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

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

#511

Post by [deleted] »

pault wrote: post #490
acjohnson55 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the majority of the population will make their income from gray market work? I can see this being feasible only if we have fusion power, some kind of benevolent dictator and a fully developed social safety net. I do _not_ see this as an inevitable equilibrium state extrapolated from the current economy and political thinking, so if it does happen it will have to be the result of decades of hard dedicated work, muc…

[deleted]

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

#512

Post by acjohnson55 »

pault wrote: post #490
acjohnson55 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the majority of the population will make their income from gray market work? I can see this being feasible only if we have fusion power, some kind of benevolent dictator and a fully developed social safety net. I do _not_ see this as an inevitable equilibrium state extrapolated from the current economy and political thinking, so if it does happen it will have to be the result of decades of hard dedicated work, muc…

Sure, think fusion power and UBI. I'm talking beyond the immediate future.

And I don't think it's that crazy, current politics aside. People will eventually realize the factory jobs aren't returning and there will need to be a political solution.

Or, we're in store for a much bleaker future...I have predictions for that one too.

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

#513

Post by Tepix »

researcher11 wrote: post #135
bronz wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whats the best country to retire in the way you have?

I'm in rual Panama. It's probably the best for tax and lifestyle reasons.

If you want to buy something from the US (perhaps a new computer), is it difficult and expensive to get stuff sent there?

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

#514

Post by alphonsegaston »

dang wrote: post #502
alphonsegaston wrote: post #66

Every job I've worked in my adult life has involved being judged by standards the boomers doing the judging could never live up to, and then covering for their incompetence with technical skills(because I'm young, so I can just do that stuff). It would be such a sad joke if it weren't for the fact that they squat in every opportunity young people have for their futures (real estate, higher positions, etc) while the y…

Generational flamewars are one of the circles of hell that we're hoping to avoid here. Please don't do this again. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13891018 and marked it off-topic.

Okay, apologies. Wasn't intentionally trying to stir up trouble, just share my experiences along the lines of the parent. I can see from some of the responses I solicited why this is problematic and will try to be more measured in my comments

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

#515

Post by recondite »

RangerScience wrote: post #108

When you look at UBI, you can consider it as the government supplying a "default job" to everyone, in the same sort of way it provides a few other "defaults" - mail (USPS) being a good example. This provides a "minimum competition" against which any company must compete - FedEx is always going to have to be better than the USPS. So notionally - if UBI provides a "default job", companies will have to offer better jobs…

Interesting take, but isn't this also the motivation for companies to automate as much of their workforce as possible? Nobody really wants to take orders at McDonald's for $9/hour and Ronald McOwner doesn't want to pay his workers $15+ when the minimum wage gets raised so he installs automated kiosks to take customer orders. Theoretically, those workers who lost their jobs to the machines are "freed" to pursue more productive ventures, but what we've actually been seeing is the 1% capturing that capital even more (as the poster above noted).

I think we're getting to a point where society is going to have to accept that vast swaths of the population are simply not necessary or otherwise employable, in the modern labor force, and hopefully, treating "labor" as an expendable market resource becomes an archaic concept, similar to how we view human slavery.

The problem is, the 1% will not change on their own, that has never been the case. The incentives are just not there for them to want to.

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

#516

Post by recondite »

politician wrote: post #264
lkrubner wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go to rural Kentucky, you will see how wrong you are. Likewise, if you go to rural West Virginia, you will see that you are wrong. Visit the farms in rural Arkansas, spend a few days, engage some farmhands in conversation. If you talk to at least 4 such people, then at least 1 of them will be addicted to meth. You can often detect this simply by looking at them. Often their teeth give them away. Spend some tim…

However, the observation that our cities are extremely competitive is on point. Between the two of you, the picture this paints is one of Americans jostling for position around twenty relatively small fires scattered amidst a large, cold, dark forest.

