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Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

nytimes.com

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Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#141

Post by adpirz »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #139
dizzystar wrote: post #22

Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, the…

>Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. I'm from Toledo and left for SF without looking back. I begged people in the SBA and business community to discuss tech with me and they didn't get it and I'd be shocked if they get it now. It was literally like "How can you make money with a website?" and this was just 8 years a…

Fellow 419-to-Bay-Area transplant. Parents are still there, but even my friends who want to stay local move to Columbus (which is actually growing quite quickly!).

The median age feels like it continues to rise as young people leave more and more.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#142

Post by CodeCube »

int_19h wrote: post #112
stanfordkid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "everyone can be a millionaire via college" mentality has created a focus on higher education (engineering, medical school, law school etc.) ... and dissuaded people from professions which may be very worthwhile (welder, autoshop-owner) ... but will cap out at wages of $200k-$300k. We've made these jobs seem "dirty" and low class when they're not.

The irony is that a lot (I would even say, most) of what's being done in the software engineering field is really more of a trade, and would likely benefit from being treated accordingly - including having trade schools rather than colleges teaching that stuff. I'm sure there are other industries like that. When enough people realize just how much of it is smoke and mirrors, I think the common snobbery towards those…

The various bootcamps and accelerator programs may end up, in the end, morphing into a form of "trade school" for software engineers.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#143

Post by CodeCube »

kwoff wrote: post #94
PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, the people working by staring at computers are also seen as a cost to be repressed and not a service to be rewarded. Supply and demand has made the cost resistant to repression up til now, but the economic system is hard at work finding out how to change that. One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor cost…

I also wonder if, in some ways, devops (I mean the "idea", not the engineers themselves) could be commoditizing IT people (not implying there's some conspiracy), blurring the distinction between devs and sysadmins in particular.

Well you could say the same about the entirety of "the cloud" ... no need to pay a team of sysadmins to manage, deploy, and maintain a data center, when you can easily provision a VM in seconds, or even better, use a SaaS offering so you don't even have to worry about applying patches and stuff ;)

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#144

Post by CodeCube »

daxorid wrote: post #90
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. Sure, but the money for that has to come from somewhere. Nowada…

I'm old enough to remember when a significant part of the "dream of the Internet" was that knowledge workers could work anywhere with an ISP. Obviously that dream was not widely realized, but there are some employers that will allow you to write code from the countryside.

Remote working is becoming more and more accepted as time goes on, and collaboration technologies improve. Video chat is by far one of the most useful things about being on a remote team, in addition to things like git/pull request workflows making it simple and async-by-default to work with others.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#145

Post by xhrpost »

dizzystar wrote: post #22

Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, the…

> "The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left."

I think this is a little too simplistic. I used this reason partially to not leave one of the cities on your list for many years. Working in software and not wanting to be part of the "brain drain". Eventually, I realized the problem was simply bigger than me and that finding quality tech work and companies was something I needed for personal health (both career and other).

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#146

Post by venning »

I have often cited the NYT Interactive team for creatively designed articles, but this one has serious problems.

On a modern Android phone, I can't see all of the article text, with an undetermined amount being cut off at the bottom. Swipe back doesn't work if you don't start the swipe from the center of the page (which is unnatural and not the same for swiping forward). There are no obvious affordances to indicate that tapping on the left brings me back. And an un-dismissible subscription dialog appears, obscuring almost all remaining text.

I'm just assuming that it renders perfectly for iPhones. Serious question: is testing for Android just not done?

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#147

Post by hathawsh »

SquirrelOnFire wrote: post #82
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. Sure, but the money for that has to come from somewhere. Nowada…

>Nowadays, "working-class, blue-collar" stuff does not make money, and if "working-class, blue-collar" people identify with the economic system which designates their labor as a cost to be repressed rather than a service to be rewarded, I'm not sure how much I can do about that. Maybe by pointing to blue collar work that still pays well. A buddy of mine is an auto mechanic and is the sole income earner for his family…

This is why I'm a big advocate (but not affiliate) of the "mikeroweWORKS" foundation. Mike Rowe, from the TV show "Dirty Jobs", is using his foundation to revive interest in trade schools and jobs. There are a lot of people who could be great machinists, electricians, plumbers, etc., but due to social pressures, they start college and soon drop out, then work for peanuts (if they can find any job at all). We need to eliminate the stigma against trade schools and encourage people to work with their hands if that's their passion.

http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#148

Post by Johnny555 »

mbesto wrote: post #101
SquirrelOnFire wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nowadays, "working-class, blue-collar" stuff does not make money, and if "working-class, blue-collar" people identify with the economic system which designates their labor as a cost to be repressed rather than a service to be rewarded, I'm not sure how much I can do about that. Maybe by pointing to blue collar work that still pays well. A buddy of mine is an auto mechanic and is the sole income earner for his family…

> Pay attention to how much you spend next time you call a plumber. Anecdotal, but the average quote I got for electricians in the bay area was $200/hour. This is also consistent for electricians in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago (just had a friend recently get work done at that price). I recently paid $2k to get a transmission done, of which $1700 was labor alone (took 3 days). Point is - these trades are no joke wh…

The $1700 labor cost isn't really labor, it also includes overhead like rent, utilities, general supplies, insurance, etc. Some of those costs are also covered by the markup in parts, but not when parts only cost $300.

If it took a full 3 days that's 24 hours of work, or around $70/hour, probably half of that went to the employee which gives him around $70K/year salary, not much in the bay area.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#149

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

hpcjoe wrote: post #9
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #2

Detroit is an odd place. For years of going there for work it was tough to find locally owned restaurants in favor of chains, it’s do-able but you might end up in weird places like a polish restaurant literally in the basement of a house a few blocks off Woodward. The people who identify with Detroit really do so. There is at first an inexplicable pride of being “from the D”, but it’s nice, there are really diverse a…

Mario's[1] for excellent Italian food. Xoxhimilco[2] for excellent Mexican food. Antonio's[3] in the burbs. New Peking[4] in GC for excellent Chinese food. I've lived in Michigan 30 years now. Came here for grad school, first at MSU, then down to Wayne State for Ph.D. Never left. There is something about this place. Even when we are getting the crap kicked out of us ... we don't give up. It took a long time to get ri…

I'll check those out next time I'm in town.

To add to it, Jeff's Kitchen was some legit authentic Chinese food. Need to order ahead of time, it's that legit, they need to get water spinach from some market a day or two before you want to it.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#150

Post by Trundle »

ajross wrote: post #130
breischl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the examples you provided (specifically dish washing, fruit picking, house cleaning) are not traditionally considered "blue collar" or "the trades." Rather they are considered unskilled labor. So your comment doesn't really respond to the GP's comments about the trades. I suspect that relatively few would argue that unskilled labor is a great way to support a family. I also suspect that conflating unskilled l…

> I suspect that relatively few would argue that unskilled labor is a great way to support a family. So... how do workers in these jobs-that-apparently-don't-qualify-as-trades support their families? We have the economy we have. Someone has to do these jobs. You can't wave a magic wand and insist that everything would be fine as long as everyone is a plumber. Someone has to pick the fruit and teach the kids. People w…

That children are going without x where x is some roughly agreed on minimum standard of living is a problem.

Jobs existing that can't support a family is not a problem.

The solution to the first might be to change the second, but it doesn't have to be.

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