Check out these household tooling made in china images:
J0 – the master definition of ‘A Job’ and the acid test for ‘Full Employment’
Image by Julian Partridge
* I *FEEL* fully employed therefore I *AM* fully employed
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EVERYBODY *wants* to create more jobs.
But it appears to me that our system for driving our supply for jobs, to satisfy all our needs, and quite reliably, is now completely broken.
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For instance:
How can the Cameron govt claim to be creating loads of lovely new jobs for us, when the economy is plunging down the tubes, yet again? [apparently]
How come the national statistics office say that the unemployment percentage is falling, when every popular poll suggests that more and more people can no longer afford their daily bread?
How come the biggest economic brains that money can buy, when all assembled there in their lofty masses to assess the latest cure for all our woes, when they look at their giant spreadsheets and say: "hmmm… Treble dip recession here we come, and look: jobs are still going up!? That’s strange!" and then just go back to their wine and canapes, and then that ridiculous photo-shoot of themselves all shaking hands in that same old display of fake unity and fake economic management confidence!?
And how come, if we’re "all doing so very well!" that only 1 out of the 7 well-educated and striving males in my little family network is fully employed?
Well, I think it’s because we’ve no idea what One Job is.
And because we’re so stuck in this conventional old thinking, and so emotionally wedded to our own version of political ideology, we just keep ploughing on, madly ignoring this humongous elephant in our collective economic room.
Despite epoch-changing advances in every other walk of life [actually, I think: because of them], we still don’t have a capable system to join up the dots properly on how we run the economy. Our ‘Jobs’ factory is still way back in the dark ages!
Well, if you want to make the right amount of ANYTHING, you first need to know how to count it.
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Back in the day when unemployment was thankfully turned from a crass, upper-class wild guess [often swiftly followed by a surprise and unruly demonstration by a mass mob of near-death-starved wannabe workers arriving awkwardly outside Number 10, fresh from their long walk all the way from… Ohh.. Where?… Jarrow, say!]… Way back then, counting jobs was easy!
You take one keen, young boy fresh from compulsory school. You walk him over to his dad’s shipyard. Pay him the going daily rate for each hard day’s labour. Fine him for any slacking so you don’t break the company coffers. And you keep doing that day in day out; till he drops dead – some 50 years later if he’s lucky.
Oh, and you deduct a token payment off his wages to pay into a friendly society fund so he can claim it back when he can’t work anymore, to keep him and his in bread and lard… Oh, and another few shekels a week for his union to keep heads of his kind floating just above water. And another small fine as his contribution to aid for the King.
And that’s One Job.
No probs!
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Fast fwd 80 years, and things seem a bit more complicated.
For a start, the missus is working for pay now. So we need to cover her for jobs too. So one family needs more than one job, now…. [Or does it!?…]
And your typical work hours have gone mad. It was 8 or maybe 12 working hours per day, 5 or 6 days per week. Sunday: illegal. Rest and church only.
And now?
Forget church. Europhiles say any more than 35 hrs is cruelty. Doctors work 60, 70 hours. Most vacancies I see on shop windows round mine say 7.5 hrs, 10 hrs, 20 hrs tops, and "must be totally flexible".
Self-employment – to succeed that is – needs 80 hours hard labour. 7 days per week. [often without pay; sometimes without sleep!]
And we’re told the whole country must now compete with all those sweat shops in India, China and Brazil… On equal terms!… Where workers there never go home!?
But David, your stats say that just *one hour’s work per week* is equal to ‘One Job’…. Hmm!? Surely not!
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Back in the day, unemployment meant "a somewhat perplexing little bother where lots of those pesky Northern working types are lazing about instead of grinding out our lovely Empire’s stock in world trade".
Unemployment wasn’t really a matter for the non-working classes then.
Landowners were not looking for jobs; they were looking for keeping their rents and square footage yields up. And the banking and political classes were just making sure that all their accounting books double-entered nice and neatly.
So job counting was treated as a bean-counter’s side issue.
But now!? Unemployment affects just about everybody!
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And then there’s that other issue about how long we want to work, and when you’d be content to pass away:
We used to go to school for 14 years, work a further 50 years [with luck], and then retire [humbly] for a final 5 years, say [and with even more luck].
But now we go to school for 21 years, work for 44 years [or zero years if you’re one of the unlucky 3 million hopeless cases (on average)], then retire [sumptuously – by comparison] for a further 15-58 years [depending on your access to premium NHS care]…
So does that mean we need more jobs, fewer jobs, or just the same number of jobs per average UK subject now???
*** What the bleedin hell is: A Job!?
And some work you do *is* a job, and some *isn’t* a job.
If I’m going to school, I’m not in a job [but I still might get paid]. But if I’m an intern trainee in work, I AM in a job [tho probably unpaid].
If I’m maxed out, caring for family, I’m not in a job. But if I pop my clogs and a professional carer has to take over, she IS in a job!
If I’m sick I don’t count for a job, because I’m ‘economically inactive’ [or "scrounging scum", depending on your particular point of view] – irrelevant to the economic master plan [apparently]… But when I dutifully come back to look for work again, I’d find that there’s no job waiting ready for me! And that now I’m forced on the dole instead… Only now [you couldn’t make this up!] – ‘brilliantly’ – I’m now ‘economically active’! A ‘thrusting returnee’ to the UK success story!
[keep taking the pills, David]
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This all is because the system is designed for only historical, money-based bean counting, not as a proactive tool for forward thinking mass entrepreneurialism. Who cares how many jobs we need tomorrow!
Well I care.
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And then there’s that sordid question about pay:
Apparently, if I were sampled in the next govt labour stats survey, I could well show up as a nicely 100% employed community of population size 1. [unpaid work for family business – profitable or not – counts as fully employed.]
And your tireless but well-passed-pensionable-age mother, who might still be working part-time in her church for pocket money, say?… Well, she’d be counted by the Tories [and Labour, and the Lib Dems, and George, and the Germans, and the US and the IMF – but perhaps not the Chinese and the Indians!] as contributing a shining example of One Whole, Fully-Economically-Active, Growth-Driving, Blue-Rinsed Private Sector Job?
What!?
And when your electricity bill goes through the roof, and you can’t afford to travel to work, and bread sky rockets, and meat become a luxury, and you can’t pay your rent [because your pay has been ‘restrained’; or because landowners are recouping their losses and hiking it up] and your savings in the bank have become as rewarding as so much toiletpaper….
Does it still mean you are holding the same number of jobs as you were last year?
And when a graduate leaves university with £30,000 debt, and gets a graduate job earning £16,000, on a 1 year contract. Is that the same as a 16 year old leaving school and joining Tesco’s permanently, with no debt, earning £12,000?
And if the average living wage for a singleton is £25,000, how many jobs does the country need to create to cover for that? 1 job? 2? No idea?
And if the UK average working wage is about £20k, and a council CEO of a region blighted by youth unemployed is on £120k, is he holding down just One Job?… Or 6?
And if the Olympics had truly created 10,000 new jobs over an average of the last 2 years, is it now also true that Boris’ jobs gap in London has just vaulted up by 10,000?… Or by only 400?
[10,000 living wages / 50 yrs desirable working life span * 2 yrs actual job longevity = 400 healthy family lives]
And those hoards of volunteers? Let’s not be coy here: were they good citizens forgoing their rightful [and worthy] salary for the good of the nation, as advertised?
Or were they [unwittingly] labour-dumping; ‘selfishly’ destroying the chance of a real paid job for everyone else?
[Or were we all just blindly manipulated into a complete muddle about the meaning of real work – just to keep David’s numbers looking passable?]
