Pretending

In the Soviet Union every worker is a government worker, and they have a saying:  “As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.“
—  Tom Clancy
From his novel: “The Hunt For Red October“
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On This Day In:
2016	And Songs Too…
2015	On The Road To Failure
2014	Each Moment
2013	Conversation
2012	4 Down, 11 Done (At Last)
	I’m Not Afraid
2011	Who’s Risk Is It, Anyway?

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Social Security

No greater tragedy exists in modern civilization than the aged, worn-out worker who after a life of ceaseless effort and useful productivity must look forward for his declining years to a poorhouse.  A modern social consciousness demands a more humane and efficient arrangement.
—  Franklin D. Roosevelt
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On This Day In:
2014	Bewitching
2013	Visiting Joy
2012	Dedication To Today
2011	Project Second Chance – Adult Literacy
	Turning Coal Into Diamonds

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Be R-E-L-E-V-A-N-T

Take this mnemonic device to heart: Risk, Experiment, Listen and learn, Engage, Value, have an Attitude of gratitude, say No to negativity, and invest Time.
—  Steve Kayser
From the article:  “Baby Boomers Risk Irrelevance in the Workplace“
[Located at one of the many blogs I follow: http://www.govexec.com
The specific post was:   http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2014/06/baby-boomers-risk-irrelevance-workplace/87070/?oref=govexec_today_nl
—   KMAB]
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On This Day In:
2013	Lacking
2012	So Small A Thing
2011	Is Your Time Valuable?

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Destiny For The Talented

All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning — that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted — would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors.  Instead of what you want to build — the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing — almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply.  As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants.  In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.
—  Gideon Lewis-Kraus
From his article in Wired magazine May 2014, titled: “No Exit: One Startup’s Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush“
[Emphasis is mine.   —   KMAB]
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On This Day In:
2013	I Do Not Fear It
2012	Until Found
2011	Reducing Goods To Data
	The Fog Of Civilization Building

 

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Uncertain Work

The American middle class is shrinking and it’s technology that’s causing it.
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Unfortunately for today’s average worker, finding or inventing a new job is harder than it once was.  When economists look back, they see that it was around 1999 when something changed.  Productivity kept going up, but where in the past median household income and employment per capita would have also hitched along, they instead diverged.  Median household income is on a steep decline, employment isn’t bouncing back strongly after the Great Recession, and a greater percentage of Americans now identify themselves as “lower class” than at any point in history.
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The trouble is that the guy who once rode along in the pickup truck is now unemployed and he doesn’t know how to design drones or code 3-D modeling software.  The average American is looking more and more like that guy.  A study by two researchers at the Oxford Martin School concludes that within the next 20 years or so, approximately 47 percent of all jobs could be replaced by automation.
“Technology is racing ahead, but our skills, our organizations, our institutions aren’t keeping up,” Brynjolfsson said.  “As they adjust, we will see more of the benefit show up in the economics, but right now there are a lot of technologies with more potential than has been fully realized.”  This trend is just getting started.
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In addition, decoupling means the upper 1 percent gets a bigger piece of a growing pie, Brynjolfsson said, which also accounts for the shrinking middle class.  “A lot of these digital technologies have winner-take-all or winner-take-most economics, where you can get a small group of people producing a better piece of software or insight, and once they’ve digitized that, they can replicate it 10 times or a hundred million times, and dominate the market for that,” he said.
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“Look at our health-care policy, look at our retirement policy,” he said.  “Those policies are built on this assumption that people have 9-to-5 jobs and stay with one employer their whole lives.  That’s profoundly not true for the American workforce and hasn’t been true for well over a decade.  A third of American workers are self-employed and another third are contingently employed, which means only about a third of the workforce has a traditional 9-to-5 job.  Yet our policymakers and our politicians are building all the policy on the assumption that this is a good way to do it.”
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People must demand that their leaders be technologically literate, Mele said, because “it’s profoundly dangerous to have elected officials or policymakers who don’t have any technical literacy to evaluate what’s going on.”  A recent Gartner report identified that 60 percent of CEOs dismiss the idea that automated and smart technologies could displace a huge percentage of jobs in the next 15 years.
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“I think we’re hitting the knee of the curve and things are getting exponential,” Armstrong said.  “Make sure that you understand and your leadership understands what is happening in these areas and what the implications are because that’s going to drive social policy and government policy to a huge degree.  A lot of this stuff is happening very quietly.
“Government has been shrinking for so long, that’s been an accepted way of doing business.  I think this is not going to leave anyone alone.  One way or another, it’s going to affect us all,” he said. “In any kind of revolution, we always lose jobs, but there’s always been something to replace all those jobs, and that may not be the case this time.”
—  Colin Wood
These excerpts are taken from the article titled: “Robots, Drones and The Uncertain Future Of Work” appearing in the magazine “Government Technology“, April 2014.
The article can be found online at: http://www.govtech.com/products/Robots-Drones-and-the-Uncertain-Future-of-Work.html
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On This Day In:
2013	Unpatriotic And Servile
2012	What Price Freedom?
2011	Particular Importance
	Three From Bette…

