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

nytimes.com

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

#451

Post by [deleted] »

lghh wrote: post #448
linkmotif wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it? Your gripe shouldn’t be with rich people, it should be with Americans en masse, who yelled and screamed all Sunday night in my apartment building about grown men running into each other on TV with such a passion you’d think they were educating their children. And then they’re poor? Boo hoo. Maybe if Americans cared about education…

> But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it? My appeal was to the amount of effort required between jobs. > And then they’re poor? Boo hoo. Poor people are allowed to have hobbies and interests just as well as the rich. This sentiment is disgusting and you should be ashamed. > You get paid 3x your wife because Americans care about what you produce, and they don't care abou…

[deleted]

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

#452

Post by barberousse »

linkmotif wrote: post #415
athenot wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (1) Americans don’t actually care about education, as evidenced by the amount teachers make Americans care very much about education but the system we're in doesn't. Kids have no value in a market economy until they have purchase power (or influence on purchase power). In a highly inequal society that means very fancy private schools, for those who can pay. And neglected public schools for the rest. The outlook of…

Kids have massive purchasing power, a fact which was discovered by marketers in the 50s and cultivated extensively since then. Marketers back to then discovered they could actually market directly to kids, which wasn’t a thing before and something people take for granted now. In American households kids drive massive percentages of household spending, not just indirectly but directly as well. > Kids have no value in…

>Kids have massive purchasing power, a fact which was discovered by marketers in the 50s and cultivated extensively since then. Marketers back to then discovered they could actually market directly to kids, which wasn’t a thing before and something people take for granted now.

I dunno about "discovered", the 1950s were one of the most radical shifts in American life. Average Children were not running around with "purchasing power" prior to WWII they were working with their parents more than likely in some capacity, the war completely altered the economic landscape of America for a ceiling of better never before seen for the common man since we were the only ones left with infrastructure not bombed to fuck all. My grandparents are poor blacks from the south, that statistically puts them in the demographic set for worst possible outcomes, but they and most of their peers were able to raise large families and buy a house on factory jobs with middle-class wages in the 50s. That kind of wealth distribution opens up a lock of sectors.

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

#453

Post by linkmotif »

lghh wrote: post #448
linkmotif wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it? Your gripe shouldn’t be with rich people, it should be with Americans en masse, who yelled and screamed all Sunday night in my apartment building about grown men running into each other on TV with such a passion you’d think they were educating their children. And then they’re poor? Boo hoo. Maybe if Americans cared about education…

> But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it? My appeal was to the amount of effort required between jobs. > And then they’re poor? Boo hoo. Poor people are allowed to have hobbies and interests just as well as the rich. This sentiment is disgusting and you should be ashamed. > You get paid 3x your wife because Americans care about what you produce, and they don't care abou…

You won’t shame me. You can’t make me feel ashamed of my father, who got my family out of poverty and didn’t even know how to order a beer or a meal at a restaurant until he was 55 because that’s just not how we spent money. Your perspective is rooted in the heights of privilege and entitlement, wherein first world people can live cozy secure lives, entitled to leisure and “hobbies” on the backs of second and third worlders who facelessly supply us cheap goods that our rich should provision for us just because we live in a country that enslaves the world’s poor. That “hobbies” and “leisure” as a human right doesn’t give you pause is disturbing, because if you don’t earn your hobbies and leisure and expect them anyway, you’re a piece of work given what goes on in the world to make our leisure possible. Americans live in a Disney fairyland created by Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. Why should poor people in America be entitled to 50,000 USD when people who work and create the things these poor people say they absolutely need to consume make 5,000 USD. What haught, what arrogance. What willful ignorance. That’s what’s disgusting.

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

#454

Post by rland »

normal_man wrote: post #224
rland wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary. Most of that money is the capital that makes up Amazon and its subsidiaries, which has consistently grown faster (created more wealth/benefit) than almost any other entity in our society. That's your neoliberal take. Personally, I'm a little dubious that wealth created is 1:1 with social benefit created. But to say that his bank account benefits nobody would be a misrepresentation.

> (created more wealth/benefit) For whom?

For society, by making the distribution of goods/services more efficient. Amazon enriches our lives (compared to no Amazon) every time anyone uses it. The resources we all save, the delta, go partially to Mr. Bezos and owners of Amazon stock in the form of profit. They are rewarded for having allocated their capital efficiently. They can spend the money on whatever they want, but it is mostly allocated back into making Amazon more efficient -- not locked away as the gp suggests.

Bear in mind this is the extremely idealistic neoliberal take.

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

#455

Post by squish78 »

asdff wrote: post #386
squish78 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos doesn't have $150 billion sitting in a bank account. Net worth != liquid cash. Roughly $120 billion of his worth is Amazon stock.

Fine, 30b in his bank account and 120b in his portfolio. All of that money was at one point in a consumers pocket and now sits removed from the wider economy in one of Jeff Bezos accounts for the sole purpose of furthering future growth of these accounts by further extraction of money out of the wider economy.

Customers engage in a voluntary transaction with Amazon. Where should these customers have spent their money instead?

