A slashdot article with the phrase "tiny nose robots" in the title. My life is complete.
Right, Bernie will have you believe that this means that the men loading trucks by hand became more productive, yet they are the ones who will not be working at all once their jobs are automated. It is always the company that becomes more productive, the people who own the company invest in new tools and by doing it they reduce their future expenses and improve throughput, this makes *them* more productive, not the people who used to do the work that is about to be automated. The company spends its capital, becomes more efficient. For whatever reason Bernie says that now, that the company is more productive, he will take the productivity gains away from the people who risked their capital to achieve it.
When the society discourages productivity, it loses productivity, this is why Americans lost their manufacturing sector.
When the society discourages capital formation, it loses capital, that is what America will find out as well.
Oh, my goodness, so many excuses. Everyone I know, who runs their own business did it *against* odds, not because they had something given to them, like 5 day pay for 4 days of work. I know people who mortgaged their own houses, sold their cars to start their business. I know people who run multiple properties and they are doing all of the work themselves, cleaning, renovating. I know people who ran a successful business, sold it, started another business and again, it was a success. They complain about things, but they do them and nothing can stop them short of death.
He's starting out great with Krypto the Super-Dog!
Lets say you start a company and you use AI to build a bunch of code and help you to devise processes that deal with client lead generation and new client onboarding, client retention and such. You do it all by yourself, lets say it brings you 100,000USD a month (you think it's impossible? I think it's very possible today, for example you can do that with a youtube channel). Does this mean that you do not deserve something and a lid should be put on something, so that what? So that a guy from the street, who doesn't have anything to do with you can get a cut of money you generate? Why?
But that's not what most businesses are like, most businesses are people starting something on their own, eventually hiring a few more people and maybe scaling up a little bit. A few shawarma shops, a few laundromats, a few properties, maybe a delivery business, maybe a few convenience stores, that's what most people would do and that's if they are successful at running at least one of them first.
If they find a way to use AI for example to make themselves more productive by automating their phone lines, by doing some marketing with AI that they have never had a budget for anyway, Bernie thinks now they have to do what, cut the hours of all of their stuff by 4 days a week? OK, who is going to be manning the stations the 5th day, the 6th day, in some cases the 7th day? (yeah, I think it's really great if a business is open 7 days a week, over 300 days a year hopefully, very useful).
The question of 'deserve' is funny, what does it mean, who deserves what? Are you an IG girl, who dates older guys so that they would pay for her traveling and expensive shopping habits? If you talk to those girls, that have it down - they *know* they 'deserve' this and that and the other thing, they always know it. It's because it's easy for them, 'if you're done with your ex, move onto the next', etc.
Unless you are in this much of a demand, you can't have this type of a world outlook, thinking that you 'deserve' something, it's nonsense. You take what you can make, what you can get, that's the reality. If you can put up another shop and make another 5K or whatever a month, good for you, that's why you are going to be a millionaire and not a bum. There is no such thing as 'collecting money', by the way. The moment I have a few spare dollars I either buy something for myself (rare) or I put it to work, I start another project, I buy more parts, I invest into more development or marketing or think of a way to use it to lower future expenses, whatever. Money is a *tool*, it is not a thing that people collect for itself. It is a tool that allows one to build more income streams. Who taught you economics, Marx?
Building a Linux distribution requires a fair amount of infrastructure, and that's something that's pretty different from distro to distro (and not all make all the necessary tooling public). Changing to a different base distro would most likely require a significant rework, and may be more than someone, especially someone who has mastered the intricacies of one distro's tooling, wants to do.
Somehow Bernie thinks that businesses owe to hire people and pay them for the sake of hiring people and paying them. Businesses are started to make the money for the people who start them, wow, a huge revelation. Have you ever started a business, tried running anything, a proverbial lemonade stand? If you have, have you hired people to sit there and do nothing? What if you started a lemonade stand, made some money, bought a juicer, used that to make more money, started another stand, hired a person. Would you pay them above the market rate? What is a market rate, you may ask? It is the rate that people in the area would be willing to show up for and to interview for your new lemonade stand position. You would have a few different people, mostly without any experience, you probably wouldn't have to pay much to man your point of sale. Would you pay them the same for being at work for 4 days as for 5 days?
Bernie can point out whatever he likes, you cannot escape a simple fact - if running a lemonade stand brought in money, there would be competition and people would be willing to find ways to automate as much as possible and to reduce prices in order to gain market share. Keeping prices low enough for people actually to buy your product while paying people for 5 days of work while they are only working 4 days is an incompatibilities in goals, you can do it until competition comes in and shows you what true efficiencies may look like. Ideas like that of Bernie is what moved production out of the Western world (USA in this case) and to places like China (and now Vietnam and others). Trying to put a lid on this development at this point is not going to work.
Years ago on this very site I noted that a country that loses manufacturing due to its socialist policies will inevitably lose engineering and will then lose education system as well. America is about half way there, there is still engineering, but it sure lost manufacturing. Try to go down the road and find a company that can make a tool that you need to make tools that you need to make products that you want. Even if you find some old guy somewhere, making dies and casts, the prices are still not going to be anywhere near close. AI is nothing without manufacturing.
I work for myself, I have 3 companies to run, who is going to give me a 4 day work week and what would that look like? Also if I could have a 4 day work week today, I would start another company and would run out of the week days anyway. Actually I have people working for me 4 days a week, this is because we run around the clock, 24x7x52 and some shifts are less attractive to the hires, especially the weekends, so we have to compensate with flexibility, but everyone is on the clock anyway, it is up to the person to decide if he or she wants to work more hours. I am always amazed at people just coming up with broad statements like that: everyone must have a 4 day work week! What does that mean? Silly simple solutions to real world problems don't work.
Should we take advice on work-related matters from someone who obviously does not have any clue what it's talking about and lives in his parents' basement jerking off his miserable life to terabytes of kiddie scat bestiality furry porn from Germany?
Amazing! Were you masturbating while writing this? I bet you feel all philosophical and cultured and dark and edgy and cool and yoo-ro-peon. Have you shoved a baguette up your ass yet? Do you dream of strutting on all fours on the streets of Amsterdam wearing a collar and a leather thong? When consciousness dawns on your obnubilated loserboy mind, do you ever consider that leaping from the tallest building in the block would be a fitting end for your useless existence?
Of course, many gas stations actually have these things called "employees" and sometimes they will put clearly-visible somethings (like a cone) at a downed pump. I see that very rarely, though.
So you do see them!
But, even for an idealist, it's hard to ignore the salary discrepancy when it gets to a certain point - especially if you have a family.
It's not the discrepancy between academic and industry salaries that matters, it's the absolute value of that salary. That's why I ended up in Canada instead of the UK as an academic - UK academic salaries are not enough to be able to afford a house and support a family on, Canadian ones are. I don't really care what I might have been able to earn in industry because I enjoy my job as an academic too much to want to work in industry. However, I have to have a job that earns enough to afford a house and support my family at a reasonable standard of living - that's my bottom line and the UK salaries for academics are well below that, even up north where I am from and the cost of living is lower.
Mommy, what happens to your files when you die?