The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people • Hacker News Board

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#371

Post by marssaxman » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:14 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #351

marssaxman wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We are the government"? Come on, we're not in high school social studies class here. The government of the country I live in answers to bankers and oil companies, with the democratic process providing little more than a glossy sheen of respectability. There is no meaningful difference between a process I cannot influence and a process which could theoretically be influenced if I could put more time and money into it…

So here is the question for you, if you were an elected representative of your country would you give your vote or influence to bankers and oil companies? If so, and you clearly seem to despise that, why would you do that? > There is no meaningful difference between a process I > cannot influence and a process which could > theoretically be influenced if I could put more > time and money into it than I actually have.…

I will never be in that position, because I will never have millions to spend running for office. I would have to sell out first, just to get the money to become an elected representative, and then what moral grounds would I have for turning my patrons away?

It doesn't really matter what I or anyone in my peer group thinks; as long as the war on drugs continues, none of us will ever run for office or have any visible role in politics. But it doesn't matter, because the tech industry offers most of us substantially more significant opportunities to change the world around us than anything we could accomplish if we wasted 10x as much time on the political process.

You're right that local politics is different; it is still mostly sort of democratic and amenable to change on the scale individuals and reasonably-sized groups can hope to achieve. But the scale of accomplishment available is correspondingly trivial, and the timescale is just as slow.

I don't see that the tea party accomplished much as a grassroots movement. It looked to me like the established political power structure successfully co-opted the grassroots tea party during the year after it emerged and has been continuing business as usual ever since, using the "tea party" brand to give their existing agenda populist legitimacy.

I am very much visualizing a better world and doing what I can to help create it; I'm just not wasting my time trying to accomplish that through some sclerotic, glacial, anti-transparent political process. I'm just working to create the organizations I want to participate in directly, helping build mutual aid networks, and supporting community values around resource-sharing and skill-sharing. Hackerspaces and co-housing and open source software, these are the kinds of projects where my efforts can actually accomplish something to help make the world a better place.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#372

Post by adamnemecek » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:16 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #358

adamnemecek wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is true, but I don't think it accounts for most of the youth unemployment we have seen so far. The jobs did not go to robots in America, they went to workers in China. I think that that is only temporary though. Once the wages in China rise enough, the jobs will be probably given to robots possibly in America.

Robots in China, quite likely. Foxconn is moving to robots as fast as they can and laying off people as they do so.

Well buying robots will probably cost the same in China and America. But for US market, if you manufacture things in the US, you will shorten your supply chain and save on logistics. But yeah, your guess is as good as mine.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#373

Post by marssaxman » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:20 PM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #355

marssaxman wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We are the government"? Come on, we're not in high school social studies class here. The government of the country I live in answers to bankers and oil companies, with the democratic process providing little more than a glossy sheen of respectability. There is no meaningful difference between a process I cannot influence and a process which could theoretically be influenced if I could put more time and money into it…

Eh, i've personally affected local elections with both money and door knocking. But in that case, i'm one voice in thousands. At the national level, i'm one voice in 320 million. You can change local stuff pretty easily. If you want to scale up to state level, you need to be state level worthy. The guy who owns 100 hotels controls tens of thousands of jobs, and his voice should carry more weight, about some issues at…

Sure, local issues are a whole different matter - my comments above were about the national government. I could see getting involved in local land-use or transportation issues if there were an opportunity which didn't involve becoming a public figure or exerting an effort disproportional to the potential results. For the most part, however, politics seems like a really slow and wasteful way of accomplishing social change, and I'd rather spend my oh-so-painfully-limited hours on projects offering a better rate of return.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#374

Post by tmaly » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:26 PM UTC

If we had space exploration capability like in Star Trek, we could think about a different approach. But we are constrained to Earth and we have limited resources. Capitalism is the best system available to allocate resources. What we have right now is not really Capitalism.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#375

Post by Domenic_S » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:27 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #369

Domenic_S wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to consider society as a mostly-altruistic, benevolent mass of humanity There is no mass of humanity in that way, just like "HN believes..." or "Reddit thinks..." is mostly impossible to say. Some folks of that generation did/do act in mostly-altruistic, benevolent ways, and some of them did/do not. The generational argument is a very clever red herring that shifts blame from a broken system to the previous generat…

I don't know how important is it for the overall argument. I may be just nitpicking, and your "go do something about it" message is great. But... > The top 1% of earners pay 50% of federal taxes. Don't they have 80% of the income in the US? If so, that's not doing their part.

A good question but no, they don't have 80% of the income. Let me flip the question though - should the bottom 40% of earners pay taxes proportionate to their share of income? Because they don't pay anything at all (federally). The point is fundamentally flawed.

> The top 1% of tax payers pay 38% of all income taxes yet only have a 20% share of total AGI. [0]

It would be easy to get into the weeds on this, so I'll drop this link and let you decide for yourself. There will always be questions like, is AGI a good measure of income %? (I say yes, because AGI-reducing writeoffs phase out very early).

There's a lot of "well it depends on how you define.." even within my own argument as you can see (do they pay 50% or 38%?) but my point should be clear enough. I hope :)

[0] http://www.financialsamurai.com/how-much-money-do-the-top-in...

