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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?

#301

Post by gloverkcn »

jdminhbg wrote: post #180
skriticos2 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point. What I read from the statement is that Warren was not good at sports (arbitrary discipline not matching his forte for illustration) so he would suck in an economy focused around it. What he implies is that a lot of people suck at most of the fields that are in great demand, but also come with requirements that they just can't adjust to.. Especially with advanced age and with the discipli…

No, I understand that, but the problem with his analogy is that he's deliberately picked a field where one person's success is matched equally by another person's failure. He's overstating his case by projecting the image of the work economy being like getting dunked on by Lebron James day-in day-out.

I have blue collar friends and relatives that would describe their working life as getting dunked on by Lebron James day-in day-out. When jobs go offshore that is an example of "one person's success is another's failure"

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

#302

Post by gregpilling »

david927 wrote: post #132
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)…

My view is that the times when Capitalism has been a long leash it ends up being wildly destructive. I love fire for cooking, forest fires not so much. I certainly don't think that the reason we don't have more jobs in America is that businesses are so hard pressed with labor laws. I just don't see that. What I have seen, over and over again, are that employers are realizing that they're now in the cat seat and becom…

"..become nothing less than abusive, deeply abusive, to their employees as a result .."

As an employer I find this surprising. I spend a lot of time and effort trying to be good to my staff. I find that a well taken care of staff delivers better results than a poorly taken care of staff. I admit I am doing it in my own self interest, but even acknowledging that it still is about as opposite to "deeply abusive" as I could imagine. I spend a third of my life with the people at work, how could that be pleasant if it was abusive?

I hope you can find a workplace one day that makes you feel appreciated. Life is better when that happens. For everyone.

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

#303

Post by gregpilling »

maxharris wrote: post #247
joshcrews wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There now is a robot that can knock you out safely https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-...

Do you know what I would give to help make this a reality? I would literally drop $10k, in cash, right now, to get faster treatment. I have the money - I worked my ass off to earn it (while sick, no less!) What I (and the experts that would use this machine on me) don't have is the political freedom to use it as we see fit. This thing could literally save my life. A team invented it, tested it, and it's just sitting…

can you apply to professors/researchers in those technologies to be a test subject? sometimes the academics have a hard time recruiting willing subjects.

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

#304

Post by gregpilling »

maxerickson wrote: post #146
themihai wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers working on minimum wage...that's something new! Last time I've checked the free market rules didn't apply on law practioners due the "prestige" issue. How does automation affect lawyers anyway?

Research. There are systems that can surface relevant cases vs the old way of a bunch of junior lawyers reading.

bots that help people fight tickets too

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

#305

Post by gregpilling »

maxharris wrote: post #216
Gatsky wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel for you - this kind of thing just shouldn't happen. I think that medicine is a bad example of the point you are trying to make though... It has a lot of embedded costs and roadblocks that aren't really related to regulation. For example - the procedure you describe is highly specialised, and can only be learnt in certain places. Say there are 4 people that can do this procedure at a hospital. Attracting a doct…

It is true that medicine is expensive, but so is setting up the technology for a major cloud provider (on the scale of Amazon), or a car coordination platform/system like Uber. The difference is that the tech examples I've provided have not had the ability to progress (and the financial reward for doing so) regulated out of them. The wait time for this is not something that just happened yesterday, and what I'm sayin…

Is it regulation, or vested interests?

When J.J. Hill did his thing, there was no landowners to argue with (comparatively). In Seattle, there must be a thousand landowners to consider in that 6 mile stretch. Each one with their own view of the need and cost/benefit analysis of the 6 mile improvement. Eminent domain is not without legal challenge of course, so this drags out the timeline. Underfunded court systems move slower than desired, adding to delays in the process.

The 'regulations' would be about safety, electrical wiring, setback etc, which just define how things should be done for the most part and do not add time. It is dealing with all the vested interests of the property owners involved, and the sheer number of them. I am a property owner myself; if the city came to me a decided that my house was in the way of a new freeway on ramp, you had better believe that I am going to want my day in court to fight it. I have the resources to drag it out as long as possible - with extensions, delays, studies, blah blah blah. It does not take much thought to understand how to slow things down in court. I am sure there is a youtube video for it.

Would you protest if your own house was to be destroyed by the 6 mile change? I assume you live in the Seattle area or you would not know about the statement. So if your own person domicile was to be destroyed, and it was a beloved place with a lifetime of memories for you, would you be complacent about its destruction or would you fight it tooth and claw? (I would fight)

I think the overwhelming majority would fight. And then it takes 25 years to go 6 miles. It is not regulation but property owners. Specifying the diameter of a ground rod in an electrical panel does not slow things down, it speed them up by removing the need to think about it. Just build to code - someone else has figured it out. I don't need to calculate loads of the panels versus the density of the square root of the moon yesterday - I just sink in 2 ground rods 20 feet deep and 40 feet apart and am happy that someone else did the math. Life is an open book test, the printed regulations are the answer key.

