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9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

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Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#171

Post by sanderjd »

chc wrote: post #147
sanderjd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that business shouldn't be expected to train its workforce is intriguing to me. This seems to be an underlying assumption in our society, but I don't recall ever having heard an argument for it one way or the other. Isn't a business that refuses to provide any of the necessary education for its employees profiting from a well-educated society without pitching in anything for the bill? If all governments worl…

Businesses pay taxes and spark huge amounts of taxable activity in the course of operating — that's how they pitch in (even discounting the non-tax benefits that businesses provide to society). If society is not providing education with those tax dollars, that would be society's choice. I can see some reasons why businesses might want to provide education (and many do in certain circumstances), but in general, I don'…

I would be interested to see some quantification of the total cost to educate a company's work force, compared with its tax burden (and the "taxable activity" it sparks, if that is quantifiable in some way), for a number of different types of companies. Has anyone seen data like this? Doing some napkin-style calculations it seems like I could convince myself of either conclusion.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#172

Post by clebio »

natmaster wrote: post #72
jameskilton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement is disjointed and impossible to follow. Both parties are obsessing over jobs, and both parties have different ways to "fix" this problem. If you want to discuss regulations, lets discuss how the lack of regulation led to the housing bubble and the near collapse of our entire economy. If you want to talk about "robotic" jobs, please discuss how this is supposed to change? Do you want the government to p…

No straw men please. I don't care about political parties, why is this suddenly a political discussion about what the government should do? I said the government should stop stifling innovation, not stifle it in a different manner. If people don't want a job that's their problem, not mine. I don't see why I should be worrying about people not interested in their own prosperity. And wow, way to make blanket statements…

>I don't care about political parties, why is this suddenly a political discussion...

Probably because your first half-sentence of your original comment was itself a political discussion: "This is why I'm so against the luddite regulations of liberals..."

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#173

Post by sanderjd »

jshen wrote: post #140
gaius wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's very warm and fluffy but it should be obvious that an education system that doesn't create more value than it consumes will eventually bankrupt it's host society.

I think you're mixing multiple issues into one big ball of yarn. A solid case can be made that America's biggest problem right now is our populations inability to think critically. "here, take this loan with fluctuatings interest rates that only lasts 5 years. don't worry you can refinance in 5 years after your house is worth more". "Don't worry about eating well or exercising, here are some pills that will solve it…

That isn't a solid case for our population's inability to think critically, it's a solid case for the problems caused by the necessity of specialization in a highly complex society. In nearly every interaction outside our chosen areas of expertise, we are all on the wrong end of an information asymmetry. Expecting everyone in society to have at least an intermediate level of expertise in is not the solution.

Here's an example - I go to the doctor, the doctor prescribes a certain cholesterol medication, I go pick it up and start taking it regularly. There's every chance that next year, someone on the internet will be implying that I'm stupid, that I lack critical thinking skills, because everyone knows that this cholesterol drug causes a major medical condition. I'll be told that anyone who knew anything about medicine at the time I was prescribed this drug would have told me that I shouldn't have taken it. And yet, my doctor, who presumably did know things about medicine, told me to take it. Should I have done my own due diligence into this drug? How would I know where to start? Do I need to be taught biology so that I know how to figure out which medicine is and isn't safe? Does everyone need to have enough understanding of medicine to make these sorts of decisions?

The financial system is less complicated than medicine, but it is not at all trivial. People who were sold snake oil by those with more expertise than themselves do not lack critical reasoning skills. They merely trusted authority, which we all have to do on a daily basis just to get by in a world where everything is complex.

tl;dr; People who didn't understand the consequences of adjustable rate mortgages or believe that prayer is the only way they can contribute to solving our debt problem aren't stupid; they don't know much about finance, but they probably know a lot about something else.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#174

Post by sixtofour »

samlevine wrote: post #134
sixtofour wrote: post #80

In a reply elsewhere here, I said "people do need to suck it up and learn new skills." How many people know how to learn new skills, or are able to recognize quickly that they need to do so? Is that a missing element in our education? You spend 12 years drinking what they're selling, and then suddenly you're expected to know how to re-tool yourself. Shouldn't education be structured in part to teach and reinforce sel…

> Is that a missing element in our education? The missing element may be learning itself. If you don't come out of college with an ability to learn new things on your own or with the help of others you may have missed the point. I've spent a significant amount of my adult life teaching people how to use Microsoft Office products (i.e. I've done tech support in some fashion or another for a while now). Some of them ha…

"The missing element may be learning itself. If you don't come out of college with an ability to learn new things on your own or with the help of others you may have missed the point."

Fair point, but I was focused more on K12, particularly if the idea that more people should go to votech and less to college catches on.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#175

Post by tsotha »

thisuser wrote: post #165
tsotha wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Government cannot create jobs. >This is nonsense. The government can fund projects that create jobs. There's no evidence this is a net creator of jobs, though. There's a lost opportunity cost to take into account here.

