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Are jobs obsolete?

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Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#251

Post by timwiseman »

dbingham wrote: post #206
noahc wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need a class in school called 'Identifying and Creating Value in the 21st Century (like your great great grandparents did)." Let's be honest, that's where the jobs are going to come from and where they are going to go. The point of the class is to get people to go from "What do I want to be when I grow up" to thinking "How can I add value to some process that people will pay me for." This puts the responsi…

We need to leave behind the concept of "value". Value was created by scarcity. But scarcity is decreasing and, in some cases, disappearing entirely. If it costs me nothing to make a copy of something, then I have no incentive at all to pay money for it. It has no "value" to me. I can copy it instantly for free. And frankly, why should I pay money for it? Sure, someone had to do work to create it in the first place, b…

You are using value in a nonstandard way. Value and price are only loosely coupled. I get enormous value from things that are free (Python, Firefox, etc).

Also, I pay for things I could have gotten for free all the time. Sometimes this is to reward or encourage the person providing it and then it is called a tip or gratuitity (or sometimes donation, though that evokes charity in my mind rather than voluntary payment for something provided). Sometimes it is because paying for it is just more convenient than going out of my way to get the free version.

[Edit: Slight rewording for clarity]

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#252

Post by crizCraig »

I think he has a great point that the value a person creates is not easily compensated in an information economy. Right now the information economy makes up less than 5% of the total in the U.S.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9632169/EconomicCensus2007.html

from

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFEconFacts?_event=&#...

So advertising for the other sectors in the economy works well to support most of the information sector right now. What happens as those other sectors become more automated though? The smaller and smaller amount of people in charge of those sectors will become disproportionately compensated for the value they create. This is already happening in Wall Street for example. So we're going to need to find some way to compensate people for their digital contributions to things like open source, online communities like this, and other informational public goods or we'll be left relying on the government and/or super rich to distribute the abundance of wealth. Neither of which sound very appealing to me.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#253

Post by shoham »

wmeredith wrote: post #234
shoham wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the title was just to grab your attention. I don't agree with everything in the article, especially the idealization of the Middle (or 'Dark') Ages, but the idea that what kind of work people will do 30-50 years from now, I think will be as great of a shift as from the farm to the factory, or the factory to the office (though probably not as big of a shift as the agricultural revolution!) I think that th…

>>I think that the title was just to grab your attention. Unsupported inaccurate inflammatory content titles are called link bait/spam.

Well, like The New York Post. What do you expect from CNN!?!

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#254

Post by shoham »

ctdonath wrote: post #237
shoham wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the title was just to grab your attention. I don't agree with everything in the article, especially the idealization of the Middle (or 'Dark') Ages, but the idea that what kind of work people will do 30-50 years from now, I think will be as great of a shift as from the farm to the factory, or the factory to the office (though probably not as big of a shift as the agricultural revolution!) I think that th…

Rushkoff writes: "What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff." To wit, the discovered it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. With the lofty assumption the idle will, lacking want, pursue productive meaningful occupation, he fails to observe…

I think that his argument is flawed, but there's some merit to the idea that what a job means will, should and has shifted.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#255

Post by orangecat »

jergason wrote: post #168
orangecat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Reducing the income gap" is not an inherently good thing. If it is, you should be thrilled with the current economy: incomes for the rich have fallen more on a percentage basis than for the poor and middle class.

Citation for this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/economy/21inequal...

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#256

Post by wbienek »

Don't have much mercy when I read these kinds of stories. I went to a job interview back in 2000 for a 28,000 a year job. Knew 6 computer languages and significantly more than the interviewee and all this colleges employees. (in my opinion) this was a small college in Michigan. They never called me back. A few weeks later I started a small company. Today I make upwards of 250k a year. No college education. They (college people) can all go starving on the street like they would have left me and my two new born twins. No help from the "establishment" for me no matter how smart I was. Let em all lose their jib and starve.. Let em be in college debt. I smirk at the barrages who would have let me go homeless every time I read stories like this.

No quarter wad given to me. Now that theyre expected to oroduce. Now thier college means diddle it is my turn to watch from the sidelines.

I know that if I don't make money MYSELF nobody ----especially "college" people will help..

Posted from an iPad I never would have had if I let the establishment guide my life..

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#257

Post by njharman »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #63
njharman wrote: post #42

Most people work to get money to spend on stuff people are making. Full employment 40+ hours a week is obsolete. Consumerism is obsolete. We should all be working 10hrs/week or less and have/consume 1/10 to 1/4 of what we have/consume today. That's not gonna happen easily, but it's gonna happen . Perhaps not in my lifetime. I'm making guess that space exploitation will not ramp up in time, it might though.

Are you suggesting that 3/4th - 9/10th of spending is on luxury goods?

Not luxury goods, consumption goods. And not just spending but production.

Yes, a house bigger than you need, a new car (let alone a new luxury car) every 3 years, driving that car to work, alone, from the suburbs, bottled water shipped from Fiji, non-locally grown food, $70 sneakers (shipped across the globe btw), $5 coffee, almost all non-free entertainment, almost anything labeled as a consumer good.

Anything that's not healthcare, shelter, education, water/food is suspect.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#258

Post by wbienek »

Spyro7 wrote: post #209

Why is this being upvoted? This article begins with a questionable premise and then descends straight into misinformation. The problems in the USPS did not begin with email. They began with a highly questionable requirement that the USPS fund a plan to fully cover the estimated future health care costs of all current employees. They are the only government institution required to do this, and it has crippled their ab…

Let em go out of business. Back when I was jobless they never would have gave me a second look even though I could have ( and still can) streamline their business..

No mercy for stupidity, inefficiency and incompetence..

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#259

Post by wbienek »

netaustin wrote: post #243
Spyro7 wrote: post #209

Why is this being upvoted? This article begins with a questionable premise and then descends straight into misinformation. The problems in the USPS did not begin with email. They began with a highly questionable requirement that the USPS fund a plan to fully cover the estimated future health care costs of all current employees. They are the only government institution required to do this, and it has crippled their ab…

So far as I know, the Google Car has not displaced any taxi drivers yet, though the author of the post puts it in the same sentence as EZ Pass.

No mercy. Let em go out of business. It is a corrupt monopoly. Try to start a competing taxi business. (or tow business) and you'll see you do NOT live in a free market. Again. No mercy. After decades they'll be getting theirs.. (yes I tried once upon a time)

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#260

Post by wbienek »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #191

Let me see if I understand this reasoning correctly. Old, fragile and stiff huge organizations like the Post Office cannot provide the numbers of jobs they used to. The economy is changing. Therefore -- some hand-waving here -- the very idea of jobs is out-of-date. Ouch. But it gets better. We should pay folks not to work. After all, there's no jobs for them, so why should we expect them to do things that are impossi…

Simple solution to all this. But like most GOOD solutions it isn't without pain. Create a state in the union with very little or no regulations to compete with china. Boom. Done. Like how Nevada has great gambling and built their economy around that and ton this day no state has anything like the las Vegas strip.

It won't happen. America will continue to sink against china et al counties with no regulation. I have no mercy.. Don't take my advice. Go out of business

There is NO solution without real pain/sacrifice..

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