Video Tim O'Reilly and the 'WTF?!' Economy (Video) 111
My (late) father was an engineer. Politically, you could have called him a TechnoUtopian. He believed -- along with most of his engineer, ham radio, and science fiction writer and reader friends -- that as machines took over the humdrum tasks, humans would work less and create more. O'Reilly seems to have similar beliefs, even though (unlike my father) he's seen the beginnings of an economy with self-driving cars and trucks, factory machines that don't need humans to run them, and many other changes the 1950s and 1960s futurists didn't expect to see until we had flying cars and could buy tickets on Pan Am flights to the moon. Listening to these conversations, I remember my father's dreams, but O'Reilly isn't as optimistic as a full-blown TechnoUtopian. He takes a "Something's happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear" view of how work (and pay for work) will change in the near future. Please note that Tim O'Reilly has been called "The Oracle of Silicon Valley," so he's totally worth watching -- or reading, if that's your preferred method of taking in new information.
NOTE: Today we have a "main video," plus a "bonus video" that is viewable only with Flash. But we have a transcript that covers both of them. Enjoy!
Tim Lord for Slashdot: Tim, you've been thinking and writing a bit lately about what you are calling the WTF Future Of Work. Explain... What do you mean? What is changing the world of work that really is on your mind?
Tim O'Reilly : Well, I started with this phrase the WTF economy because there are a lot of WTF kinds of things that make you think both what the f*** and what's the future. So there's a set of things, like the fact that AIs are starting to help doctors diagnose illnesses. There's a lot of talk about AIs and robots taking over more and more jobs. There's the fact that we have these new network enabled businesses like Uber which are literally a multiple of the size of the entire previous industry. They’re using technology to deliver the service where it wasn’t delivered before, and we’re seeing the kind of disruption that we saw on the Internet now coming to the physical world. But at the same time we also have some things that are just WTF. I started digging into some of the labor issues around Uber and the on-demand economy for example, and the frequent criticism is, well these are not good jobs, comparing them perhaps to unionized auto jobs in the 1960s and I go “Yeah, but what about the rest of the low wage jobs in our economy?” And there's some real WTF stuff there.
Slashdot: There are still people who are flipping hamburgers.
Tim: Well, more than that if you have a low wage job, whether it is at McDonald's or Wal-Mart, or even a progressive employer like Starbucks you are subject to the whims of scheduling software that tells you when to work. I wrote this line in this piece I wrote recently it is called the algorithm is the new shift boss. But what people don’t realize is the algorithm is programmed to make sure that people don't get more than 29 hours of work.
Slashdot: Sure.
Tim: To keep them part time, so you don’t have to pay expensive full time benefits. You have absolutely no agency. In our work with Code for America we discovered one of the big problems in the criminal justice is what are called bench warrants--people literally getting arrested because they didn’t follow some administrative procedures. It turns out that one reason why people don't do that is because they can't get off work. So they have a choice between losing their jobs or going to the courthouse. They don't go to the courthouse and six month later they send out a warrant out for their arrest and they end up in Jail. That’s crazy.
Slashdot: And that system doesn’t call their cell phones here.
Tim: And so I look at this and I go, okay, so over here on one side we have people vilifying Uber and Lyft in the on-demand economy where workers set their own hours, they work as much or as little as they like. They have enormous agency and that's what they value about the work.
On the other hand, we have other low-wage jobs in which people are completely slaves of the machine. And who are we beating up on? We’re beating up on the guys who are actually exposing the data to the workers and making a market in labor, and I kind of go, “How do we go forward from that?” How can we make those better jobs? They're not necessarily great jobs, but the environment of low-wage jobs around them is far worse. And so I go but there is a way forward here that's enabling workers being able to have agency and freedom.
And also for – I think we have – we do have to put pressure, we have to ask questions like, “Okay, if we have low wage workers, how would we have a scheduling – who are subject to algorithmic scheduling which does leave have great benefits for the bottom line of companies. How would we actually build the kind of freedom that you get with a platform like Uber, into that scheduling software?” It's not impossible. There are companies like Managed By Q and others who are saying, “Yeah, we built that scheduling software even though we’re making people employees, where they have the freedom to set their own schedule and more control.” It’s a matter of choices. There’s also I think massive need that I think has come out of this discussions, to figure out how to decouple benefits from employment at a particular corporation.
