it all. Your $200/month pocket-gadget will not save you ennui. So sorry

I am not a doomer but I am forced to agree with you. If we power down as a society, whether forced or voluntary, tech is going to be one of the first things that goes bye-bye.

Well, if there is a power down, it will most likely be gradual. So it could be an extension, for example, of what's been going on for the past 40+ years or so. Now, if so, wouldn't smart processors which help do things like optimize energy usage in appliances (or cars) be a natural, and even growing, thing to help get more efficient use of increasingly expensive energy?

Yeah, things like $200 all you can eat cell phone contracts are pretty stupid (and a sign that despite all the protests about having too litle income, everyone isn't exactly starving). However, things like fuel injection (which requires computer technology) certainly is a hell of a step over the traditional mechanical carburetor. Efficient furnaces now have computer boards. The list goes on and on, and it's generally a good thing.

[Cog]

Yeah. We're gonna install a quad-core in Graeme's algae cells and turn pond scum into major buckage. Sign me up. That is so sagging my pants.

ROFL!

[ennui2]

Pstarr (have to read his comments when quoted) keeps building strawmen.

Isn't the big deal about being a doomer about being adaptable?

Well, if you're in a position to benefit from "peak IT" then why turn your back on it now and go earn a scratch living as an organic potato farmer?

You adapt when you have to adapt, and it's not necessary to adapt right now, especially with oil hitting record lows. Sure, keep an eye for the future, and reskill, but that's different from quitting a high-paying job and moving to the catskills.

This does not in any way mean that I think technology will "save" us. But some people (like Pstarr) always sees things as a binary culture clash. Team "tech" vs. team "hairshirt". Those who bug out now probably don't have the aptitude for IT in the first place, or have some other reason for wanting to escape the rat-race. Stop trying to write a one-size-all prescription when everyone's situation is different.

Anytime people are doing better than he is, Pstarr does his "Doom on YOU!" schtick. That's his only schtick and it gets old.



It's not funny, insightful, or useful. It's just obnoxious.

[onlooker]

I think in terms of technology what we need is technology to forestall GW, to find fusion or something like that to power the world and technology to build a renewable infrastructure fast and on the cheap meaning needing little fossil fuels or money. Absent all that tech, I agree not much reason to be optimistic.

[ennui2]

The #1 application of IT is telecommuting. I would say (rough guess) 75% or more of all white-collar workers simply have no need to commute. No commuting means less of a need for office space. Less transportation. Less offices. Less flying around just to sit in a room schmoozing somebody. A ton less energy spent. I know the flipside is that when you're home you'll be keeping the thermostat comfortable where otherwise you could let it go cold or warm. So I don't have a definitive study on the savings, but it sure seems like a huge net gain to have a big cultural shift to a telecommuter workforce.

The simplistic mockery of gadget culture just ignores the above. We are not going to see some wholescale flip towards a World Made by Hand economy with the local cobbler and blacksmith. All attempts will go towards maintaining BAU as it is today, which means we're far more likely to see telecommuting. In which case, the electric and internet grids will NOT be the first to go. They will be the last.

[Strummer]

Yeah, except a large portion of those jobs which can be telecommuted are what David Graeber called "bullshit jobs"... jobs created with the sole purpose of employing people, producing no added value. It's astonishing how much of what we consider "productive" is in reality just a different form of consumption.

[Pops]

Really, all jobs are B/S. We weren't born with union cards, just hunter/gatherer tools. We aren't gonna do that again anytime soon I'm thinking.

But the next economy will be a lot more than just phoning it in.

--
Back in the '90s I had a little ad shop and pontificated that one day we would be "distributed" — that the sales guy would need to bang on doors but once he plugged in the orders, we'd buy most of our media from stock houses; we'd still hire local videographers & photographers to shoot custom and actors if we just had to, but any other talent: musicians, singers, voice over, illustrators, etc could be from anywhere. Then the video guy would edit from his house in Phoenix, the audio guy would mix from his bedroom in Tahoe, I'd do layouts from my cabin in Colorado Springs.

Before that even, when I first learned about the web, whenever that was, I thought it would mean a change from retail by mass production to mass specialization; local markets would expand to encompass the entire connected world. So a guy in Portland who wanted to make custom cedar clogs, but couldn't find a large enough market to survive (even in Portland) would be able to survive by selling to the entire world where there might be enough demand, even for cedar clogs.

