From way back in April.

The article argues that IT is destroying more jobs than it creates and does so by pointing to total job growth in the United States, which was positive in each decade from 1940 through to the end of 1999, but negative in the first decade of this century. I don't know if this is an accurate portrayal of the argument put forward by the authors of the book, but if so it's flawed to the point of uselessness.

First, it assumes that all job gains and job losses are due to IT, which is clearly not true. Teasing out the effects of IT on total employment is extremely difficult, but essential for establishing any sort of causal relationship.

Second, up until 2008, US job growth in the previous decade *was* positive, to the tune of about 4%. While not a stellar performance, it does still represent growth in jobs, not decline. It is only the massive job losses since the recession started which leaves the decade as a whole with a small decline in total employment.

All that the article has shown is that recessions cost jobs and that big recessions cost lots of jobs, which isn't exactly news. It says nothing at all about the effects of IT on employment. Unless you think that IT causes recessions.

It can be useful to look at the situation the other way around.

Let's say that the company you work for is worth $10 million. In other words, someone would have to offer the owners $10m to buy it from them. Let's further assume that the 7k increase that the new job offers you is 10% of your current salary.

Here's the question: If a potential buyer offered to pay the owners of your company an additional $1 million (10% more) if they cut some staff, including you, would they take it or would they reject it out of loyalty to you?

If they'd take the $1m and dump you then they have no loyalty to you so you owe no loyalty to them in return.

a blind guess has 50% chance of being right

If you guess "female" you've actually got a 55% chance of being right.

http://nextbigfuture.com/

Brian's copyediting is atrocious, but he stays on top of a wide range of technological developments.

Italian surgeon. African patient (studying in Iceland). English technology. Operation took place in Sweden.

I guess the poster of the article can be given for the error in the subject line. With such an international cast it's hard to believe that a Spaniard wasn't involved *somewhere*.

I like technologies with no moving parts.

I'm working with a small team with members in three different timezones, up to 8 hours apart. That makes any of the immediate-mode forms of communication, like Skype and IRC, difficult as it always requires someone to make themselves available outside of normal working hours.

What we've been doing is using a team blog in which each team member writes a brief summary of what they did each day, raises flags on potential issues, etc. Email is used for more extensive temporal discussions.

We're running on two-week agile cycles, so once every two weeks we have a half-hour teleconference in real-time, which helps to keep people from drifting too far apart.

We use Code Collaborator for code reviews. It's got a couple of minor annoyances but on the whole is working pretty nicely for us.

Two points:

1) When has the Fed ever printed "unlimited amounts of bills", or even unusually large amounts for that matter?

2) Deflation is, arguably, even more dangerous to an economy than inflation. Just look at Japan for the past 10-15 years. If your economy goes into a deflationary slump, you want the ability to print lots of bills to counteract it.

"Political Machines" would be utterly powerless if voters thought for themselves instead of taking the lazy way out and just voting for whomever their leaders/preachers/idols/spouse told them to.

So don't blame the powerful, blame the sheep who listen to them and allow themselves to be bought off with trinkets.

It took a while before everyone standardized on what we now know as "clockwise", but once upon a time there were clocks which spun the other way.

Since when is a closed test track considered a "real world" environment?

A corporate criminal, two religious zealots and a fear-mongering gold-pimp.

I guess the Dalai Lama is the least offensive of the lot. At least he doesn't proselytize and hasn't, to my knowledge, been the head of a conspiracy to cover up institutional pedophelia.

You must be referring to the chart in that wikipedia article. It's talking about the new phone sales, not total installed base. I've corrected the chart's heading to better reflect that.

Julian Assange is a nerd!

Doubtless the next revelation will be that he had acne as a teenager. All of which is clear evidence that he is a rapist, terrorist and traitor.