Hands-on Process Driven Individual contributor experienced in automating accounting, financial reporting processes by leveraging on Excel VBA, SQL, PowerQuery, Array Formulas etc
This section is on Excel Spreadsheet & its applications for the respective accounting tasks. Have learned and applied a lot of the techniques picked up from websites hosted by MVPs like:
Mike Alexander: One of the first few to start hosting free online excel video lessons. First mastered INDEX MATCH lookup from his DataPigTechnologies site
Ron de Bruin: One of the most comprehensive coverage on Linking Outlook & Excel. Is addicted to his RDBmerge Add-in which I have been using for years.
Debra Dalgleish: Contextures website has extremely wide coverage on many areas. Very well illustrated with lots of sample files.
Accounts Payable
Accounts Receivable
Reconciliation
Miscellaneous
Are Job losses/ stagnant wages due to technology advancement and automation?
There is fear that technological unemployment will lead to widespread loss of wages among us in general.
Such claims of entire human civilisation being defeated by automation are quite ridiculous and misguided.
On the contrary, Automation is the achievement of civilisation after years of accumulated knowledge.
What Technology has to offer is productivity which is capable of
reducing the working hours of the general public while maintaining the
same output.
Air
we breathe is free. I don't see how vast amount of goods churned out
automatically through automation could be sold to mass public of
unemployed cashless citizens for any price.That is possible provided if society chooses to. If
not, I guess its only fair to conclude that the problem lies not with
technology, but more with the choices which society as an idiotic whole
opted for.
Its more of a problem with society's concept of Job (Work / Money is a means to an end, not an end in itself ~ the confusion about job might be caused by the word "Career" which involves certain personal ego which one tends to associate with self identity.) and the existing system of distribution where "land" plays a major part.
In this aspect, Physiocrats, Bertrand Russell, Henry Ford and Henry George
shed more light on the mechanism of the macro economy... More truth and
clarity than what conventional mainstream Adam Smith's dogmatic
religion of "Invisible Hand" and Keynesian's toying of fiat currency can
offer.
The
earth, which was here before Man, is not the fruits of anyone's labor,
and is not private property in the same sense as labor products.
Everyone has a right to access land, limited only by the equal rights of
others to do the same. State-issued titles to unlimited property in
land, which allows some to hold vast amounts, often without use or with a
merely nominal use, and without continual compensation of those
dispossessed, violates this principle
Chapter "The Persistence of Poverty Despite Increasing Wealth"
A
dvancing civilization tends
to increase the power of human labor to satisfy human desires. We
should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot reap these
benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to labor. When
it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased productivity of
labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of progress go to
those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot increase. The
more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity to make
anything at all.Mere laborers, therefore, have no more interest in
progress than Cuban slaves have in higher sugar prices. Higher prices
may spur their masters to drive them harder. Likewise, a free laborer
may be worse off with greater productivity. Steadily rising rents
generate speculation. The effects of future improvements are discounted
by even higher rents. This tends to drive wages down to the point of
slavery, at which the worker can barely live. The worker is robbed of
all the benefits of increased productive power.
These improvements also
cause a further subdivision of labor. The efficiency of the whole body
of laborers is increased, but at the expense of the independence of its
constituents. Individual workers know only a tiny part of the various
processes required to supply even the commonest wants.A primitive tribe
may not produce much wealth, but all members are capable of an
independent life. Each shares all the knowledge possessed by the tribe.
They know the habits of animals, birds, and fishes. They can make their
own shelter, clothing, and weapons. In short, they are all capable of
supplying their own wants. The independence of all of the members makes
them free contracting parties in their relations with the community.
Compare
this savage with workers in the lowest ranks of civilized society.
Their lives are spent in producing just one thing or, more likely, the
smallest part of one thing. They cannot even make what is required for
their work; they use tools they can never hope to own. Compelled to
oppressive and constant labor, they get no more than the savage: the
bare necessaries of life. Yet they lose the independence the savage
keeps.
Modern
workers are mere links in an enormous chain of producers and consumers.
The very power of exerting their labor to satisfy their needs passes
from their control. The worse their position in society, the more
dependent they are on society. Their power may be taken away by the
actions of others. Or even by general causes, over which they have no
more influence than they have over the motion of the stars.Under such
circumstances, people lose an essential quality: the power of modifying
and controlling their condition. They become slaves, machines,
commodities. In some respects, they are lower than animals.
I
am no sentimental admirer of the savage state. I do not get my ideas of
nature from Rousseau. I am aware of its material and mental lack, its
low and narrow range. I believe that civilization is the natural destiny
of humanity, the elevation and refinement of our powers.
Nevertheless,
no one who faces the facts can avoid the conclusion that — in the heart
of our civilization — there are large classes that even the sorriest
savage would not want to trade places with. Given the choice of being
born an Australian aborigine, an arctic Eskimo, or among the lowest
classes in a highly civilized country such as Great Britain, one would
make an infinitely better choice in selecting the lot of the savage.
