Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

1843magazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 535 posts

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#371

Post by intended »

ganfortran wrote: post #200
flashman wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I see what you're saying here: This story is about young unemployed people who have many hours to spare and use them gaming. There are similar young people who use those hours on the alt-right parts of 4chan, Reddit or other online communities.

Not quite. Actually, it is not coincidence, 4chan is primarily a video game/anime forum while being the one of the online centers of alt-righters. Unemployment stays as the center of all issues here. Or bad employment if we look from a higher perspective. With low income and bad job, video game, as a way of pleasure, it is cheap per hour, very little requirement for room, easy obtain of the feeling of achievement, ma…

I think you and others on HN also need to consider a very critical issue on game design:

SKinner boxes posing as games.

While youth unemployment in itself generates flight/distraction direct behavior, game designers themselves are creating absolutely unethical skinner boxes which will generate addictive behavior.

This is like dumping a slot machine into the hands (literally) of vulnerable children/young adults (also literally).

I argue very strongly that this shit needs to be banned, and people on HN need to pick up that torch fast. Because if its not carried by the tech industry to clean its own house, its going to be used by those inimical to it.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#372

Post by [deleted] »

llukas wrote: post #270
zxcvvcxz wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe we ended up here due to some grand conspiracy, > but I do think that the top 1% have gotten so skilled at trapping wealth and therefore opportunity that it's really screwing over everyone else. I've got news people: the top 1% is not forcing you to watch Netflix, consume social media, or strap a VR headset on. We live in a generation absolutely devoid of personal responsibility. And it's why ideas t…

This may be new to your information bubble but have you ever read about working poor phenomenon? Your comment is perfect example of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[deleted]

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#373

Post by AnthonyMouse »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #177
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you want is to live in a low rent area and play video games then you can already do it with existing government assistance. The change is that you don't lose the assistance by getting a job. Work incentives for low-utility jobs are highly inefficient when people choose the makework jobs over real jobs, and work incentives for arbitrary real jobs are just a UBI with unnecessary paperwork, since you can just "wo…

The IRS is reasonably good at cracking down on the fraud you suggest. Existing welfare/disability fraud/etc does allow one to exploit the taxpayer as you suggest, but it requires active work to do so. That too is a disincentive, and to an extent a social stigma. UBI has no such mitigating factors.

> The IRS is reasonably good at cracking down on the fraud you suggest.

The problem is it isn't fraud.

These are all real jobs: Cook, landscaper, courier, housekeeper, driver, repair tech, janitor, etc.

They aren't any less a "job" when you're doing them for your roommate, but they're also the list of things that are already on the chore wheel. Nobody bothers to tell the government about them right now or do the accounting in dollars because there is currently no financial advantage in that. If you change that all it does is cause the same amount of real work to have more deadweight paperwork around it.

> Existing welfare/disability fraud/etc does allow one to exploit the taxpayer as you suggest, but it requires active work to do so.

It requires the same amount of active work regardless of whether or not you're "exploiting the taxpayer". Creating a bunch of paperwork for everyone is not an advantage.

> That too is a disincentive, and to an extent a social stigma.

The thing with a social stigma is playing video games all day, which hasn't changed.

Eliminating the social stigma of low income people using government programs for low income people is an advantage. There are poor kids suffering in America because their parents are too proud to apply for programs they qualify for, or don't understand that they qualify for them.

What's the point in having assistance programs if the only people you expect to use them are the most unabashed moochers because you shame honest people into not applying even though they qualify?

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#374

Post by midgetjones »

beaconstudios wrote: post #355
mattmanser wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Occupy protests around the world? Arab spring? 2011 UK riots? Black lives matter? There's a definite undercurrent that politicians are barely keeping a lid on, the latest manifestations being Brexit and Trump.

the only way they keep the ongoing strife from really effecting the political system is by keeping the left and right wings fighting each other over often minor disagreements.

And a new iPhone every year

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#375

Post by salesguy222 »

nul_byte wrote: post #357
pabloski wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I felt the game is rigged", you nailed it in this simple phrase. In fact http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-16/new-york-assemblyma... They ( the oligarchs through their politicians ) change the rules every day, but they say to us that the system is fair. Obviously it is lapalissian that the system isn't fair at all but it is massively rigged. In the past centuries people would have revolted, now they imprison the…

Pushed enough they will crack, but our new masters know this, so they keep us as teetering on the edge as possible. I like Mark Blyths comment on the matter... The Hamptons, Long Islands is low lying and provides very little defence when the angry masses come for your blood.

as a native of the area, i had to chuckle a bit when i read your comment!

just don't invade the hamptons by car. there's only one real road in, and it is only one lane each way. traffic routinely piles up on it ^.^

and unless you are invading on memorial day, july 4th, a saturday in july/august, or labor day, the richest of the rich probably will be in NYC instead!!

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#376

Post by robattila128 »

llukas wrote: post #270
zxcvvcxz wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe we ended up here due to some grand conspiracy, > but I do think that the top 1% have gotten so skilled at trapping wealth and therefore opportunity that it's really screwing over everyone else. I've got news people: the top 1% is not forcing you to watch Netflix, consume social media, or strap a VR headset on. We live in a generation absolutely devoid of personal responsibility. And it's why ideas t…

This may be new to your information bubble but have you ever read about working poor phenomenon? Your comment is perfect example of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

fundamental attribution error is a fancy way to tell someone they are self projecting, so why didn't you just say that? also you might have had disadvantages in life so you may be seeing as everyone else being disadvantaged to, the very thing you identified hes thinking with.