Since I'm posting here, I obviously didn't take advantage of my perfect knowledge of the future (or I'd be doing whatever Jeff Bezos is doing right now) but my old company IS distributed, the audio guy is still in the valley, but the video guy is in Boston, and until recently I was in the Ozarks (the lesser Rocky Mtns, LoL) — the difference between my vision and the reality is we are all now independents.

--
Freelancers, part-timers, contractors, temps, "moonlighters", "sharing" businesses are not the future; they are today. It is part and parcel of Trickle-Up. Once the corps found out they could eliminate unions, then raid pensions, then found they could move to defined contribution from defined benefit they were on it. Then after the 2000 and 2008 recessions undercut labor's negotiating position even more, corps moved away from any benefit—even the benefit of more or less full time work. Once the "old" model of lifelong employment was broken (well, one or two generation "old" anyway) large biz took full advantage of getting out of the habit of taking care of their employees.

One Third of workers now are now unattached; "freelance" to use the glossy word.

That is a big deal. The future of capitalism (on the happy, non-doom side) is unionized freelancers, sort of Syndicalism without the violent overthrow and collective ownership bit. It is what I was getting at in the options to capitalism thread (before it became so dense in obtuse rhetoric as to be indecipherable, LoL). A participatory economy, maybe glued together by digital democracy; the collectivist option perhaps digital/democratic market coordination.

For an example, look at walmart: they figured out the solution to efficient centrally planned economies is a little database work. Anyone can pay people crappy wages, what they did was plot store sales history to predict exactly how many halloween frankenstein masks vs Nixon masks would be required on exactly what days in each individual store, no more no less, no back stock, no leftovers in November, no wasted shelf space. That is the secret sauce. Supply/demand management made them the richest people in the world at the very same time the commie countries were going tits-up via bureaucracy.

The future will be robot-o-built stuff until the value of labor falls to some really low level. Until then, "labor productivity" will increase because of automation, less human per item, so less wok to go around. The result can only be either
a) stuff gets cheaper, or
b) profit gets distributed
No other way for the system to continue.



That is my crystal ball read for the morning, anyway. LoL

[ennui2]

Well, I was talking about the world as it is today, not dystopias or utopias. I'm not making a value-judgment as to what constitutes a meaningful job. But people today have to earn money to live on, regardless of what happens upstream or downstream. The article illustrated a pathway for people to get ahead, and it's a valid one. But some people would rather portray the world as lacking those pathways. It's a doomer cognitive-dissonance.

[Pops]

Well, I was talking about the world as it is today, not dystopias or utopias.

Actually the article talked about 7k jobs, hardly "the world."

The World as it is today is just as I pointed out, about 1/3 temps, unattached, secure only until the current gig is over.

[ennui2]

The World as it is today is just as I pointed out, about 1/3 temps, unattached, secure only until the current gig is over.

How many of those 1/3 underemployed workers are in IT? What's the total demand in IT? A lot larger than 7K jobs, I'll tell you that.

There is an industrial shift going on which has to be factored in, rather than just projecting the "rich getting richer and the everyman is screwed" narrative. Not to sound like a republican, but it's everyone's responsibility to take a look at the job market to see where the demand is and to maneuver themselves towards it rather than to expect to keep working jobs that are dead-man-walking. For instance, if I were a UPS truck driver, I'd have my eye on Amazon's plan to just drop-ship stuff from drones. Don't sleepwalk into the future.

For instance, once the real estate boom crashed, it put a LOT of real estate agents out of work. How should we spin this? That the natural order of things is that those people should be employed just because their experience is within real-estate? No. Because it was an artificial bubble in the first place. They better retrain. Same deal with buggywhip manufacturers at the dawn of the automobile. Doom aside, how many articles talk about how the average person needs to be prepared to change careers at least once in their lifetime due to rapid changes in the workforce?

Speaking for myself, I get at least 2-3 recruiters nagging me a week, regardless of whether I have a listing open on Dice or Monster. And I don't even have a computer-science degree, just on-the-job experience. I'm not saying it isn't harder to get ahead than in the past, but it is possible. But this idea that there are these fat cats smoking cigars overseeing armies of robots doing all the work? It's not really true. It's armies of servers--and the techies who service the servers.

