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Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

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Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#251

Post by adventured »

cpitman wrote: post #141
jkoudys wrote: post #22

America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.

I travel around the US constantly, and have never heard anything remotely close to comparing unemployment with Canada. Any talk of unemployment is always internally focused, comparing the rate to the past.

Americans overwhelmingly have no idea what the unemployment rate is in Canada, in my opinion. They certainly don't spend much time boasting about the US rate vs the Canadian rate.

It's a staged premise - which was entirely unsupported - to launch into the America Bad talking point. If you don't use a primer to launch into that, it looks particularly biased on a forum. So what you do instead, is you set up something ugly (those boasting Americans!) that can never be backed up, and that provides your on-ramp.

This is a comedy routine here on HN at this point.

Consider that the Americans boasting premise was the whole foundation to the parent comment and the parent made zero effort to back it up (it'd be impossible to support, the US is far too large, insular, and diverse for it to be likely true). The same country that, yes, largely doesn't know where Iran is at on a map, pays deep attention to Canadian economic statistics.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#252

Post by allovernow »

alpineidyll3 wrote: post #195
_0uto wrote: post #31

I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system. In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and no…

Conservative perspectives often involve some sort of built-in need to proselytize, because they view life as a triumph of ego over intrinsic human weakness. There's an idea that all people need to hear the message of personal responsibility. Sadly data is weaker than any bias of perspectives, and people find it impossible to think causally without some larger brittle philosophical framework.

>Conservative perspectives often involve some sort of built-in need to proselytize, because they view life as a triumph of ego over intrinsic human weakness. There's an idea that all people need to hear the message of personal responsibility.

If we're reducing political parties to extreme stereotypes, then perhaps the pressure of the distant right is an appropriate counter to the pressure from the distant left which encourages hedonism and infantilism well into adulthood, shuffling responsibility onto the magical collective to solve problems.

And in this way society isn't totally lost, on average, if it exists somewhere in the middle.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#253

Post by gorbachev »

brightball wrote: post #38
totalthrowaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer. Meaningful work, or contributing to the wellbeing of those around you -- that would be a worthwhile goal. Suffering just so your family isn't hungry is a harder sell. Inevitably, someone will say they should just learn skills fr…

Nobody should be taking a bus for an hour to a minimum wage job. One of the reasons a job is MW is that they are everywhere. You don’t commute that far for minimum wage.

If you work in one of the US tech hubs, ask your janitorial staff how long their commute is.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#254

Post by bilbo0s »

bsanr2 wrote: post #211
Frost1x wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue is who owns these automation processes. If I used my vast financial resources to develop (i.e. pay people to develop) a new automation process, what rights do you have to my gains? Why should I share it with you? This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.

You're making a lot of assumptions about ownership. "Your" vast financial resources are just measures of debt (money is not personal property) secured by the government. We can always collectively decide that what you did to accrue that owed debt was not worth its valuation and take steps (e.g., taxation) to correct. "Your" automation process is built on publicly-funded research and using publicly-funded resources; t…

You have to wonder why we don't just tax a little more? Do we have plenty of resources already and we just don't give it to the people struggling who need it? Or do we really not have resources to help the overworked underpaid masses out here in opioid infested flyover country? If we don't have enough resources, why not tax a bit more to get the resources? If we do have the resources, why are we not helping these people out more?

Sometimes it's just baffling how everyone can see an obvious problem and no one moves to try to at least ameliorate it. Not even asking that it be completely solved, just try to make things a little better for those people.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#255

Post by endothrowho333 »

kolbe wrote: post #243
endothrowho333 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that you can't conclude anything from data, it's just that the things you can conclude from data are limited to only two "scientifically-sound" conclusions: >1). There is a relationship in your data >2). There isn't a relationship in your data From there, you can then setup further experiments to better understand why there is or isn't a relationship -- and perhaps find the opposite is true! It's the same re…

What would you say is better: him using an imperfect study, or you just expressing your opinion?

Full disclosure: I am affiliated with myself, and represent the views of me, myself, and I. I am very biased.

Me expressing my opinion, but I don't like either. So I try to steer away from expressing "my opinion," and sticking to only things that have a high probability of being true, which in this case, is the GGGP using an imperfect study incorrectly.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#256

Post by dang »

jkoudys wrote: post #22

America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.

> America has a weird sense of superiority

Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site. It leads to nationalistic flamewars, which we seriously don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#257

Post by tryptophan »

ghastmaster wrote: post #201
LorenPechtel wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That state never existed. If you were white and in the US you could--it's just we were pushing the bad jobs off on those we didn't notice. Now we can't.

Hate to break it to you but the vast majority of people living in poverty in the united states are and have been white. The majority of government assistance goes to poor whites. Poverty doesn't discriminate. The bad jobs were not pushed off on those we did not notice. The wealth of minorities was rising until we implemented the civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business.…

>The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964.

Well this is certainly an interesting take of the situation.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#258

Post by dang »

_0uto wrote: post #31

I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system. In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and no…

> I see a lot of protestant mentality here

Please keep religious flamebait off this site. It leads to religious flamewars, which we seriously don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#259

Post by chinesempire »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #168
behringer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get treatment for life-threatening "conditions". You can only get treatment for life-threatening "emergencies". You got a tumor? Good fucking luck. You got a seizure because of your tumor? Come on in and we'll make sure to send you an absurd bill later.

I know multiple poor people that had their cancers cured without cost to themselves, no "emergency" required. The reality isn't as bleak as you are making it. The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.

> The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world

No it doesn't.

But even if it was true (and it isn't) you should also specify which type of cancer.

No country gets every type of cancer better than any other.

For example if we consider stomach cancer, South Korea is on top with 57.90% survival rate, USA is 30 points lower at 29.10%

> which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated

It wouldn't also be possible if rich people couldn't get the same treatments other countries have developed by traveling abroad or having them for cheap in Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela.

But to put it in another way: take breast cancer, where USA leads the charts with 88.87% survival rate.

According to the sources "About 1 in 8 U.S. women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime."

In Italy, where I come from, we measure breast cancer as patients over 100,000 women, not in %.

"Breast cancer is the leading tumor among women in Italy ... The incidence per age group was estimated to exceed 100 new cases every 100,000 women ≥ 40 years of age"

100 over 100,000 is one in a thousands or 0,1%, which is 120 times better than U.S. 12%.

It means that every 120 women that develop breast cancer in USA there is only one Italian woman in the same condition.

That's what really an universal health care system make possible: to not develop the diseases.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#260

Post by sneak »

sokoloff wrote: post #161
_0uto wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if all improvements over the course of history would be kept in secret for gains of owners of capital. Who own rights to the invention of an axe? Probably the first one who put a stone on a piece of wood. Should he has all rights for it forever? I couldn't really agree.

There’s a difference between having the right to the concept of an axe and having the right to my specific axe . I think GP was speaking more towards the latter.

It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of Apple’s sequence of numbers that instruct it.
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