Doc writes: FWIW, I don’t expect a robot apocalypse, or even a robot takeover. Machines have always taken jobs, and people have always found other work to do, with lots of worrying and hand-wringing between the two.
I also don’t think the focus on “jobs” is a good idea. What the world always needs is work, and humans are great at coming up with a boundless variety of work to do.
(The VRM angle on this is that people don’t just have jobs on the market’s supply side, just as people don’t just consume on the market’s demand side. We need to get out of industrial age assumptions and models.)
Look at this:
“Jobs” didn’t come into common use until early in the last century, and in a fully industrial context. That is, when people were treated as machine parts. In the digital world we have an opportunity to not think of ourselves as being parts of machines, doing “jobs” the machine requires.
Phil Writes: Difficult to express how strongly I agree with this Doc.
We’re slaves to jobs. I tell my students in the last lecture of the semester (which for most of them is the last semester of their undergraduate degree) “never confuse your job with your career.” This is the sentiment I’m trying to express to them. Your employer doesn’t care about your career, only your job. Only you care about and can take care of your career.
TRob writes: As a small business owner in NC, the amount my wife and I pay for high-deductible insurance premiums is equal to a 29th percentile income in the US ($23k). If you add the deductibles, our out-of-pocket before insurance kicks in ($36k) is equal to the 48th percentile income in the US.
Just having sufficient revenue to pay my insurance puts me in a fairly high marginal tax bracket. If my overall rate is 18% then I need to earn $42.5k to pay $36k in premiums and medical out-of-pocket before benefits kick in. That's equal to the 55.6th percentile of income just to pay insurance premiums and deductibles.
Obviously as an employee I still have premiums and out of pocket but when I was in companies with 80,000 and 160,000 employees we had a nice big group. Friends at those companies let me borrow their benefits calculators last winter during open enrollment and my contribution would be about 30% of what I pay now on premiums with deductibles of less than 10% of those I have as an independent, and all the premium and most medical are tax sheltered.
Those are some heavy-duty chains! If after paying your premiums you want money to live on, your small business must *start out* clearing enough to put you in the 70th or 80th percentile of US income. That's a huge barrier to entry for new small businesses.
Based on that I'm guessing the definition of "Career" in this context must mean managing job changes and roles to suit your interests as opposed to becoming an entrepreneur?
In any case, it's all good. To paraphrase Ben Carson, many of those wage slaves are really just enthusiastic labor immigrants dreaming of a better future for their descendants.
Doc writes: I remember asking a room full of Linux kernel programmers if they learned C in school. The unanimous answer was no. All were taught by themselves or fellow geeks.
I have heard that the largest employer in Santa Barbara is “self.” I am sure the same is true of the world as a whole.
Relevant to this is what I wrote in Small is the New Big about people I know in small Santa Barbara businesses:
"None of them want to grow their businesses any larger than they need to be. None thought about an exit when they started up. None call themselves ‘entrepreneurs,' or go to expensive conferences. Instead they socialize at bars, clubs, gyms, restaurants, churches, city parks, beaches, ball games and on the street. They tend to have roles rather than jobs. When you need one, you look for a mechanic, a painter, a lawyer or a driver. All of them also help each other out, side by side, face to face, in the physical world."
It was ever thus, and ever will be. I also believe this favors VRM, eventually.
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I deeply resonate with this thread. In practice, personal data structure, and as an informal volunteer educator of young people & parents in search of applied literacy, as well as a structured worker... I know that it requires hard work, failure testing, personal resilience, risk-taking, and incremental learning to overcome the inertia that "systems" enforce upon human participation in Society... all of them around the world.
I could care less about any of the National or International quagmires of political thought and representation. That said, I acknowledge that people are affected by all types of political maneuverings to enforce system rulings from both the left and right side of the spectrum.
