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January 16, 2014 05:58 AM UTC

Thursday Open Thread

  • 48 Comments
  • by: DavidThi808

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Gladstone to Disraeli: "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease." 

Disraeli's reply: "That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

Comments

48 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread

    1. Funny thing, though.  Laws are not sandwiches, and for many important issues, there is no such thing as a "fair compromise."  This is probably why legislators can go out to lunch together, and even split the tab fairly, but bitterly disagree on the laws which should be enacted.

    2. Here's a simpler solution.   Draw straws to see who cuts the pie — with the provision that the cutter gets the slice left over after the other two have chosen.

  1. Are you kidding?
    Is Wayne WIlliams actually running?
    Is Besty Markey?
    Is Greg Brophy?

    Wayne Williams for SoS
    31DEC2013 – $8,572 on hand

    Joe Neguse for SoS
    31DEC2013 – $97,578

    Walker Stapleton for Treasurer
    31DEC2013 – $434,088

    Bestsy Markey for Treasurer
    31DEC2013 –  $95,056

    Cynthia Coffman for Attorney General
    31DEC2013 –  $72,890

    Don Quick for Attorney General
    31DEC2013 –  $154,707

    Greg Brophy for Governor
    31DEC2013 –  $45,746

    Tom Tancredo for Governor
    31DEC2013 – $123,619

    John Hickenlooper for Governor
    31DC2013 –   $1,047,975

    http://tracer.sos.colorado.gov

  2. The issue I keep harping about – Coming to an office near you

    Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it.

    Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.

    One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades.

    When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for about $1 billion in 2012, it had 30m customers and employed 13 people.

    If this analysis is halfway correct, the social effects will be huge. Many of the jobs most at risk are lower down the ladder (logistics, haulage), whereas the skills that are least vulnerable to automation (creativity, managerial expertise) tend to be higher up, so median wages are likely to remain stagnant for some time and income gaps are likely to widen.
     

    1. Let's see how economies do with a severe shortage of wage earning consumers. Desperately poor masses can make life pretty risky for elites. Tends to produce quite a bit of nasty bloody upheaval.  Let them eat software? 

      1. No BC they are just instructed to print a handgun from their 3D printer and shoot themselves.  The future is going to be so awesome.

      2. I think we could end up with riots in the street. Change this massive occuring this fast leaves a lot of people behind in the short run. Things will be much better in the long run, but you can't eat that for lunch.

        1. And why would it get better in the long run?  Unless well paying jobs are there for the average, not special, majority what will make the situation better?

          That's what can't be gotten around.  No amount of opportunity, training, education, hard work or drive is going to get more than 1% into the top 1%, more than 10% into the top 10%, etc.  The only way to have a broad prosperous middle class majority is through decent jobs with decent pay for the perfectly ordinary majority. It's just simple arithmetic.

          Manufacturing jobs were once transformed from low paying to well paying and created our middle class majority. The same could be done now with low paying service sector jobs via a true living minimum wage. What can't be done is eliminating most jobs and somehow still having a prosperous majority middle class.  

          Onl a small minority can ever be in the creative and/or managerial class. Only a small minority can have a superior level of expertise. Everybody can't be above average, much less special.

          It may come to a point where we realize that everything that can be done isn't necessarily something that should be done, like obliterating enemies with nuclear weapons. We have that technology but don't use it. Obliterating any possibility for a majority to make a decent living because we have the technology to do so doesn't sounds equally dangerous. 

          Are you're just going to have governments provide incomes for the average majority rendered irrelevant by technology. Bread and circuses? No matter how much technology can produce you'll still need people who can buy the products. People with no buying power can't support an economy.  You'll still need consumers and the only way to have them is through plenty of jobs that provide the average majority with decent incomes. That or a massive dole.  

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            BlueCat wrote: Obliterating any possibility for a majority to make a decent living because we have the technology to do so doesn't sounds equally dangerous.

             

            It isn’t a question of morals, it’s a question of economics. If a business can get the same level of productivity with fewer workers, they’re obviously going to do it—it saves the firm money.

             The bottom line is that I don’t see this push for automation letting up anytime soon–any business that doesn’t automate, when feasible, is putting itself at a competitive disadvantage.

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            Obliterating any possibility for a majority to make a decent living because we have the technology to do so doesn't sounds equally dangerous.  – See more at: http://coloradopols.com/diary/53387/thursday-open-post#comment-536095

            1. I wasn't speaking of morals. I was speaking of the danger of desperate, seething, disenfranchised masses. Bloody rebellion. Heads on pikes.That sort of thing. And I apologize for my confusing incomplete edit. It should be "sounds equally dangerous" the "doesn't" should have been omitted. 

              I agree it's almost impossible to imagine any tech that can be used not being use, though we have managed not to obliterate ourselves so far with nuclear weapons. I just don't see it ending well.  Not even for the top fraction of a percent.