Amazing metaphor. I'm going to use that :)

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

#517

Post by cableshaft »

intended wrote: post #501
cableshaft wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a game designer here (and programmer). I think you should be clear that a game designer is not always the one who makes the decisions on how to monetize a game. Often it's the people who are in charge of financing the game's development, i.e. publishers or executives. In fact, often game designers would rather not do this pay to win crap, although it's hard to ignore that it does seem to be the primary way peopl…

This is NOT going to work, You alone can do nothing. There is NO way, an indie, or a Game firm, can afford to NOT make as much money as their competitor in the industry is making. 1) Margins and discovery is difficult in this industry. 2) If you are a public company, you will face management and market pressure to improve your numbers which means going ahead and making a skinner box. This is straight up a case for le…

I'm not sure what you're claiming I'm planning to do is not going to work. I'm not trying to fight the market trends, I understand they're bigger than me. My main job isn't even in the game industry right now, but in the healthcare industry.

My plan right now is design board games, get them published somehow (I'm slowly working on that front, my games have been evaluated by some publishers and professional designers, but nothing is signed yet), then developing an app/PC version in Unity and releasing that while promoting it on the channels I know people would be interested (i.e. board game sites). But I'm getting older and don't have the free time I used to, so it's going pretty slowly. I'm also not expecting to get rich off these games, it's more about getting things out there again and making some side money, hopefully more than a couple of games I worked on for other companies which sold abysmally due to some unfortunate timing and inadequate PR coverage (I've already made games and released them on my own that have performed better than those did, it's not a high bar to clear).

But yeah, I'm not really disagreeing with you. It is what it is. And if a much more well known game designer than I am, Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), can rail against these types of games in multiple talks while having almost zero effect in changing the trends in the industry, then I, as an almost completely unknown designer, can not expect to make any significant changes.

It just makes me less excited to get back into mobile game dev industry when I'm almost guaranteed to work on a skinner box type game.

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

#518

Post by someguydave »

chongli wrote: post #131
yummyfajitas wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll worry about that when it happens. We're not even close yet. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou... Similarly, the average American fat person shouldn't eat 6 cheeseburgers on the theory that starvation is coming.

So you want to turn all those unemployed dudes who eat cheeseburgers and play video games all day into your domestic servants, but pay them the same amount of money they're receiving as part of their benefits right now? Do you have any idea how angry they'd be if that happened? It would make la Terreur look like an episode of Teletubbies.

> It would make la Terreur look like an episode of Teletubbies.

They can have a whiff of grapeshot.

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

#519

Post by someguydave »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #497
chongli wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starvation is not the motivator I would suggest. Just curious, have you taken a look at the comments section on YouTube? There's an ENORMOUS amount of hate being tossed around and I would conjecture that it is coming from the cheeseburger gamer cohort (and their employed gamer allies). This hate is being directed at anyone who appears to be doing better than they are of late: women, minorities, Jews, middle and upper…

So we should pay the Nazis not to harm innocent Jews? Can I also get paid for starting a nationalist movement and threatening innocents?

Maybe you can start a union to cover your liabilities too :)

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

#520

Post by someguydave »

chongli wrote: post #366
yummyfajitas wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this the presumed scenario? That is not the scenario here in India, where the lower class does in fact work as domestic labor for the middle class. Starvation only seems to happen nowadays in war zones and communist countries.

Starvation is not the motivator I would suggest. Just curious, have you taken a look at the comments section on YouTube? There's an ENORMOUS amount of hate being tossed around and I would conjecture that it is coming from the cheeseburger gamer cohort (and their employed gamer allies). This hate is being directed at anyone who appears to be doing better than they are of late: women, minorities, Jews, middle and upper…

>And the people they'll end up serving? Those are the same people they passionately hate.

Do you think coddling their anti-social instincts will help them become better people? Or would a little bit of hunger motivate them to see past their animus and create more healthy and productive social relationships?

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