But if volunteering really was the answer then, then why didn’t Lord Coe volunteer as well? Why was he paid some 2 or 3 times the salary of our Prime Minister!?
[I think we can all be excused for getting really, really confused now!]
And if a banker – one who was knighted for his services to the banking world by the last losing PM, say – is then fired for cocking up our entire economy. Has he just lost One Job for his incompetence? Or does his modest pension of 340 grand a year until he finally pops his clogs at the ripe old age of 122 still count as One continuing Jobsworth in the bank [if he can find one] to keep *his* household nice in cosy mittens?
And how many jobs did his financial incompetence actually destroy for the rest of us?
Any guesses?
And if Sainsbury’s or the Co-op, say, were to retire early one full-time, senior high-salaried member of staff and were then to take on three minimum wage temporary part-time unskilled workers to take over his workload, would David then say he had just created 2 more net private sector jobs?
Or would he fess up and say that he’d actually done nothing at all!?
Or would he go further, and be even more honest and admit that the majestic UK economy had just shrunk by a little bit more?
And if your job is sharpening pencils when no one uses pencils anymore, or if you’re drilling for oil just weeks before all the oil is due to run out… Are you still ‘fully employed’?
Or do we need to create one more job for you: URGENTLY! [so you might sleep nights, confident that you’re not silently doomed to suffer a long period of systematic unemployed man abuse, viciously doled-out by the Jobcentre, ‘respectfully’ [their #1 customer service promise] mistreating you as "yet another longterm benefits-scrounging good for nothing lazy piece of workshy scum!"]
[Yes! I was given the white feather of female mistrust and scorn yesterday again. And yes: it did upset me badly.]
And if I really didn’t like my job… Or it just doesn’t fit my family’s needs? Is that one person well matched to one job!? Or not? Does David have to do anything different for me? Or am I just being fussy and selfish?
And if a million impoverished EU migrant workers were to come rushing towards our shores, to frantically Dyson-up this plague of microjoblets that David’s strategically scourging our promised land with, that said striving migrants might actually be able to feed all *their* families [because when it’s all said and done, David, we’re all humans in the same lifeboat on this], would David be right when he says he’s just created another million green-private-sector-job-shoots for ourselves?
Or has he just lit the fuse to his own political time bomb?
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When the unit of measure you are using is this woolly, you can say just about anything you like without a shred of fear you’d be found out actually telling the unholiest of unholy lies.
You can bluff and plough on; but I don’t think you can claim to be competent.
And you certainly can’t claim to be in control. Not when it’s this important!
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The fundamental problem is this: what do you want David [or whoever is in charge] to aim for? What do you want him to make you more of?
One minute he’s claiming: Britain is Booming; look! I’ve made GDP go up! The next he’s crowing: Britain is Booming; look! GDP is down but I kept jobs up! Then it’s wages are down but he made sure inflation hasn’t gone thu the roof; or it’s exports are up [only we can all see that our town streets are turning to ghosts!]
And if all that’s not enough! He’s even got a new ‘happiness’ survey coming for you, to show us all just how professionally well he’s really doing… I guess he’s just afraid he might be about to lose *his* job.
It’s just not worth listening anymore!
Why can’t we just have one thing to focus on? Just one measure that means the same thing to everyone.
[No need for embarrassment that that’s your only primary goal, George! – no need to big it up with all that banker-friendly economic buffoonery, mate!]
Just one thing.
One thing that, when there’s a shortage, it means that it’s time the tough got going: fast. And that, when there’s more, it simply means that all is unquestionably better, for everyone.
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Well I think this is it.
It’s a redefinition of the meaning and quantity of ‘One Job’.
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Any job definition needs to work easily for different players in different ways, but, crucially, it must all still add-up to a unified, coherent, successful, human whole.
In the old days, One Job for a working family meant you had the reasonable expectation of earning a full standard of living for the whole family, for one full generation.
This was the same for the employer, but he only needed to account for it as ‘one full weekly wage for a business term of 50 years’ [at which point a fulltime schoolleaver would need to be brought in to replace the fulltime retiree].
[In oldest times this was given an easy job-based money unit: the Romans had the denarius. One coin given for one day’s labour sufficient for one journeyman’s daily bread.]
And this still worked well for home carers too – typically the wife and grandmother – who would work in parallel behind the scenes to enable the whole family unit to enjoy the man’s wage. However this didn’t need any outside measurement as it was easily handled within the home, just as a matter of common sense. So the real work done in the home by them wasn’t counted as a ‘job’ at all.
[That’s where our system was not future-proofed right from the get-go: we confused ‘job’ with ‘pay’ and called everything unpaid as ‘economically inactive’ … Now ‘economically inactive’ is financially crippling! We fixed the bean-counting (temporarily) but we destroyed the value of community and enterprise…]
And, economically speaking, if your employer was employing you – in a shipyard say – then it meant that ships were being built, and that ship orders were being filled, and trade was happening, and taxes were flowing, and good ol Blightie’s books were brimming. All good.
Still easy! [ish]
This worked because the ‘Job’ was the atomic unit of the Good Enterprise, the Good Economy and the Good Life. [no pun intended]
But when money value changes wildly and when family isn’t family any more and when all family adults want to work and when caring becomes an enterprise and when job life spans shrink down to weeks or days or hours and when human life spans stretch and when school doesn’t flow into work and when retirement isn’t retirement any more and when benefits mean worklessness isn’t incomelessness and when enterprise comes and goes in the blink of an eye and when leisure becomes a profit source and when most profit doesn’t need any workers at all!!…
All that beauty of simplicity and control… It just falls into mush!
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So I think the answer is to start again.
To start again from the top, at the very mother of what we all really want. And to define a Job unit which works at that level. Only when we’ve got that clear should we then proceed back down into the detailed economic systems and bean-counting.
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My graphic depicts what I think should be understood as ‘One Job’ at this top level.
The essence of it is time [not money, roles, wages, locations, or headcounts].
One Job is shown here to be the time equivalent of the total available living time in one typical family unit.
A portion of this is deployed in work. This is the duty necessary to raise and transform a sufficient quantity of the family’s stock of profit into produce essential for the quantity and quality of enjoyment time they expect. [by the way, enjoyment time includes time sleeping in a warm bed].
For this work time to happen, there needs to be an enterprise to host the work activity. So there’s a space called a factory. But at this level there is no real distinction between work and home. So the house space and the factory space are joined at the hip. It’s all enterprise.
You can’t work without a house. And you can’t have a house without work. [it’s only recent modern life that’s found us specialising time and space to such a degree that we now see these things as totally separate, and get really frustrated when the numbers don’t add up nicely any more…]
Happiness is the end product: using its hard-earned produce, the family converts its own joy time into it’s own tacit stock of joy [like recalling that fond memory of last summer’s family holiday in Majorca].
So Mrs Jones is happy, and stops being mean to Mr Jones. And Mr Jones is happy [relieved] and feels good about his self-worth, and so he values his work time as a thing of dignity and honour among his peers. And little Tommy Jones sees his dad out and about and respected, and likes him buying him toys and having time to play football with him, and sees his mum canoodling him on the sofa… And so he wants to be just like his dad when *he* leaves school [school is tacit in this model – part enjoyment time, part work time].
And little Alice Jones sees her mum enjoying her shopping outings, and sees her mum canoodling her dad, and is jealous. And so Alice wants to grow up quick and get married, just like her mum did.
[by the way, cooking and cleaning is really work time in this model: just more refined production and enterprise improvement]
And so socially, One Job is the same as one wonderful, healthy little micro-community. An atom of a good society.