Administrative independence sets the table for the nature of our interdependence. Dysfunctional ideas abound... just go into a public school system where unionized labor is hard at work enforcing rules of an employment system that take priority over any efforts made by leaders of a suggested education system. Dysfunction is the default starting condition.. Individuals may opt-out, and self-possess their learning choices, but it is not easy or possible for the masses.
Systemic enslavement of operational choices happens on a spectrum. People are affected in myriad ways, personally. And they make choices against the backdrop of this systemic capture in an effort to overcome the failings they are affected by. Few people talk about optimizing this experience as a default condition of participation in systems because they have no idea what that means.
People do not understand contract law innately.. people do not understand Human Rights innately. And yet, recursive contracts rule the world, and owners own every possible path of productive development. The structure of your participation affects the results that are available to you... so people settle.. negotiate their standards of care.. alter their expectations... succumb to the real world pressures that family, happiness, stress, health, imagination dictate as necessary.
Still, those contracts built on the enforcement standards that precedent has levied upon participants in system transactions today... tomorrow... are very editable. The great irony of systemic enslavement that people refuse to focus on is that it has always been a choice that people opt-into by negligence. Accepting things as they are, taking the easy path, following the masses, choosing to suffer instead of self-represent your own fight, turning over your freedom to learn to a system that makes employment goals of your legal mandate to be educated... people make slaves of themselves, and always have.
Using force to constrain slaves comes after the initial negotiation where people allow themselves to be "put upon" as slaves. The hard truth is that there are "slaveable" and "unslaveable" people. We are taught fake-histories that omit the power that Individuals possess, even under conditions of tyranny, pain, and fear of death... to own self, to express 1st Rights, to determine whether enslavement is an option in the personal world you occupy. Death comes to us all, freedom... not so much.
VRM is about changing how you participate in systemic transactions of all types. From mundane to monumental, structure yields results... and potential is defined and limited by the structural choices that Individuals and Societies make. Most people do not like to live under a condition of war at all times... so administrators of the contractual exchanges in your living experiences prey upon the frailty of human stamina when withstanding stresses. Life can be made hard in so many ways... most people opt-into administrative conditions that are made "normal" by peer inertia at scale. If everyone else is doing it... who am I to say different?
Sovereignty is constructed from the consent of the willing, and its source integrity is permanently sourced from within Individual lives. This truism will not stop slaves from making slaves of themselves, or administrators from levying the high tax of contract enforcement backed by Institutional force upon the nature of people's lives. But it can affect how you participate.
So many of the things people think about are irrelevant.
Systems use people for systemic production of power, authority, and enforcement methods. This will never change. Robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and incorporated operating procedures will push the standard operating procedures that people have allowed administrative systems to produce to more and more dominant positions. People en mass will allow this to happen and propagate this outcome by simple inertia.
Meanwhile, Sovereignty originates within the personal self in all cases... and personal participatory structure is under the directed self-control of people who choose to function as owners. Every contract is relational, and I have yet to see a case where ignorance can not be negotiated away personally by Individuals that refuse to pay prices for structural ineptitude in lieu of defining cost on their own Terms.
True... owning my own healthcare is expensive.. way too expensive...but I will pay my own way unto every end before I ever allow a universal mandate to contractually define me as property of the State under penalty of law in an effort to cut my cost as a slave within my masters apportioned system. Slaves do not get respect or tolerance... and systemic enslavement does not get compliance, it produces tyranny.
Welcome to 2017.
You might not want a war, but its going to happen regardless. Slaves can not be allowed to determine how our systems function, at any cost. Individuals that self-possess their own integrity and 1st Rights are the only people that will ever determine how National 2nd Rights are construed and conveyed upon people that respect life, liberty and pursuits of Individual happiness... the only kind that exist.
Here is to people that do not negotiate away self-Sovereign Rights and invest in owning themselves structurally, at any cost. May our collective infrastructure bend to the will of these enlightened leaders of one, and influence many to follow in their footsteps.
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