Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay • Hacker News Board

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

#641

Post by wolf550e » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #629

datashow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics being politically motivated. This is a very new accusation. Do you have any reference?

The notion that unemployment (or other economic) statistics are manipulated is neither novel nor confined to the US specifically. Whether it's generally accurate is another question. But a Google Scholar search will (along with numerous false hits) turn up multiple discussions: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=une... I've chosen Scholar rather than a general Web (or literature) search as the f…

There was that article I saw on HN where IIRC a doctor explained that disability diagnosis depends on the kind of work a person can get. If they are a blue collar worker and they can't stand for a whole shift, they get disability. If they can sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and work, they don't get disability, for same medical issue.

People without college degrees get disability and stop seeking employment, making the economy worse off but making the employment statistics look better.

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

#642

Post by quaquaqua1 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

ernst_klim wrote: post #622

quaquaqua1 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>agriculture is way harder than php an illiterate man can pull potatoes out of the ground.

> an illiterate man can pull potatoes You need to put it there first, and do so avoiding the eruption of soil. Agriculture is very hard and requires much knowledge. Without knowledge you'll destroy both the crop and the land.

The potato puller is not fulfilling the role of agricultural designer. He or she is literally visually identifying a potato and using physics to pull it out of the ground.

It's like the difference between programming (fulfilling tasks), and system architecture, which is something I can't do because I don't have experienxe with huge enterprise stacks.

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

#643

Post by quaquaqua1 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #614

quaquaqua1 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>agriculture is way harder than php an illiterate man can pull potatoes out of the ground.

No Sorry. Once you understand how a loop and a decision statement works, most of the programming is already demystified. You can make bank on incremental learning and writing applications. The stakes in agriculture are higher. Who ever thinks manual labor is easy doesn't know what they are talking about. Apart from the tiredness, fatigue part of it. You also get injured, could lose crop to disease, floods etc. Agricu…

You seem to be misunderstanding.

A person who cannot read and write in any language cannot, by definition, write source code.

However, that same person can still receive a verbal command telling them to pull a potato out of the ground. Or move a box from one place to another.

This statement has nothing to do with the detrimental aspects of manual labor. Sitting at a desk as a programmer also has detrimental aspects.

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

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Post by sabujp » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

7thaccount wrote: post #479

hacknat wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it is a total lie and a very narrow definition of utility. Arguably, we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc), and over priced some of the dumbest (sorry, but if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else). Finally, nothing in evolutionary biology teaches us that human beings ought to work.…

I think work is pretty important to being human, but working 40-60 hours a week is absurd. 30 seems like a sweet spot to me. If we could remote, do only 30, and reduce pointless meetings than I bet we'd have a lot more time for the things that make us happy like family, side projects, exercise, and Netflix.

change netflix to gaming and you might be onto something

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

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Post by _jal » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

CivBase wrote: post #298

_jal wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers That's hilarious. I mean, you are correct that employers bundle employees together. But without massive government intervention during and after WWII, the industry would have been wildly different, and the way the trend began was highly historically contingent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 Econ 101 is insufficient for understand…

I do not want to spread misinformation. If that statement was incorrect, could you let me know how to correct it?

It is mainly that economic factors regarding employment insurance bundling are side effects of having employment-based insurance, not the cause.

It is very useful to look at other countries - we have lots of natural experiments in health care markets. If bundling were determinative of market structure, you'd see the same pattern elsewhere.

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

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Post by vertex-four » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

CivBase wrote: post #605

vertex-four wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, the distinction between having health insurance and being able to receive necessary healthcare is not a huge distinction. Fairly sure you know this.

I would consider a distinction between financial ruin and death to be fairly significant. That doesn't mean I think a system that so frequently results in financial ruin is acceptable. My intention is not to say "you're just broke, you're not dead ". Quite the opposite. My intention is to say that health care access is not limited by whether you have a job - it's whether you have money. Plenty of people have money bu…

Emergency healthcare prevents some causes of death - generally, those which can be fixed in an ER and allow the person to continue living a mostly normal life after. Take the example of a diabetic person, or a suicidally depressed person, as counter-examples which cannot be fixed in an A&E environment and will lead to death.

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

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Post by FireBeyond » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

lenkite wrote: post #639

Erem wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why? Practically speaking, voters do because we live in a democracy. It is perfectly fine for a society to decide "a full time job should have to pay enough to cover a person's full-time living expenses", to define all those terms reasonably, and presto enforce it as law.

It is also perfectly fine for the free market to decide this. This is society too and captures relative value far more effectively and adaptably than a fixed one-time vote.

The free market considers the monetary tradeoffs in this.

Comparing it to a holistic societal value (quality of life, family time, other non-monetary factors) is a disservice, that I believe negates the (subjective) "effective and adaptable" value measurement of the free market.

Otherwise you're just distilling people's lives and communities down to a dollar value, which in many people's eyes is the dark/down side of capitalism and how we ended up here to begin with.

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

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Post by kds3 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

majos wrote: post #347

nitrogen wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders Yeah we do, touchscreen menus (or ATM style pushbutton menus in places with bad weather). There are factories that assemble frozen mini burgers for supermarkets. There are pizza vending machines out there. So an entire fast food restaurant could be turned into a vending machine with current technology.

If you think the technology is there, what explains its lack of adoption? I don’t think McDonalds et al. are in the business of leaving easy optimization on the table. (My own guess is that touch screens are still more expensive and buggy than humans, and machine-made food still trades off novelty to be profitable. But I don’t know.)

In my city almost all of them were replaced by big self-service touchscreen displays with credit card reader attached. It's usually 4-6 machines and one assistant on call from kitchen area / takeout area when someone wants to pay with cash. They also help clients use touchscreen display to make orders when someone don't understand how to work with them.

So my guess for lack of adoption can be explained by:

- inertia and lack of incentives (who said recession?),

- people with cash,

- people who aren't good with technologies,

- people who have no one to talk to (they don't know what they want to eat today and want your advice).

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

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Post by Shacklz » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

huntie wrote: post #541

JDiculous wrote: post #309

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Yes it's a ludicrous notion that working for work's sake is a good thing. I just watched the documentary "American Factory" (highly recommended), and it's pretty clear to me that doing repetitive manual labor work in a factory is grueling, mind-numbingly boring, dangerous, and not something we should be doing if we can automate it - not to mention low status and low pay. I'd bet that most of the politicians idealizin…

I wouldn't act like you're better than politicians when your "expertise" is based on a documentary. My experience is that factory work is not dangerous[1] and companies try to eliminate any danger if it's brought up because any OSHA/medical costs are very expensive. My experience is also that the work is pretty easy. It can be boring but so are most programming jobs. I don't understand how writing CRUD day after day…

> The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are.

That's such a ridiculous statement for someone on HN. If we were to believe such a thing, why would you want to advance at all, if not for removing/reducing the work load imposed on people, or, equivalently, improving productivity per working hour?

EDIT: An article in the NYT regarding this topic came to my mind - about automation/robots etc. in Sweden. Can highly recommend it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/the-robots-are-c...

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

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Post by BurningFrog » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #560

BurningFrog wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can hate your job and still see that it serves an important purpose.

You can also hate your job and see that it serves no purpose, or worse that you are doing harm (like working collections for predatory lenders or in a factory that churns out bombs that will be dropped on someone).

You can even love your job and see that it serves no purpose!