Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#351

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

supermw wrote: post #328

TeMPOraL wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people didn't have the choice you did.

My choices were nothing special: Pay attention in school, do my homework, get good grades, pick a meaningful hobby, don't drink or do drugs, don't beat up other kids for fun, read books, work in a retail store, stay away from drama, get into a decent college and choose a good major, do internships, network, pick up recommendations, get interviews at tech companies, get tech job, start paying debts, save and invest mo…

> My choices were nothing special: Pay attention in school, do my homework, get good grades, pick a meaningful hobby, don't drink or do drugs, don't beat up other kids for fun, read books, work in a retail store, stay away from drama

I concede that the rest of this list is choices you made, but I wonder how much of the part I quoted can be attributed to actual, conscious choice on your part.

Me personally, I'm in tech by pure luck. Because my mother let me watch Star Trek as a kid, because my father arranged for a PC in our house, because they gave me essentially unlimited and unsupervised time in front of it, and because I lucked out with education reform that transferred me out of the worst class in primary school to the best one in secondary school - only because of that, I picked up programming as a hobby. My job, my knowledge and my material situation are pretty much directly attributable to this. It wasn't my choice.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#352

Post by will_brown » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #319

sol_remmy2 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western European countries hardly take immigrants. When you live in a homogenous, solely middle-class country like Sweden/Denmark/Norway, of course everything seems nice and comfortable. But America accepts some very poor immigrants and allows them to make money and be lifted up. Those are many of the people you saw on the bus.

This is wildly incorrect. Angela Merkel got in trouble precisely because she accepted so many Syrian refugees. Germany absorbed almost a million refugees in one year, which is an incredible number. On a per capital basis, that would be like the USA accepting 4 million refugees in one year, when in fact net immigration to the USA, of all forms, tends to run at about 10% to 15% of that level.

I think you may only be looking at immigrant based visas in the US. Whereas you need to look at permenant residents (ie green card holders = 13.2M of which 8.9M are eligible for citizenship).

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#353

Post by ensiferum » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

rock_hard wrote: post #227

arandr0x wrote: post #156

I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a soc…

When I came to America I had nothing: no social network, no college degree, no money! But America is a place full of opportunity and so after 10 years here and a lot of work I can look back and say that am much happier than I ever was in Europe since the day I got here! The deal is simple: work hard and the sky is the limit. I started a family, have worked at Fortune 20 companies in management positions, bought a hou…

The US of A actually has the worst social mobility of OECD countries.

https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#354

Post by metalchianti » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

adamsea wrote: post #340

shanusmagnus wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth asking why your wife doesn't switch to your job, to make 3x the salary. Either a) she couldn't do it, in which case by extension it boils down to supply and demand, or b) she doesn't want to do it, because she gets a whole bunch of joy from the job which is invisibly priced into compensation (and which indirectly goes back to supply and demand.) I don't see the discrepancy as any kind of market failure.

> "she gets a whole bunch of joy from the job which is invisibly priced into compensation" This is a pretty naive statement.

Could you elaborate? If not (b) then it seems she would certainly fall into (a).

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#355

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #344

linkmotif wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people could do well in America if they made economic decisions that led to them accumulating wealth.

Yeah, about as much as you could win a fortune in a casino if only you made the decisions that lead the fruit symbols on the slot machine to line up. This view is severely underestimating the role played by path dependence (e.g. your environment, wealth of your parents) and pure luck.

[deleted]

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#356

Post by atemerev » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

mac01021 wrote: post #335

atemerev wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won’t. Even for retirement schemes, there is not enough money; retirement age is rising, the future is bleak. UBI is basically a lifetime retirement scheme; it requires 10x more resources and completely unsustainable.

That depends what you mean by "enough money". If more than half of the population makes at least double what they need to keep themselves from starvation, then you could argue there is enough money. In short, your disagreement with the GP is probably due to a disagreement about the lifestyle that UBI is supposed to afford its recipients. Those in power might determine that the bare minimum UBI to avoid violent revolu…

Starvation is not a problem in the developed countries (and most of the developing world). Food is cheap.

Housing, healthcare and education are the problems, but $5000 per year are not nearly enough for any of that.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#357

Post by malvosenior » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

lghh wrote: post #267

aantix wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without incentives, there is no innovation. And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.

Trust me, I don't work 3x harder than most of the people I make 3x of. My wife is a teacher and I am in tech, I make 3x her salary. She works way more and spends more of both her physical and emotional labor on her job. I work hard and I do good work, but what she does is not even in the same stratosphere as what I do. I'm not innovating anything, I'm just writing decent code. She's finding new ways to help kids lear…

It's probably >3x more difficult to find someone with your skills to employ. It may be easy to you but to someone who doesn't know how to program, your work is unimaginably difficult.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#358

Post by rock_hard » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

timerol wrote: post #303

MockObject wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this wholesome content even getting downvoted?

Probably due to the strong political and moral statement in the middle. "in Europe, the socialism makes people dead on the inside" definitely requires some justification. Without that digression it's a great comment about the potential upside that exists in America.

Thanks for the feedback...let me elaborate on that a bit more then:

I was born and raised in Europe and lived there 30 years.

What I will share here is from personal expierence and will be a generalization (because there is of course always exceptions).

What I meant by dead inside is that people there don’t do anything with the safety and freedom socialism provides. They don’t spend more time with their kids or follow the arts. People had no dreams or ambitions :(

There first thing that struck me coming to America was that not only did everyone have a dream, but they were actively pursuing it.

Examples: 1. the barber where I got my first haircut was playing in a rock band and about to head out for a 4 month tour.

2. A friends girlfriend went from being waitress to becoming CEO of a organization everybody here knows

3. Lots of friend of mine are active as mentor for local underprivileged kids on the weekends

I come from a small town where you’d think there is a community and people support each other...but socialism erodes those ties. I have never seen anyone do something good for their neighbors in Europe...it’s the governments job to do so...which leads to nobody lifting a finger.

In Europe people actively try to prevent you from raising from the middle class by talking you down and being unsupportive. Additionally the government doesn’t waste a day to put another bump on the road to keep you where you are.

But to their defense they do a decent job of helping people at the bottom to get closer to the middle class

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#359

Post by 0x262d » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

in 1847, Marx wrote Wage Labour and Capital, an accessible pamphlet that made the prediction that over time, the middle classes will be squeezed out of prosperity and the majority of people's wages will trend downwards, until they hit a fundamental low point: the minimum amount required to reproduce the next generation of workers. the key point is that this is completely endemic to capitalism, which is characterized by capital owners having diametrically opposed and competing material interests to workers.

we have seen surges of militant class struggle reverse this trend at specific points in history, but in 2019, with decades of dormancy of class struggle leading up to the present, it's happening again.

abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#360

Post by freewilly1040 » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

drewg123 wrote: post #64

We're heading toward a future where more and more is automated and there is less and less room for non-creative work. Let's face it, not everybody can be creative in a way that is lucrative. Do we really want to doom more and more of the population to a subsistence income, while more and more of the gains due to automation go to a shrinking segment of the population? I tend to think that a generous UBI is really the…

Not only is lucrative creative work elusive, _rewarding_ creative work is too. Is it really rewarding to make unremarkable art that no one cares about or consumes? Maybe for some people, but not for most.