Unlimited Obama Appreciation Thread.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I think the larger problem is that people 'expect' jobs.

"OMGZ, we don't have jobs!!! Its the fault of...."

Who says that everyone gets a job? Is it some kind of human right that we get at birth? Is it inalienable, our Right to have a job? Let's face it, technology does replace workers. The wheel meant that one guy could pull a wagon rather than the four guys it took before to pull a sled. Time shifts jobs... we don't need to employ five guys at every gas station to pump our gas, check our fluids and get tipped... we do that shit ourselves now.

Jobs aren't eternal, they aren't created by fiat... and while government can support policies that may encourage job growth... they can't magically make jobs appear from nowhere.

I think the protestant work ethic "You work for your day's bread" is the main culprit here. In early societies, everyone 'worked' but that work was stuff like "Go get firewood, go get fruit, go get meat" later, it was "go plant this chunk of land"... but now, well we live in a time when society can exist with fewer jobs. We don't have any really pressing needs for people to fill. Getting past the idea that everyone must work, might get us closer to the real issue... everyone should have access to what they need to survive.

In the Schrodinger's Cat trilogy RAW talked about the "leisure class" concept in his fictional RICH economy. While its somewhat fanciful, there are some pretty interesting points scattered throughout.

[AFK]

It's that American Dream tripe.  Politicians have been continuously poisoning our youth with that garbage for years. 

[Luna]

Somewhere, the message got garbled.  The right to pursue happiness has become the perceived right to have happiness handed to you on a silver platter.

[Captain Utopia]

1.  As available information increases, people are more likely to vote/act against their own best interests.  How do you think the teabaggers got started?

Is this an argument against increasing available information?  What is the causation between increased information and bad decision making?

The link is bad information, most often deliberate.

Deliberate misinformation happens when there is less overall information, too.  I think it's harder today to start an urban myth thanks to snopes, or to successfully put out a simple lie which won't be caught.

The trade-off comment was with regards being happy with having more overall involvement at the cost of the bottom of the pyramid being superficially involved.

Wait.  What?

RWHN: "social media is casting the net wider in order to nab that one or two"

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think the larger problem is that people 'expect' jobs.

"OMGZ, we don't have jobs!!! Its the fault of...."

Who says that everyone gets a job? Is it some kind of human right that we get at birth? Is it inalienable, our Right to have a job?

Obviously, nobody says everyone gets a job.  The true Randian dream is being experienced in Tucson as we speak.  Those lousy poor people are being denied jobs, just as they deserve.  It's paradise, I tell ya.

Let's face it, technology does replace workers.

No, it doesn't.  Which employed more people, auto manufacturing, or buggy whip production?

[Cain]

The problem with that is, as things are set up right now, work or theft are the only ways to get the things you need to survive, within a western liberal democratic context.  I'm in no way a fan of the Protestant work ethic - given the choice I'd probably work 2-3 days a week, just to add some variety to my routine of reading and writing - but unfortunately I have plans which involve being alive, and for that I need to work.  It's not something I do willingly, it's something I do for the paycheck, because without it - I get kicked out of where I live, I cannot afford to eat and I starve.  And it is marginally easier than a life of crime, though I am starting to reconsider that particular stance....

[The Good Reverend Roger]

1.  As available information increases, people are more likely to vote/act against their own best interests.  How do you think the teabaggers got started?

Is this an argument against increasing available information?  What is the causation between increased information and bad decision making?

The link is bad information, most often deliberate.

Deliberate misinformation happens when there is less overall information, too.  I think it's harder today to start an urban myth thanks to snopes, or to successfully put out a simple lie which won't be caught.

The trade-off comment was with regards being happy with having more overall involvement at the cost of the bottom of the pyramid being superficially involved.

Wait.  What?

RWHN: "social media is casting the net wider in order to nab that one or two"

Yeah.  I'm still waiting to hear how this is a "happy tradeoff" over having jobs.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The problem with that is, as things are set up right now, work or theft are the only ways to get the things you need to survive, within a western liberal democratic context.  I'm in no way a fan of the Protestant work ethic - given the choice I'd probably work 2-3 days a week, just to add some variety to my routine of reading and writing - but unfortunately I have plans which involve being alive, and for that I need to work.  It's not something I do willingly, it's something I do for the paycheck, because without it - I get kicked out of where I live, I cannot afford to eat and I starve.  And it is marginally easier than a life of crime, though I am starting to reconsider that particular stance....

