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I am suspicious of the idea that fraud could somehow be reduced by allowing gig workers access to the interior of my home. Somehow this seems an awful lot like

I am suspicious of the idea that fraud could somehow be reduced by allowing gig workers access to the interior of my home. Somehow this seems an awful lot like a multibillion dollar company offloading work on me.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Somehow this seems an awful lot like a multibillion dollar company offloading work on me. That's most of the tech industry in a nutshell. From the office suite through all the "self-service" web/mobile interfaces, self-service checkouts in stores, to stuff like this - it's all making you do the work that was previously done by full-time professionals. It's a net loss of efficiency, and it only looks otherwise because salaries of full-time professionals are legible to bean-counters, while the same workload redistributed in tiny bits to masses of people is invisible in balance sheets. In short: I'm starting to believe that most of the "improvements" that came with software are actually just accounting tricks, and this is why actual performance gains don't seem to track expected gains.
- bumby 3y ago
  >It's a net loss of efficiency Add to it the time lost because software tends to be less reliable than its counterpart because multiple software interfaces tend to increase complexity. There are some things that software is wonderful for improving. But I don’t need a IoT stick of deodorant.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  I'd argue the bigger counterweight dragging down expected performance gains is lost agility. The more parties in a system, the more ossified it becomes. (Hello, healthcare) Inevitably, the world changes... and now because there are so many intermediary layers the system as a whole is unable to adapt. Then you're left with a system that can't be changed, that very efficiently does something different than what you need it to do. Or, in a nutshell, most enterprise software older than 5 years.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Have gains not been accounting tricks since the 90s? I would say that almost all of it is, eg, disassembling our manufacturing and shipping it over seas - which ultimately eroded the middle class and jeopardized national security. But neither of those is on the balance sheets of the relevant company. Anti-social short-term metricized business is the ultimate form of Taylorism — and in three generations, we can see that it’s an abysmal failure. Sprinkling math on top doesn’t make reckless greed a good idea.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Have gains not been accounting tricks since the 90s? Quite possibly. I only thought this through wrt. software, as this is my field, but the overall method seems universal: turn concentrated work into disperse work, and throw it over the organizational boundary, so it looks like you've made the costs go away.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> Somehow this seems an awful lot like a multibillion dollar company offloading work on me. That's most of the tech industry in a nutshell. From the office suite through all the "self-service" web/mobile interfaces, self-service checkouts in stores, to stuff like this - it's all making you do the work that was previously done by full-time professionals. It's a net loss of efficiency, and it only looks otherwise because salaries of full-time professionals are legible to bean-counters, while the same workload redistributed in tiny bits to masses of people is invisible in balance sheets. In short: I'm starting to believe that most of the "improvements" that came with software are actually just accounting tricks, and this is why actual performance gains don't seem to track expected gains.

bumby 3y ago
>It's a net loss of efficiency Add to it the time lost because software tends to be less reliable than its counterpart because multiple software interfaces tend to increase complexity. There are some things that software is wonderful for improving. But I don’t need a IoT stick of deodorant.
ethbr1 3y ago
I'd argue the bigger counterweight dragging down expected performance gains is lost agility. The more parties in a system, the more ossified it becomes. (Hello, healthcare) Inevitably, the world changes... and now because there are so many intermediary layers the system as a whole is unable to adapt. Then you're left with a system that can't be changed, that very efficiently does something different than what you need it to do. Or, in a nutshell, most enterprise software older than 5 years.
zmgsabst 3y ago
Have gains not been accounting tricks since the 90s? I would say that almost all of it is, eg, disassembling our manufacturing and shipping it over seas - which ultimately eroded the middle class and jeopardized national security. But neither of those is on the balance sheets of the relevant company. Anti-social short-term metricized business is the ultimate form of Taylorism — and in three generations, we can see that it’s an abysmal failure. Sprinkling math on top doesn’t make reckless greed a good idea.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Have gains not been accounting tricks since the 90s? Quite possibly. I only thought this through wrt. software, as this is my field, but the overall method seems universal: turn concentrated work into disperse work, and throw it over the organizational boundary, so it looks like you've made the costs go away.