I'm not sure I understand what you are proposing as an alternative. Taking Bezos assets to do something with?

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

#456

Post by specialist »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #308
moorhosj wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

==solely middle-class country== Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made? I think it is at least worth exploring before we jump to the ethnic breakdown of the country. Political choices are something we can change relatively quickly compared to demographics. The US has a higher GDP per capita than Sweden and Denmark which implies that the…

Yes however the demographic diversity in the US makes it less likely for people to want to "spread it" around. If your entire country is the population of one large US metro and everyone is the same ethnicity and culture, there are fewer cognitive impediments to being empathetic at scale.

One argument is the left wing split when the white suburban middle class stopped supporting taxing itself to fund the social safety net.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/9/14543938/do...

"Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots." -- Richard Rorty [1997]

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

#457

Post by ctoth »

Argue about immigration and whose country is best while they gather the torches.

Reduce the 'techlash' to another front in the forever culture war without considering how your hacker birthright is under attack.

Associate yourselves with megacorps and money, nice cars and 401(k)s.

Ally with those who hate privacy. [0]

Ally with those who practice psychological manipulation on a global scale. [1]

* Stallman warned us. [2]

* Wu warned us. [3]

* Doctorow warned us. [4]

* Schneier warned us and tried to explain it to everyone. [5]

> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

> On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. [6]

[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/zuckerberg-privacy...

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/8/8/17664580/persuasive-technology-...

[2] Anything the man has written in the last 35 years

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire...

[4] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

[5] https://www.lawfareblog.com/security-or-surveillance (He has another better article about the start of the new crypto wars but I can't find it)

[6] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

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

#458

Post by lghh »

linkmotif wrote: post #453
lghh wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it? My appeal was to the amount of effort required between jobs. > And then they’re poor? Boo hoo. Poor people are allowed to have hobbies and interests just as well as the rich. This sentiment is disgusting and you should be ashamed. > You get paid 3x your wife because Americans care about what you produce, and they don't care abou…

You won’t shame me. You can’t make me feel ashamed of my father, who got my family out of poverty and didn’t even know how to order a beer or a meal at a restaurant until he was 55 because that’s just not how we spent money. Your perspective is rooted in the heights of privilege and entitlement, wherein first world people can live cozy secure lives, entitled to leisure and “hobbies” on the backs of second and third w…

> You can’t make me feel ashamed of my father, who got my family out of poverty and didn’t even know how to order a beer or a meal at a restaurant until he was 55 because that’s just not how we spent money.

I never asked you to feel ashamed for that. I'm asking that you don't require everyone go though the same struggles as revenge.

Get this... I also think the people who are working to create the things that you are talking about should be able to have hobbies. I also think the people making the things that get consumed should be able to make enough to consume them. You are trying to turn my argument in to what you want it to be, not what it clearly is.

You are saying that, because I think people should be able to have better lives, I am saying some people should not have better lives? That doesn't even make sense.

Do better.

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

#459

Post by lliamander »

WaxProlix wrote: post #41
ipnon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the average IQ of a STEM graduate is a standard deviation or more above average [0][1], then how does a more educated populace result in something besides the stratification we see today? STEM education can help a person get on the right side of the tech split, but the STEM education itself is already prohibitively difficult. [0] https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-... [1] http://www.randal…

Where do you think causality lies here? Maybe being trained to think in ways that IQ tests prefer would raise peoples' scores? An IQ test isn't some sort of measure of inherent capacity, just a measure of how well someone takes an IQ test. People read too much into them.

> Maybe being trained to think in ways that IQ tests prefer would raise peoples' scores?

That question has been tested repeatedly by the scientific community, and the answer seems to be 'no'.

> An IQ test isn't some sort of measure of inherent capacity, just a measure of how well someone takes an IQ test.

That's just not the case. IQ correlates with many interesting phenomena.

Of course, IQ doesn't come close to explaining everything about life outcomes, but compared to virtually every other measure in psychology (or the social sciences more broadly) nothing else comes close to the empirical validity or explanatory power of IQ.

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

#460

Post by almost_usual »

crowdpleaser wrote: post #422
HarryHirsch wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the safety net was too comfortable I doubt I’d have ever felt the need to climb out of it Americans have been conditioned into accepting a staggering amount of abuse and into perpetuating that abuse.

At least people can overcome abuse and thrive off of it. I don't know a single person who had an extremely cushy childhood who is 'on fire' for anything or striving for greatness. You need adversity to be great. Not all adversity is abuse. The American dream is about overcoming and flourishing to the limits of your will power, taxing people who have succeeded to provide succor to people who don't care about themselve…

>I don't know a single person who had an extremely cushy childhood who is 'on fire' for anything or striving for greatness.

You could argue our current president had a pretty cushy childhood. Not sure if he's 'on fire' or 'striving for greatness' though.

Social mobility is heavily determined by a combination of race, IQ, gender, social-class, where you were born, and physical / mental health. All of that is dictated by luck when you are born. Our ego tries to convince us that we're "self made" but for the most part life is determined by "luck of the draw".

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