this comes as no surprise. But Camerron's post illustrates a deeper issue.
The world we live in is a mental model created by our brains, and the data that underlies the model is supplied by our senses. The model we make will differ depending on which of our senses is dominant.
For example, my primary sense is vision. When I read fiction, I often see pictures in fiction my head. I can be thrown out of a story because the pieces don't fit together, and I find myself saying "You can't get there from here!"
But vision isn't everyone's primary sense. My SO is a good example. She's extremely nearsighted. Without her glasses, anything farther than about 2' from her face is a blur. Her primary sense is hearing. When she asks me a technical question, my first impulse is to grab pencil and paper and draw a diagram. That conveys nothing to her, so I need to find a different metaphor based on hearing to describe the underlying concept.
I corresponded with a chap years back whose primary sense was touch. He felt holes in arguments. And in the oddest case I recall hearing of, there was a chap who could not find his way to the office in the morning. He was not stupid, and was a trained engineer. But testing revealed he was not visual at all. Landmarks conveyed nothing to him. He did have a strong kinesthetic sense. So he was driven from his home to his office in a low slung sports car that transmitted every dip and curve in the toad to the passengers. Thereafter, he could find his way to the office with no problem,. because his body remembered what the drive felt like.
I've spent a fair it of time over the years exploring where people are coming from in discussions. "Yes, I understand what you believe. You've made that quite clear and explicit. My question is why you believe it? How did you adopt this belief? What makes it emotionally satisfying to you?' Belief systems like religion and politics live on an emotional level, and aren't usually amenable to rational argument but cause they aren't rational in origin.
What our primary sense is and how that affects your view of the world my be more critical than you assume. No, you aren't representative, and others may not share your experience.
I'm contrary on this. I see salary level as a negative, not a positive. I want to be paid comparably to my peers.
I don't think I'm unique. I think just about all workers want to be paid comparably to their peers. They get upset if they discover others doing the same stuff with the same levels of skill and experience are making more than they are. (And here I mean a lot more, not just "been with the company longer and got regular raises".)
Value is relative. Something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and that includes the workers labor. And focusing on pay can be misleading. I saw an IT salary comparison a while back. An IT staffer in San Diego might make more than double what a staffer doing the same job in Wheeling, WV made. The reason was simple. It cost far more to live in San Diego. Employers there had to pay far higher salaries so their people could afford to live there. And the chap in WV might actually being doing better, relative to peers in San Diego, because even at half the salary, his living expenses were a lot lower, and more of what he made was disposable income, instead of just covering his rent.
If the salary you make is your main focus, I think you are doing it wrong. Money is a means to an end. Having money lets you buy things you need. Having more money lets you also buy things you want. If all you have is money, you have problems. You can't eat it, wear it, or live in it. All you can do is exchange it for food, clothing, and shelter.
And if your main focus is salary level, you are like the character played by James Garner in a film called The Wheeler Dealers. Garner was a Texas entrepreneur, buying and selling, being followed around by a breathless female financial analyst trying to understand what he was doing. He stated it very clearly. "It's a game. Money is how you keep score." If that's the game you like to play, you probably shouldn't be in IT.
I had an interchange a while back with a chap elsewhere who was folding a startup that had not proved out. That's the normal outcome for a startup. Most fail. Too many people think "Oh, I'll go work for a startup! I'll put in 90 hour weeks for shit pay. But the startup will succeed and IPO and I'll get filthy rich" No, you won't. Even in a startup that succeeds and IPOs, only the founders are likely to get rich.
If you found a startup, the goal shouldn't be getting rich. You should be doing something you love to do, and will continue to do regardless of whether your startup succeeds and you IPO. If the startup succeeds, you may get filthy rich, but that will be a side effect, and not the point of the exercise. The chap I was talking to agreed completely with my notions.
The OP's complaint wasn't money, it was inability to make a meaningful contribution. The company was too big, with too many little cubbyholes where folks could get tucked away and not have an opportunity to contribute. His challenge was to find another place in the company where he would have an opportunity to make a contribution, or to find another company to work for that would provide the opportunity. If I were him, I might even accept a starting salary that was lower than my current one, simply because I could do stuff that made a contribution, and I saw potential for growth and making more money later.
