31–40 of 82 posts
Looking at a lot of job ads they want 5 developers for one job: sys admin, dba, software dev, ui, design...
That has been going on since the dawn of IT. It is a red flag for a management team (or recruiter) that doesn't really know what they are in search of.
Looking at a lot of job ads they want 5 developers for one job: sys admin, dba, software dev, ui, design...
Don't be scared of secondary requirements in ads as most often they don't require expertise in the mentioned area. During job interviews, "database specialist" "becomes" someone, who can write simple queries, "a web designer" - someone who can tinker CSS, "web development" - update Wordpress page etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Base income does not come out of nothing though. You need state income, which depends on taxation, which depends on people working and consuming.
Unless the state owns the means of production. What if the future is red?
Most likely it'll roll out like public libraries / utilities. I already drive on government owned streets kept safe by government paid cops and clean by government paid trash pickup to visit the government owned library to use the government owned photocopier when I need to do legacy media stuff. Not a huge extension of the concept at the library to use the government owned 3d printer to make stuff or the government owned protein sequencer to make me soylent-tier food, maybe in 30 years.
If you have in-demand skills then maybe the 'gig' economy can be a nice place to be: money and flexibility can create quite a nice lifestyle, if some comments I read on HN are to be believed. But for those not in the top-layer its going to be "welcome to the precariat" [1]. Constant hustling, unpredictable income and housing, moving-on a lot, fewer social ties. For those at the bottom it's zero-hour contracts driving…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> majority of the population providing non- essential services. 'essentiality' doesn't come into the equation. Those who managed to amass a fortune being more efficient will want servants and other people to serve them (entertainers, sex workers, etc etc), which cannot easily be provided by machines. The economy will revert back to a fuedal one, where you become "owned" by the rich. Unless, of course, the people rebe…
Why would the wants of the rich require a reversion to a feudal economy? Even if you have widespread basic income, the rich will have no trouble finding people wishing to earn more and willing to trade their time for that.
I doubt this is an outcome that governments and society in general will find acceptable when they start to recognise the pattern. Instead I wouldn't be surprised if the second phase of this economy involves government regulation of the trust networks, with them being extracted into some kind of trust infrastructure on which a number of competitor service providers are allowed to operate, or at least opened up so the trust network data has to be part of the public commons. At the moment the trust networks are (rightly) seen by the companies as being their most important asset - I think we'll eventually realise that, in the sharing economy, trust is so important that it cannot be privately owned.
One problem I can see in all this is that the trust networks that the sharing economy is built on are all (currently) privately owned and exploited, and network effects mean that it is very difficult for any competitor to get established in the same space because they have to establish their own competitor trust network. As a result the tendency will be for there to be a winner-takes-all outcome creating monopolies a…
Looking at what is happening elsewhere with ownership laws, I'm doubting this will be anytime in the near future.
Maybe 'a job' is something that fitted a particular phase of our civilisation development and it just will fade away? A hunter gatherer (I bring this as my example - because as a species we spent most of our time in that phase) would do many things - but we would not call them jobs.
Maybe we wouldn't call them jobs and many people could have turned their hand to a lot of things that different people in the tribe did but returns to specialisation applies even at very low levels. I bet the best flint knappers spent more of their time practicing and thinking about their craft than the ones who did that and hunted as well.
Much like the flint knapper gave way to unionized mechanized professional stone masons, 'uber for flint knappers' will likely give way to 'uber for professional stone masons' sooner or later.
Note that drivers, hostel workers, and flint knappers don't make much money because of supply and demand for the skill. Stone masons, however, make about 50% to 100% more than the median income, not as much as programmers, but not bad.
If "uber for" can scale to higher skill level tasks, which is an open question, then there's no need to assume the jobs will always be low skilled and low pay. The article avoids this issue. Its "well known" that only a small amount of the population live in architectural/geographical areas where they can become gig drivers, aside from anecdotes. Its possible 99% of professional stone masons will remain unaffected by an uber-for-stonemasons which only scales commodity style in incredibly fast growing wealthy cities and otherwise doesn't work.
Maybe 'a job' is something that fitted a particular phase of our civilisation development and it just will fade away? A hunter gatherer (I bring this as my example - because as a species we spent most of our time in that phase) would do many things - but we would not call them jobs.
'Job' is the input side to which "rent/mortgage" are outputs. 'Job' is about continuity and stability; the ability to make commitments to regular expenditures required to maintain a particular standard of living. Highly variable income is bad for this. That's one of the reasons why people push back so hard on the "gig economy"; it brings the fear that you might not be able to make rent/mortgage next month and therefo…
And yet. I'm disciplined with money. I'm not impulsive or indulgent. I can build a mean spreadsheet. Put all this together and still the uncertainty and variability is stressful. Running down a savings account without knowing when it will be refilled is something that's always in the back of your mind, eating away at you. You build your life to fit an average yearly income - children, vehicles, rent, gym memberships, etc. When that average yearly income is NEVER guaranteed, you always suspect that this time you won't pull through, and your life will start falling apart, piece by little piece.
I can only imagine how brutal it must be for those whose skills are not as in demand or as remunerative as ours.