Is the Creative Class Engine Sputtering? 520
Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers, but, for most, 'the dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead,' he says."
Shortsighted (Score:3, Interesting)
Its not the creative class that's failing, its the middle class.
Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bingo!!
How much money is currently being wasted on litigation and licensing?
That money would fund a STAGGERING amount of new product development, research, or advancement of current products, but its being WASTED on lawyers working for patent trolls.
All the politicians want science, technology, and engineering jobs, but then they pass laws that destroy and hamper innovators and creators.
Software patents should be completely illegal. Patents on computer hardware should have a term of 12-18 months. Copyright on anything should be 20 years or less, a generation of protection for a work should be enough.
The absurd length of copyright and the extreme vagueness allowed in modern patents is killing the innovation we will need for the economy to actually improve.
Re:He is using strange definitions (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. Take a quality coder, a guy who spend all his time in his mom's basement making new projects, and introduce him to HR. It is a culture clash. One guy spends all his time working with people, the other spends next to none of his time working with people. HR knows nothing about coding and has been known to toss out programmers resumes because they don't explicitly specify they know Microsoft Word on them. At the same time, HR that does know stuff about coding might throw your resume out if you put Microsoft Word on it
In all this, there is a push to outsource programming jobs overseas, so while a company may be looking for American Workers, it is just a smoke screen, they won't hire you no matter how badly you crush their programming task they assign you. They tell Congress,"There is a shortage of quality workers in the US, so let us have more Visas." There is no shortage of programming talent in the US, just a shortage of jobs since the Dot Com bust.
Doing it yourself doesn't have to break the bank (Score:3, Interesting)
I have homebrew business ideas that I've been developing and I wanted to own my own servers and learn how to rack and manage them. I could have rented time on a cloud or PHP hosting site or whatever. But I figure that controlling my server infrastructure means controlling my costs. I consider that to be like owning my means of production if you wanna get all marxist about it.
I'm no sysadmin, but I know enough to get around Linux. I'm not doing an awesome job of it, and I have a big meltdown failure once every two years or so. Usually just a harddrive failure that I can recover from, but sometimes it's more serious. My sites haven't earned enough popularity to get sustained intense internet traffic yet; so far, my boxes have done okay with the occasional big burst of traffic for my sites ( https://clubcompy.com/ [clubcompy.com] and http://cardmeeting.com/ [cardmeeting.com] ) that I get from Slashdot or some random blog.
I negotiated my costs as a fixed $150/mo for 4U and throttled monthly bandwidth. And I'm not alone, in the colocation facility I rent at, I see a lot of homebrew rigs racked up with google and yahoo-owned servers (obviously not in the same rack and not as well cooled, heh.) I had no idea what I was doing, and the techs at the facility were totally cool and taught me how to rack my boxes and helped hold them up for me while I mounted them to the rails. The server and network hardware that I have probably totals about 4K and I built them up over years. I've still got 2U free for future expansion. I use only mini-ITX form factor mobos because I want to rack them in teensy enclosures so I can max out my rackspace, and those motherboards run cool so they go for years without any failure - heat kills. I buy passively cooled MB's whenever they're available and still meet my requirements. I have found Intel Atom boards to be extremely reliable in 24/7 operation. CPU-wise they stink, and I wish I could go 64-bit with more RAM, but I just need cheep life support for SATA and ethernet at this stage. I've had DIMM's die before motherboards, I don't mind spending extra for the best manufacturing quality there.
If you have a steady, good paying job and you're a developer, you should have a homebrew project that you hope/wish/dream will someday blow up and become your livelihood. No excuses about cost if you have even a couple hundred dollars a month of discretionary funds to burn. If anything, do it for fun and chalk the costs up to hobby expenses and do it to learn new things. Make it a long term project - over years - and you can pay for it yourself. You don't need magical silicon valley angel vc startup capital to do very cool things on the internet or in wireless apps.
Dave
Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Interesting)
India made a choice of building what is essentially a colonial economy without the colony part
I wasn't actually there, but I don't remember India making a choice. I recall it being made for them.
China, on the other hand, develops economy in a way that builds industrial infrastructure that can produce products directly usable locally.
China, on the other hand, is in a boom-bust cycle that will make what the USA is going through look like happy fun time. Or did you not notice they're producing whole cities no one wants to buy? I mean, Japan has kept it down to cars, and we mostly just build houses, but China has built enough needless, wasted, rotting cities to house what percentage of our population?
Re:terrible whiny article (Score:5, Interesting)
These people need to understand the technological revolution of the last 20 years has changed the value equation for content creators. When anyone can blog, the value of a journalist drops. When anyone can film on their phone and post it to YouTube, a studio has to work harder (competition), and the value of a movie distribution system drops. When anyone can write a story, make an ebook and sell it on Amazon or the Apple Store, then the value of a writer goes down.
"Everyone can be super! And when everyone's super, no-one will be." -- The Incredibles
Re:for the retarded... (Score:3, Interesting)
More time than it took China to do the same. Growing up I hated the cheap matchbox cars that would always break, and everything from China was junk. Now I want a Lenovo computer and nearly every apse product is made in Dina (BUT DESIGNED IN CALIFORNIA).
China is much more similar to Japan than India, as I have yet to purchase any good that ever came from India. As China develops, however, it will make more and more sense to open factories in India and India will go through an even bigger revolution than it has with software. And then it will spread to the middle east when europe, the US, China, and India all need a place for cheap manufacturing. And then it will make more sense to produce in Africa. Eventually (In a hundred or so years) every major region of the world will have had an industrial revolution.
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:for the retarded... (Score:4, Interesting)
And then it will spread to the middle east when europe, the US, China, and India all need a place for cheap manufacturing. And then it will make more sense to produce in Africa. Eventually (In a hundred or so years) every major region of the world will have had an industrial revolution.
No it won't, because there aren't enough people there to do that without significant automation. And if you have almost fully automated factories then labor is no longer the primary cost of production and it makes more sense to build them near where the consumers are and save yourself the shipping costs.
Also, China is very different from previous countries that have done this. They have a billion people, and they aren't a democracy. That makes it very easy for them to have an underclass with a population larger than the entire United States which, by applying a little automation to get some (but not all) of them out of the factories and into a middle class, can make enough goods for both the foreign and domestic markets. Then they can use central planning to implement greater automation at a rate that can slowly increase the size of the middle class, but never in a way that would cause significant unemployment.
The end result is going to be that China will be the last country to employ a large labor force in manufacturing. We could already automate half the stuff that they manufacture by hand there, the only reason we don't is that China doesn't want high unemployment and is more than willing to undervalue their currency and cause their population to work for slave wages in order to keep them working rather than starting an uprising. The second China can get any of those people into a middle class job (or, more realistically, the second any of those people dies or retires and is replaced by a young person with a better education), there will be a machine doing that work instead of a person.