I have a Fujitsu P2110 with the Transmeta Crusoe CPU. It was passed along by a friend who had upgraded to a more powerful machine but didn't want it to go into the trash. She said it was "slow slow SLOW".
Well, yes. The machine had 256MB RAM, and the Crusoe grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came to me with WinXP SP2. XP wants 512MB RAM minimum to think about performing. It took 8 minutes to boot, and longer to do anything once up. It did a good job of emulating classic mainframe "death by thrashing" You could get a daughter card to add 128MB RAM, but that wouldn't help in this case. (There was another daughter card for an earlier Fujitsu model that added 256MB, but I couldn't find confirmation it worked in the P2110.)
I treated it as an experiment to see what performance I could coax out of low end hardware without throwing money at it. I swapped in a drive from a failed laptop, repartioned and reformatted, and set it to multi-boot. Win2K Pro SP4 actually ran, more or less, on the P2110, especially after I took everything out of startup that could be removed. I also installed two flavors of Linux - Ubuntu and Puppy, and FreeDOS.
Puppy was designed for low end hardware, and Puppy itself worked well enough. Applications didn't. The speed bump was apparently the IDE4 HD. IDE4 was a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wouldn't assist.
Installing Ubuntu was a challenge. Xubuntu downloaded and installed, but performance was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums said too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended what I did - DL the Minimal CD and install from it. That would give me a working bare bones CLI installation, and I could use apt-get to pick and choose what else got added. Lubuntu got the nod as desktop GUI, and worked, though it was noting I'd call speedy.
Puppy and Ubuntu were both installed on ext4 file systems, and mounted each other's slices when they booted. I spent some time arranging things so there was one copy of large apps shared between them.
FreeDOS flew. The challenge with it was to get it to boot from grub2. I did, but have no idea which of the fiddles I tried actually made it work.
Ubuntu provided another quirk. A new Ubuntu release came out. This one required PXE. The P2110 didn't have it. Installation proceeded normally, but things went to hell in a bucket when I reboted after install. Lack of PXE made installation of the new kernel fail, and that caused a cascade failure. I had to wipe the Ubuntu FS slice and redo from scratch, carefully stopping at the last release that worked and staying put. A test in the installer to insure that PXE was present before continuing and refusing to upgrade if not would have been nice. I assumed the Ubuntu folks just never imagined someone would try to install on a machine that lacked it.
I got surprise email from a woman in Hong Kong who also had a P2110. She got the 256MB RAM expansion card, it worked, and she was running WinXP with acceptable performance. I tipped my hat in respect, but had retired the P2110. I was an experiment, the experiment was completed, and actual work got done elsewhere.
I still have the machine, but haven't booted it in ages.
A universal basic income is not a cure for this particular problem.
The reason the idea is getting interest is the number of people who don't have and can't get jobs.
Buckminster Fuller talked years ago about the need to abolish the notion of "making a living" because he was prescient as usual and foresaw a time when many people couldn't.
You "make a living" doing a job. The job exists because someone else is willing to pay to have that job done. What happens when you don't know how to do anything someone else will pay for?
Work flows to where it can be done cheapest, and pretty much always has.
As the Internet Eats the World, and robotics become more sophisticated, whole classes of jobs are going away. They are either being automated, or are being done elsewhere because the job does not have to be done where you are and someone elsewhere will do it cheaper than you can. They can do it cheaper because it costs less to live where they do, and will accept a lower price than you can charge.
(Government efforts at protectionism at best slow the process. They cannot eliminate the problem. And protectionist efforts raise costs for everyone else. How much more are you willing to pay for things you buy to see that they are made by workers in your country? At some point you'll say "That's too expensive" and not pay it, which is why those jobs go elsewhere in they first place.)
Technology gets praised as creating jobs, and indeed, it does. But the new jobs created don't help those whose jobs were eliminated by technology. By definition, those new jobs are new, and the folks idled don't know how to do them, and possibly can't learn because the job requires the equivalent of an advanced degree to be able to do it. What do those folks do instead?
