Jobs becoming obsolete?
Yes surely just as we have never recovered from the loss of shoe cobbling jobs or manual labor farming jobs due to the industrial revolution the internet and technology will be the death of us all!
Are jobs obsolete?
241–250 of 331 posts
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#242Next on CNN:
Food: Why you probably don't need it
Exercise: Less of it could mean more healthcare jobs
Transportation: Could rising oil prices make it impossible to go anywhere?
Safety: Could banning non-Christians from entering the country make us safer?
9/11: What about the bright side?
Culture: Is Lil Wayne the music genius of the decade?
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#243Why 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.
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is pretty simple to identify in my opinion. These people live in a culture of anti-education. This is going to take a lot of money to counter. The cheapest way to counter it is probably to simply pay students for good grades, starting as young as possible. Create an external motivation to learn and apply yourself where there otherwise would be none.
I don't think you can counter it with money at all. Even if you pay them for good grades they are just going to find a way to cheat so they can get the money without doing the work. Maybe a better solution would be to turn the public schools in the worst failing districts into something like the twenty-first century version of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indian_Indust…
I don't think you can dismiss money as incentive so easily. There is evidence that paying kids does in fact work (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1978758-1,0...). The point in starting the kids off as young as possible is that it will develop in them good habits. Not to mention the effect that an external incentive for kids in an entire region can have on the culture itself.
Poor black and hispanic kids are the same as everyone else in that they have no internal motivation to work hard at something unpleasant. The difference with white and asians is that they have the external incentive of a culture that supports working (reasonably) hard at school and becoming successful. Money is simply a hack to create this external incentive.
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#245Why 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…
> 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 ability to remain profitable:
"fully cover estimated future costs" means that they're the only govt institution that isn't a timebomb of future obligations. When they can't keep up, we know that there's trouble down the line, which is far better than the status quo, which is to wait until all of the assets are gone, leaving nothing but obligations.
In other words
> They began with a highly questionable requirement
this isn't a questionable requirement, it's a sane one. The insanity is that it's unique instead of being universal.
> They have overpaid this fund by billions of dollars, but they are not able to use this money to address their current financial shortcomings.
Yes, current projections say that they're overpaid, but these projections have a way of going horribly wrong.
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#246Next on CNN: Food: Why you probably don't need it Exercise: Less of it could mean more healthcare jobs Transportation: Could rising oil prices make it impossible to go anywhere? Safety: Could banning non-Christians from entering the country make us safer? 9/11: What about the bright side? Culture: Is Lil Wayne the music genius of the decade?
Right on about food. Isn't that another fear, global food scarcities, green revolution not keeping up, fields poisoned by industrial fertilizers... Let's get used to having less, unless we get back on the farm.
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a disproportionate percentage of MY salary is used to support the poor relative to rich people. The operative word there is "salary". Buffet had such a low (as a %) tax bill because most of his income isn't salary but cap gains. Let's raise cap gains tax to 50% you say? Sounds great until you sell your house in a few years.
There is a huge difference between taxing cap gains at 15% vs 50%. IMO, treat it as any other income source if I am going to work and pay ~40+% of my income in taxes why on earth should I pay MORE so people making 100 times what I do get a discount. However, I also pay a higher percentage though many other regressive taxes. Consider, I own a reasonably nice car and pay taxes on it, but if I make ten times as much I d…
> IMO, treat it as any other income source
You mean treat it like salary? It wouldn't matter. People with that much cap gains would leave investments where they are and take out low-interest loans against it. That's what they do today. Actually, lots of middle class people do (or have done) the same thing with HELOCs. Rather than selling their house for a profit (and paying cap gains), buying a cheaper house, and using the profit to upgrade the cheaper house, they took out a loan against their equity.
> why on earth should I pay MORE so people making 100 times what I do get a discount.
You imply a causal relationship where none exists.
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#248Why 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…
> 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 ability to remain profitable: "fully cover estimated future costs" means that they're the only govt institution that isn't…
> "means that they're the only govt institution that isn't a timebomb of future obligations"
This was the spirit in which the requirement was enacted. I completely agree with the idea. My problem with this line of reasoning is this:
Why fund the estimated lifetime costs of health care that will not be provided for maybe 40 or so years into the future? Why not fund a moving window of ten or twenty years of obligations instead?
There is a huge opportunity cost associated with stashing such a large amount of money away for this purpose rather than using it for current operating expenses.
> "Yes, current projections say that they're overpaid, but these projections have a way of going horribly wrong."
Indeed, projecting costs for the next half-century is a dangerous thing to do. This is why I question the rationality of handicapping the USPS with the responsibility for funding far-future liabilities based on those projections.
Even if you ignore the opportunity costs of this fund, the inflexibility of the rule as well as the fact that it puts so much faith in projections makes it a highly suspect decision.
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As hated as Wal-Mart is, they have cut the cost of living for people with low wages. The after effects are up for debate.
> But there are some things which make poverty more tolerable. Wal-Mart for one. I’d moved to Louisville with not even a fork or a spoon. Wal-Mart sells all that — hamper, dishes, utensils, dish rack, sheets, telephones, you name it — for prices so incredibly low that I was genuinely grateful. I thought about Wal-Mart’s union busting, its abused work staff of geriatrics and economically desperate wage slaves, its stocks of Third World products which in turn further destroyed America’s manufacturing, its aesthetic Sovietization of America… and then I thought about my own shitty fiscal situation. Conclusion: “Fuck ‘em.”
Re: Are jobs obsolete?
#250It'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…
> Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)?
Because that's not how it works. Let's say a company has a full time programmer at 150K/year. They can probably hire 7 to 10 workers for that much, but why would they - they have a website to build, and these guys, even collectively, can't help.