[Pops]

This last year is the first time I've ever had an unlimited, fairly fast connection. A cable/internet bundle with a speed upgrade to something-faster-than-cheapest. It is strange to be able to click on anything and watch it and not think about my usage, I have Spotify running all the time - I pay.

Way back I used plain old dialup, a bonded modem on 2 phone lines (can't remember what it was called), IDSL... then a 9ghz wireless stationary setup, but although they said they didn't throttle-they did. Then 2 or 3 flavors of cell, on 3 different radios, on 2 carriers. I used a big Dish Network dish to focus a cell signal onto a wireless router!...

My backup now is just the iPhone on ATT, it is sweet, one click on the Mac and it finds the phone and connects. I have a somewhat expensive Wilson cell amp for the road but it was a waste of money.

Check out http://www.Technomadia.com a couple of geeks who live on the road full time and work full time via mobile. Not sure if they can help, they are obviously land based, but I've gotten lots of tips from them even though I am stationary for the most...

[Newfie]

Considering a Wilson amp myself, run the antenna up the mast 50'.

Should be good for something out over the water.

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', '
')My observation is that humans have a strong desire to work, to contribute. When we can't do something useful we find something else to make ourselves think we are useful. This wasted work is expressed as consumerism and through it we create great gobs of pollution. Oh that we could just sit at home and read, paint or sing. Our drive to do useful work to do good, is killing us.

[Newfie]

Ennui,

You make some good analysis. But I think you miss the point.

In 1850 few people were bored because it too all they had to survive. They ate nearly 100% of their output.

We now have much free time, but we want to feel like we are doing something important for us, for others. We could sit around and read, sing, paint, do non destructive, low energy activities. We don't. We make pretend jobs that don't really accomplish much. Why?

Telecommuting us a great idea and can and will help us contract our foot print.

Learning how to be content with ourselves not working, not making a great fuss and feeling important, seems to be a bigger issue.

Stop the pretend jobs, let those folks stay at home and raise kids and cabbages.

This technically could be done but it would require us to rethink how we distribute wealth among other things.

But it ain't gonna happen so no sense worrying about it. Thinking about these things is a hobby of mine.

[Newfie]

Pops,

I'd be interested to hear why the Wildon amp was dissapointing.

I just ordered.

[AgentR11]

There's another thing about Telecommuting... No sick days. "Boss! I'm puking my guts out. Its horrible, I went the the doc and he said I had Influ.plaga.puke". Boss: "Wow, sorry to hear that. Be sure you have a big enough bucket next to your desk, Joe needs the costs estimates for Sect III's wiring by this evening."

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'S')hould be good for something out over the water.

[Pops]

I've mentioned before the fact that we are much more disconnected than our predecessors. Sounds counterintuitive but just look what we're doing here, tapping messages out into the aether to people we'll never meet, never be committed to, never be supported by; choosing who to "listen" to, filtering everything through our preconceived opinion of what is real... looking for a co-signer.

Telecommuting is the ultimate expression of individualism that butts right up against antisocial behavior. LOL I always say I'm not antisocial, just not that interested.

But... it could be that rather than just allowing the "export" of work from tiny little abandoned hamlets and homesteads in flyover country as I once thought, telecommuting may be the thing that encourages a return to a previous level of "community" — co-ops, organizations, even churches.

[Newfie]

It works both ways. Establishing the Global Village but also assuring that that village just feeds back in itself, regurgitating ideas. Consigners as you say.

We do have some healthy debate here so it can work, just not often enough. We are a pretty small homogeneous crowd, as you have noted.

[ennui2]

The thing about the internet (and mobile, which is kind of the 2nd wave) is that it is creating a change faster than our ability to understand it, which is scary. It's hard to really put all the pros and cons on the scale to see if it's been a net positive or negative, but it's not like it's going to stop because someone doesn't like one aspect of the change or not. The hypocrisy is that bloggers who advocate a return to a more rustic existence push their rhetoric through the internet. That's because it is the modern printing press. It is the cheapest and most effective way to reach a mass audience (assuming they're interested). The downside of everyone having a voice is getting heard among the signal to noise, this site having been consigned to the ghost-town wing of the internet years ago.

[AgentR11]

Yall will probably think this is kinda funny, but.. "back in the day..." games were considered the basic introductory way to teach users a newly introduced UI element, like the screen, or the mouse, etc. Well, we haven't had a new UI hardware element for a while, and there's one now on the edge of scaling. 3d headsets. There is also a designed world environment for large scale user interaction, currently existent in the form of MMO game engines.

