I've worked at a call center, it fucking sucks. Similar to retail you are the one who has to deal with the anger and frustration of customers due to poor company policies. What makes it worse is that you're a faceless entity on the other side of a magical voice box rather than face to face, in public, where people are more likely to watch their actions and how public responds to that. I'd definitely agree that it can be very dehumanizing. But there are plenty of people who enjoy the job too. Generally I've seen for those people that it is about the money and that they get to sit in an office with air conditioning.
Both things can be true. Call it Stockholm Syndrome to the economy or whatever, but things can be dehumanizing while people simultaneously feel lucky to have said work. It could be worse, after all.
The bigger question is if we are working on parallel paths to give these displaced workers equal or better opportunities to support themselves. Be that new jobs, avenues for them to educate themselves, basic income, or whatever combination of things raises the economic floor.
I do also fear that people will call these people dumb for choosing a career that could "so obviously be automated" but prior to a year ago their biggest fear would be outsourcing to India or Brazil. I wouldn't expect this type of person to even believe it was a realistic possibility until the last 6 months, once this stuff started to hit mainstream. I'll make a prediction that we'll see them in vogue within the next year or two. I also wouldn't be surprised if we see similar sentiment in the comments.
I would not be surprised if insurance companies who get claimants to call in, deliberately put people through these voice activated systems simply to listen in and see if their story is straight. Putting them on hold when going through the details is another way for the insurance company to listen in and see if their story is straight. People are lulled into that sense of safety that they cant be heard when on hold.
I've listened into conversations whilst someone is ringing my number, its quite interesting the conversations that go on at a company before the customer answers the phone!
Youtube reminds me the voice recognition and thus subtitles is not that good!
I honestly don't understand why people demean customer service operators. It seems to be stressful work, but I have countless times been saved by operators. They are a life-line. AI tools are as useful as a google search, and perhaps just a little more, and a lot of customer service people who just follow a script are not much more helpful. But clearly some operators are a godsend cannot replace by AI at this time.
If by wealthy having 90th percentile investments 10 years before normal retirement age then these plans are well equipped to make you wealthy. Get rich slow totally works.
What's the point of even building a website if Google is just going to scrape the information and put in a SERP? You need to add value and build a relationship with your customer.
It’s kinda hard to do that when the company who controls the platform you’re developing on is also building relationships with your customers, and can add far more lifetime value than you ever could building your app.
How many people do you think ditched their iPhones when Spotify published their antitrust complaint towards Apple? And Spotify is a huge company itself.
Anything you can do, the platform owner can do better, and this is particularly true in Apple’s case.
It's important to distinguish market cap based indexes and other asset class indexes. Small and micro-caps are notoriously hard to trade but mega-caps typically have much higher liquidity. There is a much higher chance of a micro-cap passive fund having a liquidity problem then a market cap index fund.
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Google is valued highly today because they print money today. They print money because of search and advertising. They are really good at this and that's why their market cap exceed's Apple's today.
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That would be correct if they were value companies throwing off discounted cash flow but both Google and Apple are priced as growth companies. The market believes Apple has peaked in growth and that Google has a bit more potential. It's not clear why exactly from the earnings report of the holding company. Revenue for Google is 99% ad sales so it's not clear exactly where that bottom line revenue is going to come from. All revenue from the rest of the holding company was less then $500 million.
Which shows you how much the market knows. Apple's PE ratio was 11 back in 2009.
In fact the first years of the iPhone corresponded with a precipitous plunge in their PE ratio as their revenues rose rapidly, but their share price was dragged kicking and screaming along behind them.
Your numbers are off. I hesitated to respond because the actual numbers are still pretty immaterial (but technically material) overall, but it's more like ~$2b than $500m. That's significant, especially for GCP, which is growing quickly in an still very immature and very large market. Give it 2-3 years and GCP will have surpassed AWS.
Both companies will struggle for the kind of revenue growth Wall Street is looking for. Ad sales account for 99% of Google revenue, with speculative ventures generating less then $500 million. It's all about finding products and services that people are willing to part with cash.
There are pressures from both the earn and the spend side, but the surest path to misery is living above your means. Dickens had it pretty much nailed with, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."
The people in the article find it one of the best jobs available and a path to a middle class lifestyle for their area.