All seems good to me! Yes?
And look:
We don’t even need the concept of money yet!
We don’t need an economic policy. We don’t need a government growth stimulus. We don’t even need a government. [Oh no!! David is out of a job!]
It all just kind of happens!
[Actually, I think the roles of government are tacit in this model, occurring within the ongoing dialogue of the family.., and in the subtle man-woman-family values that drive their collective positive behaviour for the good of the continued survival of the whole.]
And enterprise here is just the other side of the same life coin. It is a whole thing.
There’s no Production and Services split. There’s no need for a distinction between Public Sector and Private Sector. No Third Sector, no NGOs. No Charity. No Capitalism. No Socialism. No Social Enterprise. No lefts or rights. No meaningless Small Government / Big Society mantra…
All that guff is just modern mush and muddle that only serves to mess up this true, unified meaning of Enterprise. [messing it up so completely that no one knows what they should be doing any more.]
There’s no ‘economically active’ and ‘inactive’; there isn’t even an ‘economy’ yet! There’s definitely no Free Market. There’s no market! [But I suppose there is *freedom*!]
And there’s no paid vs. unpaid jobs; no profit vs. not-for profit businesses; no volunteering, no slavery. That too is redundant thinking.
There’s just ability, time, and positive behaviour. All together in this space: a fleeting, living bubble in the infinitity of the human cosmos. Life.
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And I think the sum of all this – the gestalt – is what I call Spirit: the beauty of the healthy whole; attitudes in perfect sync with hard reality. Daily life ticking like a faithful grandfather clock.
It’s the spirit of full employment!
[Faulty spirit, and cracks will quickly start to appear everywhere else.]
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Further more, the side effect of this positive desire-time-joy loop is change: the enterprise is changed positively in the work process. And the family is changed positively in the enjoyment process.
Houses get erected. Factories get set-up and repaired. Resources get depleted. Workers get tired. People age. Relationships develop, start, and end. Specialised roles and particular social hierarchies develop. Technology is conceived and perfected. Community is shaped and matured.
Everything just evolves, necessarily and naturally, over time.
This evolution may be observed at any moment in time as its state of order. The enterprise order. And the community order. [complimentary views of the same thing]
And we know about this order thru the accessible information about it. By what we perceive and memorise. And by how we collectively feel and talk about our world. It’s stored in our language and in our ideas.
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I’d like to emphasise the concept of Profit at this point. [There’s no concept yet of a modern business organisation and no accounting and no tax: there is no money, remember!] But there is Profit.
But I’ve rewired the whole idea of ‘profit’.
* Profit here is not what is left over after the workers have all been paid-off; it’s what the family has to start with, with which to afford it’s desirable living off.
So the produce from any uplifted profit is the worker’s profit, taken as wages. And the gain from this is the profit taken as family joy in the use of his wages. And any difference is the profit lost to the universe as waste.
And the profit only exists because it’s fed from an abundant external energy source of some kind [eg the sunlight which bears down on our little piece of heaven.]
In this model, Profit is the medium of enjoyable living. Without it: no life.
It is a critical commodity but I think it is really best seen as a ‘waste’, not as an ‘asset’.
Your stock of profit may either be in rate-limited re-supply or be finite. Either way, it must always be used economically, minimising any waste that might otherwise just go straight up the chimney.
By uplifting it, you are *wasting your desirable life opportunity span*.
[Profit here has it’s old Biblical meaning: Good. It’s what we should all seek a shared sufficiency of, through good, socially-positive manners and behaviour. Through Good Enterprise.]
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By the way, ‘austerity’ in this model is a ridiculous concept: Mrs Jones refusing to buy enough food to feed the family properly [for some reason only known to herself!] so then Mr Jones finds he has less work to do so then Mrs Jones instinctively nags him even more to work harder, cos she’s [strangely] just not as happy as she was yesterday!
[Carry on, David!]
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The absolutely critical thing about profit, though, is this:
* Profit must be distributed justly, for the good of every member of the family, with due regard for the merit they’ve earned and the utility they offer.
[I hope you’ve now seen my point here: that ‘profit’ has misleadingly become a just dirty accounting word for some, and the money-based be all and end all for many, many others, and it’s screwed us up badly! I say we’ve got it all arse-about-face: if there is any evil in profit, it’s not the existence of it – it’s essential in this model – no, it would be in the evil *distribution* of it, should that ever be allowed to happen.]
Another way of looking at this profit concept is to see yourself, not as ‘entitled’ to a gracious. long, and prosperous life. Nor as the jealous inheritor of daddy’s cash-cow. But to see yourself as a ‘lucky tramp’, an accidental settler; given by the grace of who knows what or whom the *opportunity* of authentically pursuing your own vision of the Good Life Dream right here and now.
I am very lucky should I find myself in this spot.
It would mean that I and my loved ones can now survive with confidence. I can now – authentically – be filled with hope. This plot on the planet; this squat of mine; this temporary territory… My *Home*. My *Job*. Is of *mortal value* to me. I mess it up at my peril. And I fight to keep it to the death.
So profit is really the life blood of *opportunity*.
And consequently, ‘territory’ or land is not intrinsically valuable at all!…
Mr Jones’ square footage on the ground is of *no value whatsoever* without his labour, and without Mrs Jones’ desires and helpful habits, and without a factory to house his work, one that fits the produce that fits the joy his missus seeks; and without the ability of it all to continue to churn out the right quantity of family pleasure, day in day out, for all time.
It’s the whole that’s of value, not any single factor on it’s own.
[If you were to sell or rent anything in this model, you could only validly price the Opportunity – the self-employment business plan, so to speak – on an all-or-nothing basis.]
So if we *were* to introduce the concept of territory and land ownership now, and then a money-value for time occupied on it: Rent. And then if we were to offer this rental business prospect as a going concern; and were to call it ‘property value’. Well then we would have completely lost the point!
The only thing *I own* is me. The only thing of value is *my life*.
[If I am wrong on this, then the house price crash of 2008 and the global collapse of Western banking, and the destruction of the Euro by greedy Spanish land speculators and construction tycoons by them brilliantly ‘investing’ in all the pleasure domes of kubla khan that they could possibly dream up – with not one person ready to go into any of them!… If all this land and property were intrinsically of value, then all this is just signs of the healthy vibrancy of modern economic success!?… Yer right, David!!]
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So profit and opportunity, and a lifetime of joy and goodness to society, when properly integrated, and when rightly appreciated by us as *The Spirit of full employment*, are all really the just same thing. Morally equivalent. Economically essential.
Good.
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Right! Well? All very sound-looking but still hopelessly hypothetical… Would I vote for one of these!?
[Where’s my crystal ball?…]
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A simulation story:
If the sun stops shining, then the profit stock runs dry, and work time cannot be used, and wages dry-up, and joy ceases, and… The family life is not as intended. It’s meaner and shorter. Better not let the ‘sun’ stop shining then!
Or if Mr Jones gets lazy, the factory stands idle, no produce is brought home, food is not put on the table, then Alice Jones will start to cry and so Mrs Jones hits Mr Jones over the head with a rolling pin [the same rolling pin that Mr Jones had only yesterday lovingly crafted for her… And he was only able to do that because he’d invented the lathe just the week before], so Mr Jones goes urgently back to work [and Tommy Jones sees his dad’s behaviour brutally corrected, and so learns the value of holding down a job], and all returns to normal, and the family is happy once more. Wonderful!
And what if Mr Jones is a bit pants at his work, and wastes more than he should, or is rather slow? Well less product for the profit stock owned in the work time available. And so less joy. So a lower standard of living for the Joneses. Quite right!