There's plenty of these that are free you can try, to see how they work. On your 2d screen, it doesn't look that much different than an old adventure game kinda thing. But consider, you're driving an avatar around a software defined 3d space common to a large number of other users, all of whom can see and "hear"(chat text) you, in the same way they would see and hear you at an office.

So stay with me here, we all have email clients, shared storage locations, internal company vpns, ip directed phones, large format documents are in many ways now easier to work with on big 31" 4k screens than they are on paper.. the only thing you loose at home/satellite office environment is the see&hear your office neighbor. Instead of a "castle" or "magic forest" or whatever.. x-odd story office building, complete with private offices, conference spaces, and open cubicle areas. Makes no difference to the engine what the data file causes it to render. Add functionality to auto-join/leave voice chat groups based on "range"; and you can have a national central office where people can just show up when needed; or work "there" daily. No expensive rents, no helicopter/helipad; no bathrooms, no plumbing, no business travel for meetings. Just some servers zipping along in a cool, dark data center or multiple data centers.

Just think of an insurance company for instance. You have a huge office expense for some central thing, you have large physical offices in every city; each of those physical offices is really just some secretaries answering phone calls, sales agents putting together stuff to sell or servicing clients, some management oversite, some "go-get'em" meetings maybe... NONE of that needs a physical building. So you have huge expense, minimal benefit. And even if you wanted some office space to physically meet with customers, it doesn't need to be larger than a couple offices, a conference room, and a secretaries desk with one receptionist maybe. If everyone is either VR or out meeting clients... much cost savings.

An accounting firm's city office, same deal; and with VR, its trivial to retask some guys from Dallas to the Seattle office if Microsoft gets audited or something! lol.

Anyway, the VR/mmo engine/office thing strikes me as the appropriate answer to management's constant paranoia that they won't get good work out of people that are not present because they can't be supervised. But in the VR environment, you supervise in exactly the same way you would the physical office, wonder around, see who's playing solitaire, and who's making progress on an account reconciliation. Quietly /nudge the guy playing solitaire, "red jack goes over there... but don't you have something more productive to do? Bob needs help if you're bored."

I was just thinking how far all this has progressed watching my daughter play a minecraft looking one; they were in an enclosed space, 5 skype based video conference links were open, and they were all just yucking it up no different than what you might see in a conference room when its social before getting down to "work". Got my brain to thinking we might be much closer to this next step than I thought.

[ennui2]

This is also why I think some of the big charts like comparing GDP to energy consumption don't work when you expand the time-range too much, like back to the early 70s before micro-computers. You can argue that no form of economic exchange rather than hard goods and services are "real". In other words, if you buy a song on iTunes or pay a Netflix or B2B Salesforce subscription is "real", but that kind of thing is becoming more and more of what constitutes economic output these days, and none of that stuff is directly related to the stuff ecologists complain about as far as consumerism and waste goes, you know, big 18 wheelers burning gas shipping crap around the country. It uses electricity, yes, which doesn't rely on oil per se and is much easier transferred to renewables.

That doesn't mean Wal-Mart's going out of business anytime soon or that we don't buy too much useless crap, but at least in the US, most people don't work in anything related to manufacturing any of the goods we buy. We work with information. It's an information economy. And information doesn't take nearly as much energy to manipulate as physical goods.

When I read my LinkedIn Pulse articles on entrepreneurship, all of them automatically assume that people's startups are software-related. It's very dot-com-bubble-like, actually, with the key difference being that we really ARE living in an era where so much commerce is just moving bits and bytes around the internet. All these articles on how to launch your business talk about building your "minimum viable product" which is always, always, some form of software. It's not a toaster or a ginsu knife. It's software or software as a service or some sort of Uber clone. Even with physical products, like what you see getting crowdfunded, typically these are gadgets (internet of things). So there's always a software component.

This is the problem I have with some of the doomer commentary because it is so obsessed with ecology and primary production that it fails to acknowledge how far removed the economy really is from anything resembling primary production (i.e. stuff like farming).

If anyone wants to have a piece of the shrinking middle-class lifestyle, with few exceptions, you're going to be working with computers, and those kinds of jobs can be done without a daily commute, in which case you could live in a bunker in Montana if you wanted. If the world isn't like that, it's simple cultural inertia.

