Our society has become massively automated compared to the middle ages. And we have 25 times the world population now. Yet we still have plenty of jobs;

No we don't. It's be decades since any western country had full employment, or even a policy to achieve same, thanks to the sadistic neoliberal idea of NAIRU. In most of the western world, there are an order of magnitude more job seekers than there are jobs.

And that's not even taking into consideration the swathes of the population involved in unproductive, pointless, bullshit jobs that serve no real purpose (eg: most layers of management).

Within a generation, two at the outside, the vast, vast majority of jobs involving manual labour will be performed by robots, except for those targeting the high-end luxury market. I expect a fairly large chunk of today's "intellectual" jobs will also disappear towards the end of that timeframe (eg: basic engineering, software development, lower levels of management, etc) as AI capabilities improve.

And yet there are apparently bugs still being found, otherwise there's be nothing to download for a 3 year old server [...]

Of course there would.

Just because a bug was fixed in a firmware update 3 years ago doesn't mean that update was applied 3 years ago.

For the life of me I do not understand this 'commercial strategy'.

?

Charging the customer what they are prepared to pay for a product, rather than what it costs to make, is a pretty core tenet of free market capitalism.

We have millions of dollars invested in HP hardware.

We typically only have 3yr support contracts on servers, first and foremost to handle hardware failures.

After that time, servers are cycled out into low important, or non-production tasks. Failures in these roles usually result in wholesale machine replacement.

Maintaining support contracts for all those 3-6 year old machines is not viable, nor are we expecting _new_ problems to be addressed since they are out of contract.

Not being able to download _old_ patches, firmware, etc, to apply when the servers are cycled out of production, however, is bullshit.

Rest assured most customers get at least 3 year of support. Not because of anything to do with firmware updates, but to deal with hardware failures.

Yes they do.
Where ?

Where is the incentive to "deliver broken products" when they're going to have to fix them anyway since the vast majority of customers will be in support contracts for at least 3 years ? And would have been even if this change never occurred ?

Most customers will pay for 3 years of support - just like they have the last upteen years - because of the other stuff it buys.

And they get a perverse incentive to deliberately deliver broken products from the outset.

No they don't.

All customers will have support contracts for a hardware purchase for 12 months.
The vast majority will then have them for another 2 years.
A sizeable chunk for probably another year or two after that.

Nearly all bugs are going to be found in the first couple of years, probably in the first 6 months, when pretty much everyone will have support contracts. Ie: they'll need to be fixed.

Independent people are more likely to live away from the masses, choose property with other criteria as a priority (view, weather, etc.) This is why the wealthy live in gated communities, try to prevent the public from accessing the beach in front of their house, live in the hills outside the cities, etc. They want to get away from the masses of poor, stupid, ugly, dirty, sick, etc. people. This is why royalty and titled people built castles and moats. It's why artists live cloistered lives. It's why the religious figures, the rabbis, the wise men, the medicine men, etc. had a space to themselves and people trekked to them for guidance and assistance.

The people you describe are not independent, they are actually hyper-dependent.

Without their subjects to bring them offerings, they have nothing.

This has been true for all of human history. The intelligent seek to shed the husk of ineptitude that is the rest of humanity.

The intelligent seek like-minded people.

For all the historical glory the lone inventor gets, the vast majority of progress comes from teams of people working together.

Windows 95 and 3.1 still had the same fundamental interface.
No, they didn't. They were extremely different.

The Desktop, Start Menu and Taskbar are the most obvious major fundamental differences between Windows 3.1 and 95. Extensive ability to drag & drop is another. The deprecating of the MDI interface (though - amazingly - it still lingers on in some apps). Context menus. Transparent interaction with network resources.

Windows 95 was a document/object-centric interface. Windows 3.1 was an application-centric interface.

Same with Windows 3.1 to 95, if you used 3.1 you could use 95 with no problems apart from the fact it looked a little different.

What ? No. People had huge problems moving from Windows 3.1 to 95. Microsoft even included Program Manager in Windows 95 and it was not uncommon in the early days for people to run it as the shell.

There are fewer fundamental UI differences between Windows 95 and Windows 7, than there are between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Indeed, in terms of UI fundamentals there's almost no difference at all between Windows 95 and Windows 7. But there are few, if any, similarities between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 (apart from the kinds of elements that are common to nearly all WIMP interfaces).

I do not have the time to properly research this topic, so I'll leave it here.

