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Ask Slashdot: Future-Proof Jobs?
An anonymous reader writes: My niece, who is graduating from high school, has asked me for some career advice. Since I work in data processing, my first thought was to recommend a degree course in computer science or computer engineering. However, after reading books by Jeremy Rifkin (The Third Industrial Revolution) and Ray Kurzweil (How to Create a Mind), I now wonder whether a career in information technology is actually better than, say, becoming a lawyer or a construction worker. While the two authors differ in their political persuasions (Rifkin is a Green leftist and Kurzweil is a Libertarian transhumanist), both foresee an increasingly automated future where most of humanity would become either jobless or underemployed by the middle of the century. While robots take over the production of consumer hardware, Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system? Besides politics and drug dealing, what jobs are really future-proof? Would it be better if my niece took a course in the Arts, since creativity is looking to be one of humanity's final frontiers against the inevitable Rise of the Machines?
I don't see toilets going away anytime soon....
will be in demand as long as we have computer that can break.
If someone invents a completely self programming, self healing, self building computer then maybe not.
Even if that happens I think you would need system operators for even these machines as someone has to tell them what to do even if it's only by spoken word or brain waves or whatever is the current input method.
The goals might change a bit, but the title would stay the same ;)
Because if there are two things you can count on in this world, its babies, and r***** p****.
... a mortician.
Better then a lawyer and a construction worker yes, There are already a glut of lawyers and the schooling is increasingly expensive and who says you can't print a house? Creative sure, but make sure its utilizing technology so can be part of a marketing department for example.
but being a plumber or AC repair can't be shipped overseas.
I would suggest healthcare. With the aging population, there will be a greater need for personal care. Even a healthy older person will need some level of care. I do not think robotics can handle this area well.
If labor is abolished in the future she can kick back and lounge around in her underwear all day eating junk food and watching Netflix. It's what I do.
Don't focus on specific jobs, focus on skills. Skills such as problem solving, understanding abstractions, and of course strong communication skills, both written and verbal. Skills involving dealing with and understanding people's needs will never go out of demand.
Engineering has a strong future: Robots. Nanotechnology. Advanced materials. Hydrogen storage. Fuel cells. Automation technology. Rapid building techniques. Vertical farming. Take any industry she likes, then work with a company that is going to do it better with technology, using fewer humans to do the work.
They will help with the college tuition as well.
...unless you really bought into Kurzweil's book
Seriously, try to imagine describing a lot of the things people do professionally now to someone 30 years ago. Some of them are genuinely incomprehensible. Quite a lot, even.
You can't have a future-proof job. You will have to adapt as the world changes.
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Mortuary Science
Get some experience doing nails just in case.
The life of an artist is 99% of the times very poor and destitute. It is very hard to be successful. In order for an artist to be financially secure they need wealthy patrons. If you are surrounded by wealthy people who want to purchase art then this could be a good move. If the majority of people in the world are becoming poorer and there is a lack of disposable income then the feasibility of making a living in the arts or humanities declines with this decline in disposable income.
With that said I still encourage anyone to pursue an art career because it can be rewarding mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
so join them. Become a shareholder. Who's benefiting from the current record setting profits that American corporations are posting? Not the working class that's for sure.
you are talking about something bigger.
You use your college focus to get the toolsets you need to be a generally competent employee. What you do with it, that is what is important.
My degree is in Humanities, but I have a current career in IT, and the tools transfer to other careers.
So should hers, whatever she decides. (Don't do Humanities, it is a crock now, all touchy feelly and not the critical thinking I got 30 years ago)
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
At some point, I don't see the world being able to avoid a paradigm shift in how we measure careers, labor, etc... we have invested in and achieved so much in terms of automation, ai, etc, and yet we refuse to distribute the high efficiency benefits of these things to the very masses who brought them about and are being displaced by them. If it takes less labor, per person, to make the world work, then it truly should take less labor, period... not the same (or, as things have been going lately) more labor by the few still employed while those at the top of the economic food chain rake in the entire difference just for themselves. In the end, our current path is resource wasteful in a time when we can't afford it, and all for the actual benefit of very few people. It's an untenable and unsustainable practice that's going to have to change, and I don't see us regressing to old technologies just to reestablish old careers when we already have (and simply aren't properly dispersing) much better.
Would it be better if my niece took a course in the Arts, since creativity is looking to be one of humanity's final frontiers against the inevitable Rise of the Machines?
Unfortunately taking art classes does nothing to actually increase your creativity -- it's an innate characteristic of the human soul (or brain, depending on your religious views).
Tell her to go into medicine. There is no way doctors are gonna be replaced by robots, ever.
On the off chance that some tremendous breakthroughs do lead to medical robots like in Star Wars, NOBODY will have to worry about getting a job. I'm not holding my breath though.
Your niece seems forward looking (and I assume bright) if she is looking for career advice at her age. Unfortunately for her, I don't think there's any career that you can suggest that will be entirely "future-proof" as we simply do not know what skills and fields will be in demand when she embarks on a career. Therefore my advice would be to take a different tack and identify her strengths and interests and find a career path that aligns with that. That's not to say she should necessarily study underwater basket weaving or any other field with dismal prospects, but entering a field for the money and prospects alone will likely lead to her feeling unfulfilled with her career down the road. I should know as I studied chemical engineering in school precisely because it was one of the highest earning engineering disciplines. I stuck it out and got good grades, but now that I'm nearly 10 years into my admittedly lucrative career, I can't say that I'm necessarily happy or fulfilled with the work that I do.