Work flowing to where it can be done cheapest has always been a factor. What is changing is the amount of work that can be done elsewhere or by machine. Folks doing unskilled/low skilled labor have suffered the most, as no one will pay living wages for that sort of work in an industrialized nation like the US. Well meaning efforts like mandated minimum wage increases are a band aid. There must be minimum wage jobs covered by those mandates, and the higher the minimum wage goes, the harder employers think about what the job is worth and whether they want to pay that much for it. If you have a minimum wage job, you benefit (if you don't get laid off to cut costs.) If you don't have a job and are looking for a minimum wage job the bar just got raised.
But increasingly, it's not just unskilled/low skilled labor affected. I tell people, if it can be done by machine, or elsewhere for less than you want to be paid, it will. We are still discovering how many that applies to.
Will a guaranteed basic income make everyone couch potatoes? Hardly. Aside from providing income needed to live, jobs structure time, and give you something to do with your waking hours. The bigger question is just what sort of potential people have to unleash. What would you do with your time if you didn't have to work for a living?
This is ultimately a political and social pro0blem more than an economic one. The notion of "making a living" is embedded in our culture. Jobs are status markers. What you do for a living and what sort of living you make doing it is a principal source of status. What happens to your status when you can't make a living?
I don't have good answers for any of this. I am simply convinced that we aer mostly not even asking the right questions.
When was the last time you went to Sourceforge? How do you access it?
It isn't ad filled here. They went through a bad patch when owned by the previous owner, who was trying to figure out how to monetize it, and made bad choices in how ads were presented. These days, ads normally get presented during the period when you are actually downloading something hosted on Sourceforge. (And I visit using Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled. It works fine.)
And bear in mind that the practical definition of "free" these days is "Someone else pays for it." Just who is that someone else and where does the money come from? Offerings like Sourceforge are expensive to operate and maintain, with full time salaried employees doing it. The money in their paychecks comes from somewhere. The usual source of the money is advertising.
Yes, GitHub is still free, but GitHub is now owned by Microsoft, and there are folks who object to that. (I am not one of them.)
Would you be willing to pay for a "no ads" version of Sourceforge or similar service?
Yes, B5 was an aggressive adopter of digital technology. The driver was costs. Models were expensive, and if they could be replaced by CGI, the cost of making the show could be dramatically reduced. B5 was being produced for the syndication market, which was a different animal than the usual networks, and doing it cheaper while retaining quality was a major goal. Short lived competitor "Space: Above and Beyond (which lasted one season) used models, with production costs over $1,000,000 per episode, and that was a major reason they only lasted a season. B5 did use Amiga and Video Toaster in the beginning, though I believe they transitioned to other equipment later. J. Michael Straczynski's partner Doug Netter had a company called Netter Digital that did the work. JMS commented that when he did pitch meetings with possible networks that would air the show, it was him and a 5 minute clip of their CGI renderings. When I saw the first episode opening, with the Vorlon craft emerging from hyperspace to dock at Babylon 5, I sat back open mouthed going "Whoa". I'm a computer guy, and had some notion of what it took to do that
I think I admire the energy and dedication behind this, but I can't see getting one.
I've been involved with eBooks for over 15 years. It began when my then employer decided all IT staff members should have PDAs. A Handspring Visor Deluxe running Palm OS 3.1 appeared on my desk. I started looking for stuff that would assist in my work as a Sysadmin.
An early discovery was Plucker - a desktop program and Palm client. Plucker was designed to spider websites, and convert what it grabbed into something that could be viewed on the Palm device. A good deal of the documentation for stuff I dealt with was in HTML, and Plucker desktop could convert locally stored HTML files to versions viewable on the PDA. I could carry a documentation library in my pocket.
It was a hop, skip, and jump to realizing I could read other things as well, and a good bit of Project Gutenberg and other things issued under licenses that permitted it joined the party. (I still have about 4K converted Plucker documents in a 7Z archive.)
