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Forgive me for lol'ing, but the LAST thing i'd want to see is payroll done like most software places do version control. I've tried to teach teams of analysts

Forgive me for lol'ing, but the LAST thing i'd want to see is payroll done like most software places do version control. I've tried to teach teams of analysts version control, the xkcd panel is a documentary, not a joke. https://xkcd.com/1597/ https://xkcd.com/1597/ Also, its 'totally possible' only in the sense that it really isn't: i.e. if like many tech people you ignore actual social, infrastructure, law and cultural issues and start blaming the users for why they don't use your brilliant tech product/live their lives like they're supposed to, or talk glibly about things you don't understand.

gnu8 8y ago
But I’m a software engineer so I can solve ANYTHING! /s Seriously though, I wonder how they seriously imagine streaming money would work. The largest payment processors in the world and all the banks still use IBM mainframes that are the fastest transaction processors in the world. Shared ledgers threaten to consume all of the world’s energy while providing worse performance. I suppose continuously streaming money would consume massive amounts of bandwidth in addition?
andrewla 8y ago
I don't mean that the solutions to these problems are similar to the solutions to version control problems in software, I'm just making an analogy. Version control is a tricky business and has evolved over time, and it's that evolution that I'm referring to. And I did mean "totally possible" in the sense you indicate, that is, technically possible, but far from a solved solution (after all, I'm not quitting my day job to start offering this as a service). The historical reason for a payday is that cash is hard to move, so the armored car would swing by and people would line up for money; later banks would do the same thing. Because "paydays" and "paystubs" exist, other processes and organizations latched on to them as a standard place to add more process, so "running payroll" became a more and more complicated beast, thus making it even harder to make it an incremental process. So the first barrier is now gone -- while some segments of the population are cash-heavy, modern inter-bank transfers and the rise of electronic payment systems mean that banks can easily handle the cash outlays necessary to support the demand for physical specie out of cash on hand (not to mention improvements in modeling that allow them to anticipate cash demand). But the rest of the "hanger-ons" are not even close to being able to support this; everything from landlords asking for paystubs, to how payroll taxes are handled, to the way that benefits (like health insurance or retirement plans) are calculated, to the way that non-direct-payroll services like phone bills and cable bills are calculated, and the idea of limits on services (data, etc.) that are metered on a sliding monthly window instead of a continuous rolling window mean that it would be very difficult to do effective planning, unless all services started adopting these methods. To actually allow people to do this you'd almost need to have intermediate services -- a "cell phone account" that gets funded, say, daily, and remits payments to the cell phone provider on a monthly basis. Similarly a "rent account", and so on, that would gradually allow you to get an idea of what your actual cash flow looks like, without having to deal with periodic shocks that represent lump outlays and receipts. For now it's just an interesting thought that the foundation that the concept of "payday" is build on has turned to sand, and the question is whether we can find a way to take advantage of this new flexibility. Yudkowsky's tweet addresses one possible way that this may provide a benefit, and it's interesting food for thought even though I'm not completely convinced.

gnu8 8y ago

But I’m a software engineer so I can solve ANYTHING! /s Seriously though, I wonder how they seriously imagine streaming money would work. The largest payment processors in the world and all the banks still use IBM mainframes that are the fastest transaction processors in the world. Shared ledgers threaten to consume all of the world’s energy while providing worse performance. I suppose continuously streaming money would consume massive amounts of bandwidth in addition?

andrewla 8y ago

I don't mean that the solutions to these problems are similar to the solutions to version control problems in software, I'm just making an analogy. Version control is a tricky business and has evolved over time, and it's that evolution that I'm referring to. And I did mean "totally possible" in the sense you indicate, that is, technically possible, but far from a solved solution (after all, I'm not quitting my day job to start offering this as a service). The historical reason for a payday is that cash is hard to move, so the armored car would swing by and people would line up for money; later banks would do the same thing. Because "paydays" and "paystubs" exist, other processes and organizations latched on to them as a standard place to add more process, so "running payroll" became a more and more complicated beast, thus making it even harder to make it an incremental process. So the first barrier is now gone -- while some segments of the population are cash-heavy, modern inter-bank transfers and the rise of electronic payment systems mean that banks can easily handle the cash outlays necessary to support the demand for physical specie out of cash on hand (not to mention improvements in modeling that allow them to anticipate cash demand). But the rest of the "hanger-ons" are not even close to being able to support this; everything from landlords asking for paystubs, to how payroll taxes are handled, to the way that benefits (like health insurance or retirement plans) are calculated, to the way that non-direct-payroll services like phone bills and cable bills are calculated, and the idea of limits on services (data, etc.) that are metered on a sliding monthly window instead of a continuous rolling window mean that it would be very difficult to do effective planning, unless all services started adopting these methods. To actually allow people to do this you'd almost need to have intermediate services -- a "cell phone account" that gets funded, say, daily, and remits payments to the cell phone provider on a monthly basis. Similarly a "rent account", and so on, that would gradually allow you to get an idea of what your actual cash flow looks like, without having to deal with periodic shocks that represent lump outlays and receipts. For now it's just an interesting thought that the foundation that the concept of "payday" is build on has turned to sand, and the question is whether we can find a way to take advantage of this new flexibility. Yudkowsky's tweet addresses one possible way that this may provide a benefit, and it's interesting food for thought even though I'm not completely convinced.