Anyway, that's my two cents. YMMV.
Unfortunately no best answer. IT is okay now. But 20 years from now who knows. Politics seems to be a booming industry. Unlimited money in that system she might as well get some of it. If she is one of those that wants to work in an area she loves her parents should keep her room furnished. She will be living with them for a while.
I spent a decade+ in the wrong line of work because I made the 'smart choice'. The world is sum of countless variables you don't control. Save yourself the hard lesson and just do what you actually enjoy regardless of what you think is 'future-proof'.
But an intelligent person will always be in demand, by ensuring that they are always the most knowledgeable and by working in the elite end of the business.
The jobs that get destroyed are typically jobs that require the least amount of intelligence and skill.
Take fashion. Few Americans make a living sewing any more - unless of course you are a fashion designer, rather than a piece worker.
Taxi drivers may not exist in 20 years - but race car drivers will still have jobs.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Look up the best careers. Most of them are in the health care field. I don't see robots/automated systems taking over health care any time soon.You will not be rich, but let's just say comfortable.
Seriously have her go to the local horse stable and get a job in shit shoveling. If she is nice and does a good job she may get tips on top of her pay. People won't stop using horses anytime soon (racing and recreational riding) so there is job security. It would also teach her that no job is below her.
A degree isn't required for shit shoveling and she can make money going though college by shoveling shit.
You get the picture, jobs that are onsite, and very hard to automate due to dexterity/strength requirements. Handyman also comes to mind.
Barring honest labor you can always go law or civil service.
Mortician
Groceries
Tax law
Every couple of years we, the ones who do the real work, hear that we will be owbsolete in a few years. And yet every buggy whip maker alive today is perfectly capable of making BDSM equipment and is doing fine. The needs change from generation to generation but the helpless society will still need people to help them achieve the basics needed to make their worthless lives feel less empty.
Every industry will have a down moment; there is no point . You need to be able to be flexible. The algorithms will be broken. People will be needed to clean up the mess. Make sure your niece knows how to fix things; program; pitch a tent; cook (especially for boys, but girls too); build shelter in several kinds of wilderness; complete a university degree (any one); paint; invest in shares; avoid being ripped of by slimy stock brokers; be nice to people; solve quadratic equations and do long division; fix plubing; run fast all the basic stuff. After that make sure she does the thing she's good at and enjoys.
It's the oldest for a reason. Only holodecks will render it obsolete.
It is not glamorous but if you want future-proof nothing beats prostitution.
Seriously, I know it's all anti-fem movement and all that but someone has to take care of children might as well take care of your own.
However, if having kids isn't your thing then you want to be somewhere in the robot design/maintenance track. So, something like Engineering or Computer Science would be best. Not everyone is good at math and abstract problem solving. Learn to do that really well and get some people skills and you should be able to stay at least marginally employed.
Another option might be to join the Military. There will always be a need for Generals even if all the grunts are robots. Someone, has to tell squad A to attack point B, and I'm not convinced that the lowly soldier will ever really be replaced with robots. Someone will always fight once the robots are defeated.
Also genetic engineering of crops might be a good thing to go into. We are going to need better yielding crops if we are going to support all the unemployed TV zombies the Robot's replace in the job market. Otherwise, someone might get the idea in their heads of limiting the population.
Join the army for a job for the rest of your natural life.
Depends on how long of a future you need to proof against, but I'd imagine jobs requiring human interaction and contact will be among the last to go. PT's, masseuses, and psychologists are probably fairly safe for the next fifty years.
Becoming a physical therapist will be a great way to make a living off all the utopians who are injuring themselves with increasingly bizarre sports, plus you'll get to use the latest and greatest exoskeletons at work.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
If you can think, write, and learn, you will always be able to find or create a job.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
What sorts of things is she good at? It doesn't help to recommend a sysadmin position if she isn't detail-orientated.
We will need charismatic leaders with good tactical perspective to lead the revolution(s) against the (1) A.I./robots/enhanced humans/etc., (2) wealthy corporate elites, (3) other nations, (4) and/or any other threat that will come from the idea that continuing to put faith in current talking heads, hipsters, activists, internet-of-things purveyors, etc. etc., will ultimately be _good_ for _us_.
Common dangers to your career and wages are:
1. Outsourcing
2. Automation
3. Disruptive innovation
4. Boom and bust economic cycles
Ways to protect your career and wages are:
1. Merit and Knowledge
2. Restricted professions & credentials
3. Union or government position
Not all dangers are avoidable, for example disruptive innovation is all but unavoidable, but boom and bust cycles are easier to survive in a bigger industry.
Not all way to protect career are available to everyone, for example merit and knowledge is unobtainable goal for significant portion of population (merit, by definition, it is zero-sum game). Additionally some have drawbacks - proximity to government or union usually has negative effect on one's maximum earning potential.