While I still have a working PDA, the next step was a 7" Android tablet. A variety of eBook viewers for Android existed. My choice was the open source FBReader for Android. I had previously used a version of FBReader written in C under Windows and Linux. FBReader for Android was a Java port, but worked pretty much the same was. The win for FBReader was multiple format support. I prefer ePub, but FBReader can display Mobi, FB2, and a few other things native, and display PDFs, DjVu files, and CBR/CBZ files using plugins. Effectively, I didn't have to care what format a book was in. On the old PDA, I could read a variety of formats too, but each had a dedicated viewer app, and I had to remember which book was in which format displayed by what program. FBReader on Android was a breath of fresh air.
I do not use eInk devices. I understand the advantages - they are battery friendly, and viewable out of doors. But too much of the content I read requires color support. A color LCD screen is a requirement.
I also need a device that can do other things besides display eBooks. There are limits to what I want to carry around when traveling. I already take a laptop and a cell phone. A device that displays eBooks, but can do other things in a pinch like check email, Look Stuff Up, or display MS Office files is a major plus. (I do not use a phone for that. The stuff I tend to view needs a larger screen size than a practical phone can have.)
And while I prefer open source, I am not wedded to it. I will cheerfully pay for closed source software if there isn't an open source offering that does whatever I require, or there is, but the closed source version is simply better. (And a major part of "better" is UX. Open source software tends to have less than optimal user interfaces. The folks who wrote the programs wrote good code for performing the function, but are not UX designers.) I feel the same about open source hardware.
This is a worthy effort, and I wish it all success, but I think it appeals to a rather small niche market. Amazon, Kobo, and the like are not exactly threatened.
______
Dennis
An assortment:
"The Silent Language" by Edward T. Hall.
Hall was an anthropologist attached to the University of New Mexico. He and his research partner, linguist Norman Trager, were doing research in comparative culture. Hall realized they would need a comprehensive theory of culture to describe what they were comparing and provide ways to compare them. Hall's model was "culture as communication", and the results were presented in the book above. His key point was that most of culture was like the iceberg - 90% of it is processed on an unconscious reflex level. We are no more aware of most of our culture than a fish is of the water it swims in. We only become aware when we are set down in a culture that does things differently than ours. The Silent Language is about how we use space. The followup "The Hidden Dimension looks into how different cultures use time. Many things fell into place when I read Hall.
"Games People Play" by Eric Berne.
Berne was a psychiatrist and founder of the discipline of Transactional Analysis. Games People Play was a PopSci bestseller when first published, which was odd because it's a highly technical volume written for other psychiatrists. His thesis was that most human behavior could be viewed as games, and most of what we did were ways of structuring time. Follow up with his "What Do You Say After You've Said Hello?" and "Beyond Games and Scripts". Hall's work above did much to explain teh behavior of societies. Berne's work does much to explain the behavior of people in societies.
"The Anatomy of Criticism" by Northrop Frye.
Frye was a Professor of English at Toronto University. He had completed a study of William Blake called "Fearful Symmetry", and was attempting to do a study of Spencer's Faery Queen. But he found himself trying to make sense of various terms used in literature, and the result became a work of pure theory, unconnected with any specific works. He refers to poetry and poetics, but his canvas is broader. Part of his problem was that there was no general term in English for a work of prose fiction. It's a set of four essays, covering Historical Criticism, Ethical Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, and Rhetorical Criticism, but makes clear that while each form is valid in its own terms, none fully described literature, and a more synoptic view was required.
"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn
Kuhn's work challenged the accepted notions of scientific progress, and the notion of steady accumulation. His thesis was that the real progress came from notions that lay outside accepted theories, and provided new paradigms by which reality might be understood, and faced all the resistance transformative ideas face from entrenched doctrine until they are demonstrated to be correct.
"Management: Tasks, Practices, Responsibilities" by Peter F. Drucker.
Drucker was our present generation's primary primary theorist and consultant on the practice of management, and just what management was and what mangers did. This work was probably his magnum opus, where he pulled together the ideas he'd formulated elsewhere into a coherent whole. It's a liberal education not only in management, but in the nature and structure of market based economies.