BTW, here's something I just randomly picked up off the news talking about improved jobs report.

[Pops]

There is an industrial shift going on which has to be factored in, rather than just projecting the "rich getting richer and the everyman is screwed" narrative.

Pretty sure if you will read my post with an eye to reading my post rather than projecting on it what you are expecting, you will see that "industrial shift" is exactly what it was about – just not a "we all should become coders" riff.

[StarvingLion]

"I get at least 2-3 recruiters nagging me a week"

And what skills do the recruiters have?

A. None.

About 99% of the people at peakoil.com hate the oil&gas industry, petrochemical plants, etc. The 99%ers want to sit behind a computer and pretend to do something (eg. analysts, pretense of knowledge) because its easy. No wonder there is a demand for that. This is hard:

Vaclav Smil: Natural Gas: Fuel of the 21st Century @ 2015

"Looking ahead, it is not unreasonable to
think that the combination of lower‐than‐expected endowment, environmentally
based opposition, lack of readily available drilling, and
well completion skills as well as the availability of requisite fracking
capacities, regional shortages of water, and surprisingly high cost of
extraction from deep, thin, and complex deposits will result in only
slow rates of shale gas developments, not in replications of Barnett or
Marcellus experience."

You guys want to shut it all down. You have already shut down coal and nuclear. The Apples, Amazons, etc are good for one thing only: shutting down industry.

[Timo]

Well, I was talking about the world as it is today, not dystopias or utopias.

Actually the article talked about 7k jobs, hardly "the world."

The World as it is today is just as I pointed out, about 1/3 temps, unattached, secure only until the current gig is over.

Everything is going according to plan. Before too long, 1/3rd will grow to 1/2, to 2/3rds, to 99%, all completely dependent on our universe-controlling overlords. Lots of major corporations are now hiring temps as permanent employees to avoid the costs of health insurance, retirement plans, and everything else that used to be the model for attracting good, quality employees. Temps also makes their replacement that much easier. Less hassel to fire, thus much easier to control. Even goverments are in on this gig, all to keep taxes low.

Workers are a commodity, a resource that can be mined just like any other resource. When the costs of that resource in any one location become too high, simply move to another location where the resources are cheaper. The rhetoric "right to work" only means the right of business to pay workers below minimum wage. Only by lessening the costs of labor and production can we maintain employment for all. Therefore, we should establish our policies to transform America into a 3rd world country, where our costs of labor are on par with the costs of labor in Bangledesh. That is patriotism. That is concern for American workers. Everyone should have a job, no matter how little they get paid. Temps are only the requisite transition to achieve the status of the lowest common denominator, minimum-level equality for all.

[ennui2]

"industrial shift" is exactly what it was about – just not a "we all should become coders" riff.

Now we're in a semantical argument over the definition of 'industrial shift'. I don't disagree that there are fewer salaried jobs than before or that benefits are harder to come by. However, if people are resorting to freelancing, it's because they can't get anything better, not because it's some voluntary culture-shift. If people really want a better opportunity, they should go where the jobs are still strongest. IT is a hotspot, as is the medical industrial complex. I don't know why this is so controversial.

[ennui2]

Workers are a commodity, a resource that can be mined just like any other resource. When the costs of that resource in any one location become too high, simply move to another location where the resources are cheaper

Nice rant.

Evoking Return of the Jedi doesn't do much.




What's your solution?

As far as I can see, this thread is oozing with fatalism and an avoidance of personal responsibility with a whiff of communist revolution.

[onlooker]

Yes so true Timo. I first really was informed of the true nature of Globalization by a book which was truly excellent called "The Case against the Global Economy" edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith. It presents many facets of Globalization and argues how each is intended to give more powers to corporations to the detriment of ordinary people. Ever since a central tenet of Globalization namely Free Trade has been pursued globally we have been in a race to the lowest common denominator. Corporations bestriding the planet free to cut costs however and as much as they can to increase their profits. This is what so many Free Trade agreements are about, namely bypassing taxation, environmental protection, worker rights etc. so that the almighty corporation can increase it's profits and those of it's shareholders. Sounds exactly like the world we have right now !