Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ChairmanPoo]

Maybe I am alone in this, but I don't get how all this enhacement talk is related to OWS, and I can't take dramatic posts about how prosthethics dehumanize the people who wear them and turn them into Star-Trek stock villains seriously.

[Truean]

@ Lagslayer: How the...? You managed to derail on OWS thread into cyborgs, machine overlords, genetic engineering, better living through chemistry and who knows what else that would've created. All that stuff you said and the part before it, completely missed the point. It isn't built in obsolescence, it isn't just offering busy work.

The point was incredibly simple, which is sad that no one seems to get it and instead your reaction tends to be the typical one. Either denial or derail to the end of the world is the stock answer for saying, we should pay people a sustainable wage. This is the business world's utter and madness and refusal to recognize a basic fact:

O businesses, your customers, which you love the idea of so damn much, are employees, which you don't. You can't love and hate a thing while expecting it to grow. They all want "more customers," and want to pay employees shit. Whether it's your employees buying your own product or someone else's employees, it is employees buying your product. Someone has to purchase it, and no, it isn't just busy work. To say it is just busy work means that there is no good or service that people would need to enhance their lives.

Money doesn't just "happen." its a cycle. One end of that cycle is self destructively collapsing the other. That would be the businesses destroying the people who support them in terms of both customers and labor. That amount of inequality will collapse the cycle of commerce, and anyone who does not get that will be left behind.

[Phmcw]

Actually, truean, it's all false : one can support an industry working exclusively for the wealthy, and giving it's worker barely enough to survive.
I believe you may experience it first hand in say, twenty years. This is why occupy is important : to remind the banker, traders, heirs and other businessmen that the street have it's world to say, and that we won't let their system happen.

I am not the only one thinking the USSR with his schizophrenic evangelism for the freedom of the masses, is what saved the asses of our democracies and that we have to be very careful with what the powerful are doing. The system has worked for the 1% before, is working for the 1% in a lot of countries, and may work for them in our countries, too.

[Frumple]

Actually, truean, it's all false : one can support an industry working exclusively for the wealthy, and giving it's worker barely enough to survive.
I believe you may experience it first hand in say, twenty years. This is why occupy is important : to remind the banker, traders, heirs and other businessmen that the street have it's world to say, and that we won't let their system happen.

Except not. Unless by 'support' you mean 'support in the very short term' and probably being capped off with a violent revolution or at the very least mass murder of the workers (leading to industrial collapse, because hey, no longer enough workers.). E: Murder either directly or via deprivation, mind. This is especially an issue nowadays, because there's so g'damn many people. That shit could fly centuries ago, and almost fly decades back, but it doesn't bloody work with a global population of over 7 billion. It's not frakking sustainable. Which isn't something the 1% particularly seem to notice.  E: Or care about, anyway.

[Zangi]

As for the augmentation, I was thinking something along the lines of brain growth chemicals, hopefully that can be made cheaply and be distributed en masse. Like one of those shots you get and don't think twice about it. Of course, to do something like this, with current laws, it would take many decades even under ideal circumstances to get approved. There would need to be a way to speed up the process if we hope to keep up with our machines. This is very touchy, but it's the only way I can see.

Eh, more then likely, if its made cheaply and en masse, it'll be 'copyright/trademark' / trade secret...  which means they can jack up prices for epic profits and staunch the production to keep up the illusion that it is hard and expensive to make, so they can justify the price.
Isn't that akin to what pharmaceutical companies do now?  Is it in their interest to make a full cure... when they can provide life time daily/weekly/monthly doses for even more profits?

[RedKing]

One of the most innovative things Henry Ford did was paying his workers a high enough wage that they could afford to buy the cars they were producing. (although his primary aims in doing so were to prevent turnover and get the best skilled labor he could find).

But yeah, that lesson has sort of been lost outside the IT world. Retention of skilled labor is no longer seen as a big deal because the pool of skilled applicants has grown so large, due in part to a much higher rate of education than in 1914. And there's absolutely no incentive to retain unskilled and semi-skilled labor because most of it can be sent offshore (in manufacturing and some services) or just shopped to immigrant labor (for services that can't be offshored).

Some of what we're seeing is just the natural pain of economic evolution. Today's typewriter assembly line worker is yesteryear's buggy whip maker. But it's definitely exacerbated by a corporate pay system that squeezes profits up to the rarified air of the CEO and board, encourages an overly thick layer of mostly useless bureaucrats (how many Executive Assistant Vice Presidents does a company need?) and leaves the actual workers with less of the pie and less incentive to "work for the good of the company" than ever.

[Truean]

Yes, you can cater to the wealthy, for a while. My only response, "give it time."

Skilled v. Unskilled labor distinction isn't valid or won't be for long. They'll outsource skilled labor too, and you know it. That would be what India is for in the corporate mindset. Or have you actually spoken to an American for tech support lately. (No Sanji, we know you're not "Steve.") They turned being in front of a machine cranking out slave labor into being in front of a computer cranking out slave labor....

Real simple.

[RedKing]

Ahem. I *am* an American doing tech support. Yeah, I'm familiar with the problem. Tech support is what I'd consider semi-skilled labor. Really, you don't have to know shit about computers to do tech support, and many who do it don't really know computers -- they're following a script and pre-designed flowcharts. (Now to do it well is an entirely different matter....)

But there's a lot of onsite IT and higher-level IT that can't be offshored gracefully. And in the case of much of the Federal government, it can't be offshored at all due to security concerns. There's also a steadily growing move to put customer service/tech support back in the US because they found that the only thing that customers hate more than lousy customer service is lousy customer service that they can't even understand.

But then, that was before the recession. Companies may decide to reverse course and leave Bangalore Bob manning the phones because he's a lot cheaper.

[Truean]

Ahem. I *am* an American doing tech support. Yeah, I'm familiar with the problem. Tech support is what I'd consider semi-skilled labor. Really, you don't have to know shit about computers to do tech support, and many who do it don't really know computers -- they're following a script and pre-designed flowcharts. (Now to do it well is an entirely different matter....)

But there's a lot of onsite IT and higher-level IT that can't be offshored gracefully. And in the case of much of the Federal government, it can't be offshored at all due to security concerns. There's also a steadily growing move to put customer service/tech support back in the US because they found that the only thing that customers hate more than lousy customer service is lousy customer service that they can't even understand.

But then, that was before the recession. Companies may decide to reverse course and leave Bangalore Bob manning the phones because he's a lot cheaper.

[blink blink] "They DO exist!"

But really, I'd say you're currently the exception to the rule overall.

[DJ]

I thought that programming jobs were also getting moved to India.

Oh, and as far as augmentation is concerned, I think it'd be better if we all simply became wizards and conjured wealth for ourselves.

[Luke_Prowler]

I thought that programming jobs were also getting moved to India.

Oh, and as far as augmentation is concerned, I think it'd be better if we all simply became wizards and conjured wealth for ourselves.

But if we were wizards, then we'd just conjure our own stuff, we wouldn't need money.

[GlyphGryph]

That is why (edit: HE) said wealth, not money, I'd imagine.

[DJ]

You are me

[lordcooper]

Man, I coulda sworn sworn there used to be some rails around here somewhere.

[ChairmanPoo]

Man, I coulda sworn sworn there used to be some rails around here somewhere.

The cyborgs stole them