9 ms·

There's a building body of evidence which indicates that returns are increasingly going to capital and not labour, however not as a result of "power-grabs" but

• rfnslyr 13y ago
  Jesus, now I have to feel guilty about being white, bering a male, and being a developer? Someone stop me!
  • pietro 13y ago
    Stop feeling guilty! It's stupid and wrong.
  • ronaldx 13y ago
    You have personal responsibility for your actions as a developer. If you are using your skills in a way which primarily benefits the super-rich and is a net negative to society, you should take this opportunity to reflect on that: yes.
    • rfnslyr 13y ago
      I work on mobile applications at an investment bank so the rich can fiddle with their money from their diamond plated iPhones. Does that buy me a ticket to hell?
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    • reitzensteinm 13y ago
      Why even mention the super rich in that sentence? Building a personal app for Bill Gates shouldn't make you feel guilty. Being a net negative drain on society through your profession should make you feel guilty regardless of circumstance.
      • ronaldx 13y ago
        A fair point, thanks.
    • wavefunction 13y ago
      The important thing to note is that we are all apparently working to benefit the super-rich. In fact, your options to the contrary are pretty limited.
      • ronaldx 13y ago
        I note this, but don't find that it absolves you of personal responsibility.
      • dantheman 13y ago
        We are benefiting everyone. Technology improves the quality of life for everyone, the benefits may be concentrated right now but over time they'll be dispersed. We are freeing labor from tasks, the problem is that we are in a transition period where their new tasks are not well understood. Overall software eating the world will make everyone significantly richer. Also, as always wealth is not a zero sum game. Just because someone has 100X the wealth you do, does not mean that they stole from you, or that you are poorer. In fact your standard of living has probably increased.
        • hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
          > Also, as always wealth is not a zero sum game. Just because someone has 100X the wealth you do, does not mean that they stole from you, or that you are poorer. While this makes us sleep well at night, please consider that the top richest are often connected to: - Externalizing costs to countries with corrupt/authoritarian governments - Tax evasion - Companies backed by strong governments' tax money (theft by the state), later privatized for pennies because the government is broke and/or corrupt - Banking, which never follow free-market rules - Oil and mining companies, which aren't taxed proportional to the intrinsic environmental and social impacts While wealth doesn't comes from theft, wealth concentration requires a dose of unethical behavior and not observing some people's fundamental rights. When you're at that level of capital it's an entire different game.
          • dantheman 13y ago
            Then the problem is not wealth inequality it's government intervention and government corruption. So we should stop talking about wealth and start talking about corruption.
  • RivieraKid 13y ago
    No, why?
  • LaGrange 13y ago
    You are not expected to feel „white guilt”. You are expected to acknowledge the privilege you have, to avoid its abuse, and to avoid perpetuating that state (though of course keeping awareness of the costs and benefits of such actions - nobody benefits if you just burn all your money and remove other privileges by bodily harm, for example).
    • rfnslyr 13y ago
      How do I find out what "privilege" I have? Do I have to work harder to actively offset this imaginary benefit society has somehow determined that I've been born with? I'm sick and tired of this privilege bullshit. I didn't get to where I am now because of being a white male.
      • macimumloam 13y ago
        It's not imaginary at all though. Do you truly believe that there is no benefit in everyday life gained by being a white, straight, middle-class+, male? Is there not a benefit to going to a school that can afford up to date books? To not have being open about you sexuality be a real risk to your career and health? Is there no benefit to not having racial slurs yelled at you? To not have many people in society assume that you know less because of your sex? Pretending that privilege doesn't exist because you haven't been on the wrong side does no good to yourself or society.
        • rfnslyr 13y ago
          No, I truly believe there is no such thing, it's something made up by the entitled. Why is it that I work alongside many tiny asian women and indian women that can barely speak a word of English and are in their 30's? You are assuming I go to a nice school and I'm from a nice middle class family that can support all my stuff. I'm not. I dropped out because I had no money and I was born in eastern european ghetto filth. Not have my sexuality be a real risk to my career and health? What do you know about my life, my career, my health, or anything, for you to lay baseless "privilege" assumptions? Being white isn't a ticket to kingdom come and anybody who believes so has to do some deep self reflection. I've been on the wrong side, the very very wrong side. What the fuck do you know about going to prison? Where was my white privilege when my teeth were being ground into the asphalt by 5 guys bigger than me? What do you know about not having SHIT to eat for days at a time? Not seeing your parents for weeks at a time to just bring food to the table? What do you know about spending 5 years travelling through many different countries just to escape a communist regime, to leave your family behind, to have nothing? "Privilege" is something created by the people that are already born into an upper class world and spend their days speculating upon the lives of the less fortunate which in turn sprouted this movement. Do not fucking sit here and spout this poisonous bullshit, because it doesn't exist in the extremes of life, only in the made up comfortable society you've been brought up in, maybe. You don't know shit about me.