Slashdot: Sure.
Tim: That 29 hour thing Italked about is a bug in the system. If you start saying well, benefits should be centered on the individual and you go yeah, fractional benefits, you work here 10 hours, you work here 15 hours, you work here another 15 hours we can figure out, how to allocate the incoming payments from all those employers and coordinate them. And we need to actually to start building stuff like that, so that when policymakers go as they are starting to that's a really good idea. We don't go down the path of saying well, we need to spend $1 billion like healthcare.gov to implement it and go, no actually that already exists because some hackers have built it. So that's kind of part of my hope.
But unpacking even further this on-demand economy, in the way when I did Web 2.0 I tried to unpack Google for the world and say, well here is the things that it teaches about data is the new Intel inside, it teaches about the value of user contribution, it teaches about cloud computing, it teaches us about constantly evolving software--there are a whole bunch of things. In a similar way I think this on-demand economy teaches us just a bunch of things. There is this sort of decoupling of work from employment. But there is also I think in the success of Uber, and Lyft, Airbnb versus some of the second tier players.
Slashdot: Right.
Tim: I think there’s a real lesson about doing some things that actually make a difference. Many of the companies that are, you know kind in the noise are for example, enabling what – the fabulous joke tweet sites, Startup L. Jackson said at the end of 2013, “the Uberification of everything is turning San Francisco into an assisted living community for the young”, and you go – that's not the point of this. But in fact, you could not rent a hotel room or get a hotel room in many locations, you can't get a cab in many locations, but now you can get an Uber or Lyft. You can Airbnb, I got married in New York recently not far from the cloisters, and we were able to get Airbnb and walked to our wedding site up in Fort Tryon Park, three miles away. That's real utility. And so, I think that there is a really interesting question here about how do you understand what this technology can do. That’s hard. You know, what would be the equivalent of Uber or the Uberification or anything not for the young, but for the elderly, for the shut in person who needs home care. How could we revolutionize home care, so they’ll be able to age in place--those are interesting challenges. You also see something like SolarCity, where you’re saying, okay, how could we invert the generation of power. And again, it's democratizing, it's also creating jobs all the solar installers, all those Uber drivers are good. This is actually a way forward, let's figure out the problems with it, let's build on it, but let's really start by identifying interesting important problems that we can solve using technology. And then another piece that I’ve unpacked this into is that you can only do some of this work because you give the workers super powers. So, if you think about it to be say a London taxi driver, you have to pass this exhaustive exam called The Knowledge, it’s one of the hardest exams in the world, and most taxi drivers don't have that same level of skill, but now really – the reason why so many more people were able to come into the market and work as an Uber or Lyft driver is because of GPS. The reason they’re able to find fares more efficiently rather than driving around hoping to flag someone is because of technology. So there's a whole story about augmentation and that's another part of what I'm trying to get out in my event in November.
How do we think about augmentation? How do we think about a world where technology isn't just used to replace people, to improve the bottom line by replacing people, but actually improve the bottom line by enabling people. I think the Apple Store is another great example of that. They completely rethought the workflow of the store, they put more retailer people in there, and they used the smart phone instead of the cash register that changed the whole way that worked, it became one of most successful retailers ever. And so you think about that and you go, okay, where else can we augment workers instead of replacing them? And that’s why I'm kind of looking into augmented reality in the workplace into AI in the workplace as an augmentation. It's also why I look even at a broader definition of augmentation, how technology can really enable a renaissance of manufacturing in America. One of the featured speakers is Limor Fried of Adafruit, she is doing open source hardware, she gives away all her designs which is built and meaningful business with tens of millions of dollars of revenue with no venture capital, but she is an engineer with superpowers, right? She's sitting there, if you go visit Adafruit, here’s Limor with her design station, her micro factory, which can’t be a more than a couple of hundred square feet next to her. And then you basically it is the rest it's a warehouse and shipping and she kind of built her own shipping software and then there's the little video studio where they make her Ask An Engineer, you know Hangouts and other kinds of video programs that are effectively the marketing _____ of giving away free engineering education. One of my favorite Adafruit stories of course is apparently some girl asked her mother after watching quite a few Ask An Engineer episodes where Limor and also she invites a lot of other female engineers, and this little girl asks, “Mommy, can boys be engineers too?” And yeah, you think about the social transformation in that, you just got to love it. But back to my theme, there’s a kind of augmentation that’s enabling, a renaissance of certain kind of small business in America. This is a manufacturer, but look at Etsy and Marketplace of small businesses and you look at the funding mechanisms that are coming up, we are featuring Kickstarter on the program, Yancey Strickler, at our Solid Conference talking about that there has been half a billion of dollars investment in hardware startups, on Kickstarter. That’s a huge sum is coming from crowdfunding of projects. And once again yes there are problems, not every Kickstarter succeeds but guess what, not every venture capital investment succeeds either, not every government investment in technology. I think once again people are focusing on the problems without looking at the enormous potential and I think in all of this there are signs of what the next economy looks like. We’re understanding how people are going to work, how we can put people to work, how we can improve the lives of workers and how technology can be made to serve our human aims rather than just serving the inhuman bottom line of these aliens among us that we called corporations.
