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Keith,
The problem for the working man is that as his conditions improve and his
wages rise, so also do Economic Rents rise removing his advantage and
reducing him to penury again.
One of the things that Marx got right was his noting that the Industrial
Revolution was financed by Economic Rents. Some idiots support the
extracting of Rents from the wages of labor because it provided the
wherewithal to finance the Industrial Revolution.
Bah!
Harry
******************************
Henry George School of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042
(818) 352-4141
******************************
From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, December 25, 2010 11:11 PM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION;
[email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Futurework] A Robot Stole My Job: Automation in the Recession
At 14:03 25/12/2010 -0800, Sandwichman wrote:
Harry,
I would like to recommend a 180-year old book to you. It is called The
Working-Mans Companion. The results of Machinery, namely cheap production
and increased employment, exhibited and was published by the Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1831 in response to the
machine-breaking Swing Riots. The Companion is a rather cheerful and
optimistic tract, which attributes the machine-breaking riots of
agricultural workers to ignorance of the great value that machinery
contributes to their way of life. Patiently and in a most amiable and
charitable manner, the author explains to the reader what life would be
like without machines and all the wonderful benefits they confer. The
books analytical core was a popularization of Says Law of Markets:
"There is no truth so clear, that as the productions of industry multiply,
the means of acquiring those productions multiply also. The productions
which are created by one producer, furnish the means of purchasing the
productions created by another producer; and, in consequence of this
double production, the necessities of both the one and the other are
better supplied. The multiplication of produce multiplies the consumers of
produce."
The consequence of this law is that there is no such thing as a limit to
the wants of consumers or to the means available to consumers to satisfy
their wants.
This is not quite correct. J-B Say said that as long as there were
products that people desired they would gain enough money one way or
another to buy them.
In Say's day, the only method available to the masses was by working
harder or more efficiently. In modern times -- and particularly for the
last 30 years or so -- credit has been thrust upon the masses, such has
been the desperation of the powers-that-be (governments, major
corporations, banks) that economic growth must keep going.
What have been missing for the past 30 years are uniquely new, initially
expensive consumer goods that work their way downwards from the rich to
the poor in ever-wider stages of mass production, creating ever-cheaper
versions of the same products. Since then, "new" consumer goods (e.g. PCs,
mobile phones, kitchen make-overs) are only marginal improvements,
fashionable embellishments or amalgamations of goods that are anything
from 50 to 150 years since first conceived.
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be, and that which is
done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the
sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
(Isn't the language of the James version gorgeous?!) The unknown author
was correct enough in his times (agricultural) but wasn't correct in
industrial times (very roughly 1780-1980). He's correct again now.
But maybe both unknown authors (of Ecclesiastes, and The Working-Mans
Companion) give us a clue as to what's next. A little further on, the
first one writes:
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
As to the second author, let me now skim down:
[sandwichman] Thus the amount of work to be done is also unlimited and,
in fact, expands as a consequence of machinery. The introduction of
machinery may indeed displace workers in one particular occupation for a
short while but will soon open new opportunities. The advice given to the
ordinary worker is to become a capitalist and put aside enough funds so
that if wages become depressed one can go out from the market:
[The Working-Mans Companion] "There is a glut of laborers in the market.
If you continue in the market of labor during this glut, your wages must
fall. What is the remedy? To go out of the market& Become capitalists.
When there is too much labor in the market, and wages are too low, do not
combine to raise the wages; do not combine with the vain hope of
compelling the employer to pay more for labor than there are funds for the
maintenance of labor: but go out of the market. Leave the relations
between wages and labor to equalize themselves& When wages fall by a glut
of labor, you not only continue to work, but you work harder; and thus you
increase the evil. You have, in too many cases, nothing but your labor for
your support. We say to you, get something else ; acquire something to
fall back upon. When there is a glut of labor, go at once out of the
market; become yourselves capitalists."
But how do the unemployed of today become capitalists (that is,
producers)? Unlike early industrial revolution times when there were many
innovative opportunities open to even the working man (and hundreds of
"country banks" [in England anyway, with probably many similar ones in
America] falling over themselves to finance even highly risky endeavours)
where do the unemployed get capital?
They could, however, get increasing amounts of working capital from
profits. Perhaps the clue is given by one of the undoubted geniuses of the
last century (and still alive), Freeman Dyson. Turning his attention from
quantum physics to the latest growth area in science -- genetics -- he's
lately been remarking about what he calls "garage-biology".
[Here I'm going to stop. I've decided to make this a separate topic for a
posting to three other lists and I would need to re-engineer my head
somewhat to continue here and then write de novo. But I will post it to
this list also.]
P.S. Here I just want to add a comment to previous discussion above. Even
the poorest in the advanced countries have been able to acquire the most
sophisticated consumer goods of the last century -- and originally
exorbitantly expensive (e.g. cars, TVs, foreign holidays, etc). The only
consumer good that the poor desired more than anything else -- a home of
their own -- had been denied them until the last few years. But the
economic system couldn't supply this except by means of credit which was
skilfully disguised as being affordable but which turned out not to be so.
The present economic-growth system (with apparently inexhaustible credit)
has now reached the end of the road.
Earlymorningpotofteaman
There are only one thing wrong with the book. The workers (for the most
part, anyway) who broke machines had nothing against machines, per se.
What they were up in arms about was their misery and impoverishment.
Breaking the machines was SYMBOLIC.