          2. I think the same question were asked when farming jobs disappeared and people with no other skills had to move to the city and start at the bottom. It was rough form many during the transition but the end results was a lot better.

            We'll end up somewhere much better. And that will include good jobs for most. And yes, that will require a lot more people to become much more educated, but that also was a requirement when the factory jobs became more specialized. It was a shock at first that you needed a high school degree to get a good job.

            Anyways, what's critical is to get people through the transition. Taking the Luddite approach never works out. Even if you could get America to do so, the rest of the world won't and that would leave us an economic backwater.

            1. The results were only better because the new urban manufacturing sector, regardless of the fact that some might have demanded more education, were plentiful and then even more so because they were transformed from low paying to higher paying by the organizing of the labor force to demand a living wage and decent conditions.  Thus, the average majority went from the agricultural sector to a plentiful job market.  Now you're talking about a transition to a condition without plentiful jobs because so many will be eliminated, not replaced by something else. That's a very different thing. Different is not the same as fewer.

              The crux is, Luddite or not, service sector or manufacturing sector, more training or no more training, more education or no more education, if a way isn't found to provide decent living wage jobs for the average majority than the era of a majority middle class society is over. Period. All the progress that has been made for average people since the dawning of the 20th century will be reversed and we'll return to the historic default of a tiny upper class of wealthy overlords, a small middle class of prosperous skilled professionals serving them and an overwhelming majority of struggling poor. Moral or immoral, it's not going to be very stable.

              You tell me how that can be avoided when most jobs are eliminated. And please bear in mind the answer is never going to be training everyone to be special because the existence of simple arithmetic makes that impossible outside of mythical Lake Wobegon where everyone is above average. You just don't need that many managers with creative managerial skills, for instance, with hardly anyone to manage. And who will be the consumers of all the products of all the increased production?

              How will the average majority be employed and earn decent pay? Where will a sufficient quantity of living wage jobs come from to maintain a majority middle class society? I'd really like to know how that will be possible. Where jobs are concerned you can't just say it's the quality, not the quantity that counts. Sufficient quantity is crucial. 

        2. What almost concerns me more than the increasing rate of change is our ability to adapt, particularly regarding what to do with those who are displaced by automation.

          This country seems to be run largely on the mindset of "I got mine, to hell with everyone else", so I don't expect the people who lose out to benefit anytime soon. More likely they'll be derided as "takers" or otherwise blamed for being replaced by automation.

          I think we could end up with riots in the street. Change this massive occuring this fast leaves a lot of people behind in the short run. Things will be much better in the long run, but you can't eat that for lunch. – See more at: http://coloradopols.com/diary/53387/thursday-open-post#comment-536095

          1. When one sector is replaced by another the transition may be difficult but a transition is not only possible, it can be a transition to something better. But the mass erasing of the quantity of jobs available doesn't leave much for most to transition to, does it? Once again, that's not a moral judgement. It's just arithmetic.

    2. Another interesting article on where we're going – http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21593580-cheap-and-ubiquitous-building-blocks-digital-products-and-services-have-caused

      like the move from the farm to the city, once this all shakes out the future is going to be a gigantic improvement. Yes we need to figure out how to get people through the transition. But where we'll end up will be well worth it.

      and the rate of creation right now is amazing. Truly something new in the history of the human race.

      1. Yes the ag to industry transfer was hard and ulitmately worked ok enough. (We are where we are- you conclude it's "better" ok.) 

        But to infer from that one transition that it will always work out well seems like a questionable inferance on a single data point.  Maybe we just entered  a new era of stagnation, where most people most of the time, are born, live, work and die with no real ooportunity for economic advancement. Until you have met or known some 30 yearl old Phd taxi drivers, you won't get it. Education is fine, but it's not always as valuable in the economy as many would like to believe. And student loan debt with real ROI (or normal way to default) would be a lot less easy to get.

    3. Funny!! I need to dig out that article which I recently read, swear to God, that said that cumputers now write better code than human programmers, and should therefore, for the sake if efficiency and reliability replace them all !!!

      1. It'll happen someday. I think that's still a ways off though. What is accelerating like crazy is the programming tools are becoming so powerful that one person can accomplish a lot more than before (unless apparently they're working on a government contract).

        I think doctors though could well be replaced for a lot of work, especially diagnosis, in the next 10 years. The level of medical knowledge has surpassed what a human brain can stay on top of. The ability to use all knowledge will make a tremendous difference.

        1. Absolutely true, if doctors are simply data sifters.

          Sadly, like in so many other instances, you view another field from the prism of your own, and have no clue what it actually takes to do the job.

