All I Can Do, Is Think Of You
Grant Henninger writes about social responsibility in software engineering and responds to Joi Ito on the subject.#
Over the past 50 years most jobs have been created in the service sector, the same jobs that are being automated out of existence. New industries that require skilled labor will need to be created, and this cannot be done by creating computer programs that require more people to support. In a competitive market such computer programs will not be adopted. Instead programs that cut costs, including labor costs, will be used. This is the problem with adopting such a strategy of job creation. Everybody in the USSR was employed, but there was not full employment. Labor saving devices were never put into use because that would take away somebody's job. If we had pursued that course of action through history we would still be subsistence farmers or worse yet, hunters and gatherers.
As a society we need to think through the social problems we are creating for ourselves. I see some big ones on the horizon. We are putting more and more untrained labor on the streets every day. And we don't have enough jobs for our trained labor population. Wages are decreasing in real terms and this will destroy our consumer society. Many people don't like the consumer economy we have created for ourselves. But Henry Ford's idea of paying his workers enough to buy his product was an important one, and we are forgetting it. People not only need a desire to buy goods, but the means to do so. And we are taking away that means. By doing so we will sow our own destruction. When people no longer have the ability to buy products aggregate demand will go down leading to a further decrease in the work force, then they, in turn, will not be able to buy as many goods. And this trend will continue downwards. So far, governments have been able to put a stop to this cycle, but the economy is becoming increasingly uncontrollable. So we may yet see the revolution that Marx talked about, not in the way Lenin forced a revolution, but as a real evolution from capitalism and the strife that it causes.
Robert Scoble also comments on this topic.
technology puts people out of work. Of course it does, but then it creates whole new lines of work too. Hey, one of my relatives used to shovel coal into a steam engine. Anyone want that job today? I sure don't. But that job was destroyed by Diesel engines.
Today I spent the entire day with the future staring me in the face. It is a future with an infinite number of possibilities. But, yeah, it might put some Win32 programmers out of work. So be it. In 10 years Win32 programming will look about the same as shoveling coal into a steam engine.
The new world, though, will have more customers than our Windows XP-based one does today. It'll have people doing new things, and people building new worlds.
Ryan Overbey writes about Jacques Derrida. He links to Mark Liberman doing the same.#
Ryan:
Last year the American Academy of Religion played host to Jaques Derrida. He was treated as royalty among us, a superstar, filling the convention center auditorium in Toronto with the devoted, the admiring, the loathing, and the curious. I was there mainly for the free wine in the Harvard reception, but I also wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I remember trying to take notes on the conversation with Derrida, and decided that it would be as futile as taking dictation from a raving schizophrenic. Nothing made sense. There were no propositions, no descriptions, just a series of paradoxes and avoidances. But many others were admiring, transfixed. Tenured professors chairing panels would say things like Derrida is among us, as if this was something significant, something exciting, something worth our time and attention. Never did I feel more contempt for the study of religion than in that room, with everyone hanging on his every muddled word. Of course, it's an unfair sentiment, as it relies on my perceptions of others' reactions to Derrida. What I read as awe and admiration on my colleagues' faces may have been just a kind of frozen-faced politeness, or a satisfaction that their morbid curiosity had been quenched at last.
Mark:
[A] recent interview with Jacques Derrida reminded me of a parlor game that a colleague of mine claims to have played, back in the day when it was easier to find academics who took Derrida seriously.
My colleague would open one of Derrida's works to a random page, pick a random sentence, write it down, and then (above or below it) write a variant in which positive and negative were interchanged, or a word or phrase was replaced with one of opposite meaning. He would then challenge the assembled Derrida partisans to guess which was the original and which was the variant. The point was that Derrida's admirers are generally unable to distinguish his pronouncements from their opposites at better than chance level, suggesting that the content is a sophisticated form of white noise. On this view, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, Derrida is "not even wrong.".
Randall Parker links to an interview with Dennis Miller, who explains why he shifted to the right.#
MILLER: I'm not as sure of my guesswork anymore. To be on the Left, you have to be amazingly certain about things you're guessing at, and I felt like a phony. I was looking for ideas, and all I was getting from liberals was, "We'd like a little more of your money, and we're kind of reticent to protect you from bad guys." Really? That's all you're offering? I gotta go! I can't stay anymore. Also, when I kept hearing liberals equating Giuliani with Hitler—that's when I really left the reservation. Even before 9/11, I'd travel to New York and say, "Wow, this city certainly seems to be running better." Giuliani is the kind of leader I admire. When it's five degrees below zero and you arrest somebody to get him inside and off the street—that's not something Hitler would do. It made me realize that I was with the wrong group if that's what Hitler looked like to them.
