Marxism and labor

TRX
January 25, 2012
336:
> If nothing else, it really throws an
> interesting wrench into Marxism...
> what happens when there's no labor
> involved in an industry?

Simple enough... you make everyone a "manager."

Back when Marx wrote his Manifesto, "labor" was pretty much interchangeable. Hang about the gate, get your chit, work until the whistle blew, trade your chit for cash on the way out. That only lasted until the requirements for specialized labor ramped up. Employers didn't want stoop labor, they wanted pipefitters, welders, network analysts, PHP programmers... in the odd way that things happen, the shoe is on the other foot, and the only generic, interchangeable work is now "management", where it's an article of faith that any manager can manage anything.

TRX
January 25, 2012
339:
> The US military now is more distinct
> from the rest of society than it was
> in the days of the draft.

Back in the day many of us wondered about how random the draft actually was, but I'm sure you are correct.

According to an issue of "Air Force Times" I flipped through last year, 45% of the US military is from the former Confederate states. Another 45% was from "flyoverland", ie the Midwest and various rural areas. Just under 10% were from urban areas.

Considering political orientation in the USA corresponds strongly to population density, I can see where the urban hive-dwellers would feel a bit intimidated.

TRX
January 25, 2012
342:
> The biggest misconception in pre-70s
> SF, as well as by people in general,
> was that computers were about doing
> mathematics.

Until you had some minimum critical mass of computing power, that was true.

My desktop PC functions as a typewriter, filing cabinet, music player, movie player, photo viewer, CB radio, telephone, teletype, and filing cabinet, all in one box. But I probably have more processing power and storage than existed in all the world circa 1970, not to mention the vast software infrastructure that makes it more than a glorified adding machine.

Of course, the Rube Goldberg insanity of wastage it takes to, say, view a video from YouTube fair boggles even my imagination when I stop to think of it. I watched Tom Lehrer performing "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" the other day. It was filmed before I was born, sliced into frames strung together on plastic film, with the audio converted into a squiggly track along the side. Then it was scanned and converted frame by frame into some digital format, which was then compressed. It wound up on YouTube, stored in patterns of magnetic stripes on rotating platters. It was read from there, packetized for Ethernet and TCP/IP, and then went Baud alone knows where along the Net, coming in through the cable modem, converted back from IP packets to buffered data, then decompressed via complex algorithms and sent to the video subsystem, which finally resulted in lighting up individual pixels on my monitor and diddling the voice coils on the speakers. [and I've probably left out a bunch of steps in the whole mad process...]

Now, being able to recall a film and play it on a remote device goes back a long way, and there was talk about implementing something like it for at least two of the "digital community" proposals of the 1960s. But they were talking about a mainframe in the town center and terminals in every home, with everything designed Apple-style as a single proprietary system, clean, efficient, and standardized. The bizarre structure of interlocking protocols and not-quite-standards we have now is due to incredibly cheap consumer-market computing power; cheap enough to squander and misuse it with barely a thought for efficiency, as long as the end product runs fast enough.