Those
condemned to want in the midst of wealth suffer all the hardships of
savages, without the sense of personal freedom. If their horizon is
wider, it is only to see the blessings they cannot enjoy. I challenge
anyone to produce an authentic account of primitive life citing the
degradation we find in official documents regarding the condition of the
working poor in highly civilized countries.
I have outlined a simple
theory that recognizes the most obvious relations. It explains the
conjunction of poverty with wealth; of low wages with high productivity;
of degradation amid enlightenment; of virtual slavery in political
liberty. It flows from a general and unchanging law. It shows the
sequence and relation between phenomena that are separate and
contradictory without this theory.
Working
in the system allows for synergy and more to be produced but employees
is totally dependent on the system for a share of the surplus; No room
for specialisation for Off the grid living as one needs to know
everything essential for survival in exchange for total freedom from the
system.(e.g Into_the_Wild_(film), Off The Grid Living)
Wakefield plan of colonisation:
It is founded on a correct theory. In any country, however new and
vast, it would be possible to change "scarcity of labour" into "scarcity
of employment" by increasing the price put on the use of land.
While economic historians
may debate the depth of involvement in market activities at the time,
the incontestable fact remains that most people in Britain did not
enthusiastically engage in wage labor—at least so long as they had an
alternative.
To make sure that people
accepted wage labour, the classical political economists actively
advocated measures to deprive people of their traditional means of
support. The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves
might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical
political economy. In reality, the dispossession of the majority of
small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely
connected, so much so that Marx, or at least his translators, labelled
this expropriation of the masses as ‘‘primitive accumulation.’’
The brutal process of
separating people from their means of providing for themselves, known as
primitive accumulation, caused enormous hardships for the common
people. This same primitive accumulation provided a basis for capitalist
development.
Adam Smith's account of
primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process, in which
some workers laboured more diligently than others and gradually built up
wealth, eventually leaving the less diligent workers to accept living
wages for their labour. Karl Marx rejected this explanation as
"childishness," instead stating that, in the words of David Harvey,
primitive accumulation "entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and
expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and
then releasing the land into the privatised mainstream of capital
accumulation". This would be accomplished through violence, war,
enslavement, and colonialism.
Marx “We find
on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw
materials, and the means of subsistence, all of them, save land, the
products of labour, and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have
nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and
brains.”
System as a way of controlling population
Is the current system 's agenda more for the purpose of population control?
For those who (the British Royalty etc) subscribe to Malthusian religion of over population, I believe Henry George 's Book has provided the necessary counter argument against this and I quote:
"Once
the demand for quantity is satisfied, we seek quality. As human power
to gratify our wants increases, our aspirations grow. At the lower
levels of desire, we seek merely to satisfy our senses. Moving to higher
forms of desire, humans awaken to other things. We brave the desert and
the polar sea, but not for food; we want to know how the earth was
formed and how life arose. We toil to satisfy a hunger no animal has
felt, a thirst no beast can know.
Given more food and better conditions, animals and vegetables can only multiply — but humans will develop.
In the one case, the expansive force can only extend in greater
numbers. In the other, it will tend to extend existence into higher
forms and wider powers.
None of this supports Malthus' theory. Facts do not uphold it, and
analogy does not support it. It is a pure figment of the imagination,
like the preconceptions that kept people from recognizing that the earth
was round and moved around the sun.
This theory of population is as unfounded as if we made an assumption
about the growth of a baby from the rate of its early months. Say it
weighed ten pounds at birth and twenty pounds at eight months. From
this, we might calculate a result quite as striking as that of Mr.
Malthus. By this logic it would be the size of an elephant at twelve,
and at thirty would weigh over a billion tons."
Malthus contended, in
effect, that population always tends to increase up to the limit of
subsistence, that the production of food becomes more expensive as its
amount is increased, and that therefore, apart from short exceptional
periods when new discoveries produce temporary alleviation, the bulk of
mankind must always be at the lowest level consistent with survival and
reproduction. As applied to the civilised races of the world, this
doctrine is becoming untrue through the rapid decline in the birthrate;
but, apart from this decline, there are many other reasons why the
doctrine cannot be accepted, at any rate as regards the near future.
Quoted from Alan Watts:
The
fear that adequate production and affluence will take away all
restraint on the growth of population is simply against the facts, for overpopulation is a symptom of poverty, not wealth.
Japan, thus far the one fully industrialized nation of Asia, is also
the one Asian country with an effective program of population control.
The birth rate is also falling in Sweden, West Germany, Switzerland, and
the United States. On the other hand, the poorer nations of Asia and
Africa resent and resist the advice that their populations be pruned, in
the feeling that this is just another of the white man’s tricks for
cutting down their political power. Thus, the one absolutely urgent and
humane method of population control is to do everything possible to
increase the world’s food supply, and to divert to this end the wealth
and energy now being squandered on military technology.
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