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#376

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:27 PM UTC

fweespeech wrote: post #359

ChuckMcM wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here is the question for you, if you were an elected representative of your country would you give your vote or influence to bankers and oil companies? If so, and you clearly seem to despise that, why would you do that? > There is no meaningful difference between a process I > cannot influence and a process which could > theoretically be influenced if I could put more > time and money into it than I actually have.…

> That is what I love about the Tea Party (not their politics but that they decided to do something about what they felt). In just under 10 years they have become a strong voice in national politics. Many of their members were brought into office by people just like you, passionate about what is wrong (in their opinion) with the way things are done. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/study-confirms... > A…

In my opinion, you are conflating cause and effect, but per an earlier comment I made it is incorrect for anyone to believe that their passions are not shared by others. And when those others have more money than time, that is how they "help."

If you run for office in the US, you will form an organizing committee. And you will put in your organizing documents the things you believe should be true about the world that aren't (this would be your platform) and because that is a public document, it will be published by the State or Federal elections commission with all the other platforms out there.

And you will be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, perhaps unpleasantly, that your "agenda" or platform may line up with what some billionaire thinks is the right thing as well, or maybe they just want to use you to steal votes from another player in the race (this is politics after all) and you will get donations to your committee from weird sounding names like "Higgly Piggly Partners, LLP" which are people who generally want to remain anonymous and want to help you get elected. Some of those people might be billionaires. You probably won't know but it is always good to ask what they hope to achieve by getting you elected.

And there were a number of people who ran as Republicans in California found that the Koch brothers donated money to help their elections. Did it make them tools of the Koch brothers? Maybe some of them but certainly not all of them. And if some billionaire donated to your election campaign would you suddenly do anything they said?

Look no further than the county clerk in Kentucky to see that once you're elected you are really really hard to fire, even if you don't do your job. There is nothing that says you have to do the bidding of your donors, the worst that will happen is they won't support your re-election efforts.

Politics is people. Its people collectively trying to achieve a goal, some for themselves, some for the group. Whether you are in a company or a government or on an island competing for a million dollars, politics is the process by which negotiation, decisions, and change is effected. It is perfectly legit to say that you don't understand how it works, but it is incorrect to say that you cannot participate. And sometimes participation can lead to understanding which can lead to great things. But you won't know unless you try.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#377

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:30 PM UTC

Domenic_S wrote: post #318

roymurdock wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for myself (as a 22 year-old recent graduate) - I was brought up to respect my elders and to consider society as a mostly-altruistic, benevolent mass of humanity with a conscience bent more towards justice and meritocracy than corruption and inequality. I believed that the older generation who shape and structure society through government, industry, and academia were doing their absolute best to set future…

> to consider society as a mostly-altruistic, benevolent mass of humanity There is no mass of humanity in that way, just like "HN believes..." or "Reddit thinks..." is mostly impossible to say. Some folks of that generation did/do act in mostly-altruistic, benevolent ways, and some of them did/do not. The generational argument is a very clever red herring that shifts blame from a broken system to the previous generat…

> The top 1% of earners pay 50% of federal taxes.

I think you mean "federal income tax" (and even then, have the number too high.) Which isn't the same thing as "federal taxes", or even federal taxes on income (since it excludes federal payroll taxes, which are the most significant federal taxes on income for a very large segment of the income-earning population.)

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#378

Post by fennecfoxen » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:35 PM UTC

roymurdock wrote: post #322

nostrademons wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see the people who are doing much better than their parents. The more self-aware of them know that there is nothing good that comes out of drawing attention to their good fortune. The less self-aware just assume that's how it is for everybody and don't think it's remarkable.

Sure, but if people were moving up on aggregate, we would see the middle class growing as children of the poor made their way up. Instead, we see the middle class shrinking, the poor growing, and the wealth collecting to a smaller proportion of the population as families are being pushed down due to the recession.

> Sure, but if people were moving up on aggregate, we would see the middle class growing as children of the poor made their way up.

Eh, what you really want to look at is a series of cohorts moving on up as people grow older: a lot of US population growth is from immigration (legal and otherwise) who tend to have less income (which is why they immigrate), and from children born to recent immigrants (who have substantially more children than rich people in this country).

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#379

Post by hollaur » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:36 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #82

Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it wo…

"When you know your passion and you're unwilling to live by somebody else's rules, you can make your own way. And don't misunderstand, this is not about breaking rules, this is about producing results.

Ignore the job description and produce results for somebody, I promise you, you won't be ignored. People will change the rules for you if you can produce outstanding results."

- Tony Robbins https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140527113908-101706366-if-i...

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#380

Post by chillwaves » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:36 PM UTC

Camillo wrote: post #336

downandout wrote: post #82

Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it wo…

> The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This is true, but I don't think it accounts for most of the youth unemployment we have seen so far. The jobs did not go to robots in America, they went to workers in China. To answer another common theme: we can complain about CEO pay, tax cuts, stagnant wages, etc., but the reason for the pure and simple lack of j…

This is not accurate. Even with the jobs being sent to China, they still require fewer workers due to the efficiency of automation. If you look at the global pool of jobs, the trend is the same: fewer workers producing more output.