And what if Mr Jones’ stock of profit runs dry; or a hurricane flattens the factory, or invading Vikings plunder the lot and leave him with just his life and family? Well Mr Jones better move camp and prospect for another living opportunity somewhere else, pronto! Well that’s life, isn’t it. [In fact, in this particular scenario, you might say: Mr Jones is short of One Job, and so is rapidly striving to develop a new personal enterprise to create One Job more for himself and his family. Ie: he’s ‘jobseeking’!]
And zooming back out now [from David’s viewpoint again], this post-apocalyptic job recovery ‘policy’ of Mr Jones is geared just so, so his family’s standard of living might speedily return to its normal, healthy, flourishing green-and-flowering rose bush of a 100% effective and efficient Jones National Economic Statistic of – wait for it………..
Precisely "One Job."
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I vote: yes please!
[What d’you think?]
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J0: SUMMARY DEFINITION
Purpose: To clarify the meaning of the economic unit ‘Job’ and the meaning of ‘Full Employment’ when used to evaluate the performance of modern government.
Impact goal in use: Every person is fully employed.
DEFINITION:
HAPPINESS: A person’s perception of the goodness of his life. Happiness is the same as employment: if you say you are happy then you are also employed; if you are fully employed, you are also fully happy. #whatishappiness
JOB: A forecast of a particular quality of life. A division of activity in a human setting. An economic unit of measure. A person’s living situation. A person’s identity. The idea of dignity one expects in return for his own expected duty. #whatisajob
J0 or J-NOUGHT or J-ZERO: A precise definition of ‘A Job’ in the J0 scheme. Measurement: A person is said to have one J0-Job when he/she states that he/she feels fully employed. Valid range: 0..1 [a person cannot have more than one J0] #j0 #whatisj0
PERSON: A living, sentient being or organisation of such. Usually human. The owner of a life opportunity. A human known by name. #whatisaperson
FAMILY: A self-formed organisation of people regarded as a unit for the purpose of communal living. A type of person for the purposes of job counting. May consist of relationship structures of any kind. Eg, single people, a number of cohabiting friends, siblings without parents, lone parents with one or more children of any age, 2 adults, 2 adult parents with one or more children of any age, multi-parent multi-child communes… #whatisafamily
FULLY-EMPLOYED: Found to agree with the J0 TEST. #whatisfullyemployed
*** A key concept point to note here: a J0 ‘Job’ is a time-based concept. It is measured by forecasting ahead. ie it is not a ‘how many people were employed yesterday’ measure. In this way, a J0-Job integrates with a business plan; with a ROI projection; and with a govt budget or BoE growth forecast.
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#j0test J0 TEST FOR FULL EMPLOYMENT:
Speaking responsibly as a family in the first person and thinking forwards from now to the foreseeable future,
I am fully employed if the following statement is true:
I feel that:
SPIRIT: my way of living shall always be true to my own values which are consistent with those of my chosen peers, and I expect to be able to remain free to maintain this integrity. Survival inspires me.
And:
BEAUTY: I have a place in my world and I am in my place. Everything touching me seems to fit together well. My whole life just looks right. Survival looks good to me.
And:
JUSTICE: I am afforded frequent and sufficient joys that fit my needs and merits. Any imbalances between me and my chosen peers are quickly resolved between us. I am allowed to survive.
And:
JOY: I have a regular experience of uplifting moments of joy. I see myself having purpose and I am free to cooperate and compete fully within my chosen community. I do not feel deprived of valid dignity. My relationships seem right and secure. I value myself. I feel at home. I want to survive.
And:
POWER: my community just works. I expect the life I want to last without compromise. I trust in my own resources to cope with any likely disturbances and new challenges. I am not anxious for exceptional good fortune. I do not feel something disastrous is about to happen. I am free to pursue whatever lifestyle I choose. I feel self-reliant. I am confident that I will survive.
SCORE CARD: SPIRIT /4 BEAUTY /4 JUSTICE /4 JOY /4 POWER /4: TOTAL /20
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Personal footnote:
My J0 score has changed wildly over the recent years. I currently do a weekly personal J0 scorecard as part of my job-winning system [along with the usual pipelined oppo stats and the govts v useful ‘positive steps’ count.] I also tally-up my paid hours, and my capacity hours, and my weekly profit to track my own rapid enterprise/full-employment development process.
Before I finally quit my aerospace job, I’d now estimate [I hadn’t discovered J0 then!] my J0 was around 4/20.
After discovering the #mission4jobs oppo and launching myself full-on into it, I was really fired up – ppl found me an inspiration! I’d estimate my J0 was about 10/20 then [I was a bit deluded, and I was rudely awakened as I was blocked from every avenue to engage with the establishment (poss something to do with being a proto-tramp living in a garishly painted car!?)]… [Another point to note: your class doesn’t affect your J0: I was living in a car and at that time I loved it! So a nation *can* get ‘poorer’ and still be happy!]
When I finally admitted failure and tried to rejoin the ‘normal’ UK working economy, I was more than rudely awaken: I was hosed with freezing water and beaten up. That and other devastating family issues caused me to almost give up. My J0 was fluctuating on an upset by upset basis in the range of 0-3/20. Don’t go there, guys!
… Things are much, much better for me now; I have hope; I’m well-housed tho precariously, I only get disrespected once every 2 weeks… Last week’s J0 tally was 4/20. I can cope with that for now.
My Work Programme goal [my own plan that is – my coach would not understand any of this; his goal is just to get his fat, Julian-off-benefits-bonus off David, no matter how he achieves it…] is to exceed 10/20 this year. But my strategy is to sail on past there, on to a full, Julian-style J0 of 20/20. By job creation thru starting-up my own paying business again; thru practising what I’m banging on about here…
As Monarch and PM combined, of the Whole Nation of Julian, I can’t see any point in aiming any lower!
Can you, David!?
…
RED CHALLENGES:
Help to evolve valid thinking and drive positive action on jobs:
1. What is the statistical validity of this model?
2. Write a simulation story for these scenarios:
– gluttony
– poverty
– coping with an episode of sickness
– a stranger appears and joins the family
– two families share this one space, and cooperate so both have One Job each
– Mr Jones invents the iPad
– recovery after a devastating storm
3. The Joneses decide they want to write down a description of how to keep their Good Life model working perfectly. It will be a ‘Jones Manifesto’, a document written down for the record so that Alice and Tommy might easily get ahead of the game when they eventually graduate into independent family-hood. What should this document say?
[This next one is especially for David…]
4. How many new J0-jobs have you created today?
5. What is the current job gap for:
– yourself
– your family
– your network / gang / crowd / street / community
– your local authority
– your MP’s constituency
– the UK?
6. What should the next level definition of a job, J1, look like?
…
For my family.
…
Rev 3.4
——-
An Excerpt ~ ‘Beard Trimming Scissors are Nitroglycerin’
Image by Viewminder
You know what else is weird?
The term ‘Duvet Cover.’
I only learned about ‘Duvet’s’ when I got myself into a long term mutually beneficial semi-monagamous relationship that was both emotionally and sexually satisfying to me and the woman that was my life partner.
A couple of life partners ago.
None of my genius buddies have a clue as to what a ‘duvet’ is.
I Love women.
If I didn’t I would never spend so much time trying to understand them and to so selflessly help them to understand that the quest for ‘hot freaky’ can bring them and their man rewards and pleasures that they’ve never considered.
Sharing ‘hot freaky’ can bring a man and a woman closer together than they’d ever thought.
Women are the most beautiful things on earth.