The most prosperous time of my life involved some rather shady dealings.

The problem with criminals is that they're generally stupid.  If you go into it with some brains in your head, you have a better than average chance of doing well.  For a while.

[Captain Utopia]

Yeah.  I'm still waiting to hear how this is a "happy tradeoff" over having jobs.

It's not - did anyone say it was?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Yeah.  I'm still waiting to hear how this is a "happy tradeoff" over having jobs.

It's not - did anyone say it was?

Yes, actually, you did.

[Cramulus]

And you get 99 people that consider their part to be done.  Just saying.

Okay, but the point isn't that pressing Like makes you an activist. Those people weren't doing anything anyway. If their passive, superficial level of participation increased the number of real participants, they helped in some fractional way. Which is more than they were doing before facebook.

[Cain]

That's the thing.  I'm worried about the mafia/cartel effect, as described by the criminal sociologist Diego Gambetta (who should also be read by every IR student).  Basically, organized crime is stupid by design, because too clever people come up with clever ideas that allow them to rip everyone else off.  So the leaders of such cartels hire and organize the ranks below them so people stupider than they are oversee the day to day operations - and stomp on anyone who shows signs of being too smart for their own good.

That and I have an aversion to Albanian gangsters - its a long story.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Don't blame the robots... all the stats I look at show a MASSIVE decline in industrial fatalities over time.  How much of this is due to compliance and regulation, I have no clue, but the less squishy meatbags you have in direct contact with heavy/poisonous/pointy things, the better.

Greed may have caused it, but the results are not altogether terrible.  That is, if you prefer to be unemployed than dead.

Youth may or may not be more superficial than before.  But they are also getting involved in global concepts and events in an unprecedented scale.  I'm happy with that trade-off.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

That's the thing.  I'm worried about the mafia/cartel effect, as described by the criminal sociologist Diego Gambetta (who should also be read by every IR student).  Basically, organized crime is stupid by design, because too clever people come up with clever ideas that allow them to rip everyone else off.  So the leaders of such cartels hire and organize the ranks below them so people stupider than they are oversee the day to day operations - and stomp on anyone who shows signs of being too smart for their own good.

That and I have an aversion to Albanian gangsters - its a long story.

The trick is to find a niche that doesn't put you in competition with organized criminals, or one that makes you more trouble dead than alive.

The problem with that, of course, is that most criminals I've come in contact with can't make that distinction.  That's why they're criminals...They can't run a risk/reward analysis.

So you get in, make your pile, and try to stay alive long enough to get the fuck out. 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

The problem with that is, as things are set up right now, work or theft are the only ways to get the things you need to survive, within a western liberal democratic context.  I'm in no way a fan of the Protestant work ethic - given the choice I'd probably work 2-3 days a week, just to add some variety to my routine of reading and writing - but unfortunately I have plans which involve being alive, and for that I need to work.  It's not something I do willingly, it's something I do for the paycheck, because without it - I get kicked out of where I live, I cannot afford to eat and I starve.  And it is marginally easier than a life of crime, though I am starting to reconsider that particular stance....

And therein lies the real problem. Our society is living in a fantasy where every person that wants a job can get a job. Its simply not realistic. I work in IT and I can think of ways to "create more jobs", but why would we?

We could replace the automated patching system we use with with a sneakernet of geeks that would go apply patches to everyone's systems on a biweekly basis. We could stop using the automatic anti-virus software and go back to manual updates for that as well. We could stop using Virtual servers and gho back to rooms full of boxes that need hardware updates and maintenance and administrators...

But really, why the hell would any company do that? Automated patching is far closer to 100% compliance than any sneakernet and Virtual Servers provide everything we need at a fraction of the cost and with increased stability.

The same is true for automation in factories, its true for pretty much every kind of work we do. Every time someone invents a new tool, its likely to put some people out of work. And I don't go for the belief that it automatically makes more jobs. It doesn't... automated patching/desktop updates etc is a part time job for one resource... not a full time job for a whole department as it once was... Even if everyone it replaced learned the tools, they wouldn't be needed.

Until we get over the idea that everyone that wants a job magically has a job, we'll just continue with the nonsense of blaming corporations, government, tea partiers, the Internet, those damn lazy kids these days, and whatever else we can come up with. Jobs aren't a guaranteed right.