Privacy is dead. That’s all their is to it. The ingenuity of mankind will rapidly find more and more ways to subvert it as our mastery of materials and systems expands and matures. What will be the conventions of the future, the mores and expecations, the rules? Who knows? We probably cannot even imagine the sort of society that will be born out of everyone being in the view of everyone else everywhere and always.

At best all we can do is try to avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls (drastically asymmetric access to information, etc).

That issue occurs when there are repeated calls to render a sparkline on a hidden element, but won’t help with sparklines that have subsequently been removed from the DOM – I may try to address that prior to releasing 2.0 – Send me an email if you’d like to help test!

Cheers,
Markk

New jobs in traditional industries isn’t really the point, so much as new industries is the point.

This is exactly my point though – the “new industries” we are seeing do not seem to come anywhere close to replacing the jobs they’ve destroyed, much less creating enough to deal with the numbers of new jobs that are needed every due to simple population growth. I.e., the jobs are being destroyed much faster than they are being created, new industries or not . I can’t think of a new industry in the last 10-20 years that even comes close to filling this category. The video game industry isn’t even coming close – 2010 stats indicate that the entire US industry (which is the lion’s share) only employs about 120,000 workers directly or indirectly. From what I understand, the US adds at least that many new workers to the workforce every month due to simple population growth, so this isn’t going to dent job loss, much less the inflation in the workforce from population pressure. Video games are massively profitable – but that simply backs up my assertions that we just don’t need all the workers we have anymore.

…lots of jobs are being creating through globalization, though not really in North America…

This, I think, is conjecture. The research I’ve done indicates that the jobs being “created” are primarily the jobs of expensive “first world” workers suddenly opening up to be done by workers elsewhere. I’m just not seeing that globalization is requiring anywhere near the millions of new workers that are available now every month due to global population growth. There is some amount of work being created simply to take care of the population as it grows, but there simply aren’t massive new industries anywhere that require millions of workers, which goes back to the original point of my article. Maybe we’ll see it in fifty years or something, but I’d bet on war or natural forces reducing the population pressures long before we see any industries form that somehow suddenly need human intelligence (rapidly becoming inferior to artificial intelligence for most productive, non-creative purposes) or strength (our advantage now is solely in finesse, but we are losing that to robots by the month). I could be wrong, but so far I don’t see a huge risk of it.;)

I agree. This is what I’m driving at. Especially when the “goal” of change is some idea that is deeply embedded in society, quiet education is going to be much more effective than protest in the long run. It’s hard to dismiss the idea as coming from a bunch of dirty hippies when it’s just encountered as rational conversation in a social context, or as simple practice in a business or community organisation. I think leading by example still works; while shouting about injustice is useful for getting ideas into people’s faces, that sort of direct confrontation is also a good way to get people to harden their positions. It carries risk, especially when the demands are diffuse and the threat scale and target (a few thousand protestors vs. tens or hundreds of millions in an entire population) is laughable. That’s not to say it should never be used, but it should certainly not be the only (and not necessarily the first) tool in the arsenal of change.

Strongly agree.

I think that it’s a very difficult argument to make that the internet and the associated economic activity have actually helped in creating jobs. It seems like if that were true, North America would have a glut of jobs [...]

Well, creative destruction implies that innovation both creates and destroys jobs — so not having a glut of jobs is expected. I guess the real question would be net jobs — is the total number going up or down?

(Though could be more complex too, e.g. the standard job of the 1950s might have been lifelong and enough to provide for the wife and kids, whereas a more temporary job in today’s world where it’s harder for many families to survive on a single income is quite different.)

Basically, the internet proved that the potential labor market was much bigger than the number of opportunities. And I’m hard-pressed to think of obvious examples offhand where the internet has created new jobs in traditional industries. Instead, I see boosted efficiency trimming off entire industries (content middlemen being the obvious ones) without providing a correspondingly large increase in new job opportunities elsewhere. Fewer people can easily do the same work.

