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What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

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Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#281

Post by infinite8s »

vacri wrote: post #228
maxharris wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no robot that can knock me out (safely so that I wake up when everything is done), snake a thing down my windpipe, poke through the exact right spot in my bronchial tube and into my mediastinum (a name for the bag that my heart), and retrieve a chunk of whatever surrounds my aorta. But here I wait, while people capable of doing this (or at least capable of learning how to do it - and that's a lot of people)…

There's no robot that can write cronjobs for the place I work at, but with my oversight, those cronjobs are force multipliers, allowing little old me to do the job of dozens of people if we had to run those things manually. Automation doesn't mean a 100% reduction of staff, but merely a significant reduction in staff. There's plenty of automation snaking its way into surgeries.

Those cron jobs are just manual management of automation. If you take a few steps back, it doesn't seem too unlikely that that can be automated as well (as a recent example, Kubernetes has automated away a whole swath of what recently required manual management of individual server automation).

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#282

Post by infinite8s »

karmajunkie wrote: post #233
techdragon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the only way to do such "expensive" work requires significant support. Things like their legal protection against liability, mandatory requirements to have X to do Y in a jurisdiction, and other sorts of things can really eat into the revenue of a small business or sole trader.

Exactly. The trick to billing $1000/hr is finding someone who'll pay it, and having the connections to get in front of them, and their trust that its $1000/hr well spent, which entails no small amount of theatrics on the part of a corporate shield.

I wouldn't characterize 'significant support' as theatrics.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#283

Post by infinite8s »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #214
civilian wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting aside how [President] Elon Musk pays for it all, facepalm you can't compare the side effects of a massive government spending plan without looking at that! It'll all come out eventually. Either we borrow, and tax our future generations, or we tax more businesses now, which would also repress business activity and American competitiveness. There's a few items that could be solved with the market. Like: Remov…

>There's a few items that could be solved with the market. Like: Remove city's zoning laws with a federal mandate, to encourage the market to build urban housing. You don't need the gov. to do it, just remove the limitations. Disallow internet providers from offering kickbacks to condo/apartment managers to open up the market. We should probably tax semi trucks & cars with snow tires more, because they're the ones th…

Well, that period also required a lot of the rebuilding due to the destruction wrought by WWII. Sadly it seems the idea of 'creative destruction' to unstick markets and lead to innovation also seems to apply to real world infrastructure (in this case requiring real world destruction).

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#284

Post by infinite8s »

gwright wrote: post #241
civilian wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting aside how [President] Elon Musk pays for it all, facepalm you can't compare the side effects of a massive government spending plan without looking at that! It'll all come out eventually. Either we borrow, and tax our future generations, or we tax more businesses now, which would also repress business activity and American competitiveness. There's a few items that could be solved with the market. Like: Remov…

One reason infrastructure projects are so expensive in the US is the Davis–Bacon Act. Yet another example of government intervention in markets with 100% predictable negative side effects. Yet I'm sure there are many people in favor of "prevailing wages" while bemoaning the fact that we don't invest enough in infrastructure.

That doesn't explain the vast infrastructure projects of the 40s - 70s after WWII.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#285

Post by infinite8s »

maxharris wrote: post #135
clifanatic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't have to convince a committee to give you permission to make a new app. You do if you want to get paid to make it...

But this is an equivocation. In medicine, the present state is that we have the equivalent of censorship in speech.

That's a false equivalence. How could you be sure that your 'doctor' has any idea that they know what they are doing. Market mechanisms don't work with this kind of information asymmetry.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#286

Post by mathattack »

st3v3r wrote: post #182
mathattack wrote: post #12

It seems like there are 2 things that can be done: 1) Make it easier for new firms of all kinds to open and create job. (Less occupational licensing requirements, etc) 2) Reduce the cost/burden of employment. (If someone has the choice to hire an employee in SF and Texas, they'll choose Texas since the laws are more business-friendly)

For #2, if by "business friendly", you mean anti-employee. Despite all this hoopla about California being "business unfriendly", it still leads in startups and innovation. Mainly because a lot of the talent wants to be in a place where they have freedoms, and don't have to worry about business taking their work done on off hours.

