One Philosophy I would like to resurrect it that of the beginning and end of the 'world.' Whenever a Life begins it is the creation of a world. Whenever a Life ends it is the end of a world. This is the many worlds theory. In the wheel of time it says there are neither beginnings nor ends to the 'wheel' of time. This is a Great lie.
I would've called Ford a lot, but Marxist? I kinda doubt it.
"It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages."
-- Henry Ford
We're a society that depends heavily on the service sector. Over 3/4 of the GDP comes from services. And over 3/4 of the people depend in one way or another on them for their job.
Services are awesome when it comes to generation of GDP. Because it's pretty hard to store them. They have to be used when produced. More, they usually have to be consumed. And only by consumption, value is generated. Yes, consumption. Not production. That's hard for the supply side preachers to wrap their head around, but tell me, what did you create when you produce something? Revenue? No. You accrued cost. You had to invest material and manpower to produce something. Without having someone to sell it to, it's quite worthless.
Value is generated when you sell it. But that doesn't contribute to the GDP yet. Because if whoever purchased your good or service uses it to produce other goods and services, the value of your product becomes part of the cost for his product. That's, globally speaking, a zero sum game. The 100 bucks you just earned might have gone into your pocket, but the economy, the supply side, did not generate anything at all yet. Because some other supplier is now 100 bucks short and needs to find an end customer, a consumer, that not only pays those 100 bucks on top of whatever he has to ask for to cover the other costs he has for material usage and his manpower.
Only when someone buys such a good or service and removes it from existence by consumption, actual revenue is generated. That, or when you export it.
Now, as stated in the entrance sentence, we're pretty dependent on the service sector. And it's damn hard to export services. How do you sell a haircut to some Frenchman? Only if he comes to you as a tourist. And
If you want to sell services, you need people with money. And most services are simply bought and paid for (and consumed) by average people. For a simple, logical reason: I only need one haircut. No matter how rich I may be. I only need one gardener to cut my grass and I only need one house cleaning service to clean up my mess. I won't hire another one.
Services, though, are something you need to be able to afford, and they're usually also the first thing people cut back on when money gets tight. When facing the decision between having something to eat for the rest of the week or getting a haircut, I guess it's easy to determine which one it's going to be.
In a nutshell, and the TL;DR version: If you want jobs, make sure people have money to spend. It works pretty well for countries that didn't axe their social programs and ensured that there would be many people who can still spend money on more than just food&shelter.
But these are at least things that you might consider when thinking of "internet" and being connected and online. But who'd think that their stove could "go online"?
It's worse than that. Even and especially if people don't WANT to deal with that "internet of things" crap and just want a stove that "just works", it may open a can of worms even worse than if they tried. If various computer parts of the past are a lesson (WiFi routers come to mind especially), things will be configured with as little security and as much availability in mind as possible. Read: It should work out of the box without configuration necessary.
Now guess what happens when someone buys a stove because he wants to cook, doesn't give a shit about the built in WiFi and never bothers to configure it while said WiFi is configured to connect to whatever is within reach to ensure people won't call for their "stove WiFi not working" because they'd have to do some security configurations.
Press that Start button! See if I care!
Uh... some of my appliances already exhibit that behaviour. Fuckin' Chinese crap!
And in a few 1000 years people will claim it's religious mumbo-jumbo and create fabulous stories of how we worshipped some god named IRS.
What? What did YOU think that whole crap in Egypt is about?
A lot of school districts in California either bought iPads or Chrome Books for every student. It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of weird priorities (and weird bureaucracy).
The issue is usually due to the source of the funding. These devices are purchased using one-time funds, often in the form of grants from the federal government. They either cannot be spent on teachers, or while allowed it would be silly to do so because you'd just have to fire that teacher next year.
Teachers and really big ticket items like buildings are recurring costs, and therefore need consistent funding. To get more of them you need similarly consistent funding and not one-off grants; not all money is equal.
Ist der Ruf erst mal ruiniert, lebt sich's völlig ungeniert.
It loses a bit in translation, but essentially the meaning is "once your reputation is ruined, you can as well stop having any shame".
As if the current one wasn't... but this will be a completely new beast.
You will have not only a customer base who doesn't know jack about the internet (and who might not even care about it, let alone consider their fridge, toaster or dishwasher being even remotely connected to the internet), you will have MS with its record of treating security as an afterthought, leading to half-baked tacked-on solutions that may or may not finally work more or less correctly after half a dozen iterations or so.
And now let's ponder why this might be a problem with appliances that might be a bit hard to "field-upgrade", simply due to their nature of not having a sensible user input interface. Let alone having users that often neither know nor care about their ability to be upgraded.
But, and that's the important bit here, this isn't just some "toy", like what a computer is to many people out there. A computer is something they use for their pastime. To play, to collect pictures, to surf the 'web, to have fun. If it doesn't work, well, that's a pity but nothing that would make the world stop. But with the IoT we're talking about the machines that store and prepare their food, the machines that clean their clothes and dishes, stuff that does matter to many people more than their "toy" computer.
And don't think that after a while of crappy, insecure appliances with embarrassing hacks we'll get better secured appliances. Remember who the companies are that you're dealing here. It ain't MS and Nintendo. We're talking the likes of GE here. They don't make their stuff more secure. They simply have finding security holes outlawed. It's cheaper. And they already bought the politicians anyway, so they can as well let them get to work. And of course the idiots will cheer that their fridge will no longer cook their cheese now that they're secure from the evil hackers.
I predict a lot of rather interesting times coming our way.
So do those politicians.
That's the only reason we can still travel while the commie countries had their subjects locked in: There's no "west" we could run to.
Same reason no bank robber ponders the implications of getting caught. That't not part of the plan. They have enough hubris to think of themselves infallible and don't deem it possible that their master plan could backfire.
For reference, see Nazi Germany and their zeal for recording pretty much any and every single one of their crimes.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
http://www.bbc.com/news/259075...
http://www.cnet.com/news/snowd...
If you can't be assed to google for 5 minutes, I cannot be assed to provide proper links.
I.e. you die of diabetes, heart attack or a stroke before you could get demented.
To do nothing is to be nothing.
