Burning off the useless eaters

[Tim May]

On Friday, May 2, 2003, at 12:53  PM, Thomas Shaddack wrote:

>
>> In a free society, nothing stops an employee from seeking a lower
>> stress, less demanding, lower profit margin employer, lower-paying 
>> job.
>> In America, these low-paid employees are called "public teachers."
>
> Lower stress? In the job where you can get shot? (Well, luckily not in 
> all
> locations.)

Don't believe what you see on television or movies is any measure of 
the norm. Similar to the "inspection paradox," what one is observing is 
usually not the norm.

While a few teachers all around the world (U.S., Australia, Scotland, 
Germany, etc.) have gotten shot, this can happen in lots of 
professions. It's what happens when there are a few billion people with 
television cameras and reporters in close proximity.

>
>> Do you think American schools do not have such clubs? I was in a dozen
>> of them, and President of several.
>
> I am not surprised. :) How expensive they were to attend?

What are you talking about? All of the clubs I knew of were free. A few 
were closed except to those invited (based on various criteria), but 
most were open to anyone with interest. Same as Cypherpunks.

>
> Capitalism is a good idea, as long as it has the form of a lot of 
> small,
> widely varying subjects. The current trend of consolidation brings away
> both the competition and the choice, and with high-enough barriers to
> entry there will be no new small subjects to disrupt the balance.

Yes, you are right, the great electronics companies of the 1960s sit 
astride our economic life, crushing the life out of real competition! 
With Fairchild and Rheem Semiconductor and Mohawk Data Sciences 
controlling everything, new ideas and innovations cannot be developed!

And the 1970s were much, much worse, with the computer companies 
consolidating their power and dominating all computer work! Who can 
innovate when Burroughs, Honeywell, Data General, Univac, NCR, DEC, and 
CDC utterly dominate?

>> But your rant above says you would probably be happier under state
>> socialism, which makes this list your absolute worse enemy.
>
> Not necessarily. I just dislike the situation when money are the
> beginning, the center, and the end of virtually everything, and where
> people are degraded to mere replaceable "human resources".

Nonsense. Anyone who has recruited, hired, fired, and otherwise managed 
employees know the true story. Namely, that good people are hard to 
find, hard to hire, hard to keep, and that they must be coddled and 
accommodated in their idiosyncracies.

Do you think Declan's employees view him as just an interchangeable 
part?

Better yet, do you think I have changed all that much since when I was 
a physicist working for Intel? I was considered a trouble maker, a shit 
disturber....but a damned good thinker and problem solver. I often 
solved problems almost "on the spot," in meetings where I was brought 
in, when roomfuls of idiots had been assigning each other "action 
items" for months. (A lot of time people seem to think they cannot 
solve a problem by thinking about it, so they try to look busy, shuffle 
papers, and hope someone else solves the problem. I merely listened, 
poked around, and developed mental images of what was happening. 
Usually this worked very quickly.)

For this, they cut me a lot of slack. They gave me a big lab and told 
me to keep on doing what I was doing.

This is about as far from "degraded to mere replaceable "human 
resources"" as one can get. And there were a lot of people treated like 
me.

And when I had to hire people, finding them and keeping them was no 
easy chore.

(Getting rid of some of them was also difficult...especially the 
coloreds. Our Personnel people practically flipped out when a colored 
person had to be fired. We had to do extra steps, and still we got sued 
for "racial discrimination." I don't think any of the coloreds ever won 
their cases, though.)

You seem to have some very skewed ideas of what "capitalism" means. You 
seem to think it means mean old capitalist bosses whip the proles and 
fire them at will. Your teachers are still teaching you the Marxist 
dialectic, I think.
>
>> Free markets are often rough. They mean there is no one to provide 
>> food
>> for those who have no skills to offer.
>
> Contemporary free markets (we'll leave aside the fact they aren't 
> really
> free) are driven by short-term profits. Higher investments aimed to
> distant future are rare and far between. Basic research suffers, like
> virtually everything with no immediate profitable application.

Nonsense. Basic research is being done by many people. Corporations 
have never been the best place for blue-sky, academic research. This is 
one reason the U.S. and Western Europe have thousands of excellent 
universities and colleges offering Ph.D. programs and all the things 
that go with them (professors doing research, grant money, tie-ins with 
corporations, etc.).

"Research" is a very broad topic, covering many fields and many issues. 
Issues of basic physics vs. applied technology, issues of biological 
principles vs. new drugs and new tools, issues of fundamental 
mathematics vs. computer programming.

I think research is doing very well. Some fields are "mined out" in 
terms of major new paradigms, at least in terms of the energies and 
scales we can now probe. Some are undergoing rapid change. Some are 
hotbeds of academic research, some are most closely related to 
corporation projects. All to be expected.



--Tim May
"The Constitution is a radical document...it is the job of the 
government to rein in people's rights." --President William J. Clinton


--Tim May
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any 
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm 
to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient 
warrant." --John Stuart Mill