Policy choices that
- encouraged capital mobility
- tax advantaged capital vs labor
- gave an ever larger share of the national income to the ultra rich
- to not enforce regulations against allowing unlimited supply of taxi cabs.
- to subsidize walmart to the tune of $6.2B in 2013 [1]
- to bail out banks and screw mortgage holders
- to allow banks to get so large they implicitly carry the backing of the US government and then turn around and go gambling, keeping all the profits and dumping the losses off onto you and me
- to allow Amazon not to charge tax and undercut local businesses for most of their history
- to subsidize amazon with the USPS [2]
I'm not saying any of these are necessarily right or wrong, but they weren't programmers. They were choices we as a society made via our representatives.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
[2] http://fortune.com/2017/07/16/amazon-postal-service-subsidy/
> - encouraged capital mobility
This part, right here, is what drives me absolutely crazy and why, for all of its faults, I love the European Union.
I have no problem competing against someone else anywhere in the world to see who can do my job better, faster, or cheaper. The difficulty? I am unable to follow "my" job anywhere it is being done but the money to pay me sure as shit can be sent anywhere on the planet to pay six other people.
This is why I get a little nationalist when it comes to jobs, manufacturing, and services...the thick black lines on the map make it the most prudent course for me. If my employer says "Seattle is too expensive, we're packing up operations and moving your job to Cleveland," I'm legally allowed to work in Cleveland if I so choose. But if my employer says "Seattle is too expensive, we're packing up operations and moving your job to [choose your own city outside of the United States, Canada, or Mexico]," it is difficult or impossible for me to follow.
It pisses me off that money or goods get to be treated differently than the people who actually produce them.
Who is "we"?
I doubt it. I certainly don't recall being asked, and I'm in a privileged position, relatively speaking.
I'd be curious to see how I could participate in the current environment.
I (and you) have been asked when had an opportunity to vote. Have been asked when did not call my representative to make him/her accountable for their particular vote for a policy. Even when I have never tried to get elected.
It's the political process. Although many tech people I've met seem allergic to doing anything that seems like 'politics'.
This is as ridiculous as blaming serfs for the feudal system. You're conflating a symptom with the root cause.
Workers have been squeezed for all time, with or without programmers.
One group is subjected to ultra efficient capitalism.
Another group can benefit from a myriad of complex tax breaks, government deals, revolving door relationships between legislation and business, ZIRP, NIRP and when things get really dangerous for them: outright bailouts.
Not all mega-corps depend on all of these unfair perks. I actually have a rather positive view of SV and the tech sector. They derived huge benefits from ultra loose monetary policy over the last few years (Amazon included), but they also do some genuinely great stuff.
That's why I said it goes way beyond the tech bubble.
The Information Age revolution has empowered and freed us countless ways. But it has also freed us to make bad choices. And it has empowered us to do far more damage to ourselves, our civilization, and our home than ever before.
And at the same time, we live in in world where the mechanisms of our existence - shaped by evolution and civilization are less suited to dealing with that ever before.
I'm confident that we can figure out new strategies for dealing with the world we've created, but I'm unsure how much damage we will do to ourselves first.
After people had enough of the unregulated/bootleg taxi industry, government introduced regulations - insurance, training requirements, maintenance, which all drove up the cost of taxi service, of course. In a reputation-free unregulated market, corner-cutting is a great profit-optimization solution, but people generally don't want to bear the cost of systems that cheat them, or expose them to sky's-the-limit risk, so that plenty of drivers gambled with their customers' lives by not wasting time on silly things like repairs, insurance, a license. Unregulated taxi service harmed a lot of people. So there is a lot to consider about Uber being an unregulated equivalent, particularly as related to its profitability.