Slashdot: I think, a lot of what you’re talking about is most visible with one person who has some skill, I just hired off of Craigslist somebody mowed my lawn, from another city’s airport who didn’t have PayPal set up and within an hour, set up a PayPal, I paid him, he mowed my lawn and sent me a picture, and that’s a – sort of – one person with a lawn mower multiplied by Craigslist, is a lot different than driving a neighborhood.
Tim: Yeah, I think that we have this enormous opportunity to make people’s life better and it won’t look like going back to the 50s or 60s, but we can take some of the values that came from that. One of the people on my program is a guy David Rolf who’s the guy who is a labor organizer one of the most successful in history, actually I think largest labor organizing thing of some service workers in LA since Ford was unionized in the 40s, right, but he was like it was easier to organize voters to pass the $15 minimum wage ordinance than it was to organize workers at Seattle airport which is what he was trying to do and he started to figure out Oh you go to Internet you do so there is a new model to how you do these things. But one of the things that he said that was great, he said God didn't make being an auto worker a good job, it was the set of choices that came about because people fought really hard for it, and I think it's super important that we as a society figure out what kind of world we want.
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or maybe because Taxi cabs companies have never had competition before, have been slow to embrace new technology, and have never invested in improving service at any time in the past 50 years, while making drivers fork out a massive amount of pay for their medallions and leasing fees. Getting a cab is an unpleasant experience in my town (a very large metropolis in the US)...getting an Uber is anywhere from decent to pretty nice...getting a Lyft is usually even nicer.
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The last time I've had to use a taxi, I called to see about a cab to pick me up at one of the more notable hotels, waited about 30 minutes with no vehicles other than the people loading/unloading, then got a text that I owed them a no-show fee.
Uber/Lyft seem a lot more friendly than that. They might even bother to show up.
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The 8 hour work day 5 day work week was started by Henry Ford, not unions. Ford did that as an incentive to attract permanent employees. It proved to be very successful and caught on.
Unions were at no point making any kind of demand for that. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, and up until Ford, typical hours were 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Prior to the industrial revolution, most people were farmers and worked seasonally, typically less than 30 hours a week during planting season and about
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The reason they're doing better than taxi and limousine industries is because they're not involved with unions and tons of bureaucracy. Simple as that. Been proven time and time again, unions and red tape kills productivity and innovation. SOLVED. You're welcome.
...and you don't think that it has anything to do at all with the fact that the new business involves a convenient app connected to an efficient centralized planning service, whereas the old business usually involves things like trying to wave down any empty yellow cars that might happen to pass by? Either approach could be implemented with or without unions.
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The Uber one was the only one that surprised me. 3x more revenue is probably partly due to not have to worry about things like employee benefits, fleet maintenance, etc., but with that big a difference surely quite a few more people are using cabs than before.
The others... meh. Expedia has more "rooms for offer" and fewer employees than all the major hotel chains put together, AND as many airline seats as all the airlines! That's because, just like AirBnB, they don't actually have any rooms for offer. T
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3x more revenue is probably partly due to not have to worry about things like employee benefits, fleet maintenance, etc., but with that big a difference surely quite a few more people are using cabs than before.
Well, if that was the case, the the 3X more revenue is due to the news not knowing the difference between revenue and profit. I expect that Uber has 3X the profit, because they are screwing over their drivers, not being properly licensed, and several other illegal cost saving measures.