Now for more practical advice - a technical profession that interfaces with government, requires accreditation, and deals with local or critical infrastructure would be most stable long-term position. Civil engineer, food inspector, dentist are some typical example.
I'd choose security if I had to choose now.
I've been in networking, sysadmin and telecoms over 25 years now and past 15 years also involved quite a bit IT-security. Security is and will be there whatever we will be doing far in the future. It's not going away for sure and more complex systems become more there will be security related work to be done.
Health care is probably the most future proof career. People are going to keep getting injured and sick and our aging population will have more health problems over time. Doctor, nurse, pharmacist, radiologist, physical therapist, etc. You really can't automate health care.
Would it be better if my niece took a course in the Arts,
You can just show her how to get a job at wal mart directly take the shorter path.
Seriously though, a course sure, suggesting it as a career path is laughable though
yes we need artists, yes some make money. Most don't, most at best get the occasional commission or design clip-art
all thats left are a bunch of squalling kids looking to take over the remaining gravy trains then fight each other tooth and nail to tweak process synergize or in some other way euphamism the other guy out of his job.
She could get working on time travel
Heating, ventilating, and air conditioning. The job sucks, but it's steady. Automation of ductwork installation and repair is a long way off. Unlike construction, there's maintenance work; someone always needs their A/C fixed.
... the oldest profession.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
...of permanence. Perhaps such is normally willed to us by well meaning superiors (making themselves feel good in the process), but it is a serious delusion.
First, one should identify a field which generally appeals. From there, the field needs to be constantly analyzed to see what makes it work (i.e. current "skills"), but always keeping one's eyes to what new skills (or a new field, for that matter) might soon come into play. It's not about her career. It's about what needs doing in the world.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
As other worthies have probably pointed out elsewhere in the comments, the best idea is to learn critical thinking and remain flexible. STEM education is valuable whether you're working in your specialty or not. Unlike Underwater Basket-Weaving or other majors that seem like a great idea as a freshman, STEM educations generally push students to learn basics about how the world works that can be universal (including submarine crafting mechanics). I have this same issue with my kids and I think the answer is just to let them know that building a network and constantly learning is the highest-payoff strategy but no guarantee. Anyone giving a job guarantee is, to paraphrase, lying or selling something.
Also I'm planning to have my drugs delivered by Amazon Drones(tm), so that's not a future-proof occupation either.
I'm not sure that the blatant misogyny in the joke here is worthy of anything higher than a -1: Flaimbait, but really: if you can completely automate production of every single thing that people depend on for their day-to-day lives: food, drinking water, medicine, and shelter: what's left?
Sure. Sure. Art, science, human progress. We're never going to give those up. Taking care of your own home and family would be the one obligation that would remain as a personal duty(yes, regardless of gender).
It's not yet, but at some point we're going to have to assess our work-ethic culture with the inevitable collision with technological progress.
Are you kidding me? You're planning your daughter's career based on predictions from Kurzweil and Rifken? They both have notoriously bad track records. Kurzweil is the guy who predicted that we'd have automatic translation for phones ten years ago. (He claims that his prediction held true because 2004 smart phones shipped with crappy text translation apps, but it is obvious from context that he originally meant real time voice-to-voice translation.)
I have no doubt that much of what Kurzweil and Rifken predict will eventually happen, but their timelines are far too optimistic. IMO, the best advice you could give your daughter is to keep away from factory work (everyone will be replaced by robots relatively soon, even in China), law (far too many grads, far too few jobs -- you need to go to a top 10 school if you want any shot at a good job), and academia (same problem as law).
Barber/hairdresser.
Doctors are or will be subjects of the state, capped and controlled with bureaucratic discipline. The big corps are getting the H1-B nirvana they demand and swamping IT with cheap Asian labor.
Law is the place to be. As the power of the state grows employment of vast numbers of well compensated lawyers is inevitable. This is why the DMV area (District, Maryland, Virginia) area is outperforming the rest of the nation in terms of income growth, rates of employment, etc. They're living a 1960's American Dream life with steady income, gold plated benefits and pensions; you can't get that anywhere else any longer aside from academe.
The means of government employed lawyers is assured as we evolve into a nanny state adjudicating every aspect of the hoi-polloi.
This is the recommendation for Arts degrees. I myself hold 3 of them in political science. I do tech support for a living.
Testing 123
Look for a skill set that can be applied anywhere. I'm a programmer by trade, but there's very little I can't do with electrical, plumbing, carpentry well with a bit of education.
Critical Thinking is something that seems like it can be used in any setting. Things like that.
Industry can't get their hands on enough developers right now and we're worried about those jobs going away?
Seriously, google, Microsoft, etc. are lobbying the federal government to lure SW people from other places so we can fill the void here.
I have a friend who became a lawyer couldn't find any work. He's a SW manager now because that is where the demand is. A really old guy told me at lunch today he his phone is ringing off the hook for SW work and that if I wasn't raking in money right now I was doing something wrong.
Construction doesn't seem like a good thing to into when you get older, but it's not my field so I wouldn't know.
What does she want to do. It's fine if she doesn't know yet, too many kids are forced into a box too early, but those are the types of questions you should be asking her. What is she good at? What are her hobbies? There may be jobs she doesn't even know about that may relate to them that you can help her discover. Picking a profession is not something really that should be done on statistics/probability.
