I agree, it's totally outrageous that people with "backgrounds in sociology and political philosophy" are preying on our most vulnerable global corporations and infiltrating their most sensitive and secret labor camps!
280 karma · joined May 11, 2010
They also have an interactive tool that generates HTML/CSS: http://www.3x4grid.com
But that didn't happen. Instead, people did try it themselves and the market was flooded with extremely poor design. Before, not having a logo at all was the floor, the absolute minimum of branding. But after DTP, the floor was raised - having a poorly-designed logo that you did yourself was the new minimum. Today, crowdsourced logo that you paid $300 for is rapidly becoming the new minimum.
Nothing changes for designers, because there is no ceiling. Thinking of design in the very narrow, branding sense: it cannot be commodified, because whenever the minimum level is raised, it becomes ubiquitous and generic, and that creates the new zero point. Designers get paid to design things to stand out from what's ubiquitous, whatever that happens to be at the time.
They would, except that most of them were once non-designers who learned the principles of design. That is how you become a designer.
Or maybe he means non-designers can learn how to design by reading a book? Yeah, I guess designers would scoff at that - reading helps, but you really have to practice to be any good.
The state of California pays 9.8% less for similar jobs, in line with the national average of 11.4% less.
It's relevant because one of the methods for reducing unemployment was encouraging entrepreneurship. Considering the small chances of startup success, isn't the relationship between Crowdspring client / designers exactly the same as Venture Capitalist / startup founder? Most of the designs are losers, just like most startups. You could even extend this logic to social media participation - lots of people make YouTube videos, a few get huge and earn a share of the advertising dollars, same with blogging.
When there's an oversupply of skilled labor, you can switch to a contest model instead of an employment or contractor model, driving down the costs even more. This problem affects young, relatively well-educated Westerners, and as the Business Week article points out, this is the root of the current political violence in Egypt. Companies trying to find new ways to grow will demand tax cuts, governments will cut benefits to give it to them because they want to see improved unemployment numbers, and this will further enrage the struggling unemployed. If this trend continues, it's a downward spiral that could bring increased political violence in the West.
Despite all claims to the contrary, the very fact that Rand even bothered to write a book at all betrays her secret, perhaps unconscious need for recognition. Here, the medium is a message - if Rand's audience is the superior people, why did she choose to communicate her ideas in the format most accessible to the "oxen" of society, the novel, instead of a dense philosophical treatise? She even helped to make the movie version of The Fountainhead, an even more accessible format.
If the rich are so desperate for our approval, why not give it to them? They don't need to play stupid and wasteful status games to seduce us into admiring them, they can compete with each other, we'll add up the score, everyone gets ranked and that will be the end of it. OK, maybe there will be an awards ceremony on TV every year.
The main obstacle to this system is that most of the rich wouldn't go for it because they'd never admit that they crave recognition from people they consider inferior.
I was thinking that people could work part-time and earn 50% of standard income. Median household income is around $50k right now, so this is a decent standard of living.
> if you provide some useful service and that service would be made more useful if you could hire a graphic designer to make it pretty, you wouldn't be able to
A two-person household where both members worked full time would be making 3.6x the current median household income, which is way more than they need. This surplus could be used as investment capital, where it would be distributed and decentralized, so it would be much easier to do Kickstarter-style funding. If we accept $75k at the point where money stops having an impact on happiness, individuals would have 20% above that line to play with for those kinds of things. Essentially, the stack ranking converts your surplus productivity into status for you, and distributed evenly to your friends and neighbors, who have the power to return it to you if they think your project is socially or economically valuable.
Some good points though, especially the part about profit as an index of what makes people happy. The problem with our current system is that this is only true if your profits come from people who make less than $75k. 40% of consumer spending is driven by people in the top 10% ($82,500 annual income), so it's fair to say that that spending is misallocated and doesn't contribute to overall happiness.
You mean a low unemployment rate?
> Your system relies on taking away a great deal of money from rich people... the more you do it the harder those rich people are going to try to avoid paying
Not really, no. Money in excess of $90k isn't confiscated, it's still used to purchase status just as it is today. The only difference is that it's purchased from the government instead of BMW, De Beers, etc. Status markers are essentially arbitrary anyway, why not just have a single number? It's much more efficient.
> suppose that every employer that currently pays anyone $(90k+x)/year decides to pay them, say, $(90k+0.1x)/year
They could do that, and it would lower everyone's rank. This would cause some people to quit those jobs and find other jobs that offered more status, lowering supply and causing the price to go up again. If salaries drop because of market forces, the savings would be used to invest in the business: hiring other employees, improving operating efficiency, R&D, etc.
> they also want to get rich because wealth brings large houses, etc.
Any income above $75k doesn't contribute to personal happiness, and standard income is already 20% above that. Luxury goods don't contribute to happiness, they're just a wasteful and inefficient way of signaling status. That money that could be used to improve lives or fund innovation.
"But wait," you say "How will we incentivize entrepreneurs if they can't earn more money?" For everyone making over $90,000 (approx. 11% of the population), their pretax salary is used to assign them national ranking that's publicly available, much like a ladder tournament, which could be subdivided into regions, industries, etc.
The rationale for this system is that we use one system - money - for two unrelated social purposes: reducing suffering and establishing status which incentivizes production. In my system, these purposes are less coupled.
The $90,000 number was calculated by dividing the total US income by the number of workers, so this would need to be adjusted yearly. If this system was applied globally, the average salary would be $25,000 which is quite a step up for billions of people. It means that today, humans create enough wealth annually so that every two-parent household on the planet could live like the American middle class.
Bonus: you can tell them you're giving them "autonomy", and also fire some managers.
As web apps become more important, the notion of an OS HIG needs to evolve. Obviously an app needs internal consistency, but how consistent do two apps need to be between each other? An apt comparison is the world of typography: the rules for good text layout don't specify one font for every single book, we can handle the fact that different books use different fonts. But there are still rules for good typography, they're just more general than "All uppercase G's should look like this: G." This is the direction that HIGs would need to go, but whether this is a good thing is debatable. For whatever reason, I have a hundred or so books on my bookshelf and basically all of them have very good to excellent typography. Web sites and apps have nowhere near that level of consistent quality. Native apps are better, but now we're going to start to see more of the web's no-rules design norms applied there, which probably means a few really gorgeous apps and a whole lot of crap.
All the other men she was hanging out with were able to do it. Speaking for myself only, maybe you are different: raping a woman has never crossed my mind, even when my "passions were enflamed". It's not something I have had to overcome.