As for 3 times the revenue, that is simply not possible, unless literally 3 times the number of previous livery passengers have suddenly started taking livery services. I find that unlikely to the point of impossibility.
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As for 3 times the revenue, that is simply not possible, unless literally 3 times the number of previous livery passengers have suddenly started taking livery services. I find that unlikely to the point of impossibility.
The CEO of Uber claims that it is true [businessinsider.com]. Prior to Uber the taxi market in SF was $140M. Today, Uber alone has revenue of $500M in SF. He claims that by making the process convenient and frictionless, and bypassing the government imposed artificial scarcity of taxis, Uber has drawn in many new customers.
... not knowing the difference between revenue and profit.
Both the CEO of Uber, and Tim O'Reilly (another very successful CEO) are well aware of the difference between revenue and profit. They are clearly talking about revenue, not profit.
Re: The reason they're doing better than others... (Score:2)
This is certainly the case in Austin. I don't know the numbers, but way way way more people use Uber and Lyft than ever used taxis. And the streets are safer for it (less drunk driving).
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Good point. Revenue may well be affected by those things though. If you're a cab company that has to maintain it's own fleet and pay out benefits, you having to balance your desire to always have a car handy when a customer wants a ride with the practicalities of actually having to have and maintain those vehicles. Uber doesn't have to do that.
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...and you don't think that it has anything to do at all with the fact that the new business involves a convenient app connected to an efficient centralized planning service, whereas the old business usually involves things like trying to wave down any empty yellow cars that might happen to pass by? Either approach could be implemented with or without unions.
Hardly any cabbies or limo drivers belong to unions or get benefits or even salaries. When I drove a cab I rented it for $75/day(in Baltimore) and took it home with me. I could have had it on a 12-hour shift for less. After a while I bought my own cab. I didn't have a permit/medallion, so I rented one from a friend. Did I make a living? Sure. But I worked a lot of hours.
Limousine: I drove for Maryland Limo, the BWI airport franchisee for a few months to learn the businehss. Then I got my own limo -- and drove it happily and profitably until Andover.net offered me a considerable salary to dump the limo and be their full-time editor in chief.
TODAY, I'd probably drive for Uber, even though it's a shoddy company. Remember when they decided to cut fares? BAM! Every driver who had invested in a nice car got burned. But I would maybe stay with Uber for a year, then go off on my own once I had a decent "book" of private customers built up. I assure you, this is what the smarter Uber drivers are doing. Also: there are people in the big cities who buy Uber-qualified cars and rent them to drivers either for a fixed rate or on a percentage split -- just like a cab company.
Also, Uber may have a nice app, but others are catching on. Read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08... [nytimes.com]
Uber is cute, but it's purely pump and dump. You just wait and see.
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Do they apply for hack licenses: No
Do they maintain a fleet of vehicles: No
Do they pay any employee benefits: No
What they do is organize unlicensed taxi drivers through a website and take a sizable chunk of the profit off the unlicensed driver taking all the risks
Virtually no operational costs and no risk to themselves, well except legal ones which will fall on the corporation and the slimes who run it will scurry under new rocks when the law finally catches up to their scumbaggery
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They should get licensed. Perhaps the law needs to be changed to legalize it. In the mean time, I say amend the law so those earning under $2,000/year only need personal (not commercial) auto-insurance. Why? I figure if someone is earning less than $166/month, they're not "really" doing anything that crosses into commercial territory, if you know what I mean. At that point, it's more hobbyist than making a living.
If I were to use the service, I don't care how much they earn from being a taxi, they had better have insurance that will cover me if they crash. It is not fair to make the consumer bear the risk based on how many dollars the cabbie makes.
If they are only driving a few hundred miles per year commercially, their insurance will be far cheaper than a full time cabbie.
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I would like to see what data you are analyzing for that conclusion. It seems to me the periods of highest economic growth rates have coincided with higher rates of union membership in the US, certainly higher than we see today. Correlation does not imply causation, but it would exclude your conclusion.
Of course, the idea of using evidence to reach conclusions rather than ideology may be foreign to you.
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Ridesharing is also a different market from the traditional cab market in many ways. It's people getting together as individuals to carpool tp the palces they want, with the added convenience of a common app interface to link up drivers and riders. It's not ideology that causes Uber to not take out taxi licenses, but the fact that they are offering a new product to a new market. Bureaucrats and old-line cab companies scramble to understand what's going on in the same way that RIAA scrambles to make sense of
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Sure, except that's not what Uber does.