They’re soft and they smell good too.
Personally I’m always amazed at how good that their hair smells.
They also have unique capabilities and they can create a spectacularly color coordinated home that actually feels like it’s full of warmth and love and lots of throw pillows and organize it and run it as a dictatorship with a military like precision.
You can’t even organize the garage.
In short…
women are everything that you are not.
And you could never be no matter how hard you tried.
That’s one of the reasons that you love them and you’re willing to risk the explosive and painful soul crushing ramifications of relating to them in an intimate way.
Because they are ultimately your partner in the quest for ‘hot freaky’ that has consumed most of your thoughts for your entire life, both sleeping and awake.
Why they put up with your shit is another story entirely.
She might never be your ‘buddy’ but you’ve still got a few of those left that she doesn’t know about.
You can’t do it without them man.
Women.
Not your buddies… they’ll never get you anywhere near the promised land.
At best they’re someone that you go to to drink beers with after your progress towards your lifelong goal of entering the gates of ‘Shangri-freaky-la’ has been derailed by some stupid shit thing you’ve said to your woman at the worst possible time.
Because you’ve got a big habit of doing that.
Women are absolutely essential in the quest that will be the journey to the promised land.
Unless you like hairy guy ass.
And that’s entirely your call.
You know I love you and I’d support you even if that was your choice.
Or your genetics.
But after knowing you for as long as I have you’re pretty much hetero.
I mean…
you think maybe being gay would be easier than actualy having to think about all of this shit… particularly after one of your legendary and spectacular blowups resulting from your gahdawful ability to say the most stupid shit you possibly can to a woman at the most critical time…
But you just can’t decide all of the sudden that you’re gay.
Or at least that’s what conventional wisdom dictates.
And just because you’ve come to love and admire duvet covers doesn’t mean you’re gay.
Ask your therapist next time.
The sexy one that you sit there and tell all about your obsession with ‘hot freaky’ and you secretly wonder if one day she’ll just crack, give in and take you up on your repeated subtle offers.
You would have never discovered duvet covers if a woman didn’t bring them into your life.
Until she showed you, you had no idea that you could actually buy a cover to shove your old dirty ink stained comforter in to and that it would look like it’s brand new.
I just don’t understand whay people call them ‘duvet covers.’
I mean… a ‘duvet’ is a cover for your ugly ass comforter right?
So what’s a ‘duvet cover?’
Either it’s a redundant term…
or it’s a cover for a cover.
Maybe I’m missing something here.
That’s some brilliance right there… duvets… a product that had to be invented by a man… simply because it hides your dirty nasty old thing and makes it look new… but better than the most skillful application of duct tape ever could… at the same time given a french name and embraced by women as their own because they go for things with french names… and forgotten about by men because it was given that same french name.
‘My girl’s coming over tonight and my comforter looks like crap… I need a duvet cover quick.’
If you only had a clue as to where you could buy one.
I gotta admit that at first I thought when Snuggle Bums said that she needed to go and pick up a ‘duvet’ that it was some kind of mysterious feminine hygene product that I had no business knowing anything about.
I started to get a little nervous and wonder why in the world she would possibly be telling me this.
I remember fearing that her next move was going to be asking me to go to the store and pick one up for her.
It sounded suspiciously ‘french.’
So I was relieved when I found out what it really was.
Women think of some pretty cool stuff sometimes.
Because they’re not thinking of ‘hot freaky’ all of the time.
One of these days I’m gonna come up with a list of the top ten inventions by women that would make single guy’s lives more worth living.
But since I’m a guy I’m gonna put it off until a woman who loves me asks me over and over again to do it.
And when she gives me an ultimatum I will make it a goal.
Then I’m gonna write that list on duct tape that I’ve fashioned into a piece of paper because I can’t find the paper… but I knew that the duct tape was right in the garage where I left it last time I decided to try and fix something a couple of years ago.
Bedskirts would be on that list if I ever wrote it.
Right on top.
Has any single guy ever gone out and purchased a bedskirt?
What an amazing invention those are!
It’s like a device that conceals all of the shit that you either throw under your bed or that just ends up there.
Like all of those socks you’ve been missing forever.
The kind of shit you usually only find after your lease expires.
Like that stuff under your dresser when you move it.
Women just do that kind of thing when they’re bored.
Looking under furniture.
It must be the female equivalent of fishing.
‘I think I’ll pull some furniture out of its place and see what’s underneath it today’ they must think ‘I don’t have anything else to do… and the paint store is closed on Sundays.’
That’s how women get their super powers of knowing where everything is.
That and the fact that they actually put it away.
But it’s not just because men are slobs… even though we obviously are… it’s easy for women to put stuff away because they’re the ones who know where to put it.
Because they unilaterally determine where stuff should go in the female dominated houshold.
Which is any household where a woman lives.
Even if a guy’s put something away you know he’s not outta the water.
He’s gotta put it in ‘the right place’ too.
You know she’s just trying to provoke you when she says ‘Honey… did you put the adjustable wrench in the china cabinet?’
You remember the first time you took your chick to your crib?
You thought she was checkin’ out your CD collection and admiring your fantastic taste in little known independently produced music?
While you were workin’ out the details of your carefully choreographed plan to show her your duvet cover…
She was really looking at all of your prized personal possessions and hoping that one day the two of you would have a fairy tale wedding and a garage big enough for all of that shit to fit into.
Guys just hide shit.
Especially from women.
It’s in our genetic programming.
It’s so that we can cope with women.
The problem is that we hide it and we forget where we hid it and then we need to ask our girl… who then tells us that we’d know where it was if we actually put it away in the right place.
The place she determined that it should go.
Without telling us.
Or more likely with us not remembering that she told us.
Of course… if she said to us ‘honey… I want to talk to you about your need for ‘hot freaky’ and those things that you’ve been asking me to try doing… I know that ‘hot freaky’ is something that you think about a lot and I want to be supportive towards you that way… and I would… I mean more… if you put your beard scissors away in the basket that I’ve purchased for all of your male grooming products that I’ve found the perfect place for in the bathroom… and since I can’t relate to chopping that much hair off of my face every day I wish you’d also be sure to clean every last whisker off of the vanity after you’re done shaving… she might see you start to fade when you ask yourself what a ‘vanity’ is because you shave at the sink… but she could snap you right back if she turns to ‘hot freaky’ and says… ‘you know if you did that for me baby I might be more inclined to actually think about doing that twisted shit you’re always trying to get me to do under the duvet cover.’
When I look back on the conversation I remember it something like this…
‘Hot freaky’… put beard trimming scissors away… ‘hot freaky’… cleaning up whiskers off sink will bring me closer to the promised land of ‘hot freaky’… women want to want ‘hot freaky’ as much as men… just clean up after yourself and you are by default one step closer to ‘hot freaky.’
Beard trimming scissors are a funny thing.
They are a ‘relationship flashpoint.’
Beard trimming scissors are ‘nitroglycerin.’
That’s because she will never use them.
She plucks her faint almost invisible whiskers off of her face with tweezers.
And she always puts them back in the first aid kit so you never even know they were gone.
Because she doesn’t want you to know that she has whiskers to pluck anyway.
And in the female mind the next logical thing to do after seeing the tweezers left out would be to ask ‘what were you doing with the tweezers.’
She doesn’t want you to ask her that.
That’s why she puts them away.
SHE knows how to hide shit from you buddy.
Your male brain wants to leave the beard scissors right next to the faucet on the thing that she calls a ‘vanity.’
Because that’s where you’ll use them next.
And you hate looking for shit.
Almost as much as asking her where it is.