Some laws are good for individuals, bad for the specific company and bad for the ecosystem. (example: Ease of suing companies)

Some laws are good for individuals, bad for the specific company, and good for the ecosystem. (example: No non-competes)

Some laws are more ambiguous. (example: Minimum Wage)

Laws in bucket 2 are what help California. Laws in bucket 1 hurt. Laws in bucket 3 are harder to determine.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#287

Post by vkou »

fineIllregister wrote: post #185
vkou wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they aren't supported by the state, they are supported by their families.

I don't see how that's a relevant response to my comment, as it doesn't answer my question. It's not really a matter of public policy, unless you're suggesting we some how legally prevent people from supporting family members who aren't working.

My point was that even if the state doesn't pay someone to sit around, and play video games all day, in a high-unemployment economy, family members will. Either that, or the person in question dies homeless.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#288

Post by dsacco »

logfromblammo wrote: post #278
yummyfajitas wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely, generous welfare isn't preventing Islamic terrorists from blowing up Europe on a regular basis. But lets take your claim as given, namely that some classes of people are so dangerous if we don't pay them they'll harm us. If I thought you were right, then I'd probably turn to the Brexiters and Trumpkins for a solution. Are you really claiming that the poor are basically just gangsters and terrorists?

Hungry and/or angry people commit more crimes. That's just axiomatic. Desperation will cause those who had formerly been following all the rules to try something different in order to improve their situation. So social welfare as a bribe mainly helps that marginal fraction that would only shoplift if they absolutely couldn't pay. And there are a lot of people like that. It won't do anything about those who would shop…

As a nitpick, it's not axiomatic that hungry and angry people commit more crimes. It could certainly be true, but it's not so self-evident that the claim requires no proof.

Also, what's the point of making a quantifiable estimation (your "90%") if you have no actual data behind it? Just say you believe something based on observation; throwing out a nice round percentage to describe your belief, even as a figure of speech, does a disservice to real attempts to quantify phenomenon in a discussion.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#289

Post by st3v3r »

mathattack wrote: post #286
st3v3r wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For #2, if by "business friendly", you mean anti-employee. Despite all this hoopla about California being "business unfriendly", it still leads in startups and innovation. Mainly because a lot of the talent wants to be in a place where they have freedoms, and don't have to worry about business taking their work done on off hours.

Some laws are good for individuals, bad for the specific company and bad for the ecosystem. (example: Ease of suing companies) Some laws are good for individuals, bad for the specific company, and good for the ecosystem. (example: No non-competes) Some laws are more ambiguous. (example: Minimum Wage) Laws in bucket 2 are what help California. Laws in bucket 1 hurt. Laws in bucket 3 are harder to determine.

I'm not convinced that bucket 1 is bad for the ecosystem.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#290

Post by antisthenes »

dredmorbius wrote: post #248
adamnemecek wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans don't work that way This is fundamentally an issue with the educational system. Change the system the rest will follow. Saying that humans don't work this way is like saying that nothing heavier than air will ever fly. > incapable of learning enough to be more valuable than a machine I don't think that AI and human intelligence will ever completely converge. > Machines will put a floor on value and people wh…

I'm largely disagreeing with you here. There is, I think, ultimately a problem with having to unlearn old skills which is difficult. If nothing else, you end up with a workforce in a particular area, say, if retrained, who bring in very widely divergent backgrounds on how to do something. This might not be all bad if your goal is to mix and match methods and come up with something better . But that's rarely a firm's…

> There is, I think, ultimately a problem with having to unlearn old skills which is difficult.

Picking up new skills at a level that puts you in competence with AI is just as difficult. As you age and your responsibilities increase and mind plasticity decreases, your capacity for learning decreases almost asymptotically.

You simply cannot make 40-50-60 year olds learn new skills and expect any ROI on it.

Most great ideas generally run face flat into the big wall of human biological limitations.

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