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Are jobs obsolete?

cnn.com

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Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#111

Post by johngalt »

tjstankus wrote: post #12

The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance. Reminds me of this quote from Jello Biafra: Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed pr…

We spend more per student than we ever have in history. Why wasn't the country in chaos when there weren't public schools at all?

Teaching the kids that they are owed something merely because they have less than someone else? Seems to justify theft to me.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#112

Post by [deleted] »

tjstankus wrote: post #12

The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance. Reminds me of this quote from Jello Biafra: Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed pr…

[deleted]

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#113

Post by tibbon »

In a related video that CNN linked in, it was being questioned if companies that aren't hiring are being unpatriotic. Union leader James Hoffa was saying that Apple is being unpatriotic by not hiring here in the US.

But, I don't quite understand James Hoffa saying that Apple isn't hiring- they are hiring both retail and corporate jobs.

http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/

Yes, they employ and sub-contract a lot of people overseas, but that's just the way things work in 2011. How many people are going to pay $10,000 for a laptop or $1,400 for an iPhone? That's probably the difference in price that it would require for Apple to make their products 100% here.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#114

Post by ams6110 »

ryandvm wrote: post #29

It's a fact that computers/automation are going to continue to obsolete human jobs. Nothing short of a technological apocalypse is going to reverse that. And I agree that we shouldn't really lament the reality that a trucker who used to spend 50 hours a week vacuously staring at the highway no longer has to do that. But that's a triumph. One more human mind freed up for greater accomplishments. That said, I'm dubious…

Such fundamental social changes rarely happen smoothly and peacefully. The next 50 years should be interesting.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#115

Post by jbooth »

ams6110 wrote: post #106
jbooth wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the landlord can't afford mortgage, how they gonna lower the rent? Run that scenario forward a couple steps and you see the real looming problem.

Landlord is foreclosed, bank sells at a loss, new owner rents at a lower amount. Nobody said it would be pretty.

Ok, so we had a problem the size of a few paychecks, now it's the size of a piece of property. Hey, whatever, right?

But I said a couple steps, keep going, multiply that by a few hundred thousand or a couple million around the country. Can you think of any other problems that might result?

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#116

Post by CWuestefeld »

[deleted] wrote: post #58
dreamdu5t wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what Jello implies is wrong. People have the inherent ability to do bad things and treat eachother differently, regardless of whatever property system you have in place. Unemployment and undereducation will not be eliminated by the removal of private property. You don't have to be a property owner to be a self-absorbed dick that doesn't care about other people. If people want to make sure everybody has a livi…

[deleted]

I'm missing the connection between your comment and the parent. But to answer your question:

In times of economic hardship, people have less to lose. If you've got everything you want, you don't want to rock the boat. If you're dissatisfied but are still able to make a decent existence (whatever that means) for you and your family, then you might want to rock the boat, but you're unlikely to take the risk. If you're already in a situation where you can't provide, then there is very little risk, so what the heck.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#117

Post by ippisl »

chailatte wrote: post #36

My theory from before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769 - In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet. - 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via se…

One thing that would really help such scenario become an affordable reality, is seeing the cost of living rapidly decline for people living with low wages.

For them , the major living expenses are housing, healthcare, food and energy, and a car(when there's no decent public transportation).

Those areas mostly doesn't see big cost reductions. Some of it is because high barriers to entry, regulation, dislike of low-end disruptive innovation by people(in healthcare and probably in housing), low investment in r&d (in construction) and other reasons.

On the other hand, if you look at the third world, those are exactly the ares they out innovate the west:

1. low cost housing(Tatas to build world's cheapest home for Euro 500[1], cost of residential buildings made with reinforced concrete to average of less than 1,500 yuan($235) / square meter[2])

2. low cost healthcare(Dr. shetty, reducing the cost of heart surgery to $2000 and working towards $800[3], program that trains lay people to treat depression in india[4] , and many many others)

3. low cost transportation : the famous TATA nano.

4. while u.s. is really innovative in this field, china is probably leading this field throught huge investments and low labor costs.

So this leads to an interesting situation: In 20 years , when automation might take hold(here and in the third world), who will be better prepared for it?

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2770956 [2]http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/45-more-buildings-to-follow... [3]http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-06/world/india.health.cities... [4]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/world/asia/11iht-depress.1...

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#118

Post by nitrogen »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #99
hackinthebochs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're reading that way too literally. The point is that the property owners, those with wealth, are too greedy to allow their wealth to be taxed for social services such as better schools and an improved prison system. It is this greed that comes back to bite them when those kids rob and kill them.

those with wealth, are too greedy to allow their wealth to be taxed for social services such as better schools My property tax bills beg to disagree with you. For the 16 years I've owned my house, I've watched the portion of my taxes that go to our schools go up far faster than the rate of inflation. If there's a problem with education, it is absolutely NOT that there is insufficient money being invested into it. Thi…

I believe I have discussed education issues on here with you in the past. Suffice it to say, I believe you are sorely mistaken.

1. Proportions of taxes can shrink or grow at any rate independent of inflation. This doesn't say that the absolute value given to education per student (and that's the measure that matters) has or has not exceeded inflation.

2. Statistics saying that e.g. yy% of students do not benefit from reduced class sizes or increased educational spending, where yy is some large double-digit number, ignore the critical exceptions to those statistics. Public education must address the worst-case outcomes, not just the average case, or those (100-yy)% of dropouts will sink into ghettos and become a significant drain on society, when most of them have the potential to be net contributors.

3. As I'm sure I've said before, talk to a few overworked, stressed-out teachers after an arduous day of dealing with students threatening them with violence, administrators not supporting them with classroom materials (try teaching math without any textbooks), etc. It's like babysitting 250 erratic 4-year-olds a day without the right toys to pacify them, except those 4-year-olds can kill you.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#119

Post by jbooth »

ojbyrne wrote: post #84
jbooth wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way that there's a comparable level of jobs. You know how many people the newspaper industry used to employ nationwide? Craigslist had substantially less than 100 last I heard (maybe they've grown a bit), pushing a way larger volume of classifieds, without any expensive correspondents or any of that news crap. As the original commentator stated, bringing their jobs back would be silly make-work now that th…

Kijiji, AirBnB, Cars.com, etc. etc. See http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-cr... I think you didn't grasp the phrase "second order effects."

There should really be a Godwin-like rule when it comes to accusing someone of not knowing how to read.

How many people does AirBnB employ, again? I've never even heard of Kijiji.

Add up all those companies and you're around the level of a single 100k city newspaper. Maybe 2-3 of them. Did you know that newspapers actually employ a lot of people who's whole job is to get stuff printed out on paper and delivered to everyone's door?

Again, nobody's arguing for going back to stupid inefficient gray-paper classifieds. They're just pointing out that efficiency has eliminated more jobs than it's created this time around (see also manufacturing), and there doesn't seem to be an obvious next step for those unemployed if they can't learn programming.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#120

Post by shoham »

Thanks for sharing! Great article, reminded me of a great speech I read recently that Paul Graham gave in 2005:

http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html

The jist is the same as Rushkoff's, and Lanier's conclusion-- that people perform better when they do something they care about enough to do it for free. The paradox with the digital age is that consumers have grown accustomed to not paying for digital goods -- and artists have grown accustomed to settling for any attention they can get, which means marketing gimmicks, and settling for the lowest common denominator far too often for authors of original content. Lanier covers this well, for sure:

http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

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