NEVER ask your woman where your beard trimming scissors are.
Ask her where she got that amazing top… or where she picked up those jeans that looked like their creation was inspired by her ass and her ass alone… or those incredible shoes.
Just never ask her where your beard trimming scissors are.
You can get away scott free asking where a lot of other stuff is if you do it right and approach it with a lot of thought and incredible foresight…
especially if you use romance or your consideration of her in your quest to find your lost treasure…
‘Honey Baby Sugar Sparkles… I was thinking that one day I would like to take you on a romantic camping trip and you know… I realized that I have no idea where I put the camping stove.’
But never ask her where your beard trimming scissors are because you were supposed to put them away you slob.
It’s like telling her ‘Honey… you’re always cleaning up after me… I just don’t know how I could live without you.’
You’d be about to get whatchoo deserve smart guy.
If you have some deep need to set the lobe off and be the beneficiary of a brutal smackdown… then you can ask where your beard trimming scissors are.
They’re the one thing that you’re always leaving out that she knows she will never ever be guilty of using.
If you’ve got kids… particularly daughters… this is where they can really mess things up for you.
I love my daughters more than anything in the world.
And I’ll be the first to admit that they’ve taught me so much about women.
When they’re giving their pink glittery plastic pony its daily bubble bath in the sink they’ll sure as day spot those scissors.
And then they’ll decide that pony needs a haircut.
Because pony just realized that pony’s boyfriend doesn’t take anything in life seriously he never puts shit away and pony’s decided to dump that asshole because life would be so much better without him and pony needs a new haircut to symbolize this turning point in pony’s life.
Knowing that cutting the hair of anything results in a long lecture by mom…
Princess’ll take your beautiful stainless steel beard trimming scissors to a more secret location to give pony a radical new hairstyle.
Meanwhile, you’re safely at work without a clue as to the fact that the fuse has been lit.
You have gotta deal with this situation rather delicately.
It’s pretty much ‘two against one now.’
And that four times as much feminine power as you’ve ever proven you can handle.
The only thing you’ve ever proven is that indeed a man can live for a week eating nothing but american cheese slices.
You need to get Princess Pony Hairstyles back on your side.
If your beard trimming scissors aren’t where you left them or in the basket in the bathroom closet your woman purchased to organize your male grooming products…
you know the kid’s got them somewhere else.
And when you ask the kid she’s gonna visualize cutting ‘My Little Ponies’ hair and know that if she tells you where your beard trimming scissors are is like admitting that she’s been cutting said pony’s hair.
Even though she might only be five or six she’s already so much smarter than that.
Remember…
You’re still dealing with a woman… just a smaller version… who’s just like a regular woman except she’ll probably never fantacize about dousing you with gasoline while you sleep and burning you alive.
Because she’s your ‘Little Glitter Princess.’
And princess’ don’t do that.
Chicks who watch the Lifetime Network do.
But you gotta get those beard trimming scissors back.
You can’t just say ‘Princess… listen… my beard trimming scissors aren’t on the sink… and they’re not in the basket that mommy purchased so lovingly for me to oraganize all of my male grooming products in… and that generally means that you have them… because you’ve been cutting ponys hair with them… and if you don’t fork them over… I’ll be forced to ask your mom where they are… and then she’ll blow her freakin’ lobe and I ain’t not only not gonna get a little of the ‘hot freaky’… the pursuit of which led to the birth of my Beautiful Little Princess… but there’s a chance that not finding those beard trimming scissors might result in my life becoming a living hell for two weeks or so and we don’t want daddy to live a life of misery and hell for two weeks now do we Sweet Glitter Pony Princess?’
Besides she already knows that the ‘sink’ is that thing in the kitchen or the laundry room.
And that’s not where she stole your beard trimming scissors from anyway.
She’s already studying you dad.
Probing you with her superior feminine mind…
identifying the weakness’ and the vulnerabilities of men.
She looks to you to leave your beard trimming scissors on the vanity so she can remember her deep almost instinctive need to cut stuff with them.
Like pony’s hair.
Or construction paper.
To make you beautiful and touching greeting cards with.
You’re not thinkin’ here man.
Because you’re pretty good at doing that.
Always ask yourself… everytime you’re looking at a woman… even a mini version… ask yourself what it is that they ‘want.’
It’s the only thing that matters really.
To them.
And therefore to you… the ‘modern sensitive man’ who is actually trying to understand ‘them’ in order to coexist in peace and love and the quest for ‘freaky hot.’
Because ultimately they are going to get what they want so you might as well just identify it as soon as possible and capitulate you dufus.
And Princess wants another pony… and some glitter… and some smelly markers.
That have glittery ink.
So she can draw ponies prancing around fairy tale castles overlooked by dominant all knowing unicorns who symbolize the superiority of womanhood.
Work with her man.
Work with her.
It is the only way.
She can teach you a lot about women.
Your little Princess wants to give daddy what he wants.
But daddy’s gotta remember the genetics at work.
Because even at this point Princess’ little genetic deck is all stacked up against daddy.
You gotta do the right thing Daddy.
‘I’ll tell you what sweet little Princess Glitter Rainbow… I’m going to go up to my room and lay in bed and stare wide eyed at the ceiling and think of the ramifications of asking mommy where my beard trimming scissors are… and when I do that I just want you to know that if you find my beard trimming scissors and return them to me without letting mommy know that they were ever out of my possession… I will not only not even ask you where they were when you found them… I will reward you for helping daddy out by buying you that purple plastic pony you’ve been really wanting… with the long hair… the one that comes with the brush.’
This is where your panicked ass just sold out the entire male race.
Yes… you’ll get your beard trimming scissors back… probably within five minutes… but now you’ve just reinforced in that girl that knowing where shit is gives her power and dominion over the entire male species.
Because it gets her exactly what she wants.
That purple plastic pony with a hairbrush.
The one mom wouldn’t get her.
Because you’ve already bought her thirty of them and she keeps cutting all of their hair off.
Not to mention your beard scissors will be kidnapped and held for ransom time and time again dude.
You should at least ‘try’ to find shit yourself sometimes and not just ‘wonder’ where it might be.
That’s why when I’m missing something I always start my search in the garage.
I really enjoy tooling around in the garage looking for stuff.
Every box and plastic bin I open is like a time capsule of my life.
Sometimes it brings me to tears… the nostalgia I find in there.
The emotions I get when I realize… there he is… my ‘Talking Billy Bass!’
I always loved that talking bass.
What a revolutionary invention.
He looked so real and happy when he sang that song.
‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ by Bobby McFerrin.
I’m so amazed that the battery is even still good after all these years.
And from the contents of the box… the newspaper packing and stuff… I can tell that he’s been buiried alive in there for almost seven years!
All my shit’s seemed to migrate to the garage slowly over time.
I used to think a garage was a place for putting a car away.
But that’s only for single guys.
Little did we know that ‘garage’ is french for ‘a place to dump all of a guys shit.’
‘Un lieu de jeter tout de merde d’un homme est dans le garage.’
You see that dipshit?
I got that right from google translate.
I typed in ‘a place to put all of a man’s shit is the garage.’
Then I hit ‘translate’ and ‘to french.’
The word garage is in there.
Just like we say it.
Only the french say it differently.
With contempt.
Like they say everything.
While stomping out a cigarette on the floor.
In a cafe.
Before they demand more strong black coffee.
And another ‘kwaaaaaaasant.’
In a black and white film.
That you only took your woman to see so you could impress her.
So she’d tell her friends all about it so you could secure their all important vote in the matter.
‘He’s amazing and sensitive and he loves french cinema!’
