141–150 of 163 posts
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How about putting back together giant structures that are falling apart? Our infrastructure is rotting away --- that Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007 was a bit of a wake-up call. There's no shortage of stuff in the United States that needs to get fixed.
Wouldn't you need some specialized skills for that? Trusting unemployed psychology majors with bridge reenforcement doesn't inspire much confidence.
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I spent a year after college looking for jobs to apply to. I found three I was remotely qualified for (those I applied to). If I applied for even a small portion of the jobs that pop up on local job boards, it would consume every hour of the day. In a normal economy you'd see entry level jobs there. But every job wants years of experience and specialized certifications. I don't even have the means to get the certific…
One piece of advice: don't let the job ad make you think you're unqualified and stop you from applying. Employers often a) don't know what they want/need b) throw everything they can think of in that ad. It may be a challenge to get past the naive recruiter without all of the skills mentioned on your resume, but it can be worth it because the interview will bear out whether you'll actually be useful to the hiring man…
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Alright, she was an honors student - what skills did she learn?
Presumably skills for nursing the mentally infirm, as the account of her employment after her education indicated. The statement that she was a honors student has nothing to do with her education, but is an expression that she's devoted to her tasks.
I do not debate her devotion to her education or her job duties, but the misfortune of modern youth is that our educational backgrounds often bear no resemblance to what will bring value to an employer.
If her resume says "BSc, Disadvantaged Female Chimpanzee Sciences, Harvard," it might well be that she studied hard. However, her studies are likely to have done little to improve her value to most employers.
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I've never understood how being "overqualified" is a problem. No one says you have to list your degree or make mention of it. Just pretend you don't have one? What am I missing here? Are people too egotistical to accept a job at McDonald's when they have a degree? It has always been my opinion that any job is better than no job. If you need money, take what work you can. There's nothing that says you can't keep looki…
For an employer there is a real cost associated with finding and hiring a new employee. The worry is that someone who is over-qualified is going to continue to be looking for higher-paid/higher-skilled work that is a better fit for them. That employee will also be generally less concerned about their future career path at the job they are over-qualified for, which can lead to reduced quality of work. In a customer-fa…
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You were called out for it in the previous thread, and yet you're still including children in your full-time labor force participation rate. And as near as I can tell you've conjured your "80% of the poor don't work at all." figure out of thin air. You don't adequately address the objections in the linked thread, and you're making the same oversimplifications.
You were called out for it in the previous thread, and yet you're still including children in your full-time labor force participation rate. Yes, Michaelchiasri raised this objection. He didn't bother to do the math, which showed that it has little effect. I addressed his concerns in the reply to that comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441 It's very strange - you read his comment, but not my reply to it…
It increased the figure from 10% to 15%. Why are you deliberately deflating the figure when it still appears to support your point after removing children?
>I'll give you a hint: 7.5 million is about 20% of 37.3 million.
That figure is the percentage of the poor who work or look for work for at least 27 weeks per year, not the percentage of the poor who do any work or look for work at all. Farm laborers for example could work 50 hour weeks May-October and only hit 25 weeks. And they would be poor.
Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more. Wealth is manufactured by machines not people. Some generation has to close the gap between how wealthy society is and how much average member of society has to work for same basic needs. You can't make basic necessities cost always nearly same amount of work because that work thanks to technology is producing more and mor…
Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more. This is a myth. The poor work very little - their full time labor force participation rate is only 10% or so (this includes both the employed and unemployed). 80% of the poor don't work at all. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf (Before you criticize this statistic as being too simple, go see this thread where I answer m…
Zinn: There are two issues here: First, why should we accept our culture's definition of those two factors? Why should we accept that the "talent" of someone who writes jingles for an Advertising agency advertising dog food and gets $100,000 a year is superior to the talent of an auto mechanic who makes $40,000 a year? Who is to say that Bill Gates works harder than the dishwasher in the restaurant he frequents, or that the CEO of a hospital who makes $400,000 a year works harder than the nurse, or the orderly in that hospital who makes $30,000 a year? The president of Boston University makes $300,000 a year. Does he work harder than the man who cleans the offices of the university?