The Yeti thinks we need a policy of truth in our homes.#
Children learn to lie at an early age. Faking tears in the crib brings the mother running. Falling down and scraping your knee, but waiting to cry until you get into the room with adults.
As little boys get older, they are told to confront their troubles. Little girls are taught to solve their problems through coercion. "Please Daddy?"
Read on for the intriguing part.
Kevin posts a new Knowledge for Thirst entry.#
I love beverages. We wouldn't be here if I didn't. When I find a beverage I like, I can write a symphony about it as easily as I my lungs fill with air. But when I find a beverage I hate, that I really, deeply hate, it's as though my words don't want anything to do with the memory of that beverage. They won't come. They don't even want the taste recorded. They want it disacknowledged, erased, forgotten.
It occurs to me that maybe this isn't a problem in an of itself, but rather a symptom of a larger affliction, which is my aversion for the blurring of lines. I like things individually but not mixed together. [...] I like juice, and I like water, but I don't enjoy water juice, and I despise juicy water.
This is related to the problem I had with Propel. When I desire juice, I shall drink juice. When water is called for, I will not rest until water is found. Never will I crave a middle ground. Can you picture me uttering either of these sentences:
"I could go for some juice, but only if it was a great deal more bland!"
"My tongue cries out for water with a vague citrusy aftertaste that lingers like cottonmouth!"
Richard comments on the Yahoo! story about there being "No Stigma of Women Over 40 Dating Younger Men."#
"There seems to be no stigma now for dating men a few years younger. Twenty years ago, women didn't have the jobs. Today they have the jobs, they have the money, they can call the shots." This is in reference to women in their 40s, alas, not their late 20s or early 30s, many of whom, for me, are ASOWs. (ASOW is an acronym I coined, and stands for Attractive Slightly-Older Women.) But it's interesting, because I had argued (along Crittendenonian lines) that since women tend to date older men, that the supply of older men is not merely finite, but decreasing, whereas since men tend to prefer to date younger women, their supply is almost infinite, because there will always be women younger than them. I pause to quote from a movie my generation, watched either in high school or in early college, Dazed and Confused. Talking about his unwillingness to worry about his inability to graduate from high school, the Matthew McConaughey character says "That's what I like about these high school girls: I keep getting older, they stay the same age." (It's properly done with a hand motion that further creepifies the quote.)
Moxie covers it.
Women over 40 endorse the men who can still get it up
Demi Moore has fueled women over 40 to seek a recall on men their own age.
Close to one third of unmarried women ages 40-60 would like a younger candidate for boyfriend.
Women feel the gray hasn't performed to their expectations and seek to trim the fat and find younger more muscular alternatives to govern their love lives.
Feminists claim this is a huge victory in the stride towards gender equality since 96.9% of men aged 40-60 prefer to date younger women.
If Moxie ever wants to get on that bandwagon, she can call me ANYDAY.
Steven writes about his new PowerBook.#
8. If you look closely at the specs, you will notice that the new 15" PowerBooks are ever-so-slightly larger in all three dimensions, and a notch heavier. When you actually handle one however, they feel gigantic compared to the previous rev. It's weird how a tenth of an inch here and there adds up to such a subjective difference.
Screenshots of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.#
This is really weird: Today I went to Christie's Toybox to get a couple of new porno magazines, and there was this one three-pack of magazines that came with a free pair of panties. They weren't supposedly used by the models or anything, they were new panties. White panties with little red hearts on them. They were wrapped around the magazines and the whole thing was wrapped in plastic, as porno magazines usually are. This seemed very strange to me. I guess some guys just want a pair of panties laying around the house, or maybe the guy's a crossdresser and wants to wear them. Or maybe they think if they give them to their girlfriends or wives they wont mind them buying the porn. I don't know. The magazines they were packaged with weren't any kind of weird fetish magazine or anything, it was just a straightforward sex mag. And no, I didn't buy them. I did buy a couple of magazines, but they didn't come with free panties or anything like that.