  • jgalt212 13y ago
    For the state of your fragile self-worth, I recommend staying far away from the Lifetime movie channel.
  • sremani 13y ago
    How many White Male Developers are on the world's 85 richest people ? You are diverting this issue towards race - I am not white - and I do not look up to people because they are White. There are attributes I care about - but every once in a while a dude comes and complains about race. I too felt others were mistreating me for my race - but when I changed my mindset - I did not see people mistreating me, so I guess its the VIBE not the race.
• LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
  And what about keeping rates at 0% for longest time allows people with access to cheap credit (i.e. bankers) to get uber wealthy while poor and middle class are left with the bill (inflation, paying taxes to the banks). Inflation if measured as the US Government measured it last time during Reagan years is at 10% per annum in the US at the moment. And have been for a few years now. This is the reason for growing gap not the technology. Sound monetary policy - i.e. let banks go bankrupt - would make sure there are no excesses.
• kokey 13y ago
  Technological unemployment isn't exactly a new thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment
• nhaehnle 13y ago
  Here's a thought that I was recently introduced to: All such discussions should always be prefixed with "Given that/As long as society's distributional mechanisms are accomodating, ...". In this particular case: "As long as society's distributional mechanisms are accomodating, technology can lead/leads to returns increasingly going to capital rather than labour." This is important because the distributional mechanisms of society are not natural laws and they are not set in stone. So much of our lives is already affected by technology, why not change those distributional mechanisms to minimize the negative impact of technology? For example, there is a lot of debate these days surrounding policy proposals like the basic income or the job guarantee, both of which would likely have changed the impact of technological change. So we can discuss whether or not the regressive changes in distribution of the last 40 years were primarily [0] due to technology or not until the cows come home. But I would argue that this is not the key question. The key questions are (1) are we happy with these regressive changes in distribution and (2) if not, what do we need to change to revert them? [0] After all, power grabs by the top 0.1% very obviously happened in that period of time. Just look at Thatcher and Reagan and the like-minded political movements they inspired in other Western countries. The only question is about the extent of their impact.
• bjourne 13y ago
  Not true and it omits to mention that increasing the inequality was intentional. Not as in a consequence of technology but politicians mandated that more profits and less wages would be good for the economy and implemented policies that made it so. Here is what happened in Sweden which you can see is third in increasing the 1%'s share. Sweden has lots of companies that export stuff to the US and other places. Now they get paid in dollar which they convert to Swedish kronor. So a Swedish company sells cars to the US and gets $100 million/year. Convert it to kronor and you get about 1 billion. Government decides to help them so they decide that Swedish currency is only worth 50% of what it used to (yes they can/could decide that). Suddenly, they the company now makes 2 billion per year. Meanwhile, Swedish people buy TV:s and game consoles from the US. All that now cost double of what it did since their currency is worth half of what it was. So what should the Swedes do? Demand salary increases to offset the higher prices of course. Since the (exporting) companies makes double the profits, they should be able to double the salaries. Except it wasn't so easy in the eighties to just demand that especially not when the government opposed salary increases. Salaries did rose though, but not nearly as much as they would have to keep pace with the increasing profits. Btw, this is not a simplification at all. There is a tape of the prime minister at the time saying that "salaries are to high and that's why the krona needs to be devalued." Similar things happened in other countries too.
  • yummyfajitas 13y ago
    There is a tape of the prime minister at the time saying that "salaries are to high and that's why the krona needs to be devalued." Yes, it happens all the time and in many countries - it's called Keynesian economics and it's the dominant paradigm of modern economics. (Namely, inflate the real value of sticky nominal wages away to make hiring people more attractive.) I have no idea why you believe this is some conspiracy to increase inequality. It's true that recessions reduce inequality, and ending a recession will increase it. But is it maybe possible that proponents of stimulus have ending the recession as their goal and increased inequality is merely a side effect?
• anovikov 13y ago
  Isn't it more about that the jobs that gain due to the technology are mostly in the top 1% range? I mean, the share of income going to the top 1% increases that's sure, but most of that are huge and ever growing salaries and bonuses of managers and high-end professionals - not stock dividends. If you see stock performance (at least public stocks), both in terms of cap growth and dividend yield, you see a pretty grim picture in the last 10 years compared to older times. Privately held companies are somewhat in the shadow here, but there is no big reason to think they are doing much better than public ones. Stock appreciation and dividends are what forms income of capitalists. So it is change of the salary distribution to the top 1% (to the extent that it dilutes that said 1% of many smaller capitalists that used to be there with some ex-proletarians) from lower income groups, not shift of focus from capital to labor. Personally all rich people i knew 10 years ago were business owners or co-owners, with addition of a few corruptioners. Now it is about even between business owners, corruptioners, and high-end professionals who don't even steal where they work. Maybe that is my personal experience/change of my contact circle, maybe a trend.