New jobs in traditional industries isn’t really the point, so much as new industries is the point. Take the all-too-often-used example of entertainment… from live theatre to movies to home video to the internet, you have a constant process of competition, of creative destruction, of the emergence of new industries and transformation or destruction of old ones… musicians aren’t necessarily needed to play music live in the theatres anymore, but all sorts of new opportunities for music have emerged through 20th and 21st century media… entire massive industries, like the video game industry, didn’t even exist half a century ago… etc., etc.

The notion of efficiency reducing the total number of jobs suggests a kind of static world or closed system, that new industries or new jobs — beyond our present imagination — might not be enabled by improvements in efficiency elsewhere. Another perspective is that efficiency allows us to move on, to automate certain things so that we can focus on other things, and that’s part of what makes the economy “grow” or quality of life improve…

(Re: globalization, I agree with the difficulties in competition, but not sure if it’s necessarily a problem in the long-term… lots of jobs are being creating through globalization, though not really in North America, so depends what the scope is we’re talking about… and with outsourcing reducing costs, goods becoming cheaper, that can enable other growth and development (e.g. if computers cost two or three times more to make, that’d affect their affordability for business, costs for those businesses, efficiency all around)… lots of ripple effects with globalization, not sure that’s a clear case of jobs being destroyed.)

Fundamentally, I’m saying we’re nearly twenty years into this “new world,” and the trend is not the birth of huge new industries. A trend isn’t factual, and only hindsight will tell the full story on this one, but I’m not optimistic that we’re going to think of some new thing to do that actually requires millions of workers unless it’s simple manual labor.

I guess I’m just not convinced it’s a fundamentally new world. I see the accelerating technological progress accelerating other processes, like that of innovation or creative destruction. What might have taken centuries in the time of the printing press may take several years or less nowadays, but I’m skeptical that things are fundamentally different in the sense that we’ve reached some sort of a ceiling. But it’s interesting to consider that possibility.

As for revolutions and social change, I think that they’ve almost all involved actual bloodshed. When enough protesters get hurt or killed, my guess is that 1) it’s usually embarrassing to people in power that they couldn’t handle it more discreetly, and 2) there is a general sense of “it could happen to me” that spreads even among non-protesters that makes them more supportive of the underdog cause. ( I’m guessing you saw this article about the tipping point for the spread of ideas? They suggest that “[w]hen the number of committed opinion holders…grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”) It’s not enough to simply have some portion of the population be uncomfortable, I think. People can live with uncomfortable but they can’t live with starvation or genocide or brutality , so I think these tend to be the breaking points. And, of course, I think change on that scale is a bit of a wild animal – nobody really knows what happens when it gets unleashed. There’s just madness for a while and a new equilibrium emerges. I don’t think that anybody planned out the French Revolution or the Arab Spring or the civil rights changes in the US, etc. But I’d still argue that the street protests were more symptomatic of a need for change than they were a mechanism for change in itself.

To me, it seems like street protests are more effective when combined with other methods, e.g. having an educational campaign to inform minds, change hearts, and staging demonstrations in the streets to draw attention to the issue, build the movement, etc…

I agree. This is what I’m driving at. Especially when the “goal” of change is some idea that is deeply embedded in society, quiet education is going to be much more effective than protest in the long run. It’s hard to dismiss the idea as coming from a bunch of dirty hippies when it’s just encountered as rational conversation in a social context, or as simple practice in a business or community organisation. I think leading by example still works; while shouting about injustice is useful for getting ideas into people’s faces, that sort of direct confrontation is also a good way to get people to harden their positions. It carries risk,especially when the demands are diffuse and the threat scale and target (a few thousand protestors vs. tens or hundreds of millions in an entire population) is laughable. That’s not to say it should never be used, but it should certainly not be the only (and not necessarily the first) tool in the arsenal of change.