yzhengyu

If the end outcome of increasingly rapid automation means that a significant percentage of humanity ends up being unable to participate in economic activity due to an inability to acquire currency, then we are in big trouble.

Or perhaps we were encouraged to look away from the curtain all this time.

As for corruption in Singapore, well, let me just say that one of the caveats of these corruption indices is that whether you perceive it. If you are a foreigner visiting Singapore or even a local living here for a while, your daily life in general will probably be pleasant as long as you are not involved in any form of political activism.

Most of the shenanigans in Singapore are related to politics and how the incumbent party has maintained its power. There is a reason for Singapore being placed in the nether regions (144th rank in the Press Freedom Index) in various press freedom rankings and why we are labeled as a "hybrid regime".

As for people who keep gushing about Singapore and how awesome our country is, all I have for them is a wintry smile and the old phrase, "Not all that glitters is gold".

If you want your content to be protected, fine, you can go back to using third party plugins. Then users will have a clear choice on whether to consume your content.

In India, plenty of social standing comes from willingness to spend on lavish events/customs - like weddings - to entertain friends, family, guests.

So, there is value. Of the social type.

That's the problem with many current social welfare systems - the poor are dictated by the types of aid is given to them. We rather have an overhead of up to billions of dollars obsessing over procedures, checks, regulations etc to ensure "unacceptable" outcomes do not occur.

And in there is the tendency for corruption, fraud, etc.

The latter actually requires conscious effort.

And the sad thing, it is not limited to bureaucracies or government organisations. I have seen bugs that are not fixed, patches that are rejected because it allows someone somewhere to behave heroically in an attempt to impress someone.

When I first experienced this, it was a very real WTF moment from the School of Dilbert Mismanagement.

The .gov here has been playing with the exchange rate (rather than interest rates) to help out but it really hasn't really worked out.

In the first place, the majority of Singapore's successes is largely due to a pro-business policy which has attracted massive amounts of foreign direct investment.

In the second place, my observation is that in general Singaporeans are well-schooled, not well educated. As Mark Twain put it, there is a difference.

And there is also the uglier side of a hyper-competitive system which darylteo has pointed out. And then you ask yourself, where do the "losers" of this competition end up?

The challenge at this stage is to ensure we move our lowest gear up - and I can assure you, our lowest gear is pretty low. Unfortunately, unless the technocrats get mind-transplants from the people who did the Finnish or Danish model, I don't think its going to change.

Most people who buy into Rand's philosophy essentially buy into this message, it is rather pointless to try to debate the more subtle points of her philosophy with them.

IMHO, human society is neither about collectivism or individualism but a dynamic balance of the two.

The primary observation now is large corporations channeling their reserves and holding them in various locations that is friendly to capital - i.e. no taxes or other costs in simply holding large amounts of cash in reserve.

I think at this stage of global economic development, it is an issue the world has to face. How in the world are you going to incentivise these entities holding all these vast amounts of capital to put this capital to real wealth generating activities instead of sitting on it or leaving it to the financial sector to push it around?

Unions are just organisations. In the Nordics and many other European countries, unions proactively work alongside employers to ensure that the workforce remains highly productive, etc.

And a diagram (in such a 4GL) does not help when it has hundreds of decision nodes and the end-user (read: a human being) visual system can only deal with at most 10 nodes.

It is also very amusing when the executives finally realize how unnecessarily complex their order processing chain is.

And rather amusingly (and if I remember correctly...) the char data type in Java is not really the equivalent of char in the other C derivatives.

I would not be surprised that Senator Webster is unaware. Especially since he has spent most of his working life as a politician.

Yes, its one choice. But personally, I find that to be rather too smug / elitist and smacks of "Oh, its HIS/HER choice - there's nothing DEFICIENT or FLAWED with the current setup" rather than recognizing that the market/world is inherently complex and difficult to navigate.

Arguing that it's one choice is just sophistry. Kinda like those just world people I meet who argue that the poor deserve their station because its their choice.

And as greenyoda pointed out, the last time this was done, it was driven by business managers who thought they get get rid of the last link and make it accessible to every employee.

All they did was to make things more complicated and get ensnared into the trap laid by SAP, Oracle, et, al.

Of course, no one got fired for purchasing from big name vendors.

For example, say, you are a skilled plumber who owns a similar business repairing/installing plumbing in Shanghai, China. Theoretically, all these skills would actually make him/her eminently employable or set up a similar business, say in Sweden.

Unfortunately, that is really not the case.

Be as much as most of us would wish, capital has really achieved utter victory over labour. Till we have some major innovation which will neutralize the advantages of having mass amounts of capital, we are transitioning towards a new feudalism.

As I was mentioning to a colleague, the only reasons why we have a job is that software development/programming/computer systems is still sufficiently complex enough for up to 80% of the world population.

Or else we would actually be quite screwed as well. ;)

It is very amusing and somewhat depressing on how the most intelligent of individuals can be reduced to a frothing reactionary if you know his/her life history and deduce their biases.

In this case, I would not call it stupidity - I would call it inherent, (very human) instinctual biases and tendencies in dealing with contradictory thoughts in your mind.

Or what most of us understand as cognitive dissonance.

I would imagine this tendency probably arose from as a result of natural selection ranking flight or fight instincts very highly. Those who were not able to ignore or rationalize away what made them feel uncomfortable [which cognitive dissonance invokes in us] probably ended up dead very quickly out on the savanna while hunting or gathering.

However, on a personal note, I am actually very optimistic as more and more people become aware of our inherent human limitations, we can grow and become better individuals and create better social constructs to overcome our group tendencies.

Unfortunately, it would probably take a long time. Probably not in our generation.

From a personal perspective, I am actually quite wary of the idea of a minimum wage since that is usually set by the government but for a different reason. If the government is really pro-business, I wouldn't trust them to set the minimum wage high enough for sustenance.

What I would prefer a system as described by marcusf where employers and employees are required by law to periodically negotiate with each other to set a salary floor in each of their localities where they do business.

Like what unions are supposed to do. Before they got demonized and destroyed in the Age of Neo-Liberalism.

And yes, the article is horse manure.

I guess to use something that I saw on HN the other day, it's the dichotomy of the creative film crew versus the sterile manufacturing line.

Note that business people can't help themselves. After all, this is what business school has taught them in how to become managers.

The keyword is "manager". Note that it does not mean leadership. We are sorely lacking in leaders. At every level.

Unfortunately, what I gather from the behaviour of my peers is that they lack the spine to do so. They can't muster the courage to draw a line in the sand.

So they keep picking up assignments, fail to do them adequately, and need to perform heroics to cover their ass till some other guy comes along to save them.

Ironically, some of them wonder why they keep getting passed up for promotion. I don't have the heart to tell them why.

Someone else bears the true costs - example, say some random Chinese factory worker at Foxconn who though is able to survive on meagre wages, is unable to spread his genes since he is not able to find a wife and set up a family - while you reap the rewards and go on to sire a new generation which has the incentive to behave in a similar manner.

I use to be very high falutin about all this thing, thinking some true Marxist society will emerge eventually when capitalism collapses. Now, after looking at all the neuroscience and psychology research that has been done, I'm not so sure if we can ever escape the more primal and insidious parts of our nature.

So I took out a week to produce a test case to show him the difference was statistically insignificant and not worth the costs involved in porting. I think his head exploded.