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Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

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Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#211

Post by goobynight »

mcguire wrote: post #152

How do high skilled service jobs fit into this picture?

Probably much better, but I don't know the math myself.

The main key is having just some barrier to entry.

If you know how to repair motorcycles, you're going to be around more people that can afford motorcycles in a city. They'll be more expensive ones on average and people will be less likely to do the work themselves (time is worth more or they don't have a garage to do the work)

There's a shop in Chicago that only works on mopeds. They charge $75/hr on the workbench and that's for relatively cheap machines. Wait time without a rush fee in summer is on the order of weeks because they are the only non-independents in the game.

Due to the population, you can also run pretty niche services/shops. I know a place that only does battery sales and services. Phone, automotive, household gates, and so on.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#212

Post by pnw_hazor »

danmaz74 wrote: post #146
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make very good points above. I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes. That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive? If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you’d receive a written…

I really wouldn't compare learning a very specific technology with college. The idea with college level education is that you get the foundations of what you study and a learning method, so that you can adapt to changes (eg new technologies) faster and better. Of course you can learn the foundations without college and not learn them with college, but on average it's much easier to do so with that.

In my experience undergrad programs can fail hard in this too because of the limited time to cover the subject matter.

14 chapters of Digital Signal Processing in 12 weeks w00t!

For many of my engineering courses at a top tier public university it was in-one-ear-out-the-other.

Though, the most of stuff I learned at community college (pre-engineering) did stick.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#213

Post by tbrownaw »

sudosteph wrote: post #88
jnbiche wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turned out, college was partly a proxy for class. What college grad earnings in the 60s was actually saying is that upper-middle class kids grow into upper-middle class adults. I think this is a critical observation that lots of people--including some economists--have missed.

A college degree may not be a panacea for class mobility, but lets not forget that class mobility without a degree is pretty much not possible in the slightest. Per a Pew study Brookings cites ( https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2014/02... ): > children born in the lowest income quintile who do not earn a four-year degree are four times as likely to wind up in the bottom (47%) as those who earn a f…

...A 53% chance is "pretty much not possible in the slightest"?

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#214

Post by deboflo »

eropple wrote: post #171
deboflo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a serverless certification would be great. These certs are more foundational in scope.

I don't see why it would be, to be frank. "Serverless" is a how . It's a tool, not a solution, and you should be expected to pick up new tools without waving around a piece of paper saying you know a tool. Except for button-pusher roles I've always hired for whys, not hows, and certification programs seem to never care about the whys. College degrees don't assert that you know how to learn, that you know how to deriv…

AWS certification exams test for basic and foundational AWS knowledge. They don’t try to do anything other than that. The “whys” are learned in the field, certified or not.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#215

Post by claudiawerner »

pitaj wrote: post #206
peisistratos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? There is an easy way to see that and it is if the median inflation-adjusted hourly wage has risen in the US since the early 1970s. Or if inflation-adjusted weekly earnings have risen. They have not, with GDP growth, both have fallen . That this even has to be discussed shows the deep control those heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from wo…

I'll never get tired of hearing "wage slavery", "exploitation", "surplus labor value" etc from idiots who are still clinging to the labor theory of value.

It's strange that you dismiss a heavily researched area well respected in modern philosophy and heterodox economics as being "idiots".[0] You may say their research is flawed, but there is no grounds to call such people (who usually hold PhDs in economics and work at world-tier universities) "idiots".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490388

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#216

Post by pnw_hazor »

cma wrote: post #168
alkibiades wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“not enough money to go around” Where do people get this strange idea that if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? Bill Gates got rich with an invention that also generated probably a trillion dollars in economic growth for everyone. Including most people on this sites income.

What was Bill Gates invention? Wasn't that PARC?

Microsoft.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#217

Post by ausjke »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #71
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make very good points above. I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes. That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive? If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you’d receive a written…

The more I learn about Texas, the more it seems like they're doing everything right.

Until Texas is overwhelmed by migrants from CA and Mexico that is, that joint-force is changing TX from red to purple, and to blue soon. At the moment, Austin is more liberal than most CA cities already.

When TX is taken the US will officially turn into a social/welfare state, the US is doomed already, similar to what happened to Rome in the past.

People from CA or Mexico are running from there for a reason, however when they arrive TX, their first to-do is to make TX look like where they used to live. They are virus.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#218

Post by claudiawerner »

smokeyj wrote: post #195
peisistratos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? There is an easy way to see that and it is if the median inflation-adjusted hourly wage has risen in the US since the early 1970s. Or if inflation-adjusted weekly earnings have risen. They have not, with GDP growth, both have fallen . That this even has to be discussed shows the deep control those heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from wo…

If someone invents a tool and sells it for a profit - who was exploited? Is it not possible for everyone to be richer than they started and also create wealth?? The question was really simple. Your answer is the kind that inevitably ends with "you just have to read Das Kapital". That is not an answer.

>If someone invents a tool and sells it for a profit - who was exploited?

Nobody, and Marx doesn't say that anyone is in such a case.

>Is it not possible for everyone to be richer than they started and also create wealth??

In some way, it is possible - after all, the worker is richer than he was before (he has more money thanks to his wage) as is the capitalist (who has made money from the sale). Now what wealth is created? Arguably, social wealth in the case of new technology being developed, for example. But Marx doesn't deal with this concept of "wealth" or even immediately money, he deals with the concept of value, which works at a different level of abstraction to money. The value-form only becomes the price-form, they're not identical.

I'd suggest looking up theories of exploitation as they have been figured in Marxisms that don't rely on a labour theory of value. It's too much[0] to summarize in one HN comment, but you don't need to read Capital either (though it would be helpful).

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#219

Post by claudiawerner »

fastball wrote: post #174
dragonwriter wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's, at best, extremely misleading; outside of the most extreme absolute deprivation, relative deprivation (or prosperity) appears to be much more of a contributor to experienced disutility (or utility) than absolute deprivation or prosperity, such that, in practice, and modulo alleviating the most crushing poverty (which isn't where marginal gains go in the developed world, even where such poverty still remains)…

I am impressed with the level of nonsense in this comment.

I'm impressed by the fact that people on a site like HN, supposed to be held at a higher caliber than Reddit, prefer to downvote rather than engage with the substance of comments.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#220

Post by the_fuzzyone »

ausjke wrote: post #217
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I learn about Texas, the more it seems like they're doing everything right.

Until Texas is overwhelmed by migrants from CA and Mexico that is, that joint-force is changing TX from red to purple, and to blue soon. At the moment, Austin is more liberal than most CA cities already. When TX is taken the US will officially turn into a social/welfare state, the US is doomed already, similar to what happened to Rome in the past. People from CA or Mexico are running from there for a reason, however…

I couldn't hear you over your dog whistling
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