That said, of course it's good to reign in certain things - there aren't a lot of jobs for underwater basket weavers. But, you could suggest offshoots of that - either a basic business degree to run her own shop, or something in textiles/manufacturing. But it's always best to go with what she likes and/or is good at as a starting place - vs. figuring out what has the least amount of risk and going for it no matter what the profession is.
This is where those "aptitude" tests that you take in high school might be helpful. I'm sure there are equivalents online, or her school might still offer them. I'd never use them as a sole resource, but they can help you find things that may not be obvious. In high school one of the careers that mine said was "law enforcement" which at the time I laughed at - yet now, in my mid-30's - I suddenly found myself working in a different field in the private sector, but as a financial investigator. Something to those tests, I think.
People has that bad habit of dying...
People have to eat. Plan for migration into servicing food service machines at some future time. And then servicing food service servicing machines.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It seems like a profession where your identity, presence, and personal behavior is part of the product being sold. Possibly the only such profession?
There will be more of these jobs in the future than right now for sure, but there might not be many overall. Still, possibly the best bet for any job you'll need a degree to obtain.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You really can't automate health care.
Yes, you can and it has been.
And it can be offshored. I worked on the software for McKesson that enables X-rays and whatnot to be offshored, Pharmacy robots, and various things are automating healthcare. It's amazing how much of medicine is just following a flow chart - even at the physician level.
In the not too distant future, we will be seeing healthcare being mostly automated: at least in other countries that don't have an organization like the AMA. Step into a full body scanner, anything the system can't recognized is sent to a doc/tech and a solution will be given: lifestyle change, prescription, or whatever.
Even today, computers are more accurate in diagnosing illness than doctors.
Instead of finding a job that is future proof, or learning a set of skills that will get her a job, why not recommend to her to do something that she enjoys doing? No one can predict the future, and settling for a future proof job because the job that she would want to do may possibly go away sometime in the future sounds like setting her up for a miserable life. The best advice is to follow a path that she enjoys. A job will always be just a job, but a career is doing something that you love.
Becoming a salient artificial intelligence maybe?
Slashdot editor. Those guys are set for life! Timothy even has a lordship!
Future proof job? Prison administration. Learn an eastern foreign language. Lots of 3rd world countries need American expertise in our core competency: fascist dystopian prison industrial complex manufacturing.
War on drugs is out. War on cybercrime is in. Big business. Make technology essential to capitalism and criminalize poor people trying to break in to the Capital City/Elysian or out of District 12/Earth's gravity well.
Get them hooked on drugs/VR and they'll hack their way to indentured servitude with Air Force Cyber Command sweat camps under the watchful eye of General Alexander^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Jean-Luc Picard.
Very Cyberwarrior! Much "tip-of-the-spear"! Wow!
We all know eventually the only ones profiting will be those who own the robots. So become a capitalist. Take that money she was going to spend on a college education and start a business instead. A few rules, though:
1) It must not be something other people do for free for fun. Don't become a photographer.
2) It must be something where eventually other people do the work while you make the money. Don't become a freelancer.
3) It must be scalable. That is, adding workers/locations/production increases profits. This is similar to "don't be a freelancer," as there are only so many hours in your day.
4) When you're finished, you can sell the business to somebody else. That is, it must be a business that accumulates assets, rather than just service contracts.
Good luck.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Get a job building things for the future.. If you can handle the math and learn to build things creatively that is a good basis for a ton of careers.
I told my daughter: get an undergrad degree in this.. if you don't like it later than get a Master's and change.. but getting an undergrad in something simplistic and simple later limits your options.
College is expensive.. learn hard things there.
The answer really depends on several things, but she should start by looking at what she is good at and what she enjoys doing. Trouble is, for kids coming out of high school, they may or may not really know either one of those things yet. I knew right off that I enjoyed writing computer programs (taught myself Basic and some C during high school), so I went for a CS degree for system programming in college, and ended up working as a sysadmin. My wife was the opposite, and didn't find out that she enjoyed working in health care until having to get a "real job" after a couple really bad years of college. I also have a nephew who spent almost 8 years in college, switching majors (and sometimes colleges) every semester for the first 5 years until he found a passion for social work.
If she doesn't have a specific field that she is interested in, but she does want to go to college, I would recommend she pick a degree program that offers an Associates degree mid-way through, (or just go for an Associates of General Studies,) in order to make it easier to get a job or switch colleges halfway through, should the need arise. (In other words: be prepared.) If she wants to go into a field where she would need an advanced degree such as a Masters or PhD, I recommend picking a university that offers the advanced program she wants for her Bachelors' degree, as they often offer automatic acceptance to students who received their undergrad from them, and also may offer dual grad-school credit for some advanced undergrad classes.
With regards to books recommending one avoid studying computer science, I have one statement: We have not reached the Singularity yet, and if nobody studies computer science, how are we supposed to get there?
foresee an increasingly automated future where most of humanity would become either jobless or underemployed by the middle of the century. While robots take over the production of consumer hardware, Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system? Besides politics and drug dealing, what jobs are really future-proof?