          How do doctors get the data they then have to sift? (We do have internet access for conditions we're not familiar with, and common conditions happen commonly.)  History taking, which has not been perfected by humans, can be broken down in to computer code?  Some people are better diagnosticians because they can infer things from how a patient walks or sits.  How they maintain eye contact or not through history taking tells you where to push for more information.  Some patients lie to you for reasons of secondary gain.  Good doctors have these skills intuitively, and they're hard to teach to people who don't have them, but with the programmer's hubris you think they can be reduced to 1s and 0s.

          1. Couldn't agree more. Everything isn't widgets. Our long time family doctor retired a few years back and what made him invaluable to us was that he was so good at asking the right questions, things that don't always show up in tests, things you might  not think to "input" as data. He always had time to explain and answer all questions. He had the good judgement to know when to send you to a specialist instead of trying yet one more course of antibiotics. In fact he was very conservative about antibiotics even back when most doctors were handing them out like candy over the phone if you called and said you had a sore throat.  Not him.  He also knew us as individuals and therefore knew what was "normal' for us and that what might be well within the parameters of normal in general might not be for one of us or that what might not be so "normal'' was fine for one of us.

            Teaching isn't all widgets and practicing good medicine certainly isn't all widgets. We really miss him. We had absolute faith and confidence in him that was never disappointed over the 25 years he was our family doctor, during which time he treated us from very senior grandma to the kid from the age of 17 months. He's also funny and warm.  Enjoying someone and being comfortable with them as a person makes it a lot easier to communicate effectively and get the best results.

        2. Maybe. The bigger threat I see to doctors, especially here in the U.S., is medical tourism. International airfare isn't cheap but considering the ridiculous cost of care in the U.S., it might make sense to go overseas if there's competant medical professionals who can do a procedure you need for less than what it costs in the U.S. 

    4. Computers can certainly do a number of things better than humans, and the number of things will increase over time, I can't help but feel like some of the things that computers allegedly can do better than humans are either exaggerated or rely on some extremely (if not overly) optimistic assumptions. 

      With all that said, automation is definetely going to continue to throw more people out of work, as technology increases. The fundamental problem is what do we do with all the people whose jobs have been made obselete by automation? There don't seem to be a lot of easy or good answers here–I certainly don't profess to know the answer. Hopefully, it won't take civil unrest to figure it out some kind of workable solution.

      1. Depends who's in control.  Humanity has gone from a nonstop struggle for food and shelter and not to get eaten by predators, to maybe just a 20 hour a day struggle, to modern what? 12 hours, 16 if you're a parent with young kids or really poor working 2 jobs. 

        So depending who's calling the shots, we're looking at computers freeing most people to still have a decent standard of living with a true 6-8 hour a day workday, or computers making only the top 1/10 of 1% of people much, much richer, while the rest of us sink into desperate feudalism. 

  3. Bennet and Udall missing as Senate Dems question Trans Pacific Trade deal that has been called "NAFTA on Steroids".

    The letter lays out a case for the use of fast track trade authority being antiquated and not appropriate for the 21st century. The senators want a new trade negotiation and approval process more “consistent with the constitutional role of Congress in trade.”

    Fast track is only good for Corporations and has harmed un immensely. And this is very worrying, unless you love how Corporations treat our workers, and environment, and economy:

    TPP and TTIP are not just any trade agreements. They substantively alter American democracy by removing power from Washington and placing it with corporate tribunals. This suspension of democratic accountability and oversight will allow transnational corporations to supersede nation-states as the most powerful legal entities in the world in economic decision making. Some may argue this already exists in fact, but if TPP and TTIP are passed it will also exist in law.

    Do Mark Udall and Michael Bennet stand with the citizens of Colorado, or with the Corporate Behemoths who want this to pass with as little debate and scrutiny as possible?

      1. I view it as coming full-circle: I was at the final night of the DNC convention in 2008, where our current President gave his speech, so if the RNC comes to Denver, I guess I'll be the outside this time protesting.

        1. I was at the historic Mile High Acceptance Speech events with my son. Earned us two really good tickets with volunteer hours. It will be almost as much fun protesting. maybe more.

          1. The 2008 DNC protests weren't that exciting, at least as viewed from MIle High.

            Hopefully, a RNC convention would have better turnout, I know I'll go if I can. laugh  

            1. They should be much more fun as Denver is much more Dem friendly than R friendly. We should have great protests. I meant it will be almost as much fun (or more) protesting this one as participating in the last one. And it was great to be there and share that history with our son. Dad doesn't do political events but he votes for the right (make that correct) people. It will be sad too because I've lost two loved ones, both of  whom voted for Obama and were thrilled to see him win, since then. One was my beautiful, sweet, loving brother whom I miss every single day and still can't quite believe is gone. Of course, for us, he isn't.

      1. Considering the Republican's tastes in this sort of thing, they might need to special order some–I'm not sure the run of the mill hookers would do. 

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