Let People Move to Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#301

Post by 6c696e7578 » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #295

6c696e7578 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose what I'm arguing for is keeping onshore, but allowing people to telecommute. They all speak the same language and understanding. The company doesn't lose anything, probably saves a great deal in real estate and building insurance.

Yeah, but why would they do that, if balfirevic is right (and I think he is)? Once everyone is telecommuting, the question becomes: do I want to pay a 50%-80% premium to get a native speaker, instead of someone who speaks it quite well and might have even worked previously in the UK?

I don't know, but there is often quality of work comes into question.

Businesses who look to offshore expect it to be cheap, they often find that cheap doesn't mean good. Good offshore may cost a similar amount to good onshore. Offshore may be be unsocial hours for local time.

There's also often a cost of the business decision makers taking a jolly trip to the offshore location to see their offices (no idea why this is needed), if telecommuting doesn't work well enough to trust the remote office, why go there?

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#302

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #299

war1025 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value is absolutely added by both, and suggesting otherwise is pretty naive. Landlords take on the responsibility for long-term ownership and maintenance of a property and give people access to it on a shorter term basis that is much easier to get out of. Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service. If you "eliminated lan…

Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs? Alternatively, we could make the government responsible for ones that individuals can't afford.

Sure, they could self-finance repairs. But how do you get from here to there, and is there the promised land you think it is?

You can't just take the houses away from landlords and rip up all the mortgages - not without destroying the economy. For example, there's a lot of peoples' pensions that are invested in mortgage-backed securities. Sure, it would be nice not to have a mortgage - but maybe not at the price of also not having a pension.

So, how do we get to this place of no landlords and no mortgages without blowing up large chunks of the economy? By the government buying all the mortgages and all the landlord-owned property. That's... rather a large amount of money. Where's the government going to get it? Either from taxes, or from just creating it. That would be quite a bit in taxes, which is kind of zero-sum (and if you think that they're just going to take the taxes from other people, it very rarely works that way). And creating the money would be inflationary, which causes its own kind of damage.

And, would this be the promised land? It would be a land where nobody built new houses ever again, or else a land where the government kept spending money to buy new houses. In one case you'd see the supply of houses age and deteriorate over time. In the other case, you'd see the decision of how many new houses to make being made politically, rather than by the market. That usually works out sub-optimally.

So be careful what you wish for. Not having to pay rent sounds nice. But your solution may be worse than the current problem.

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#303

Post by sgt101 » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #245

sgt101 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism.

That would be an economic or market structure, and may be a possible solution. I'm looking at LVT and land use regulation myself. My initial quip was to point out that (as I suspect @anonymoushn was alluding) the problem isn't technological. Rather it's one of incentives, politics, and market structure.

Yes - agree. I am being provocative as well (HN doesn't like, but sometimes it's useful).

This is a problem of policy and social engineering - technology can and will help, but it won't solve it.

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#304

Post by war1025 » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #299

war1025 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value is absolutely added by both, and suggesting otherwise is pretty naive. Landlords take on the responsibility for long-term ownership and maintenance of a property and give people access to it on a shorter term basis that is much easier to get out of. Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service. If you "eliminated lan…

Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs? Alternatively, we could make the government responsible for ones that individuals can't afford.

> Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs?

I paid cash for my house, and yes, that does mean that my present income is more fully available for repairs.

Rent and mortgages don't go solely toward upkeep of the property. The property itself has a value.

On the extreme short end of space ownership, you have hotel rooms that you rent day to day.

Zooming out a bit more, you have apartments and rental houses that you can rent month to month or year to year from the land lord.

Zooming out even more, you have mortgages, which are basically you in a rent-to-own agreement with a bank over the course of the mortgage.

I don't think most people have issues paying night-to-night for hotels. If you don't mind paying for a night in a hotel, why would longer term space rentals be an issue?

Further, mortgage rates are more or less at all time lows. So the bank isn't even taking that big of a cut of your money.

Landlords don't make that great of a return on their money either. Housing prices effect them just as much as someone buying a primary residence. Often the rent is too damn high because the housing cost itself is too damn high.

As to why housing markets in some major metros are so messed up, that seems to be largely down to artificial restrictions on supply vs demand.

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#305

Post by aguyfromnb » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

sgift wrote: post #125

aguyfromnb wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You most certainly can lend money you don't have. Of course, you're going to have to come up with it somehow (so will the bank), likely by borrowing it. Which is fundamentally no different than what a bank does, albeit their balance sheets are larger and counterparties different. It's "borrowing" all the way down,and how the financial system works.