In a piece about feminism in the New Yorker a few years ago, Ariel Levy
wrote, "There are political consequences to remembering things that never
happened and forgetting things that did." She was referring to the alleged
incidents of "bra burning" that took place in the 1970s. Reports of bra
burning were, to paraphrase Mark Twain, "greatly exaggerated." Rather than
being a story about an actual event, the alleged bra-burning incident was
a simile that a reporter used in comparing feminists to draft resisters
who burned draft cards.
If the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had still been around
in the 1970s, perhaps they could have issued a tract explaining to women
the support and comfort provided by brassieres.
On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Harry Pollard
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
I suspect, Michael, that this whole subject would be enjoyed by the 19th
century Luddites.
I repeat, it's a red herring designed to avoid the real problems.
Or, as is the newly popular phrase to describe US politicians, it's kicking
the can down the road!
Merry Christmas!
Harry
******************************
Henry George School of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042
(818) 352-4141
******************************
-----Original Message-----
From:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 11:52 AM
To: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Re: A Robot Stole My Job: Automation in the Recession
Pitfalls of automation on the way to the singularity:
As scary as this scenario is, taken as a model for the larger trend, it's
heartwarming that the financial cohort was reduced to the role of gofers for
the people who actually *do* stuff and that at least *some* critical stuff
got done under the circumstances.
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 20 December 2010 Volume 26:Issue 25
Also at:
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.25.html>http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.25.html
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:07:20 -0500
From: "Robert L Wears, MD, MS" <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
Subject: Health information technology risks
Since the ECRI Institute recently moved health IT to its 'top 10
list' of hazardous healthcare technologies for 2011, I thought I
would offer this case in point.
Shortly before midnight on a Monday evening, a large urban
academic medical center suffered a major IT system crash which
disabled virtually all IT functionality for the entire campus and
regional outpatient clinics. The outage affected ADT, financial,
medical records, laboratory ordering and reporting, imaging
ordering and reporting, and pharmacy systems. (Two
semi-independent subsystems, EKG, and picture archiving, were
still functional in a limited sense). The outage persisted for 67
hours, and forced the cancelation of all elective procedures on
Wednesday and Thursday, involving 52 major procedures and numerous
minor procedures (such as colonoscopies). All ambulance traffic
was diverted to other hospitals during the outage (estimated 70
diversions). There were substantial delays in obtaining
laboratory and radiology results on existing inpatients, so
despite the reduction in the numbers of incoming patients, it was
difficult to clear out the hospital as physicians delayed
discharges pending those results. Not surprising to the readers
of RISKS, the outage was due to a concatenation of small failures
and long-standing but unapparent underlying latent conditions.
The triggering event was a hardware failure in a critical network
component. This was repaired but required major servers to be
manually restarted. During restart, the servers halted and
reported critical errors; it was then discovered that certain file
permissions had been changed that prevented the clinical systems
from rebooting, and operators from reverting to prior versions.
(It should be noted that these systems had not been rebooted for
over 26 months). Ultimately it was found that these changes
resulted from an attempt to install "high availability" failover
capability two years prior. The high availability project had
been plagued with problems from the start, and eventually was
halted prior to completion, but some changes that had been made
were never completely rolled back, unknown to the system's
managers. These changes, in the presence of the network fault,
had the effect of triggering an attempt to execute high
availability failover processes that were nonexistent and thus led
to the reboot failures. Once this issue was discovered and
corrected, clinical servers could be restarted. The databases
then underwent extensive integrity checks, and when these were
satisfactory, services were resumed on Friday at 1600.
Backloading the clinical and financial data accumulated during the
outage took considerably longer than the downtime did. There was
no evidence this event was due to external agency, malware,
hacking, etc. Interestingly, no pre-existing data were lost
during the crash and downtime. A previous risk analysis had
estimated direct costs for complete downtime at $56,000 per hour,
so the total direct cost (not including lost revenue from canceled
cases or diverted patients) is likely close to $4 million. As far
as is known, no patients were injured during this event. The
risks here are multiple, but a few salient point are worth
emphasizing. First, it was difficult initially for frontline
workers to convince help desk personnel that the system was
unavailable due to the partitioning of the network secondary to
the initiating hardware failure. Second, it was difficult to
understand the nature of the failure or to uncover the ultimate
cause of the event. Third, the organization was slow in
activating its own internal disaster plan - an incident management
group was not convened until 1530 Tuesday, roughly 16 hours into
the incident. Fourth, the social element of the sociotechnical
system that is a hospital was able to quickly reorganize in
multiple ways and keep essential services operating in at least
some fashion for the duration. Many of these adaptations were
made "on the fly"; one of the most interesting was rescheduling
financial staff (who now had nothing to do, since no bills could
be produced), using them as runners to move orders, materials, and
results around the organization. Fifth, as has been frequently
noted in RISKS, maintenance played an important part in this
failure. The irony of the role of "high availability" resulting
in unavailability is rich indeed. Sixth, as Richard Cook has
pointed out, a working system, even with known flaws, is a
precious resource, so the reluctance to ever submit to a full
restart over the course of two years, which included multiple
large and small maintenance downtimes, is understandable, even
though that might have identified problems like the undocumented
permission and script changes at a time when they might have been
more easily recognized and corrected. As more and more care
delivery organizations with little experience in managing
clinical, as opposed to business, systems install more and more
advanced, clinical HIT systems -- systems that have not been
developed from a safety-critical computing viewpoint -- more
frequent and potentially more consequential failures are likely.
Robert L Wears, MD, MS University of Florida 1-904-244-4405
(ass't) Also Imperial College London
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] +44
(0)791 015 2219
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Sandwichman
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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