[Newfie]

Enuui,

I think there is a fallacy in the way we view the economy. At least there are two ways of looking at it.

I'll use health insurance as an example.

At the core you go to a dr. who provides a service and you pay him. In a single payer system there is a middle man, the tax collector, who takes your money and pays the dr.

In our economy there are many, many middle men who handle the money between you and the dr. But the basic transaction, where the value add is, remains unchanged. We just have a very complicated and inefficient system for making payments. The multitudes of middlemen do not provide a "service" in any fashion.

What they do is to spread out the cash flow in the economy so as to create consumption so that the economy can grow. Put crudely they are digging and filling holes in the ground and calling it "work."

I call it "welfare with dignity." Others call it "jobs." But the real purpose is just to have a way to put money in circulation to a greater number of people.

These middle men do something else, because they need offices, and cars, and computers, etc. they create demand. So now the money they skim off for the faux service they provide also must go to supporting all their office and work requirements. This boosts the economy and helps to make it grow because it creates demand.

I other words, in a consumptive service drive economy, there is no real advantage to efficiency. In fact, efficiency is to be discouraged.

By having these folks telecommute, it makes things more efficient, you are working against our economy as it is structured.

I don't like it, I think it is STOOPID, none the less it seems to be the way things work.

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', '
')By having these folks telecommute, it makes things more efficient, you are working against our economy as it is structured.

[Newfie]

OK, I estimate you understood about 0% of what I was trying to communicate, oh well. I do agree there is no concerted strategy, but there is a general underlying philosophy, Keysenian Economics, that is like a religious tract.

What do we do with all these laid off workers since we get so efficient? Why is part of the Feds mandate full employment? Sounds institutionalize to me. Which does make it part of our modern tradition.

How do you explain that when I was growing up Drs didn't have any staff but now have 2.5 clerks on average? Thats a modern consumptive culture at work.

On a personal rant for a bit.

FWIW, "hoteling" is having the employee share (forced upon them) corporates overhead costs. It's not telecommuting. It's what happens when management manages a company, but forgets its product. My Wife, the psychoanalyst has patients who come to her to talk of the personal depressive effects of "hoteling." Not a huge issue to be sure, but one that wears on people, tears them down.

From personal experience, you get engineering offices with no space to lay out drawings, no way to do an estimate. Employees being forced to do company mandated training on the clients nickel, travel on your own time, etc. It erodes moral, decreases efficiency, coordination, and quality.

I'm sure there are better work environments than I have seen, yet the trend I'm seeing is pretty grim for the employee and the product. Thank God I'll be done with this crap in a month, then I'll be consulting from our boat.

I advocate telecommuting. I understand the advantages. But it's a small answer not a panacea.

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', '
')How do you explain that when I was growing up Drs didn't have any staff but now have 2.5 clerks on average? Thats a modern consumptive culture at work.

[Newfie]

No, my logic is just fine. It doesn't fit the world view you have developed. It's in front of your eyes, you can't see.

[Pops]

I don't know. Jobs fill a need. They may appear extraneous but if someone was not willing to pay, with their labor, for your labor, you'd be out of a job. Isn't that the basis of the whole bit?

If people are willing to pay for phone games, I guess they feel they have value. I made a pamphlet about breast cancer treatment yesterday, and, a facebook header for an entertainment venue. One may be seen as more "valuable" than the other but I got paid for both because someone thought it worth the money.

Lots of work today is far, far removed from basic survival. Isn't that a good thing?

[Newfie]

Jobs fill a need for sure. For a few thr need is to provide food and the stuff we need. For the balance it is filling a psychological need to feel like you are contributing to the hive.

Go I g back to my fav kicking boy, med insurance, what need are they fulfilling?

I don't think there is a grand conspiracy, but our consumptive economic system is ingrained into our thinking.

Pops, you sometimes talk of the fat in the system, how we can down size our energy needs and thus adjust to oil resource restrictions. Doesn't that excess energy we are consuming relate to unneeded jobs?

Do you really believe that our current med insurance system is more efficient than a single payer system?

Yea, jobs make us feel worthwhile. In that way they are needed. If we cut out all the nonsense jobs we would crash the economy. Adapting a different wealth distribution system would help.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'F')or the balance it is filling a psychological need to feel like you are contributing to the hive.