For a few years, I’ve been thinking about the problem of work in the West. It’s been apparent at least since Bertrand Russell’s lifetime that, as globalization and more specifically automation came to be employed in the workforce, there’d be less of it to go around for the average first-world laborer (yes, I know that terminology is out of date). As that happens, the cost of labor goes lower, and the problem of a living wage looms for more and more people.

It’s become much more apparent in the last few years, with the stagnation of incomes, the massive increase in part-time jobs, the introduction of automation into what were traditionally white-collar domains like law, accounting, research.

This should be a cause for celebration. We’re on a trajectory toward a world where menial labor is becoming a choice, not a necessity for staying alive, where we get to choose to spend our time doing meaningful work that imbues our lives with joy (sorry for the utopian hyperbole). But we still have the fundamental problem: in our society, remuneration for labor is how you stay alive. No work, no pay. So for every advance toward the mindless-labor-free world, there’s huge and justified pushback from those whom it should benefit but who would be deprived of the income required for a decent standard of living.

The problem is the link between the income required to live, and the work required to maintain that income. So long as the Protestant work ethic is a major driver in our society, it will not be feasible to just hand out money to those unwilling to work. Passing minimum wage laws are a stopgap that arguably create as many problems as they solve. Welfare systems are subject to abuse, and engender resentment by those upstanding citizens who support the idea of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

Just the other day, though, I realized that we as a society went through this once already. The transition from wage to salary for the professional classes is exactly the decoupling of work from income that I’m thinking of. Wages are paid for a certain amount of time spent doing a minimal quality of work, where the unit of value is the work-hour. Salaries are paid based on the job to be done, with the unit of pay the job to be performed. There’s a notorious elasticity in the amount of time a worker spends ‘at work’ when they’re salaried; the expectation is that the job will be done. In contrast, wage earners are meticulous about the amount of time they spend at work, and when (overtime, holidays, …) because that’s the unit of value in their work life.

Salaried employees negotiate income based on how much they need to live. Salaries can be a measure of how well someone does at their job. There is a much looser connection between the ‘amount’ of work in a salaried position and the income earned than the connection in a wage position.

We need to find a mechanism like this for the coming world of work, where income and labor are much less directly connected. That way, we can all share in the riches of that world without consigning those who aren’t CEOs or come from wealthy families to just scraping by.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201306/familiar-sequences-attract-attention is an interesting article on the psychology of attention, and specifically how regularity captures attention when the surrounding ‘field’ is random. Directly applicable to the study of rhythm, I think.

The TSA took my mother’s homemade fruit jelly from me this morning. I’d quizzed her on the difference between jams and jellies the night before, but I think the distinction would have been lost on the TSA official.

The chap in front of me had a mango confiscated. I suppose it could have been one of the exploding varieties.

Can Capitalism Tolerate a Democratic Internet? An Interview With Media Expert Robert McChesney.

It’s Godzilla capitalism vs everyone else, again. If large corporations don’t wanna do it, the ‘public interest’ has to step in.

Makes me wonder how come I’ve been able to make weird music, make a living as a software craftsman, and start this blog without a major multinational. This tech lowers the cost of entry to everything (soon to include genetics, micro-medical devices, custom hardware 3-D printed, …) just so goombahs like me can do it for hardly any money. Sorry, Mr McChesney, I just don’t buy it.

There is an asinine discussion going on on the Dianne Rehm show regarding the bombings in Boston and the use of the word “terrorism”. Some debate over “domestic terrorism” vs “foreign terrorism”; some acknowledgement that use of the term has legal and procedural consequences; some jingoistic “we will all pull together in the face of” and “show what it means to be American”.

I’m very tired of this term. As some have noted, merely invoking it pretty much terminates any more rational discussion on the matter at hand. Two of the participants, including the host, have noted in defining the term that it requires ascribing to the perpetrator the motivation of inspiring fear in the civilian populace, and yet at the same time acknowledge that our limited understanding of what exactly happened and who is responsible makes it impossible to know anything about motivation. Doesn’t this therefore imply that the term is inapplicable to what we know about what happened?

Calling it “terrorism” is a political act. When villagers in Afghanistan describe drone strikes as state-sponsored terrorism, we understand them to be making an accusation that we do not acknowledge: we never use language like that in our own descriptions of our acts. Neither do we describe IEDs on Iraqi roads as terrorist weapons. They’re simply weapons.

As Gen. McChrystal noted in a recent Times interview, those without access to drones and SEAL teams will commit acts of violence with the weaponry available to them. This applies equally well to deranged individuals, malevolent organizations, guerilla warriors, or foreign states.

Throwing the word “terrorist” around as a catch-all for intent to harm has consequences. Let’s not invoke those consequences unknowingly, and especially before we know who did this and why.

New Zealand Parliament legalizes gay marriage. After the vote, they spontaneously all start singing ‘Po Kare Kare Ana’, a love song, in Maori. It was very moving to hear on the radio.

Finally, an ad for home cleaners that uses a male to make its point instead of a stereotypical cheery housewife. A guy doing the laundry! Who would have thunk? Kudos to whomever makes Tide.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCYwAOCLiTA

Here’s the dilemma.  Most of what I want to do is made better by being able to do it on more than one machine or platform.  If I want to use RSS, for example, I want all the viewers that I use for this on all the different machines and operating systems to be in sync about what I’ve already read, what I’m subscribed to, and so on.  If I want to jot down notes, I want them available and editable everywhere.  If I have an encrypted database of passwords, I want them available on all the devices I use and I want to be able to edit them anywhere.  Same with code.

Local solutions, software that runs on a given device, exist for all these things.  Increasingly, “cloud” service providers exist for all these things.  The only added benefit they bring is precisely the “available everywhere” feature I mention above.  The cost, however, is that I lose control over all this data that I’m sharing; it’s stored by the provider, managed by the provider, shared at their discretion and ultimately disposed of.

In many cases, there are solutions that are optimal for me.  For example, source code control is a well-understood problem that has several solutions that work for me.  I’ve used everything from centralized systems hosted by service providers, to my own setup on an ISP, to in-house client-server systems, to peer-to-peer, and I’ve migrated my codebase from one to the other without hassle as I’ve changed.  The client side has been similarly painless; as each new OS or IDE has appeared, open-source clients for source code control have popped up as well.  I have control over my code, I’m not threatened by services disappearing, and I have universal access in a secure way.

I’m still looking for similar software for other needs.  It seems to me that the universal access piece of this is exactly what is appealing to many about net-hosted applications run by third parties like Google: Docs, Reader, Blogger, and now Keep, Evernote,Tumblr.  But it’s not necessary to cede control of my stuff to these services to gain universal access, it’s only necessary that I have a network-accessible place to store things (S3, my local ISP, my own server on a static IP address or some such), standards for interop like RSS, iCal, plain text, and client software that uses those standards for all the different platforms I’m using.  So I need to get on with it and identify those standards and clients, and break the bad habit of “trying” and then buying into web services that come with such a high long-term cost.  Recommendations welcomed.