Uber doesn't profit because the preexisting taxi system was bloated with waste or laziness. Uber's business model works by providing consumers with amateur service, and driving down workers' compensation with particularly precarious contracts. They offload the cost of fleet maintenance and even fuel to their contractors. On top of it all, their funding goes not towards enhancing their quality standard of service, but towards sabotaging self-sustaining, "skin-in-the-game" established taxi services to lower their quality by having to cutting their prices, compared to Uber's predatory pricing. It's not about having a trillion dollar, Millenium Prize-worthy, NP-hard route optimization algorithm that cabbies could never comprehend. It's not about how a ~sharing economy~ shatters the paradigm by revealing new low-hanging fruit improvements to maximizing the flow of queued operations.
At a basic level, people give the same parameters to Uber they would for a cab: start location, end location, pickup time, and payment. Nowadays Uber drivers and taxi drivers alike both use the same GPS apps to plan routes on the fly. The automated aspect of Uber's taxi service is mostly the means through which the customer is interacted with -- app textbox UI elements versus phone message, billing to credit card via the internet vs a point-of-sale terminal, drivers turning down potential customers at their discretion via app or in-person.. -- and not so much "how the sausage is made" behind the scenes.
The secret to Uber's money? It's about spending as little as possible as it takes to make contractors pay out of pocket for the costliest parts of the business -- sustaining contractors and the resources required for driving others around -- while at the same time getting the contractors to provide the business's lifeblood and value themselves at a fraction of what it's worth. Presented as a "side-hustle", Uber pitches you the idea that you should accept low wages (and no benefits) for an exclusive chance to buy into a gamified battle royale, for scraps, in Uber's proprietary arena. Drivers are at the mercy of a stringently unforgiving rating system, where one single four star review takes twenty five star reviews to repair the damage done to their reputation. And if they do slip under four stars, they get suspended. Oh, and did I mention that all the while they bear the cost of upkeep, fuel, etc.?
Uber doesn't prioritize allocation of profits, ad infinitum, into more programmers; it would never make money that way! The programmers at Uber are no more responsible for the profit-creating decisions in the unregulated grey area it relies upon than the engineers who built the first factories were responsible for the decisions made by factory owners. "Child labor costs less" and "if you won't work 12 hour shifts someone else will" were both common justifications for ways corporations benefited from abject conditions to the detriment of society. Today still it is common for capitalists to publicly laud democracy as their most cherished ideal of managing the nation, while simultaneously enforcing policies that deny contributing workers from contributing to decisions about their contributions at all.
Offloading unavoidable costs as externalities paid for by someone else (specifically, Uber contractors) is the number one capitalist strategy for increasing profit, and really has nothing to do with Uber's technology or programmers at all - it's not like the programmers can create new technology that reduces further how much they pay their drivers without going below the operational costs for retaining their an employee-supplied fleet, or technology that can take more money from customers' hands than they pay for. At best, the centralized system they have interferes little with individual transactions, encourages carpooling, and updates driver availability in realtime (while collecting a lot of valuable consumer patterns, of course). At worst, it penalizes drivers for simple gestures such as giving a customer a couple of minutes to use the restroom, instructing the driver to move on to the next customer. Uber also used to do fake ride DoS attacks against Lyft, by requesting rides from remote locations before canceling them half-way there.
Uber is efficient in a way that BF Skinner and Eddie Bernays might approve of, but would to many others just look like not remembering the lessons of history. Uber is but an old scam with a new face. I can't see their existence continuing for more than, say, two years without serious revamping - afaik they aren't even profitable yet in the first place, they just live off borrowed money atm.
And ditto re: worker abuse for Wal-Mart and Amazon, and ditto re: anti-competitive salted earth policy tendencies towards smaller players. The engineering programmers don't even participate in the decisions to move around cost burdens in business strategies - the closest they get to calling the shots on spending, is when they're coding the revised implementation of whatever sleek new approach upper management wants ready to present at next year's shareholder's meeting. Better make 'em look good!