Think of the big picture. If the future you are describing really happens, with the vast majority of society scraping for an ever smaller piece of the pie, what would be the natural outcome? What skills would be in demand?
There would be a lot of big crime targetted at the very few, very rich and the corporations (giant concentrations of assets imply large scale criminal operations). There would be a lot of petty crime between the proletariate (mostly crimes of opportunity with a low profit margin, probably not much of a career there except maybe in racketeering). Maybe some shakedown operations not too far removed from mass copyright enforcement. There would be religious and ideological pontification, offering hope to hopeless people, whether substantive or illusory. There would be a lot of civil unrest, and a lot of mechanisms for suppressing that unrest (tough to say which side will have the upper hand at any moment, but both sides will have openings).
So: Information security, physical security, ideology / idolism / propaganda and counter-propaganda, sockpuppet armies and microtargetted mass messaging, law enforcement and thuggery, lickspittle to the wealthy, and influence management and peddling, off the top of my head.
Consider what postmodern feudalism might look like. That should be a reasonable picture, if what you suggest should come to pass.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
No farmers, no food.
Kitty (a blonde bombshell): Y'know I was reading a book the other day.
Carlotta (a world weary diva): (taken aback) Reading a book?
Kitty: Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book! Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?
Carlotta: (giving her a once-over) Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
plumbing, electrician, framer, mechanic, heavy equipment operator. if you're working for a contractor, not in-house at some firm, there will be boom and bust years. but no makerbot can do this work.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I have an ex-roommate who does refrigeration repair ... the pay's okay, but the hours can really, really suck.
He's on-call every couple of weeks, and might have to drive an hour away to fix a chiller at a grocery store; if they can't get to it and get it repaired before it warms up too much, they might have to destroy thousands of dollars worth of food. (and if you to go and get parts, you're kinda screwed) I don't think it's quite as bad as the 'always on duty' as some sysadmins get stuck with, but it can be much more stressful than you'd expect.
I also don't know if it's quite as steady work, even with the 'can't be shipped overseas' argument; my
understanding is that with the slowdown of new home construction, there's an oversupply of pipefitters, so companies aren't necessarily hiring. (this might vary by city).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Tell her to study home economics.
Ok, I'm sure dude here was trying to troll and all... but...
Any kid strait out of highschool needs, desperately, to have true home economics down. And I don't mean cooking.
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
The basics of double entry bookkeeping.
The basics of Auto loans and home loans
The difference between Mutual Funds and Index funds and why you should always go with an index if you can.
What a fiduciary is, and why you should never take investment advice from someone that you don't have a contract with.
The difference between a 401k and a Roth IRA, and why you need both and why paying off your house before retirement is bad.
You should be investing at least 10% of your income into retirement. Really, 10%.
In the vast majority of cases you will get paid the same if you get your degree from a tech school, where your tuition will total under $10k as you would from a state or private college where you're going to pay that much per semester! (i.e. go to a tech school unless you want to be a doctor)
I came from a very poor family. My parents pulled themselves up through hard work. They didn't know a lot of that stuff, I had to go out in the world and learn it on my own. But I see a LOT of kids come out of school and just have no clue. They get financially ruined by scam artists as soon as they walk off the stage at HS graduation. They go to a state university to get a nursing degree when hospitals are so desperate for nurses they're actually paying dental assistants to go to school in my local area!
It doesn't have to be that way. Educate your kids on this stuff. If you don't get it all yet, go with them. My life completely turned around when I took some pretty simple 1 week courses at the local community college.
Well, well said. College shouldn't be just a glorified trade school--you should be learning how to think, reason through problems, and expanding your sphere of experience. If just some of those skills can be acquired through education in any field, then you can adapt to emerging job market dynamics.
I recommend to her to get a rich father and live off the trust fund.
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Tell her to go to beauty school and become a hairdresser.
1. It's not outsourceable.
2. It's unlikely to be automated due to the precision required involving sharp objects around the skull.
3. It's more an art than a science.
4. You get to meet people in your local community.
5. The hours are reasonable.
6. In general it's a respectable profession.
My advice for 'future proofing' is to stop treating "futurist" fiction like it's fact. It isn't 'inevitable rise of the machines'? Seriously? Does your daily life actual revolve around Terminator &/or the Matrix? Those are FICTION. There are a tremendous number of jobs opening all the time in all fields even as we 'automate' more things...
I agree with Confucious there! As a teacher, I can say I have seen plenty of people chasing after the job-of-the-week. The company goes under, and you lose your job (or to keep it, you have to move out of state, country, live on an Antarctic glacier, etc.), then you have to retrain and spend a fortune. And they're not happy, because they lost their job, they're worried, they're in debt, more debt now because of student loans, and now they have to do some stupid job they don't really want to do for the oil company because that's the only way out they see. Nuh-uh. Don't let her grow up like that.
Everyone I know that followed their own path (granted, small sample size, etc etc), has seemed to end up way better off. They do what they love, they are in demand because they are good at what they do, and just everything seems to have a way of working out. Make sure she knows (1) what she loves; (2) how to think and solve new problems; (3) give her an entrepreneurial spirit, so she can CREATE HER OWN JOB and take care of herself if she doesn't want/find one in the market.
