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‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

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Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#191

Post by dragonwriter »

tptacek wrote: post #70
dllthomas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother recently finished nursing school. The number of times he got the question, "you're gonna be a male nurse?" ... He had a number of cute responses.

The prejudice and stereotyping here is ridiculous, but honestly, I think something that needs to happen (for a variety of reasons) is for the term "nurse" to be retired, and replaced with something like "medical associate". The nursing profession is extraordinarily important, and we underutilize it in this country. Most of us should be talking to "nurses" much more frequently than we do, and much more often than we t…

> I think something that needs to happen (for a variety of reasons) is for the term "nurse" to be retired, and replaced with something like "medical associate".

Nursing has its own tradition and model of education , training, and care that is quite distinct from that of medicine. Nurses aren't medical associates. (And there already is a profession called, depending on jurisdiction, physician associate or physician assistant -- which follows the medical rather than nursing model -- which would be confusing if nurses were renamed medical associates.)

And, given the idea that nurses are increasingly the dominant point of contact, it would make more sense (were we to decide to erase the distinction) to rename physicians "nursing supervisors" rather than the other way around. Of course, confusion with names of existing roles would again be a problem.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#192

Post by antisthenes »

jethro_tell wrote: post #37
retbull wrote: post #5

It is interesting that the people who are losing jobs aren't retraining. What exactly is Trump/Republican party going to do to help with that? Bring back Coal when renewable is cheaper?

What are you going to retrain as? A 50 year old programmer with no experience and 50,000 in school loans? I was a carpenter, I retrained at 28 and it was rough. I can't even imagine being older. Most of the guys I worked with out in the field didn't even own computers. They were just getting real phones. It's a brain rewiring not just picking up a couple new skills.

I think most people underestimate the amount of time and effort involved in retraining.

People are good with technology grew up with it their entire lives. There are exceptions, but if anything, they prove the rule.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#193

Post by jethro_tell »

antisthenes wrote: post #192
jethro_tell wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you going to retrain as? A 50 year old programmer with no experience and 50,000 in school loans? I was a carpenter, I retrained at 28 and it was rough. I can't even imagine being older. Most of the guys I worked with out in the field didn't even own computers. They were just getting real phones. It's a brain rewiring not just picking up a couple new skills.

I think most people underestimate the amount of time and effort involved in retraining. People are good with technology grew up with it their entire lives. There are exceptions, but if anything, they prove the rule.

I think people also underestimate the amount of lifestyle change that goes with that sort of thing.

You're not going to go to school and retrain to be a programmer or some type of professional in a small town where there are 2 web devs and a little ISP two towns over.

You're not going to move a family to a tech hub at that stage of your life so you can start over in an entry level job.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#194

Post by diyorgasms »

ben_w wrote: post #63
knieveltech wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that blame would be misplaced? Liberals tossed workers and organized labor overboard ~30 years ago: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/23/yes-democratic-...

I would assume that the Democrats (as a non-American, what's up with calling them 'liberals'?) being out of power for four years will make them literally incapable of being why Trump fails to solve these problems.

The Democrats are absolutely liberals in the European sense of the word. They are pro-capitalism and have abandoned any pretense of pro-worker or leftist thought. HRC was George W. Bush reincarnate, Bill Clinton was as far right as any pre-Reagan Republican. Obama is a bit to the left of the Clintons, but he's still staunchly center-right and you'll notice that Obamacare is not single-payer nor does it allow for the government to compete in the marketplace.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#195

Post by Ensorceled »

antisthenes wrote: post #181
Ensorceled wrote: post #65

There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't. Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so…

The issue isn't just driving jobs, or at least that's only part of the more complex issue. In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts". To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from th…

Yeah, driving is only an example, a large one to provide scope of the problem. It's a lot of people and they can't all be retrained for new jobs ... there isn't that many new jobs for them to train for.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#196