[ninja-edit: eeeek! apologies for the W-o-T]Programmers are not making the decisions on how to operate. You're thinking about the businesses who attempt to cut their expense and make huge demands on their workforce, taxes, and on the market themselves.
For completeness, calling something a "killer" has several connotations. One is in the very literal sense by which I call a "screwdriving tool" a "screwdriver". This is technically correct and probably not what you mean. Another connotation involves blame, and you simply can't apply this to an object without agency.
(I'm still not pro-gun, btw. I just agree that calling it a killer is not a very convincing argument on the matter)
(Nor do guns "make a living like everybody else" :) )
My point is, if your boss commands you to do something unethical, this does not dissolve you of blame (unless you are an inanimate object :p).
Hyper-capitalism in the form of efficiency gains made possible by software-driven matching algorithms in markets that, when productivity is higher, don't need/warrant these efficiency gains. Such as the formalized platforms for the micro sharing of cars (Uber), personal living spaces (Airbnb), and labor (TaskRabbit, Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, etc.). We currently do more efficiency-shaving than actual new product building, so programmers are in high demand, but programmers aren't to blame. It's just business.
Then there's the hyper-socialism of government-back asset purchases in response to the 2008 financial crisis. For example the $700B in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds were used to purchase equity in financial institutions and other important institutions, giving the government part-ownership of major banks, insurance companies, auto manufacturers, etc. - recapitalizing them so they could begin to shed toxic assets. Thankfully TARP is closed out and the government got paid back, with interest, so we closed the book on mass government ownership of private assets back in 2014.
Technically, the biggest boost to the economy - $4.5T of mortgage-backed securities, bonds, and assets by the Federal Reserve's 3 waves of QE - shouldn't be considered socialism, because the Federal Reserve is an independent, non-government entity. [1]
But it certainly feels like hyper-socialism because it undermines of the organizing principle of a democratic society - citizens should have both the right and the duty to elect officials to act on their behalf, and hold them accountable. Especially in such an important organization as a central bank, which basically plans and attempts to control major economic variables such as the rates of inflation and unemployment.
In the end, I believe that the governors of the Fed made the right call to bail out banks through lowering the FFR and engaging in QE. It probably saved many people's lives, without exaggeration.
Who knows what the hell the public would have voted for if they had direct representation in the Federal Reserve. If people voted for change over stability, many would have ended up shooting themselves in the feet. Ala Trump trying to remove healthcare subsidies for many of his voters.
But TARP and QE also set a terrible precedent. The bailouts undermined the idea/feeling of "economic freedom" that is probably the central and most powerful idea the United States of America has going for it. No taxation without representation? What about no bailouts without representation?
[1] Creation chartered by Congress, with the president appointing governors, but with monetary policy decisions taking effect without the approval of Congress or the Executive branch, does not receive funding from Congress, governors' terms span multiple presidential/congressional terms.
Its a self-funded government entity created by law.
> But it certainly feels like hyper-socialism because it undermines of the organizing principle of a democratic society - citizens should have both the right and the duty to elect officials to act on their behalf, and hold them accountable.
Like many government entities, it's officials are appointed by elected officials and powers and priorities are set by elected officials through law; this in no way subverts accountability.
Do you feel like you are adequately represented in government, and that you can trust elected officials to appoint staff those who will make decisions in the best interest of you, your family, your city, state, nation, etc.?
No, but (as my comment history shows) that's because we have what is empirically shown to be a very poor electoral system (among those used in modern democracies), not because officers of the central bank are appointed rather than elected.
To the extent you can blame anyone for ultra efficient hyper capitalism, blame programmers. It's programmers that allowed Uber to turn the inefficient and leisurely taxi industry into the Uber/Lyft rat race. It's programmers who develop the on-demand work scheduling algorithms at places like Wal-Mart. Programmers are the reason why Amazon can take over all the mom & pop stores, turning warehouse workers into appendages of machines. Programmers are the ones who enable international mega-corps to enjoy unlimited economies of scale.