
The Late (Internet) Telecom Revolution Is Not Such a Big Deal - walterbell
http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-late-internet-telecom-revolution-is-not-so-big-a-deal/
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nickpsecurity
He's right about most of this. Refreshingly different article. I counter
mainly on productivity:

1\. As mirimir said, we can get information and training faster than ever.
That has directly implications for labor force. We predictably see more talent
than the market is even willing to utilize in some areas.

2\. VOIP and video conferencing make collaboration easy between people that
likely would've had to travel.

3\. Retrieving files on people, the law, whatever is a process that takes
minutes instead of hours to weeks.

4\. My taxes are filed and refund received quickly.

5\. Self-checkouts can handle 6 customers in the time it takes a regular
checkout to handle 1 or 2. Doesn't mean they'll move that fast but
productivity & cost savings were proven out.

6\. Planning algorithms on computers let us quickly produce optimal schedules,
division of raw resources into parts, routes, industrial steps, and so on. The
gains here are real.

7\. Scheduling itself deserves special mention. Well-designed scheduling
systems dramatically reduce waste throughout the organization while getting
the mission done. First case study I saw was HCA spending about a million on
one to save $300 million across their hospital chain. I call that computer-
driven activity quite an economic result.

8\. The combination of computers, cloud, and competition make many services
formerly requiring specialists nearly dirt cheap for startups or small
businesses. Each can therefore get more done with less money.

Just a few to counter his point that there's been no productivity gain. If
he's measuring macroscale, what he's probably seeing is productivity gains all
over the place combined with competition that keeps financial effects in
check. If anything, we're hyperproductive these days to the point where
computers' capabilities require us to do too much. It's hard to simply break
even today much less have numbers wildly ahead of the competition.

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mirimir
> The one, unqualifiedly great thing the Internet has done is provide access
> to information. Movies, books, news, technical papers–all of that. Today, I
> can find out information which I would have needed to visit a library to
> find out in 1990. Often, I can find out information I would have need a
> university library to find.

This deserves more than a throwaway paragraph! Forget libraries. In an hour of
Internet searching, I can get information that would have required weeks of
work in 1990. Visiting libraries. Calling people, asking who might know
something, tracking them down, talking them into helping me, etc, etc.

> As one of its negative side effects, the Telecom revolution enables a
> panopticon surveillance state which is far more intrusive than what Orwell
> imagined in 1984 or which the Stasi created in East Germany.

True enough. But it's not all that hard to obfuscate identity.

> Information doesn’t “want to be free” and the rise of the Internet has seen
> a vast tightening of copyright and patent laws, rather than a utopia of free
> information you are actually allowed to use.

Unjust laws are commonly ignored.