But everything I've read so far convinces me the UK is little different to the US and Australia.

The fundamental problem is there's more people than jobs. It is unlikely to be resolved in the future due to both political (conservatives and their backers have no interest in pursuing full employment) and practical (within a generation or so robotics are going to render probably half the workforce obselete) reasons.

Thanks for the discussion.

The point of unions is not to drive the "evil corporations" out of business. That would be counter-productive and stupid.

The point of unions is to put employees on an equal footing to employers when it comes to negotiations on working conditions and pay.

Generally, they achieve this goal well.

A free market is what people do when no-one holds a gun to their head forcing them to do something else.

But then inevitably someone does get a (metaphorical or literal) gun and starts holding it to people's heads.

Remember, total corporate profits in the US are less than 10% of total wages in the US. "Evil big corporations" are certainly paying as little as they can get away with, but there's not much slack there in the first place. It's not like, on average, we could be paid 20% more if our collective bosses was only more generous - that money just doesn't exist (and small companies are on far thinner margins here - making payroll is a monthly uncertainly for most).

Why must salary increases for workers be sourced from existing profits ? Why could they not be sourced by reducing the ridiculous pay packages of upper and executive management ?

There are lots of system admins around, but not a lot of them have advanced devops experience.

Maybe you should consider taking someone on and training them.

It might even generate a bit of loyalty.

Right, so if I quit my job now there's no other jobs available for me? Don't be so stupid.

I’m not the one being stupid. I’m talking at a macro level. You’re nitpicking at an individual level.

There are ca. millions more people looking for work than there are advertised jobs. That doesn’t count all the people who could work but for whatever reason aren’t considered to be looking. That means there’s not enough jobs. It doesn’t mean arbitrary person Joe Blogs cannot find a job. Obviously individual people move in and out of jobs all the time.

If we pretend to be physicists for a second, and assume each job is a perfect sphere, and we could somehow match up every single vacancy with a willing applicant tomorrow, you would still have millions of people either without a job, or working less hours than they want to.

That’s because there’s not enough jobs.

Yep, that's exactly the problem, over a million of them are NEETS for starters, youths not in employment, education, or training. They can get away with it because they live at home and £90 a week is still plenty enough to pay for the latest XBox games.

Where is the evidence these people do not want to work ?

What's the relevance of your anecdote exactly?

That your argument because you can in certain situations drive from point A to point B in less than three hours means long commutes don’t exist is stupid.

Of course if you live on one side of London and commute to the other and dawdle about walking slowly or happen to work or live far from a tube station then you're going to be able to get your commute up to 45 minutes but that still means they can get anywhere in the capital from their doorstep within 45 minutes which for a city with a population of over 7 million (think about the size of that) is not unreasonable.

The _average_ London commute is something like 37 minutes each way.

You are arguing a 45 minute commute is unusual. In actual fact it’s common if you live in London.

I am not making any comment about whether or not that is “unreasonable”. I am making the point that it could be a reason that taking a particular job is impossible.

Except that's unnecessary because guess what? we also have publicly funded schemes to deal with those problems for parents.

You have a scheme that picks children up from their homes, takes them to childcare and returns them at the end of the day ? From anywhere ?

They also get the bulk of childcare paid for, and child tax credits which leaves them with a net profit for having a child.

A quick Google says the base tax credit is 500 quid. I know the cost of living there is a lot lower than Australia, but I still doubt that would be enough turn a profit on the annual costs of child rearing.

You're just showing you have no idea about the breakdown of UK finances, the amount of benefits available and so forth. Bank bailouts don't even get included in general spending figures as they're classed as one off costs. Some of those banks have been sold back to private investors and much of the money recouped now anyway.

Who said anything about a breakdown of finances and spending ? You said:

“This is a large part the reason we ended up with one of the highest levels of public debt in the world when the financial crisis hit.”

Incorrect. See above. You've no idea what you're talking about:

Actually that breakdown is the same one I found before commenting.

I was under the impression we were talking primarily about welfare frauds - people who could work but choose not to, and how much the welfare they receive costs.

I think you just need to admit you're bitching about problems in your country and trying to project them everywhere.

Actually everything I’ve read during this discussion has led me to believe you have exactly the same problems. The sort of middle-class welfare you mention (payments to millionaires) is a problem here in Australia as well.

This shouldn’t really be surprising, since the people running the whole western world for the last 20-30 years are all adherents to the same broken neoliberal economic philosophy.