I think that last point is perhaps the most important. The best (and really only) way to prepare for the future is to learn how to take care of yourself. Create your own job, live on a budget and NOT be in debt (debt makes you a slave to the job trends since you can't settle for a more fun but less paying job), grow your own food, pick up a few trade skills to do house repair, etc... Of course definitely encourage higher level thought if she wants to be an engineer, but if she wants to be an artist, let her, as long as she knows how to take care of herself.
I'm not sure that the blatant misogyny in the joke here is worthy of anything higher than a -1: Flaimbait, but really: if you can completely automate production of every single thing that people depend on for their day-to-day lives: food, drinking water, medicine, and shelter: what's left?
Sure. Sure. Art, science, human progress. We're never going to give those up. Taking care of your own home and family would be the one obligation that would remain as a personal duty(yes, regardless of gender).
It's not yet, but at some point we're going to have to assess our work-ethic culture with the inevitable collision with technological progress.
You consider suggesting she learn to be a homemaker to be misogynist?
It's an important and fulfilling role, more important than ever in a world full of fucked up little bastards, deserving of your respect. It's you that is the misogynist for suggesting that only a persecuted woman would choose such a task. Just because a homemaker isn't producing something for you personally in exchange for your money doesn't mean what she does isn't of vital importance to us all.
You suggest she'd be most useful as a modern jester for your amusement. That's a pretty horrible thing to say. You're a real piece of work.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Health care is the modern issue. The societies which don't already have it are getting it. There's not enough health care providers now, and demand is only increasing.
Doesn't really matter if you're a provider or an enabler (e.g. health and human services, medical transcriptionist, etc) ... demand is there.
Sure, most doctors could be replaced (with improvement) with an expert system. But they will fight that tooth and nail for the foreseeable future, no matter the cost.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have to agree.
Tech jobs are most in demand, but even those are slowly being eliminated by automation. In the not too distant future, most people will be dependent on the government socialist programs, and only the "rockstars" will have good high paying jobs.
I recommend she take a differnet path and completely steer clear of the labor market. She should either start her own company, or she should learn everything she can about money, and learn to be a invester. become a master of money. understand how it's made (physical and monitarily) and how it works. Then she is much less likely to be a slave to the system.
The whole idea is based on the assumption that Moore's law will continue going on forever. It already seems to be slowing down, and no trend can go on forever.
Even if we have computers with the power of a human brain, that doesn't make it magically as smart as a human brain. You will still need to understand exactly how the brain works and recreate it in software.
A modern day PC can simulate a worm; but only with the proper software, which only exists because we know where every single neuron is and how they are linked.
which says cook and plumber
and I'm sad to say, lawyer, bureaucrat, and politician
other classics which may get killed by technology
doctor, banker, broker
Get off the grid, learn how to grow your own food. Then just watch as the rest of the world go down in a mega-clusterfuck GMO zombie apocalypse.
Why are "fucked up little bastards" deserving of our respect?
Finance, IT... something that is needed in at least some small part in every company. Every company needs someone to keep the books. As companies get bigger, every company needs some bit of IT.
Every company needs management as well, but those type of jobs seem to be less stable. It is more difficult to "fire / reorganize away" a doer than a manager in an organization.
If you get into something more specific like Mechanical Engineer, your options begin to be more limited (less jobs in smaller cities)... but your pay goes way up!
She should focus on her skills first. I suggest that being able to write and speak well will take her to the front of whatever field she decides to choose.
The best place to begin that isn't in technical fields, but rather the so-called liberal arts.
Secondly, plan on getting an advanced degree in the field she wants - at least a Masters.
She can place math courses in as electives early on in case she decides to go for something technical later, or even decides to pursue a real MBA.
This guy started with a BA in history, but he's rather an exceptional person. I just mention him to point out that nothing is written in stone by your first choice of college. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Science & engineering are both good fields. By science I mean disciplines like physics, chemistry, biology and the like. By engineering I mean mechanical & electrical/electronics engineering and similar fields. These fields have a higher than average likelihood of leading to a fun job with reasonable pay and lower than average unemployment.
Taking care of old people will also be in increasing demand, but I'm not sure that those jobs ever will pay well.
Salespeople will be among the very last to be replaced by something else.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Suggesting she become a homemaker despite her explicit request for career information and knowing nothing about her other than her gender -- yes, almost certainly misogyny.
Train for Management, Business Administration and Making Tough Decisions(TM). There is no way that our corporate masters are going to outsource/offshore/automate their own cushy positions or let the great unwashed get their hands on the robots producing the goods.
Stick Men
You've posed a very difficult question because it involves predicting the future, which is always tricky and often wrong. So ... a couple of points.
Brynjolfsson's and McAfee's The Second Machine Age is a good resource on this (reference below.) They state that any job that can be routinized will be automated. Therefore your niece is looking something that cannot easily be reduced to a routine. Whatever she chooses will have to involve daily challenges that involve unstructured problems–those without convenient "plug-and-play" solutions and that will involve a creative and flexible mind to solve.
A second point is that careers in IT, such as computer programming won't go away, but any such jobs that are routine will. I've thought for a long time now that the future will belong to people who have computer programming skills as well as knowledge in a subject discipline that will aid them in programming for that discipline. An example would be a combined major in computer programming and biology (bioinformatics, etc.) As jobs in a particular area are eliminated, such a flexible skill set will be of value in new areas that open up. so she should have two strings to her bow.
