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If the author of this believes what they wrote then I feel sorry for them, they're seeing the worst in a good situation and they're substantiating it with an op

If the author of this believes what they wrote then I feel sorry for them, they're seeing the worst in a good situation and they're substantiating it with an opinion piece that's purported as scientific. Ironically the paper quoted in this article is a victim, or maybe a symptom of the citation issue it points out. You don't need to be a genius to see the innovations of the last 5-20 years however they are so much more complex that they're harder to understand. It's a LOT harder to explain Amazon (the global teleportation of goods and services) then it is to explain electricity.

fragmede 5y ago
We were promised cold fusion, flying cars, and 2-day work weeks. Instead we got side-hustles driving other people around, delivering stuff for other people, and a faster mail-in catalog. The world's most advanced machine today isn't some science experiment to further our knowledge of the universe (although we certainly have those); no, the world's singular most advanced machine is the one that delivers advertisements to us because we're all too cheap to pay $70/yr for Facebook because none of us have enough money. Sure, the machine behind Amazon is too complicated for any one person to know, but it's a glorified mail-in catalog. That's the crowning achievement of humanity in 2021? That or NFTs? I'm very grateful for my Prime membership but forgive me for wanting better than that.
- dsabanin 5y ago
  > I'm very grateful for my Prime membership but forgive me for wanting better than that. The world is eagerly awaiting for your contribution. In this regard I believe rules of open source projects apply. You want something? Work on it or help those who work on it.
- jspaetzel 5y ago
  We all want better, and in so many ways we're getting there.
- aksss 5y ago
  > $70..none of us have enough money. C’mon - a) none of us likely see $70/yr in personal value in Facebook; b) Facebook thrives on participation. It’s not like ads and PII harvesting are a consequence of people not paying, it’s the other way around. To put in perspective, most of us would spend $70 on dinner with partner or friend because that one-hour experience, during a single day, has so much more silly value than a whole year of Facebook. Consider that. Nobody “promised” anything, or if you listened to some futurist high on their own farts, joke’s on you. Those people still exist, btw, and are presently telling you fully autonomous cars will be ubiquitous in five years, and alternative energy can replace fossil fuels by tomorrow. Global supply chain improvements have a far greater impact than providing you a “glorified mail-in catalog”. I think the attitude you expressed in this comment is a case in point of not seeing the submerged portion of the iceberg and thereby not appreciating the truly remarkable changes in the last thirty years.
  - strgcmc 5y ago
    Not the person you replied to, but let's talk about "global supply chain improvements" for example... When Amazon launched 2-day shipping with Prime, it was truly a landmark milestone, in terms of technology and operational prowess. I certainly wouldn't argue with you about the great impact that something like that had. But what came next? 1-day shipping? That's a 50% improvement, when the previous benchmark was 90+% improvement going from 4-6 weeks down to 2 days. That's exactly the kind of stagnation the author is describing. And what else happened in the past 30-50 years of supply chain optimizations? A worrying lack of investment in resiliency, in durability. COVID-induced supply shocks went from transient to semi-permanent, because by design much of our supply chain infrastructure has very little "slack" (because extra unused capacity is waste, and waste is lost profit), and thus no good way to catch-up, no good way to quickly retool, readjust, to shift manufacturing from one region to another, etc. (because, fragility is actually specialization which equals profit). I think the person you responded to sees more of the iceberg than you give them credit for. I think there's no reason to fall victim to lowered expectations, when pretending to be futurists/futurologists... why can't we have 1-/2-day shipping, "agile" supply chains, AND resiliency and durability and ability to recover from supply shocks? Why settle for just 1 aspect of remarkable changes, and stop there? Perhaps the world needs a few shocks to realize how much it is undervaluing the value of resiliency? In the grand scheme of things it was probably healthy to pop the stock market bubble of 1929, of the 2000s dotcom boom, and the real estate bubble in 2008. Will COVID pop the supply-chain bubble that we've built for ourselves, where we've incorrectly assessed the value of (i.e. actually the cost of), fragile supply chains?
- elliottkember 5y ago
  > We were promised We really were not promised these things. We imagined them and got carried away.
caconym_ 5y ago
In the frame of the article, I think the innovations of the last few decades need to be measured by the economic growth they've created, not their essential complexity. So how is our economy doing, then? Corporate profits and shareholder value are soaring, and a lot of these recent "innovations" (gig economy, Amazon warehouses and the broader logistics sector, etc.) seem to be creating many new jobs. And yet, we're looking at vast swaths of [young] American adults in their productive prime who (by the metrics I've seen) own less of America's wealth than ever before, who can barely afford to rent housing and certainly not to buy their own property, and who are—for some mysterious reason, hmm, I wonder what it could be?—not having kids. From a job creation perspective, at least, I can tell you why these new "innovations" are not the economic boon they look like on paper: they create jobs, but many of those jobs are worthless because they don't pay a living wage. In many cases (looking at you, Walmart) it's an open secret that employees essentially must supplement their meagre incomes via welfare programs. I don't know if I totally follow the author's sketch of innovation as a cause of economic growth, but I think the two are at least related. Propertyless, shackled to intractable debt and pecked to the bone by rent-seeking parasites like corporate landlords (natch) and the healthcare industry, most Americans do not have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth to pursue innovation and/or entrepreneurship^[1]. They might have the essential hunger, but the aforementioned factors suppress it. Corporate feudalism is rising, and these new barons are using every tool at their disposal to grow their fiefs and maximize the extraction of wealth therefrom. ^[1] Possibly I'm going against the grain here, but I don't count e.g. driving for Uber as "entrepreneurship".
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  “ ossibly I'm going against the grain here, but I don't count e.g. driving for Uber as "entrepreneurship” Does anyone? How is setting your own schedule at all akin to owning your own company?