"The Making of Economic Society" by Robert F. Heilbroner.
This is probably the best single volume overview I'm aware of on economics and economic history, beginning with just what an economy is, and the changing conception of economics through history, with the transition from Traditional through Command to Market economies and the issues involved with each. Many animated discussions I see online about economics make me say "Those words don't mean what you think they do. Please read Heilbroner, and come back when you have. Then we might at least be talking about the same things."
"The Problems of Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell.
Russell is concerned with knowledge, and how we know what we know. He asks "Is there any knowledge in the world so certin that no reasonable man could doubt it?", and concludes that it's one of the most difficult questions that can be asked. When we understand the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we are launched on the study of philosophy, which is concerned with precisely such questions. If philosophy is of interest, this is a superb place to start.
"Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" by R. H. Tawney.
Economies don't exist in vacuums. The are aspects of the societies in which they exist, and reflect the values of those societies. Religion has been a critical part of the value systems of societies for as long as there have been societies, and religious notions on what sort of behavior is acceptable affect the structure of economies by determining what sort of transactions are permissible. Tawney is specifically concerned with religious thought in England affecting social organization and economic issues in the period immediately preceding the Reformation and the two following centuries, but while his focus in England, his description of the way in which Christian religious doctrine changed gradually to make a capitalist economy possible in England, the underlying processes could be applied through Europe in general. Read this as a companion to Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", originally written in German and concerned with the Netherlands and Germany.
"Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" by Joseph A. Schumpeter.
Schumpeter was an Austrian economist, a contemporary of John Maynard Keynes, and (briefly) Austria's Finance Minister in the 1920's. Like Keynes, he considered himself influenced by Marx. But unlike many others, he believed Marx "asked all the right questions, and got all the wrong answers". Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy was Schumpeter's (often delightfully snarky) attempt to understand what Marx got wrong and why. It's a useful brainwash after you've spent any time reading MArx or other folks who consider themselves Marxists, and provides a needed sense of perspective.
Whether any government mandated minimum wage boost "works", depends upon who you are. Who benefits from it?
If you are currently in a minimum wage job, you may benefit. You're making more money, because the government says so! (But your employer might just decide wage costs are too high and lay you off...)
If you are unemployed and looking for a minimum wage job, the bar just got raised. The higher the minimum wage is set, the harder employers look at how badly they need the work done. The job they might be willing to pay $10/hour for might not be worth $15/hour to them. Your quest to get a minimum wage job just got harder.
And if you are willing to accept less money, because some money is better than none, it doesn't help you, because employers aren't legally permitted to pay you less, even if you would be happy to accept it. So you likely get a substantial underground economy of "off the books" employees, getting paid in cash that doesn't get reported to the government. And those folks may actually take home more than minimum wage employees because taxes don't get deducted from their wages.
(I live in the NY metropolitan area. I see a lot of that. And there are employers who would pay the higher minimum wage, but the employees don't want to be on the books. Many are undocumented aliens, and being on the books leaves a trail pointing to them and possible deportation.)
If you are the government that mandated the higher minimum wage, you might not benefit financially, because the amount of taxes you see is less than what you might see if minimum wage was lower and more people had minimum wage jobs. (Of course, for government who do this, it's about getting votes, and impact on tax revenue isn't a consideration.)
And bear in mind that what the employee gets in a minimum wage job is rather less than what the employer has to spend. The employer must deduct and remit taxes, and must maintain the appropriate records for legal purposes, and that costs money.
Ultimately, "it takes two to tango". There must be workers looking for minimum wage jobs, and employers offering them. The government can't require employers to hire workers they don't need, and increases in minimum wage will tend to decrease the number of minimum wage jobs available.
Ultimately, minimum wage increases have the effect of decreasing total employment, but this seems to get missed in such discussions.
The goal of minimum wage increases is to insure workers can make a survivable income. But value is relative - something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and that includes the worker's labor. Minimum wage jobs are minimum wage for a reason. They are low skilled/unskilled labor, and what the worker does simply isn't worth that much to those who need it done. What the minimum wage folks need is to be able to acquire the knowledge and skills that are worth more to employers and be able to get better jobs. Increases in minimum wage by themselves don't aid that.