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Ridesharing is also a different market from the traditional cab market in many ways. It's people getting together as individuals to carpool tp the palces they want, with the added convenience of a common app interface to link up drivers and riders. It's not ideology that causes Uber to not take out taxi licenses, but the fact that they are offering a new product to a new market. Bureaucrats and old-line cab companies scramble to understand what's going on in the same way that RIAA scrambles to make sense of the evolving music market.
So basically like a bulletin board for hooking up people going somewhere and other people wanting to go there? Sounds great. Uber should do that instead of running a for hire taxi service like they do now.
Uber could even still make money (finder's fee) for hooking people up. The drivers would lose less money going to their destination because the riders could share some of the cost. However, legally the rider can only pay up to their pro rata share, so regardless of the number of riders, the driver cannot
Re: The reason they're doing better than others... (Score:1)
Your math is off; it should be:
S = 1 - 1/(N+1)
At N=0, S=0. As N increases, S approaches, but never reaches, 1.
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Like this French company who has been steadily growing for 9 years with little trouble : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This is real ridesharing, where drivers are explicitly forbidden to make a profit. Of course, the service has its opponents, and yes, a few drivers break the rules and manage to make a profit but it is nowhere near the controversy that surrounds Uber.
isn't that kind of the perennial question? (Score:4, Insightful)
People have been asking this question for literally 150 years or so. Even if we restrict our horizon to things published in the last month, there's quite a bit [theatlantic.com]. Do we need another take on this? And from... Tim O'Reilly?
No, this is exactly what they expected to see. The main thing they were wrong about is that they expected to see it within 20 years.
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No, this is exactly what they expected to see. The main thing they were wrong about is that they expected to see it within 20 years.
I've found that the one thing Futurists are consistently really bad at is predicting the future.
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Ignore literature and science fiction and look at reality. Remember that saying "Art imitates life."? Well, it has some realistic foundation.
The people did not see the extent of manipulation being used against them 60 years ago. It was easy for them to imagine a world in a state of Utopia because they were under the impression that their Government was run by them, it was looking out for their best interests, it wanted Freedom and Republics across the globe. We could argue how true this actually was, bu
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Keep electing them. So long as they are deadlocked against each other, it's where they do the least damage.
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In any era, futurists extrapolate from their own present. In the Fifties, with the Cold War was placing atom bombs on top of rockets, it was easy to assume that space would be the new frontier for the masses. At the same time, only a small cadre of the techno-elite had ever seen a computer or had any knowledge of how they might evolve.
So they predicted a lunar colony with everything being run by one central computer.
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Dude that's been the last 20 years. 40 years for government work.
8 hour day, 2 hours of actual work, the rest wasted in 'all hands meetings' etc.
The real problem is those that do no work at all, but demand time from those that do. Perhaps we could tell them the world was about to end and put them on an ark.
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For anyone who's tempted to dismiss the AC because he's an AC, research backs him up. The average white collar worker does a few of hours of productive work a day. Judging by the highway construction guys, it doesn't seem like blue collar workers do much more.
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Open any book by any publisher. Editing and quality control are now "cost centers" that don't "make money", so nobody wants to spend money on it. For the cost of a good editor they can pick up another monkey for their army of typewriters. And that's what's committed to paper. Look upon my ebooks ye
might
y and de-spair.
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Editing and quality control are now "cost centers" ... Look upon my ebooks ye
might
y and de-spair.
You owe me money to replace my overloaded irony detector.
But your point is valid. Someone I know told me she was writing science fiction books that were being sold on Amazon, I think it was. I went to get a preview and my God, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't understand it because, like, every three, words there was, a comma, or so. A copy, editor could, have cleaned it, up so easily.
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You. I like you. That was well done.
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The O'Reilly books that I've read look as if they've been skim-read by someone an
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they will still need engineers and plumbers, but most of humanity will just become surplus labor
the rich and powerful will release a virus, and 99.9% of the problem will take care of itself
as a bonus, climate change will reverse with the world population reduced to 7 million and no more massive fossil fuel use
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The video adds nothing. It is useless fluff trying to garner ad dollars.
Beats me. I didn't watch it. I prefer to read it. A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but it takes 10,000 words worth of data to store it. A video takes 1 millions words worth of space to store it. Give me the 1,000 words, please.