The reality is people are taking advantage of the generosity we have in our society and people who grow up comfortably will never know how to see someone below their standard of living as a leech but instead as oppressed. Redistributing wealth more and more creates less opportunity for the free market to lift people out of poverty.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#377

Post by branchless »

09bjb wrote: post #263
branchless wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. I've got a good job and it has gotten me almost nowhere. Land prices have outrun wage gains. No point working. If I didn't have kids I'd drop out. Landlords, banks and boomers are disgusting.

Owning your own home has never been an optimal investing strategy anyway--consider index-based investing instead. Play with a compound interest calculator and see where you can get with 4-10% interest each year.

You don't get it at all. None of it. This goes to show how people who consider themselves financially literate have no idea how things work.

Banks create new money by lending. Most lending is issued against real estate. People who "invest" in holding the same piece of land to accrue the effort of others do not have 400K. They "borrow" it from the bank (the bank creates it).

Go to your bank and tell them you want to borrow 400k to invest in indexes.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#378

Post by AnthonyMouse »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #337
scarmig wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most readers here have significant flexibility in our work schedules and choice of jobs. But right now, I take on an extra responsibilities and an extra 10 hours a week over the regular 40 hours in the hopes of getting a promotion and a ~15% raise. This flies flatly in the face of a sublinear utility to income relationship. And I choose this even though I could easily move to a less intense or part-time job. What's y…

This flies flatly in the face of a sublinear utility to income relationship. It does no such thing. Will you put in an extra 20 hours for a 30% raise? How about 30 hours for a 45% raise? Sublinear utility merely means that there is some point at which you'll stop. I wonder if there'd be a significant gender split in how a UBI acts as a [dis]incentive to work. In the Mincome experiment, which resulted in a 10% decreas…

> It does no such thing. Will you put in an extra 20 hours for a 30% raise? How about 30 hours for a 45% raise?

By that point you're just running into the superlinear cost of time. Easy demonstration: What about an extra 130 hours for 195%? 40 + 130 > 168, so that's literally impossible. 120 would be possible but you would die of sleep deprivation.

Even if the value of money is linear or superlinear, the value of time quickly catches up to it as it becomes more scarce.

> In the Mincome experiment, which resulted in a 10% decrease in work effort, the effect was higher among women than men.

You always cite the 10% but the link you gave last time showed that the majority of the decrease was from young mothers and students. That's clearly a different situation than people quitting their jobs to play video games.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#379

Post by acjohnson55 »

ehnto wrote: post #120
acjohnson55 wrote: post #58

What is the labor market, if not an interminable, poorly designed MMORPG? Most of us will be alive by the time there's enough economic incentive for all the things humanity needs, with only a token labor force. Many of the world's richest countries are already there, at least when it comes to their own citizens. In the future (i.e. the present, in the software world), to the extent that employers need workers, they g…

Your assumptions rest on some very big claims, such as being able to work part time as a low end labour worker. I can't imagine how that would come about in a natural market unless cost of goods dropped even further, and that's not possible through automation alone. Food for example, still needs huge resources and even if it's 100% automated you can't avoid the use of the finite resources required for it. I do apprec…

I see this part-time work happening via things like the informal economy and the sharing economy. We're certainly a long ways off from this dynamic playing out across the entire economy, but it seems to me to be the general direction we're headed.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#380

Post by marknutter »

diogenescynic wrote: post #182
marknutter wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such bullshit . Right now you can walk into a long haul trucking job with zero years experience and be making $70k minimum with a $10-20k signing bonus after a short month long training. And that's one of myriad trades that are available today . The lie that has been sold to America's youth that everyone has a "right" to go to college and is entitled to a job upon graduation will go down as one of the greates…

What are the hours and benefits like for long haul trucking? I'd imagine it's not a job widely available in West Virginia or areas where there is mass unemployment. Genuinely asking and I don't think what I said is bullshit. There are definitely people who can't find full-time jobs and spend their time playing video games because it's a cheap hobby/luxury/entertainment. Why else do you think the labor participation r…

> What are the hours and benefits like for long haul trucking? I'd imagine it's not a job widely available in West Virginia or areas where there is mass unemployment.

The benefits are like any other salaried position, and the hours are restricted by federal mandate for safety reasons. The one downside is being away from home for extended periods of time, but... y'know... it's a job; if it were easy it wouldn't pay well.

The labor shortage in the trades is well documented:

http://www.career.org/news/shortage-of-skills-construction-s... http://www.centerforamerica.org/pledge/gr/AAMGA_Magazine_Rat...

> Why else do you think the labor participation rate is so low? Why don't all those people who lost manufacturing or coal jobs just follow your advice?

They should follow my advice. My guess as to why the participation rate is so low is because Millennials are living at home with their Baby Boomer parents, playing video games and avoiding the harsh realities of adult life. They were sold on the false dream that they could get any degree they wanted and walk right out of college into a high paying, indoor job. Dreams like that are hard to wake up from.

> I don't think you should dismiss millions and millions of people making minimum wage, working part-time, or out of the labor force altogether and just assume (without a shred of evidence) that they are simply choosing not to take well paid jobs that you describe as so freely available.

When we no longer have a labor shortage in the trades and other blue collar jobs, I'll stop dismissing the millions of people making minimum wage.

Post reply on HN