TL:DR Money not rules is the delay maker.

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

#306

Post by emblem21 »

zghst wrote: post #296
emblem21 wrote: post #183

At Emblem 21, we analyze not just the time, material, and energy costs for economic activity, but also the complexity components as well. Every economic activity consumes and yields complexity. This complexity is difficult to measure given its contextual nature, but it is encoded into the pricing of the transaction itself. Currently working on very advanced neural networks to detect the edges of this contextual compl…

Your site is down. I find it a bit worrisome, looking through your repos that many files are blank. I would like to learn more about your company.

Greetings. Our corporate structure is undergoing a fundamental transition (from a software contractor to a holding company) and we're still deciding on presentation and community outreach.

...which is to say we have plenty of researchers but no social team. :)

Our primary goal is the formation of autonomous labor by helping put the institutional periphery into place: legal review, trade agreements, economic policy study, political and memetic steering, and financial innovation. Robots just won't automatically take all of the jobs. Humans are very good at cutting their own throats collectively and we very much account for this.

We have three private tech projects at this time that cover the UAV and theoretical mathematics space.

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

#307

Post by njharman »

winstonewert wrote: post #101
njharman wrote: post #83

Honest question: Is it not widely accepted that 1) Eventually, and probably pretty soon (within 100years), that there obviously won't be jobs for everyone. Automation, progress(efficiency gains) and increasing population makes it inevitable. 2) That a general "goal" of society is do away with jobs. In any traditional sense. To me we've been approaching that ever since agriculture provided ability to support specialis…

Aren't specialist activities like science, art, and killing each other jobs?

Job is kind of a hard definition. Being compensated seems to be the main difference between job and; hobby, charity (working for "free"). Entrepreneurial endeavors lie in a muddy middle ground.

With increasing efficiency and automation "needs" will become increasingly cheap, approahing free. I believe without needing compensation just to survive, many will chose not to have jobs. They may, and probably will, still work.

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

#308

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

merpnderp wrote: post #31
mordocai wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if the data is there to make that claim.

Just the Chinese and Indian cases seem more than enough data to make this case. Both economies stagnate behind the world trend until they open up free markets, at which point their economies explode and a billion people are lifted out of abject poverty nearly overnight. There is an arguable case for strong welfare states, but true socialism has literal mountains of evidence against it.

China and India are heavily state-managed and in no sense are they genuine laissez-faire free markets. China still thinks of itself as Communist.

True socialism - on the soft European model - has literally mountains of evidence for it.

The basic problem is maximising productive - i.e. innovative and practical - activity, and not allowing the economy to financialise, which replaces actual activity with meaningless proxy casino activity.

Capitalism on its own concentrates wealth and chokes off its own air supply. Government management on its own ossifies into bureaucracy and oligarchy.

There's a sweet spot between the two where government provides stable markets, seeds R&D, and prevents excessive concentration of wealth and power, but talented and inventive individuals are still rewarded for talent and invention, and the cost of entry for new business ideas is as low as possible.

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

#309

Post by bduerst »

adamnemecek wrote: post #164
bduerst wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I've worked some people to try and come up with product ideas to fit this type of future, but it's at least 5-10 years off, and dependent on factors like the current title-based education system being replaced by something more skills-based.

Who are the people working on this?

It was just with some colleagues.

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

#310

Post by reality_czech »

astazangasta wrote: post #276
reality_czech wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people look back on the period from 1945 to 1970 as a golden age of growth under a more left-leaning economic regime than today. It sounds like you are one them, based on your "let's organize the economy" enthusiasm. The problem with that is that the post-WWII period was much different than today. Pretty much every other advanced economy besides the US had been economically devastated by a long and bloody wa…

I'm not advocating going back to 1950 or having planned economies (I am rather an anarchist), I am merely pointing out that it is wrong to suggest an orientation to short term profit makes the best economy.

Most economic debate occurs in spherical cow land because it ignores the political realities of the debate. Sure it would be possible to have a wise, far-sighted government that invested in exactly the technologies that were needed for the future. But once the government is a source of patronage, politicians have a huge incentive to funnel off the money to their friends and cronies. In the end, it is usually better to leave the government small and accept that there is some long-term planning you'll miss out on.

In the same way, if we could have a benevolent dictator, he would certainly govern better than our crappy government. But dictatorship is inherently unstable because the most ruthless person seizes power. So the dictator could not stay benevolent for long. Better not to have the dictator, even if it means having a less efficient government.

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