Intersting video, shame about the Flash (Score:1)
I really enjoyed the main video, but I'll never see the Flash video I guess - kind of a shame to produce something and then purposefully make it un-viewable to a significant portion of your readership.
There were a lot of people who could not get behind the term "sharing economy" used in a previous sorry to describer Uber and the like. Hopefully they can get behind the term "on demand" economy, which also does a great job of describing the fundamental difference between her style jobs and traditional jobs.
A
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What transcript? The video is totally different than the text below, and the lower flash-only video I assume is also different.
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So you're saying the little link under the video that says "Hide/Show transcript" is half lying? Perhaps it should have read "Hide/Show some text partially related to the video"?
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Didn't see that since it was undertake Flash video I couldn't play...
But the transcript is only for the main video, which I was able to watch fully - not the bonus content. I can see where you might also have been confused on that point, since it was below the Flash video (though it you'd watched the main video you would have known).
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Please accept my apologies - Somehow I managed to *not* paste in the second half of the transcript. Usually -- really, almost always -- the transcripts have *more* info than the videos. So I slammed in the rest just now, with a little less polishing than usual, but it's all there.
And Flash. Everybody who actually works on the site (and reads your comments) agrees with you.We tell them over and over, but I've been working on Slashdot since it was brand new and shiny (UID 357), so what do I know? Obviously n
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That's exactly why I no longer have Flash installed at all, because half-measures like "flash approval" (I used to use a plugin called Click-To-Flash that was similar) still lead the server to understand you CAN use flash, so they require it instead of just letting you see content...
By not having Flash at all, instead the server realizes it must give me HTML5 video or I'll see nothing - which is why I could watch the first video, but not the second.
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And that's exactly why I still have flash and click-to-play installed, because I don't want them to autoplay flash bullshit OR autoplay html5 bullshit.
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It sucks, it drains battery, it's a vector for ads, its an attack surface,its a vector for malware, is uses bandwidth, and it constantly wants to update which is annoying. (And given that its a big vector for malware... it needs to be updated.)
Does the flash updater try to install crapware too unless you opt out every single time? I just can't be bothered with it.
I do still have flash on one of computers, but not most of them. I find I don't miss that much that I actually want to see.
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sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree
I am an Opera user. I could do it through a GUI but, really, it is just faster to type it into a terminal. I have that one memorized. *sighs* It's a long story.
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Im curious, you boycott flash for what reason?
Because the web as a whole works better without it now.
I had click-to-flash installed for a while, but the websites I use most regularly (including my bank) work better if they think I just plain don't have Flash at all and have to give me something else.
The real question is why the hell would you keep Flash around when it's so easy to do without now? You don't have to work for the pentagon to find it desirable that your bank credentials will not be scraped (th
Re: Intersting video, shame about the Flash (Score:2)
And job displacement and an ever growing class of people who cannot get jobs no matter how educated they are and how much student debt they take on, and increasingly useless job retraining programs that just give false hope and let the politicians claim they're doing something ... that's the dystopian picture painted in many sci-fi sto
30 hour work week, my ass! (Score:2)
The algorithm is the new overseer [slashdot.org]
TFTFY, Tim.
Only if we're lucky. (Score:2)
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Assuming we kept the current economic models, we'd be driving millions of people into poverty and creating a super stratified ultra-rich class.
Ah, so you're talking about business as usual...
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...Uber and Lyft will make more and more money because taxi companies refuse to keep up with the times. The last time I took a taxi, long before uber and lyft came onto the scene, I was so overcharged for the short little ride I took that I vowed to walk before I take a taxi again. Long live Uber and Lyft!
Once they have killed off the taxi industry, what is their incentive to keep prices down? Basically, if Uber and Lyft take over they will be replacing a competitive marketplace with a duopoly, or a monopoly if only one of them survives. Less competition is always worse for the consumer.
Nice dream, but.... (Score:1)
...while we can make machines do just about anything, it will almost always be cheaper to have people do them so why would the corporations who make these decisions do anything else?
And the moment you start talking about someone other than the corporations making these decisions the cries of "welfare state" and "socialism" will be deafening.