> Of course, you're going to have to come up with it somehow (so will the bank), For the most part modern banks can lend money that didn't exist until they lend it to you and that stops existing the moment you pay it back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

>banks can lend money that didn't exist until they lend it to you and that stops existing the moment you pay it back

Of course. How else should the money supply increase but to create it out of thin air? All of it is. Imagine not being able to buy a house until Fred paid mortgage his off? This is a reason why getting off the gold standard was a good idea. What's the point of having a dollar be equivalent to the price of an ounce of gold (which itself is an arbitrary peg), along with all the mechanisms required to maintain that peg? If you want something equal to the value of an ounce of gold, buy an ounce of gold.

This is what Bitcoin proponents get wrong about its use as a currency; a static supply is a problem. Why would you want to limit people's ability to perform transactions in the unit of account? If you can't increase the supply as needed, then you have to find ways to further divide what's out there (which is just the other side of the same coin).

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#306

Post by scottLobster » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

0x445442 wrote: post #292

scottLobster wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, manufacturing. Not design. You can teach anyone with a high school education (even less, see 3rd world factories) how to solder or how to operate machinery efficiently. VLSI, circuit design, operating system development, FPGAs, even app development requires years of specialized training just to be competent at the fundamentals, usually taking the form of a degree. So if you want to hire designers with min…

So I guess you don't buy into "just learn to code"?

Haha, yeah it's the "just" part that's the issue. In all seriousness I'm actually helping my wife learn to code at the moment. Her last job was as a pharmacy tech, but she hated that job and isn't satisfied with me as the sole breadwinner. She hadn't even touched the command line until a couple of years ago. She's come a long way from zero and is now learning React, but it'll still be at least another year, maybe two before I'd say she's ready to produce something professional-quality on a professional schedule. And that's with me taking care of the bills, funding the educational resources she's using (not a 4-year degree), doing a LOT of tutoring in the first year and and passing along insights I didn't get until my first job. And she's put a minimum of 30 hours a week into it, often more.

I can only imagine what someone with greater responsibilities, less time and no mentoring would go through. Not saying it can't be done, clearly it has. But just because a few talented/lucky/insane people can start from nothing and strike it big doesn't make it accessible to the average coal miner. If it did our salaries would be a low lower.

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#307

Post by reallydontask » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

bitforger wrote: post #268

reallydontask wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Friends are peers that have similar life experiences and values (and humor) This is an pretty narrow definition of friendship.

If you have a better definition, I'd like to hear it. I don't have many friends, so my definition encompasses all of them. Maybe if I had a better definition, I'd be able to make more friends.

I'd open up your definition:

anybody instead of peers

some shared experiences or some shared values and forget about humour.

FWIW, I'm probably not qualified as I probably have more activity partners, or context friends, than true friends but your definition seemed incredibly limiting.

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#308

Post by brnt » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #294

brnt wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was not talking about you specifically. If you have never experienced or observed stratification, then you may simply not get around much (in terms of social circles). It's not that strange, I cannot afford it either, I just made some chance acquintances, mostly through my socially far more capabele partner. Class had become the most useful criterion to distinguish groups to me. It's not about guarding oneself exp…

I come from the UK, which is pretty strongly stratified in terms of class (to my knowledge, the most stratified, at least historically). My observation was that, as long as you're straightforward and pleasant, people from all backgrounds are unlikely to dislike you if you come from a 'higher' social class. They'll have lots of ideas about who you are or what you're like, but they are mostly positive. People from rich…

The point is not whether or not the differences are meaningful, the point is the differences exist, and are reinforced by self-selection, conscious or not. Parallel culture if you will. You are right, it doesn't have to be hard to cross the boundaries, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#309

Post by ck425 » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:56 AM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #145

ck425 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with the Scottish central belt. There are plenty of good jobs up here. Part of the reason for the London centricness is that relatively few people realise just how many good jobs there are outside of London.

All the jobs are a few clicks away from being found. London probably offers quite a few amenities that people want, even though they hate many aspects of it. One of the crucial amenities a big city provides is security that if you lose an income stream, you will be able to get another easily. How much are people willing to pay for that?

If you're a software engineer that security exists in every major city. Plus the cost of living to salary ratio is so much better that it's far easier to save an emergency fund.

Re: Let People Move to Jobs

#310

Post by 0x445442 » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 10:17 PM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #306

0x445442 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I guess you don't buy into "just learn to code"?

Haha, yeah it's the "just" part that's the issue. In all seriousness I'm actually helping my wife learn to code at the moment. Her last job was as a pharmacy tech, but she hated that job and isn't satisfied with me as the sole breadwinner. She hadn't even touched the command line until a couple of years ago. She's come a long way from zero and is now learning React, but it'll still be at least another year, maybe two…

Yeah, the notion we were just going to make all those folks who work with their hands into web devs was doomed to failure from the get go.