We are seeing all sorts of commentary elsewhere about job losses to automation. The only reason many minimum wage jobs still exist is because it's more expensive up front to automate them than employers want to spend. At some point, minimum wage boosts might just make it worth the employer's while to spend the money needed to automate those jobs. Then what do the job seekers do?
This is an example of why I flatly refused to install an IM client at a former employer who wanted IT staff connected and instantly available. (The issue was laid to rest in a conference call when a co-worker said "The nice thing about Dennis is that if he's at his desk, he answers the phone on the first ring. If he's not at his desk, you won't get hin in IM, either!" Bless him. He got it.)
The sort of stuff I did was mostly not user facing, since I was admin for the nix boxes, and not usually supporting Windows on the desktop. The things I did tended to require peace, quiet, and extended concentration to make sure I understood the problem and had created a working solution that wouldn't blow up in someone's face.
The underlying problem is that computers are good at multi-tasking, and humans aren't. When a computer is handling multiple concurrent tasks, and an interrupt comes in, it must save its place in what it's doing at the moment, handle the interrupt, then go back to the saved place and continue where it left off. It's stack processing, computers are designed to do it well, and are generally fast enough that the user thinks the computer is only doing the task she's working on. The overhead isn't apparent.
Humans aren't good at stack processing. I've seen papers from years back indicating the average developer can handle 5-7 parallel tracks at a time, and beyond that, things get lost. Stuff getting lost because the developer was trying to keep track of too many things were highly fertile sources of bugs.
And humans aren't anywhere near as fast as computers. Conceptually, you do the same thing as a computer - you are working on a task and get interrupted. You must save your place in what you're doing, handle the interruption, and resume where you left off. There is significant overhead there, and if you get interrupted enough, you spend most of your time stack processing instead of actually working on tasks. You get the equivalent of old time mainframe "death by thrashing", where the mainframe was spending more time context switching than actually doing work.
Some of us are better at multi-tasking than others, but I think all of us over-estimate how good we actually are. I've advised folks elsewhere to try an experiment - work on one task at a time, and continue till it's completed, instead of juggling multiple concurrent tasks. I'm willing to bet the amount of work you actually get done will jump.
What confuses me is why the shop in the article thought that sort of real time communication was a good idea in the first place.
The world we live in is a mental model created by our brains, and the data that underlies the model is supplied by our senses. The model we make will differ depending on which of our senses is dominant.
For example, my primary sense is vision. When I read fiction, I often see pictures in fiction my head. I can be thrown out of a story because the pieces don't fit together, and I find myself saying "You can't get there from here!"
But vision isn't everyone's primary sense. My SO is a good example. She's extremely nearsighted. Without her glasses, anything farther than about 2' from her face is a blur. Her primary sense is hearing. When she asks me a technical question, my first impulse is to grab pencil and paper and draw a diagram. That conveys nothing to her, so I need to find a different metaphor based on hearing to describe the underlying concept.
I corresponded with a chap years back whose primary sense was touch. He felt holes in arguments. And in the oddest case I recall hearing of, there was a chap who could not find his way to the office in the morning. He was not stupid, and was a trained engineer. But testing revealed he was not visual at all. Landmarks conveyed nothing to him. He did have a strong kinesthetic sense. So he was driven from his home to his office in a low slung sports car that transmitted every dip and curve in the toad to the passengers. Thereafter, he could find his way to the office with no problem,. because his body remembered what the drive felt like.
I've spent a fair it of time over the years exploring where people are coming from in discussions. "Yes, I understand what you believe. You've made that quite clear and explicit. My question is why you believe it? How did you adopt this belief? What makes it emotionally satisfying to you?' Belief systems like religion and politics live on an emotional level, and aren't usually amenable to rational argument but cause they aren't rational in origin.
What our primary sense is and how that affects your view of the world my be more critical than you assume. No, you aren't representative, and others may not share your experience.