Now she knows damn well that the only thing ‘french’ you like are french fries.
Back to ‘le garage’ you idiot… if I can’t find it in the garage, then and only then will I consider even going and asking her if she knows where ‘it’ is… and we both know full well that she knows exactly where it is… and therefor risk blowing the lobe when she gets all over my ass about it.
Because I’ve come to see this as the ‘third oldest woman trap’ that there is.
Asking your woman where something is.
She knows where that camping stove is.
She knew it from the day you left it on the counter in the kitchen hoping that she’d do the loving and supportive thing with some miracle product she purchased from gahd knows where and clean it for you.
She did.
She cleaned it for your sorry ‘helpless in all things domestic’ ass and she put it away in the garage where she has determined that it belongs.
And then she mentally photographed it sitting there on the counter in her otherwise dream kitchen.
Just to store it in the lobe for use against you one day.
When you say the stupid thing that you’re destined to say that will set her off.
The reason you couldn’t find it in the garage is because she put it in the bag that it’s supposed to be stored in.
Three years later when you ask her if she knows where it is the day before you are supposed to go on a family camping trip and incidentally the day after you went out until three in the morning with your buddies when she assumed that your understanding and supportive self would be available to help her pack…
You ignorantly asked her ‘baby… have you seen the camping stove?’
Depending on her volatility at the moment and her propensity to want to make your life miserable you might get away with it.
But odds are, since you’ll be leaving tommorow you are in for it.
Especially if you add ‘you know the one I left out on the counter for you to clean last time we went camping three years ago?’
You just did it again.
You should visualize that ‘plunger box’ with the big ‘T’ shaped handle that they use to set off dynamite with on cartoons.
You know the one.
It’s in the garage.
Because your dumb guy brain just put both hands on that handle and pushed it down with everything you’ve got.
You’ve admitted to her that you have ‘a memory.’
And that’s gonna set her off a million ways to Sunday you watch.
Because you been tryin’ to convince her that with all the pot you’ve smoked in college that she’s right… you can’t remember shit.’
She’s always known you could remember SOME things… like the names of car parts or esoteric and rare, little known and used ‘species secific’ types of fishing gear… but not things that matter to her…
like anniversaries and stuff…
She’s accepted your ‘memory problems’ at times and coped with it.
It’s gotten you out of quite a few jambs in the past.
But now the gig is up dude.
If she actually lets the primitive lobe come to dominate her in this moment… and why wouldn’t she… and she ‘visualizes’ that camping stove on the counter three years ago… after recalling her perfect mental photograph of it that’s been quietly tucked away in the lobe for all this time just waiting for you to set it off like some kind of progressive slot machine in Las Vegas…
That’s guaranteed to make her blow unless you took her to the ‘Valley of Love’ within’ the last twenty four hours.
And I hope to gahd for your sake that you did.
A recent ‘religious experience’ in the Valley of Love is the only thing that’ll save you right now.
Because havin’ the lobe erupt before a long road trip is the fucking very worst time you can set it off Asshole.
You are gonna be sittin’ in a car in tight proximity to her for hours, pointing out historical landmark plaques and their interest and significance while she says absolutely nothing and fiddles with the climate controls incessantly.
And pissed off women fiddle with the climate control knobs and buttons in the car like nothing I’ve ever seen.
I know because I’ve seen a lot of pissed off women try to micromanage the climate controls.
Talk about brutal.
Why can’t you just be freakin’ considerate for once in your miserable life?
If not of your girl, then maybe just every other guy in the world?
Now your relationship junk is gonna be spillin’ all of its black death mojo vibes on innocent guys in towns hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
They didn’t ask for that.
Thanks a lot dickhead.
I’ve learned something about women that’s as close to a ‘universal truth’ as it comes.
Their ‘volatility’ grows to near epic and catastrophic proportions the closer that you get to departure for any trip for which ‘packing’ is required.
You’ve gotta be on your best game right before going on vacation.
Screwing it all up on vacation is disasterous because you won’t have work to shield you from the ramifications of being your guy self.
You’ve got to be on top of your game man.
Go the extra mile and help your woman pack to the greatest extent of your ability.
And don’t do that thing where you fuck it up intentionally just to make sure that she never asks you to do it again.
You really want this to be a nice vacation don’t you?
Then don’t fuck it all up idiot.
You have been warned.
Repeat: You HAVE been WARNED.
Churchill Club Top 10 Tech Trends Debate
Image by jurvetson
I just got back from the Churchill Club’s 13th Annual Top 10 Tech Trends Debate (site).
Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI, presented their trends from the podium, which are meant to be “provocative, plausible, debatable, and that it will be clear within the next 1-3 years whether or not they will actually become trends.”
Then the panelists debated them. Speaking is Aneesh Chopra, CTO of the U.S., and smirking to his left is Paul Saffo, and then Ajay Senkut from Clarium, then me.
Here are SRI’s 2011 Top 10 Tech Trends [and my votes]:
Trend 1. Age Before Beauty. Technology is designed for—and disproportionately used by—the young. But the young are getting fewer. The big market will be older people. The aging generation has grown up with, and is comfortable with, most technology—but not with today’s latest technology products. Technology product designers will discover the Baby Boomer’s technology comfort zone and will leverage it in the design of new devices. One example today is the Jitterbug cell phone with a large keypad for easy dialing and powerful speakers for clear sound. The trend is for Baby Boomers to dictate the technology products of the future.
[I voted YES, it’s an important and underserved market, but for tech products, they are not the early adopters. The key issue is age-inspired entrepreneurship. How can we get the entrepreneurial mind focused on this important market?]
Trend 2. The Doctor Is In. Some of our political leaders say that we have "the best medical care system in the world". Think what it must be like in the rest of the world! There are many problems, but one is the high cost of delivering expert advice. With the development of practical virtual personal assistants, powered by artificial intelligence and pervasive low-cost sensors, “the doctor will be in”—online—for people around the world. Instead of the current Web paradigm: “fill out this form, and we’ll show you information about what might be ailing you”, this will be true diagnosis—supporting, and in some cases replacing—human medical practitioners. We were sending X-rays to India to be read; now India is connecting to doctors here for diagnosis in India. We see the idea in websites that now offer online videoconference interaction with a doctor. The next step is automation. The trend is toward complete automation: a combination of artificial intelligence, the Internet, and very low-cost medical instrumentation to provide high-quality diagnostics and advice—including answering patient questions—online to a worldwide audience.
[NO. Most doctor check-ups and diagnoses will still need to be conducted in-person (blood tests, physical exams, etc). Sensor technology can’t completely replace human medical practitioners in the near future. Once we have the physical interface (people for now), then the networking and AI capabilities can engage, bringing specialist reactions to locally collected data. The real near-term trend in point-of-care is the adoption of iPads/phones connected to cloud services like ePocrates and Athenahealth and soon EMRs.]
Trend 3. Made for Me. Manufacturing is undergoing a revolution. It is becoming technically and economically possible to create products that are unique to the specific needs of individuals. For example, a cell phone that has only the hardware you need to support the features you want—making it lighter, thinner, more efficient, much cheaper, and easier to use. This level of customization is being made possible by converging technical advances: new 3D printing technology is well documented, and networked micro-robotics is following. 3D printing now includes applications in jewelry, industrial design, and dentistry. While all of us may not be good product designers, we have different needs, and we know what we want. The trend is toward practical, one-off production of physical goods in widely distributed micro-factories: the ultimate customization of products. The trend is toward practical, one-off production of physical goods in widely distributed micro-factories: the ultimate customization of products.