Post by internaut »

tptacek wrote: post #130
VLM wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider even more traditional methods of elder care such as apprenticeships and village elders. It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they ne…

I don't understand how we continue to dignify the premise that elder care in our existing marketplace isn't a fair trade. We want our elderly family members to be comfortable. If nobody was available to perform these services, we'd do them ourselves, at great personal cost. Instead, we exchange money for the services of specialists. Everybody comes out ahead. We don't need "the kids to derive considerable value from…

I hear a litany of complaints from parents about paying for childcare, and also with paying for grandpa/grandma's nursing facilities. If you add up the costs and deduct them from salary + cost of living, very, very few middle class families are going to come out ahead.

It is expected (in my country) that a retirement home is so expensive it shall require the sale of the family home, so inheritances don't pass to the children or grandchildren.

I've worked before in nursing care facilities/retirement homes, and I'm certain most of the people there receive very little simulation and few visitors. It's a miserable and lonely existence.

I'm a fan of using markets for lots of things, but the market mechanism is overly used for this particular usecase and lots of people are under enormous strain because of it.

Basically the only case in which they ought to be used is in the final months/years where the person is too frail or incapacitated i.e. like state care systems.

tldr; I do not in fact believe it is economic. Additionally it damages a heap of other things ranging from cultural transmission (long term repercussions) to mental health on a personal level. It is a bad deal.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#197

Post by Ensorceled »

karmacondon wrote: post #115
Ensorceled wrote: post #65

There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't. Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so…

If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely. No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years. So we need to ma…

Retrain for what exactly? If driverless trucks and cars eliminate a several million truck drivers and taxi cab drivers where do we find jobs to replace those lost occupations?

We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#198

Post by opo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #123
wavefunction wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks who worked in manufacturing plants like automobile factories were considered part of the middle class, before neoliberal globalism reduced their earning potential and employment opportunities.

For a while, people who worked in manufacturing jobs, saved and invested surplus income over a career, etc., could often reach the classic capitalist-economy definition of middle class (neither predominantly dependent on wage labor nor having enough capital to meet support needs plus accumulate more capital purely by renting others labor to apply to the capital) by late in their career. That is no longer as attainabl…

>...but in the US specifically domestic tax reform to shift the burden from upper income earners to lower-to-middle-income workers over time, particularly the enormous shift under Reagan, is more specifically the problem

Simply not true. The number of people who pay zero income taxes has never been higher due to EITC etc. The top 1% paid about 19% of federal taxes in 1980 and about 39% in 2014.

http://www.ntu.org/foundation/page/who-pays-income-taxes

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#199

Post by dang »

kefka wrote: post #178
dang wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads into garden-variety partisan battle. That's not what this site is for.

I don't think there's anything "garden-variety" happening coming up. And what else is this place, than a discussion about tough topics? My flagkilled post expands greatly on the sentiment of that commentary. The fact of the matter is, people with low income are not targeted(for the most part) by entrepreneurs. Along the same idea, those very people have little to no input in the economy ~ they are non-entities. I've…

> And what else is this place, than a discussion about tough topics?

HN is a place for the gratification of intellectual curiosity. Partisan sniping isn't compatible with that—indeed there's nothing that destroys it faster—so we should keep it out of our comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#200

Post by maverick_iceman »

stupidcar wrote: post #66
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #4

This is, for society at the very least, a "good thing". Who's dream is it to perform a "relatively narrow set of repeated tasks" for 8 hours a day? As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labour instead of a middle class of unfulfilled office drones stuck in a stupor. IMO, the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onbo…

Now you have a glut of skilled workers all chasing the few remaining well-paid jobs, and driving down their wages in the process. Plus you still have a huge mass of unemployed people who ended up in those jobs because they lacked either the aptitude of temperament to gain skills in the first place, or are too old, poor or poorly situated to take advantage of the opportunity now. Soon, due to the dearth of people empl…

How do you know that new forms of jobs would not arise?
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