Without some sort of massive political/social upheaval I dont see us ever getting to a point where "the people" benefit from time saving devices to the extent TFA is sug
Precursor to Tech Singularity (Score:2)
If I was making a new civ tech tree, the "wtf economy" would be right before tech singularity. Doesn't end well.
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You think that is isn't already the case? Most people need to work for corporations just to give their money back to them for food, clothing, transportation, retirement, credit rating, medical care, etc. We live in an oppressive corporate culture as bad as any of the dictatorships or oligarchies in fictions.
Work less would work except for (Score:2)
A minority taking more than their share. I would love to work less but still have a secure lifestyle which is what mechanization and Taylorism was supposed to bring use. But if wealth accumulates into the hands of a fewnot due to any hard work or cleverness on their part but accident of birth, all it leads to is unemployment and eventually starvation.
Machines let us be more creative? (Score:1)
... that as machines took over the humdrum tasks, humans would work less and create more.
Unfortunately, the people whose jobs are being replaced by machines aren't usually the creative type. DaVinci might have been an autoworker before a robot welder replaced him and he could devote his time to creative endeavours, but Jane Smith, who used to be the receptionist/phone answerer at Multi-Corp, didn't start winning Pulitzers once the call director replaced her.
Eliminating the overhead (Score:2)
Imagine how little you would need to work without the overhead of HR, legal departments, management, and governments? These are things that can be automated away over time. If you need a task and can just pay for that task everyone would be so much wealthier and have more time.
Most people on a salary job do very little actual work. Lots of time is wasted doing useless things. You could choose more money or leisure. The more specialized we all get the better.
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Most people on contract jobs do very little work.
Just to counter your baselessly "Most people on a salary job do very little actual work" claim.
So who is doing all the "hard work"?
Who empties the bins at the office? Who unblocks the toilet? Who makes sure that you get paid? Lots of people who do actually work.
Flash? Boooo! (Score:4, Informative)
C'mon Dice, making Slashdot Videos require proprietary software?!
(This is my first time voicing a Dice-era complaint.)
Re: (Score:2)
Everybody who actually works on the site agrees with you.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh. Thanks for letting us know. Whatever the future brings, I hope you folk get more of a say.
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It's the WTF Video Engine, whaddya expect?
Work less? lol. (Score:2)
"as machines took over the humdrum tasks, humans would work less and create more"
No, what happens is humans work less, and spend more time looking for work in order to survive. The problem with the utopian ideal is that they keep pinning it on the idea that you'll be able to survive with little or no money, which is star trek bullshit that will never happen.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately it's a pipe dream because the people who have the most power over laws and policies are also the ones who control the majority of the wealth. I'm sure there are some wealthy people with enough sense to understand that balancing out financial inequality is a good idea, but most will fight it tooth and nail.
Postcapitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting book by Paul Mason is saying something similar but in a broader context. Things are changing due to technology and better access to information. It's hard to control information. Technology is eroding the price of information. Non-market social organizations are replacing capitalist organizations.
"The neoliberalist capitalist model has resulted in civil wars and economic disaster, and it’s only going to get worse. Unless, Paul Mason argues, we take advantage of the technological revolution we are living through and create a postcapitalist sharing society. If we let prices fall and delink work from wages, we can save the world from disaster"
http://www.theguardian.com/com... [theguardian.com]
"There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx."
http://www.theguardian.com/boo... [theguardian.com]
"The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next."
It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago."
Sure (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, if you had read the article, you would know that Paul Mason admits that he has serious reservations about whether or not what he is seeing will take place. I also have the same reservations. The oligarchs are powerful and will fight back with their control of government and all of their money (and they do have all of the money).
He offers this as a possible future... not a prediction.
Re: (Score:1)
The thing is, those "striking" changes will only take niches to fill. Yes, they will make impact here and there, but, for illustration purposes, Linux and open source likewise was nearly expected to change everything fundamentally - and did it? It did, but to certain extents only. Of course, incremental and intervening changes in/with new media, as per McLuhan, will advance all the time. But, again, nature of processes is evolutionary and fragmented. Expectation of sensations should be put aside. Was there
*sigh* Why are people so dense? (Score:1)
"What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines?"
The future is lower prices until everything is free. Human effort is the only thing that needs to be compensated. You know? Really! WTF?!
Something clear (Score:2)
Something's happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear
This is just latest class warfare incarnation.
Maybe It is me! (Score:2)
very interesting video (Score:1)