There's also no evidence that keeping taxes low (the opportunity cost) creates jobs. Just look at our employment performance over the last decade

Where are taxes low? Certainly not where I live.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#176

Post by zwieback »

damienkatz wrote: post #115
zwieback wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Materials are much better now than in the 60s or 70s but not as good as in the more distant past. My house was built in the 40s and looks better than 10 or 15 year old houses in the area. On the other hand, insulation was crap or non-existent then and furnaces were less efficient.

Survivorship bias. Poorly built houses from long ago are no longer here, reminding us how poorly they were constructed, only the best examples survive. In 150 years, only the best houses built today will still be standing, and people then will be compare these houses with flimsy mass produced homes and say the same things.

Some bias, yes, but there are other things at work. When my house was built large beams, wide siding boards and clear wood for hardwood floors was readily available. As the supply of those materials shrank cheaper woods and the first engineered wood products showed up but they weren't particularly good. Builders were switching to aluminum windows, formica, carpeting and drywall but hadn't necessarily figured out how to build well with those materials.

Now we have higher quality engineered materials made from cheaper wood but they cost a lot more so people don't use them for mass construction.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#177

Post by sanderjd »

kalid wrote: post #92
jarrett wrote: post #52

The question of whether automation causes unemployment to rise in the long run is addressed in detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_automation_to_u... TL;DNR for the Wikipedia article: People have worried about machines putting humans out of work for centuries. But the unemployment rate has not risen steadily over the same period even as technology has constantly grown. The long term trend (measu…

I'm probably missing something, but I don't see how driving the marginal cost of human necessities (food, shelter, clothing, health care, education) to zero is anything but a good thing. Is the world worse off because we have innumerable, self-replicating automated "robots" (plants) which, for free, convert carbon dioxide back into oxygen? Should we prefer a universe where humans must do this themselves? Now what if…

I think what you are missing is the in between phase where scarcity still exists, but the best way to produce scarce outputs does not involve humans, besides those who own or run the scarce-output-production entities. This seems to me to either produce societies with wild inequities between a very few producers and a very many do-nothings, or the types of socialist utopias that we appear to be really horrible at as humans. The everyone-has-a-magical-everything-maker phase, I agree, that sounds pretty solid.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#178

Post by tomkarlo »

MoreTuple wrote: post #82
muhfuhkuh wrote: post #54

IMO, the problem is much more than just automation and advancement in technology. It's actually far graver, and maybe inexorable at least in the short term. Hate the man or his policies (or both), but you can't deny President Obama's observation that training education is the real problem in the so-called "jobless recovery". America as it currently stands has a total, almost prideful disregard for education (public a…

Every person that I know that has considered starting their own business has decided against it for one reason only, health insurance. They have always been the obtainer in chief of health insurance for the family and it is too risky to go without. I strongly suspect that a public health option would blow the job market wide open between folks who want to retire but can't because health insurance is idiotically expen…

This is so true... if you don't have a spouse whose coverage you can utilize, the cost of health insurance is prohibitive, ESPECIALLY for anyone over 30 who has a spouse and kids. At that point going without insurance (as I did when doing a startup, and so many other entrepreneurs I've seen do) is not just risky, it's irresponsible and foolhardy. Taking financial risks to start a business is fine - but you shouldn't have to risk your health and your family's health.

If the government wants to see more people starting new businesses and taking risks, it needs to remove the HUGE disparity in healthcare costs between working for a large corporation and going solo. There's just no reason it should exist.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#179

Post by [deleted] »

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #167
chernevik wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, your own response raises the elaborated problems to your proposals. But you're so committed to your preferred end-state that you've flipped the obvious answers. State bureaucrats will be smarter than federal? because they're "decentralized"? Healthy people will pay premium for a program that will take them at any time? C'mon man, really? This stuff doesn't even link up with your first explanation of the pro…

"State bureaucrats will be smarter than federal? because they're "decentralized"?" "Smarter"? Why would they need to be "smarter"? They just need to analyze a business plan just like any other bank would (which is why I propose a "credit union" style of management and disbursement), but you're saying it will be rife with waste and fraud. I disagree, and can name this very network upon which we disagree as just one co…

[deleted]

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#180

Post by sanderjd »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #170
sanderjd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that business shouldn't be expected to train its workforce is intriguing to me. This seems to be an underlying assumption in our society, but I don't recall ever having heard an argument for it one way or the other. Isn't a business that refuses to provide any of the necessary education for its employees profiting from a well-educated society without pitching in anything for the bill? If all governments worl…

People can leave their jobs at-will, which makes it is lower-risk to employ people your competitors trained than to train them yourself.

But it is higher-risk to be unable to find anyone employable than it is to train people yourself. So the system depends on a surplus of already-trained workers, which someone needs to provide, or everyone suffers.
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