fragmede 5y ago

We were promised cold fusion, flying cars, and 2-day work weeks. Instead we got side-hustles driving other people around, delivering stuff for other people, and a faster mail-in catalog. The world's most advanced machine today isn't some science experiment to further our knowledge of the universe (although we certainly have those); no, the world's singular most advanced machine is the one that delivers advertisements to us because we're all too cheap to pay $70/yr for Facebook because none of us have enough money. Sure, the machine behind Amazon is too complicated for any one person to know, but it's a glorified mail-in catalog. That's the crowning achievement of humanity in 2021? That or NFTs? I'm very grateful for my Prime membership but forgive me for wanting better than that.

dsabanin 5y ago
> I'm very grateful for my Prime membership but forgive me for wanting better than that. The world is eagerly awaiting for your contribution. In this regard I believe rules of open source projects apply. You want something? Work on it or help those who work on it.
jspaetzel 5y ago
We all want better, and in so many ways we're getting there.
aksss 5y ago
> $70..none of us have enough money. C’mon - a) none of us likely see $70/yr in personal value in Facebook; b) Facebook thrives on participation. It’s not like ads and PII harvesting are a consequence of people not paying, it’s the other way around. To put in perspective, most of us would spend $70 on dinner with partner or friend because that one-hour experience, during a single day, has so much more silly value than a whole year of Facebook. Consider that. Nobody “promised” anything, or if you listened to some futurist high on their own farts, joke’s on you. Those people still exist, btw, and are presently telling you fully autonomous cars will be ubiquitous in five years, and alternative energy can replace fossil fuels by tomorrow. Global supply chain improvements have a far greater impact than providing you a “glorified mail-in catalog”. I think the attitude you expressed in this comment is a case in point of not seeing the submerged portion of the iceberg and thereby not appreciating the truly remarkable changes in the last thirty years.
- strgcmc 5y ago
  Not the person you replied to, but let's talk about "global supply chain improvements" for example... When Amazon launched 2-day shipping with Prime, it was truly a landmark milestone, in terms of technology and operational prowess. I certainly wouldn't argue with you about the great impact that something like that had. But what came next? 1-day shipping? That's a 50% improvement, when the previous benchmark was 90+% improvement going from 4-6 weeks down to 2 days. That's exactly the kind of stagnation the author is describing. And what else happened in the past 30-50 years of supply chain optimizations? A worrying lack of investment in resiliency, in durability. COVID-induced supply shocks went from transient to semi-permanent, because by design much of our supply chain infrastructure has very little "slack" (because extra unused capacity is waste, and waste is lost profit), and thus no good way to catch-up, no good way to quickly retool, readjust, to shift manufacturing from one region to another, etc. (because, fragility is actually specialization which equals profit). I think the person you responded to sees more of the iceberg than you give them credit for. I think there's no reason to fall victim to lowered expectations, when pretending to be futurists/futurologists... why can't we have 1-/2-day shipping, "agile" supply chains, AND resiliency and durability and ability to recover from supply shocks? Why settle for just 1 aspect of remarkable changes, and stop there? Perhaps the world needs a few shocks to realize how much it is undervaluing the value of resiliency? In the grand scheme of things it was probably healthy to pop the stock market bubble of 1929, of the 2000s dotcom boom, and the real estate bubble in 2008. Will COVID pop the supply-chain bubble that we've built for ourselves, where we've incorrectly assessed the value of (i.e. actually the cost of), fragile supply chains?
elliottkember 5y ago
> We were promised We really were not promised these things. We imagined them and got carried away.

caconym_ 5y ago

In the frame of the article, I think the innovations of the last few decades need to be measured by the economic growth they've created, not their essential complexity. So how is our economy doing, then? Corporate profits and shareholder value are soaring, and a lot of these recent "innovations" (gig economy, Amazon warehouses and the broader logistics sector, etc.) seem to be creating many new jobs. And yet, we're looking at vast swaths of [young] American adults in their productive prime who (by the metrics I've seen) own less of America's wealth than ever before, who can barely afford to rent housing and certainly not to buy their own property, and who are—for some mysterious reason, hmm, I wonder what it could be?—not having kids. From a job creation perspective, at least, I can tell you why these new "innovations" are not the economic boon they look like on paper: they create jobs, but many of those jobs are worthless because they don't pay a living wage. In many cases (looking at you, Walmart) it's an open secret that employees essentially must supplement their meagre incomes via welfare programs. I don't know if I totally follow the author's sketch of innovation as a cause of economic growth, but I think the two are at least related. Propertyless, shackled to intractable debt and pecked to the bone by rent-seeking parasites like corporate landlords (natch) and the healthcare industry, most Americans do not have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth to pursue innovation and/or entrepreneurship^[1]. They might have the essential hunger, but the aforementioned factors suppress it. Corporate feudalism is rising, and these new barons are using every tool at their disposal to grow their fiefs and maximize the extraction of wealth therefrom. ^[1] Possibly I'm going against the grain here, but I don't count e.g. driving for Uber as "entrepreneurship".

germinalphrase 5y ago
“ ossibly I'm going against the grain here, but I don't count e.g. driving for Uber as "entrepreneurship” Does anyone? How is setting your own schedule at all akin to owning your own company?