Beyond that, people who can think clearly (take a course in argumentation,) and communicate clearly will always be more in demand than the confused and numble-toungued.
Reference:
Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2014). The second machine age : work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies (First Edition. ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
According to an Oxford study from a year ago, about 702 job positions or 47% of all jobs can be automated in the near future.
I for one vote for reducing the work week from 40 hours to 20 hours so we can all stay employed, make money, enjoy more leisure, and let the machines do most the work.
Links:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2014/02/26/will-r2-d2-snag-your-job/
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
My son looked at me as a systems admin/engineer (or sme on some apps), and the hours I put in, and decided to be an electrican. Hes 18 already completed his electrical training, has his trainee license and is following a journeyman around, and in 2-4 years should be making around 50K to 90K (50K is US average). He can do a 40 hour work week, has the ability to move to a smaller town and still make a good living wage.
Being in the tech field, I'm stuck to major cities, on-call hours, off hour maintenance windows, and cant just take a couple weeks off to go enjoy life. Sometimes a blue collar job at a little lower pay than a white collar job has more benefits. Really depends.
Seattle area has been building tens of thousands of low income apartments that are cap'ed at 50K income, and are brand new, and look better than some of the apartments 2x the costs.
No job is really future proof. Trying to find one is stupid.
There are a ton of career assessments out there. Take one. Find the career you can do with the abs minimum of education. Yes, you may want to go into social work, but with the cost of the degree vs income, you will likely never be able to afford anything. You(and your parents) will be paying loans off for the next 30-50 years. Probably never have kids w/o incredible financial pressure, which translates into kid problems, spouse issues, and the like. In fact if you can get away with it, I'd avoid college. The costs of a 4 year degree are high and while there are benefits in a perfect world, we don't live in that world.
IF you don't know what you want to do, and the career assessment doesn't work for you, then try to work (or unpaid intern/volunteer) with many different careers.
People fear automation and the progress of technology, that somehow it's going to put society out of work. I think this view is backwards. If you've worked in the labor force for a decade or more, you might have noticed that historically there have always been jobs where people sit around all day and do practically nothing. It's parodied in movies constantly because it's a reflection of what's pretty much always been the case. Like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho - just one character from a whole cast of characters who put their feet up on desks and got paid copious amounts of money for seemingly nothing. Or Sam Lowry's desk job in the film Brazil. That's just how it went, the technology didn't exist at the time to make companies efficient, and they needed to get certain work done, so companies just had tons of these almost meaningless positions. This is mostly the reason why global competition was such a wake up call in the 70s and 80s. We've gotten a lot more efficient and a lot of positions are just removed. There's really no future proofing of anything, and the term itself is marketing junk. If you want to provide value in the job market, have a career that requires creativity and has a high learning curve and high market value. Also, always be willing to learn new skills that will help you maintain this value since skills inevitably become obselete.
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
That's basically lowest-common denominator advice -- a better piece that is still a simplification is to ensure your credit card use is always backed by cash (your accounting tips may help in tracking that independently of the banks). A majority (admittedly not a vast majority) of people pay in full every month, and thus do not lose and typically gain from credit cards (other than possible cash-only discounts which aren't super common and imply no debit card either). cite: http://www.creditcards.com/cre...
I agree that it's exceptionally rare that doing anything other than paying in full every month is a good idea, *especially* when you need that cash to eat because that starts a death spiral.
[...] and why paying off your house before retirement is bad.
Also an oversimplification, this one dangerous. There was a time when mortgage rates were higher than some credit card rates...
The notion of "haves" and "have nots" are going to be about robots, not about money. There will be two kinds of people in the future - those that own the robots, and those that are either displaced or enslaved by them.
Automation is going to make the future rather bleak, indeed. Universal welfare, anyone?
Here's a couple of books on the subject. The second one helps answer your question specifically, and in great detail.
There is no job in existence today that we won't have the technology to either eliminate or turn into skill-less labour within the next 20 years. That doesn't mean technology will overcome all jobs, but which ones will stick around will be almost impossible to predict.
Blow Jobs. totally future proof
Is that the goal, to never grow or change jobs?
How about you tell her to master a skill, spend college having fun and building a network, travel and grow as a person.
Learn to spell and write like a human. Do not get something stupid tattooed on her face, hands or neck.
Then when she graduates, she can get a job doing something and then get a job doing something else,
Good people are employable for ever, sucky ones are not.
Andrew
> and yet we refuse to distribute the high efficiency benefits of these things to the very masses ...
> who brought them about and are being displaced by them
Unfortunately, this misses the key and unpleasant point. Efficient creation of any good results in an oversupply. And then there is a huge problem of how to get people to buy _your_ cheap production instead of someone else's. We can't "distribute." People must come to want your goods.
You can see this in agriculture, for example, where grain farmers don't get much - but the people who invent new and ridiculous-sounding bread and sandwiches, and the people who advertise them, do. Much the same is true for cars, consumer electronics, and the like.
Unless you like being a cog in this, any such career is a bad idea. (Of course, a few people will make a fortune there, but not many.)
