Happy 80th birthday to Charlie Harper, British singer, songwriter and lead singer of the punk rock band UK Subs, born on this day in 1944 in Hackney, London.
Happy Birthday to Paul John Weller, English singer-songwriter and musician with The Jam, Style Council and many other musicians and bands, born on this day in 1958, Woking, Surrey, England
#JustFinished Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant
This has been an absolutely fascinating book to read and is perhaps the most important book I'll read all year. Merchant is spot on with his commentary about the parallels between the first Industrial Revolution and now. We have not learned a thing about protecting our populations and economies from mass unemployment during technological upheaval.
I spent last night thinking about the "shift to the left" initiative at my old job, basically reducing the complexity of any work you can enough for someone lower paid and lower skilled to do it. And now the push to automate anything that is repeatable. In both cases, the companies reduced staff enough to make you HAPPY to get the work off your plate. By running departments "lean" enough to mean we can't complete our objectives,
the powers that be force us into participating in our own obsolescence. It's sinister and brilliant at the same time.
Shifting to the left has morphed into shifting to lower cost environments. Hire someone in the Philippines rather than Hong Kong or North America. And sure, I'm all for global wealth, but it does seem both exploitative of the Filipinos and detrimental to those in higher paid environments.
If we were hiring them for expertise rather than for taking up lower level work, I would feel differently. But doing this is restricting entry level positions in places where you're trying to get your experts, thus limiting the growth potential in those economies. It's going to depress the tech sector in ways I don't think they've considered enough to care about. Or maybe they have considered it and still don't care.
There was even a quote in the book from some first Industrial Revolution tech bro saying, essentially, "Go ahead. Try to get the government to care enough to fix this." And we're right back there now. We can't even go back to the old ways of destroying the tech that's destroying our lives because we live in a surveillance society. And where the hell is that AI being hosted anyway?
It's spread out across geographies and there are backups. I don't know how we'll make it through this.
Are other sectors as bad as tech? What happens in NA when what's left of the middle class is gone and only the ultra rich can afford to live? As each small piece of wealth for the average person erodes, cracks appear in the foundation of the economy, and the negative impact will spread.
'The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) is proud to announce the launch of the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive (NIBSDA), the first-ever digital archives database on Indian Boarding Schools. NIBSDA is a groundbreaking project aimed at preserving and bringing to light the history of the U.S. Indian Boarding School era.'