[NO. Personalization is happening just fine at the software level. The UI skins and app code is changeable at zero incremental cost. Code permeates outward into the various vessels we build for it. The iPhone. Soon, the car (e.g. Tesla Sedan). Even the electrical circuits (when using an FPGA). This will extend naturally to biological code, with DNA synthesis costs plummeting (but that will likely stay centralized in BioFabs for the next 3 years. When it comes to building custom physical things, the cost and design challenges relegate it to prototyping, tinkering and hacks. Too many people have a difficult time in 3D content creation. The problem is the 2D interfaces of mouse and screen. Perhaps a multitouch interface to digital clay could help, where the polygons snap to fit after the form is molded by hand.]
Trend 4. Pay Me Now. Information about our personal behavior and characteristics is exploited regularly for commercial purposes, often returning little or no value to us, and sometimes without our knowledge. This knowledge is becoming a key asset and a major competitive advantage for the companies that gather it. Think of your supermarket club card. These knowledge-gatherers will need to get smarter and more aggressive in convincing us to share our information with them and not with their competitors. If TV advertisers could know who the viewers are, the value of the commercials would go up enormously. The trend is technology and business models based on attracting consumers to share large amounts of information exclusively with service providers.
[YES, but it’s nothing new. Amazon makes more on merchandising than product sales margin. And, certain companies are getting better and better at acquiring customer information and personalizing offerings specifically to these customers. RichRelevance provides this for ecommerce (driving 25% of all e-commerce on Black Friday). Across all those vendors, the average lift from personalizing the shopping experience: 15% increase in overall sales and 8% increase in long-term profitability. But, simply being explicit and transparent to the consumer about the source of the data can increase the effectiveness of targeted programs by up to 100% (e.g., saying “Because you bought this product and other consumers who bought it also bought this other product" yielded a 100% increase in product recommendation effectiveness in numerous A/B tests). Social graph is incredibly valuable as a marketing tool.]
Trend 5. Rosie, At Last. We’ve been waiting a long time for robots to live in and run our homes, like Rosie in the Jetsons’ household. It’s happening a little now: robots are finally starting to leave the manufacturing floor and enter people’s homes, offices, and highways. Robots can climb walls, fly, and run. We all know the Roomba for cleaning floors—and now there’s the Verro for your pool. Real-time vision and other sensors, and affordable precise manipulation, are enabling robots to assist in our care, drive our cars, and protect our homes and property. We need to broaden our view of robots and the forms they will take—think of a self-loading robot-compliant dishwasher or a self-protecting house. The trend is robots becoming embedded in our environments, and taking advantage of the cloud, to understand and fulfill our needs.
[NO. Not in 3 years. Wanting it badly does not make it so. But I just love that Google RoboCar. Robots are not leaving the factory floor – that’s where the opportunity for newer robots and even humanoid robots will begin. There is plenty of factory work still to be automated. Rodney Brooks of MIT thinks they can be cheaper than the cheapest outsourced labor. So the robots are coming, to the factory and the roads to start, and then the home.]
Trend 6. Social, Really. The rise of social networks is well documented, but they’re not really social networks. They’re a mix of friends, strangers, organizations, hucksters—it’s more like walking through a rowdy crowd in Times Square at night with a group of friends. There is a growing need for social networks that reflect the fundamental nature of human relationships: known identities, mutual trust, controlled levels of intimacy, and boundaries of shared information. The trend is the rise of true social networks, designed to maintain real, respectful relationships online.
[YES. The ambient intimacy of Facebook is leading to some startling statistics on fB evidence reuse by divorce lawyers (80%) and employment rejections (70%). There are differing approaches to solve this problem: Altly’s alternative networks with partioning and control, Jildy’s better filtering and auto-segmentation, and Path’s 50 friend limit.]
Trend 7. In-Your-Face Augmented Reality. With ever-cheaper computation and advances in computer vision technology, augmented reality is becoming practical, even in mobile devices. We will move beyond expensive telepresence environments and virtual reality games to fully immersive environments—in the office, on the factory floor, in medical care facilities, and in new entertainment venues. I once did an experiment where a person came into a room and sat down at a desk against a large, 3D, high-definition TV display. The projected image showed a room with a similar desk up against the screen. The person would put on 3D glasses, and then a projected person would enter and sit down at the other table. After talking for 5 to 10 minutes, the projected person would stand up and put their hand out. Most of the time, the first person would also stand up and put their hand into the screen—they had quickly adapted and forgotten that the other person was not in the room. Augmented reality will become indistinguishable from reality. The trend is an enchanted world— The trend is hyper-resolution augmented reality and hyper-accurate artificial people and objects that fundamentally enhance people’s experience of the world.
[NO, lenticular screens are too expensive and 3D glasses are a pain in the cortex. Augmented reality with iPhones is great, and pragmatic, but not a top 10 trend IMHO]
Trend 8. Engineering by Biologists.
Biologists and engineers are different kinds of people—unless they are working on synthetic biology. We know about genetically engineered foods and creatures, such as gold fish in multiple other colors. Next we’ll have biologically engineered circuits and devices. Evolution has created adaptive processing and system resiliency that is much more advanced than anything we’ve been able to design. We are learning how to tap into that natural expertise, designing devices using the mechanisms of biology. We have already seen simple biological circuits in the laboratory. The trend is practical, engineered artifacts, devices, and computers based on biology rather than just on silicon.
[YES, and NO because it was so badly mangled as a trend. For the next few years, these approaches will be used for fuels and chemicals and materials processing because they lend themselves to a 3D fluid medium. Then 2D self-assembling monolayers. And eventually chips , starting with memory and sensor arrays long before heterogeneous logic. And processes of biology will be an inspiration throughout (evolution, self-assembly, etc.). Having made predictions along these themes for about a decade now, the wording of this one frustrated me]
Trend 9. ‘Tis a Gift to be Simple. Cyber attacks are ever more frequent and effective. Most attacks exploit holes that are inevitable given the complexity of the software products we use every day. Cyber researchers really understand this. To avoid these vulnerabilities, some cyber researchers are beginning to use only simple infrastructure and applications that are throwbacks to the computing world of two decades ago. As simplicity is shown to be an effective approach for avoiding attack, it will become the guiding principle of software design. The trend is cyber defense through widespread adoption of simple, low-feature software for consumers and businesses.
[No. I understand the advantages of being open, and of heterogencity of code (to avoid monoculture collapse), but we have long ago left the domain of simple. Yes, Internet transport protocols won via simplicity. The presentation layer, not so much. If you want dumb pipes, you need smart edges, and smart edges can be hacked. Graham Spencer gave a great talk at SFI: the trend towards transport simplicity (e.g. dumb pipes) and "intelligence in the edges" led to mixing code and data, which in turn led to all kinds of XSS-like attacks. Drive-by downloading (enabled by XSS) is the most popular vehicle for delivering malware these days.]
Trend 10. Reverse Innovation. Mobile communication is proliferating at an astonishing rate in developing countries as price-points drop and wireless infrastructure improves. As developing countries leapfrog the need for physical infrastructure and brokers, using mobile apps to conduct micro-scale business and to improve quality of life, they are innovating new applications. The developing world is quickly becoming the largest market we’ve ever seen—for mobile computing and much more. The trend is for developing countries to turn around the flow of innovation: Silicon Valley will begin to learn more from them about innovative applications than they need to learn from us about the underlying technology.
[YES, globalization is a megatrend still in the making. The mobile markets are clearly China, India and Korea, with app layer innovation increasingly originating there. Not completely of course, but we have a lot to learn from the early-adopter economies.]