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Closing The Gap?

We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today – and will make possible tomorrow.
—   Alvin Toffler
From his book:  “Future Shock“
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The American middle class is shrinking and it’s technology that’s causing it.  It’s not all bad.  The gains in efficiency begotten by automation have been great for productivity.  And productivity means progress.  It always has.  Since the Industrial Revolution began around 1760, new technologies have been stealing jobs, and since 1760, people have responded by finding or inventing new jobs that contemporary technologies couldn’t do.
It’s a good system — in the long term, everyone benefits from technological progress, and while the workers losing their jobs in the interim might feel a bit miffed, people have always found a way to bounce back into an ever-adapting economy.  Besides, if machines can do something better than people can, it would be senseless to ignore such utility and hold back progress for fear of a few temporarily lost jobs.
Unfortunately for today’s average worker, finding or inventing a new job is harder than it once was.  When economists look back, they see that it was around 1999 when something changed.  Productivity kept going up, but where in the past median household income and employment per capita would have also hitched along, they instead diverged.  Median household income is on a steep decline, employment isn’t bouncing back strongly after the Great Recession, and a greater percentage of Americans now identify themselves as “lower class” than at any point in history.
—  Colin Wood
[From the article: “The Uncertain Future Of Work” appearing in the magazine “Government Technology“, April 2014.
The article can be found online at: http://www.govtech.com/products/Robots-Drones-and-the-Uncertain-Future-of-Work.html
And, no, I don’t believe technology is “causing” it (the shrinking of the American middle class).  Greed and an economic system which has corrupted the political system and which is debasing the educational system is the “cause”.  But, hey, I’m just a liberal democrat, so what do I know…  Right?   —  KMAB]
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On This Day In:
2013	On Parenting
2012	What Knowledge Is
2011	The Indefinite Accumulation Of Property

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Ready To Be Fried?

At the pinnacle of technological progress, man becomes a god.  New machines and software are continually forged in man’s image and taught to do things that once only people could do.  A day will come when man’s machines surpass their creators in their capacity to do and to think, and it will be at that technological singularity that the economy will double on a weekly basis and mankind will become peripheral to a new reality and consciousness beyond human comprehension.  Conservative estimates place that date at about 100 years from now, but in the meantime, there are smaller fish to fry.
—  Colin Wood
[From the article: “The Uncertain Future Of Work” appearing in the magazine “Government Technology“, April 2014.
The article can be found online at: http://www.govtech.com/products/Robots-Drones-and-the-Uncertain-Future-of-Work.html
—  KMAB]
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On This Day In:
2013	A Real Lover
2012	Winning Wars
2011	A Different Lesson

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Powerful Substitute

If the power to do hard work is not talent, it is the best possible substitute for it.
—  President James A. Garfield
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On This Day In:
2012	Heroes Restored
2011	As You Should

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Just Lucky

I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work.  …I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than.  I was always just lucky to have a job.  And every job I had was a stepping-stone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job.  Opportunities look a lot like work.
—  Ashton Kutcher
From a speech at the 2013 Teen Choice Awards
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On This Day In:
2012	The Undeveloped Child
2011	What Is Your Canvas?
2010	Giants Win Games 3 & 4 – One Away From World Series!!

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