Talent And hard work are qualitative factors which cannot be measured quantitatively. Since there is no way of measuring them quantitatively we accept the measure given to us by the very people who benefit from that measuring! I remember Fiorello Laguardia (US Senator) standing up in Congress in the twenties, arguing against a tax bill that would benefit the Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, and asking if Mellon worked harder than the housewife in East Harlem bringing up three kids on a meager income. And how do you measure the talent of an artist, a musician, a poet, an actor, a novelist, most of whom in this society cannot make enough money to survive - against the talent of the head of any corporation. I challenge anyone to measure quantitatively the qualities of talent and hard work. There is one possible answer to my challenge: Hours of work vs. Hours of leisure. Yes, That's a nice quantitative measure. Well, with that measure,the housewife should get more than most or all corporate executives. And the working person who does two jobs -- and there are millions of them -- and has virtually no leisure time, should be rewarded far more than the corporate executive who can take two hour lunches, weekends at his summer retreat, and vacations in Italy. ... But better still, why not use as a criterion for income what people need to live a decent life, and since most people's basic needs are similar there would not be an extreme difference in income but everyone would have enough or food, housing, medical care, education, entertainment, vacations.... Of course there is the traditional objection that if we don't reward people with huge incomes society will fall apart, that progress depends on those people. A dubious argument. Where is the proof that people need huge incomes to give them the incentive to do important things? In fact, we have much evidence that the profit incentive leads to enormously destructive things -- Whatever makes profit will be produced, and so nuclear weapons, being more profitable than day care centers, will be produced.
And people do wonderful things (teachers, doctors, nurses, artists, scientists,inventors) without huge profit incentives. Because there are rewards other than monetary rewards which move people to produce good things -- the reward of knowing you are contributing to society, the reward of gaining the respect of people around you. If there are incentives necessary to doing certain kinds of work, those incentives should go to people doing the most undesirable, most unpleasant work, to make sure that work gets done. I worked hard as a college professor, but it was pleasurable work compared to the man who came around to clean my office. By what criterion (except that created artificially by our culture) do i need more incentive than he does?
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The fact is than even the educated kids are unemployable. We constantly try to hire graduate developers here in London but the fact is that most of those kids are simply unemployable. They have impressive degrees from the best universities, but I simply can't hire someone who can't code a simple Fibonacci algorithm at the whiteboard in the interview room. In the language of their choice. I'd even accept an only margi…
fib a b 1 = 1
fib a b 0 = 0
fib a b n = (fib a b (n - 1)) + (fib a b (n -2))
I'm most worried not for the numbers as for the corrosive effect long periods of unemployment have on employability. You lose the simple habits which are required for lots of gainful employment, such as "getting up before 9 AM consistently" and "working mostly non-stop for 8 hours a day". I see this in a lot of these articles where folks will, e.g., claim they applied for 15 jobs in 3 weeks. At some point the new nor…
This is so true. I have a friend, fresh out of college with a Masters degree in CS from a German university, who has been unemployed for about a year now and in that time he has sent out maybe 10 to 15 applications. I carefully try to nudge him in the right direction by keeping an eye open for job offers that might interest him or by suggesting programming challenges/projects that could improve his skills. But instea…
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Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more. This is a myth. The poor work very little - their full time labor force participation rate is only 10% or so (this includes both the employed and unemployed). 80% of the poor don't work at all. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf (Before you criticize this statistic as being too simple, go see this thread where I answer m…
Please go read Howard Zinn. You are 100% wrong. Poor people work more hours, harder jobs, more dangerous jobs, are more likely to die at a younger age etc etc. Everything is worse for poor people and your argument of just blaming the poor is counter-productive and myth. Zinn: There are two issues here: First, why should we accept our culture's definition of those two factors? Why should we accept that the "talent" of…
The BLS disagrees. Can you tell me a reason I should trust Howard Zinn over the government agency tasked with measuring such things?
As for working harder jobs, I am agnostic. If you have evidence, cite it. I agree the poor die younger. I won't address the remainder of your post, it's mostly unsupported value judgments and opinion.
The fact is than even the educated kids are unemployable. We constantly try to hire graduate developers here in London but the fact is that most of those kids are simply unemployable. They have impressive degrees from the best universities, but I simply can't hire someone who can't code a simple Fibonacci algorithm at the whiteboard in the interview room. In the language of their choice. I'd even accept an only margi…
I've been working in industry for over 10 years and the only time I've ever had to write a fibonacci sequence generator was during a code challenge (that lead to an interview).