I agree that choosing a career on the basis of these two's opinions is silly. But there are big forces in play. The really good at anything will thrive. The average only if there's an inevitable demand, such as skilled trades.
(I write this as a somewhat cynical 70-year-old who has watched many so-called bright ideas come and go.)
Tell her to do what she enjoys for as long as she can because life is a lottery and you can't predict how it will turn out.
Yes. I used to cut hair but had to quit for medical reasons (cannot stand long term due to blood vessels in legs). I made $25 a cut for me and $40 for women + tips. I shared the proceeds 50/50% and the tips were mine. I made on average $1500 week.
Tell her to study home economics.
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it. .
This is terrible advice. Credit cards are the easiest way to build credit. The advice should actually be: Pay off your credit card in full every month. If you won't be able to pay it off, don't buy things with it.
The rebuttal: "This is too hard for some people" is not a reasonable response to this. This is a trivially easy behavior pattern to adopt. If you can't do this, I don't believe it is possible to be financially secure. This is the smallest, easiest, step in playing the game of our society's financial system.
the "FUTURE" a la fifty years ago was all about reducing human labor, getting machines to do it all. It's beginning to happen. Now all we have to do is figure out how to DISTRIBUTE the stuff. (reference: search "distributivists") The goal is minimal work for all, evenly offered. Examples: Why have some people employed full time, others unemployed due to lack of positions? Why not make the jobs half time, and employ twice as many people. (Maybe it's only 10% unemployed, then reduce hours ~10% and employ all at 90% time. You get the idea).
If robots make cars, say, only those with jobs can buy. 100 years ago, Ford and mass production had mass consuption. The car workers could buy the cars. This was the secret. We're losing that.
You say "That not the way the system is setup". I'm saying, change the system.
I could go on. Sorry no time. Gotta go to work.
> Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
That's terrible advice. The best way to improve your credit is to actually have credit in the first place. A good credit score is a balancing act involving increasing the length of time you've had credit, minimizing 30/60/90 day lates (or more accurately, not having any), and having a good amount of available revolving credit (but not too much). The point is to demonstrate that you can be responsible with a decent amount of credit for a significant amount of time.
Not having a credit card whatsoever does not help you, it only hurts you. Think about it, if a friend asked you for money, you'd feel more at ease if the two of you had a history wherein he demonstrated that he could promptly repay you, and over a longer period of time paying back small amounts of money, you'd feel more comfortable lending him larger amounts of money.
The best thing to do is to get a credit card and pay it off in full every month. Pretend that the card is an extension of your checking account and never spend more money than you can put your hands on in any given month.
Fully agree with everyone needing to know personal finance. Home economics is not personal finance, and covers many more areas. Look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
As for your advices though, some are dangerous generalizations.
A credit card, when repaid in full monthly, builds your credit history and gives you a good credit score. Often times they also come with a cashback or a loyalty points program, which means it's more advantageous for you to be using it (not to mention your money stays in the bank and accrues interest for a bit longer).
Paying your house in full, as another poster mentions, is sometimes beneficial. Both to decrease interests payments when interests are really high and to build an asset you can capitalize for future investments.
The amount you need to invest for retirement is entirely dependent on your personal situation. A 10% yardstick gives people a number, but they should really find out what _they_ need.
Other than that, completely agree.
Agreed. I just got $400 back from my credit card, and I have never paid them any fees or interest. I never see cash discounts, so I'd be paying the merchants' fees regardless, so I may as well get the cash back.
IF you are disciplined, credit cards are very handy.
If you're not disciplined, you should get disciplined.
See, I get the misogynists. They're idiots. But the people who out of their way to see zero misogyny in blatant misogyny. They're the ones who concern me.
Because that seems to be the normal reaction to justified accusations of bigotry these days: an immediate switch to defensive mode without a thought in between. And if that's normal, then every fractional scrap of progress has to have the whole argument over basic human equality be fought over and over.
Future proof job - predicting the future! Join Rifkin and Kurzweil in the only guaranteed sinecure!
As a side note I was amused to see the suggested spell correction for Kurzweil.
What does she LOVE to do?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
And no one has yet to suggest that OP's niece should become a teacher. Sad.
...about structural unemployment and a basic income: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Historically speaking, space exploration started with robotic devices who later get replaced with astronauts.
I may be a bit biased here, but the need for Geologists is not going to go away until the Earth does. The sheer range of jobs available with a Geology degree is staggering, everything from a naturalist at a county park to Oceanography all the way up to the oil & gas industry or the USGS ( or insert your country name in front of the Geological Survey ) Federal government jobs.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
are not very easy to offshore and demand is not going away either.
The Menendez brothers had a good plan; they just botched the execution of it.
Tell her to become an M.D. and specialize in obstetrics. Unless there are no humans, humans will still have babies, and the process of delivery will still be fraught with problems. If she likes art, then maybe industrial design. Widgets may end up being 3d-printed, but someone still has to make them look pretty.
"Jeremy Rifkin (The Third Industrial Revolution) and Ray Kurzweil"
Who are collectively batting zero when it comes to predicting the future.
This is akin to telling her not to get into aerodynamics after reading Well's "The War in the Air".
This is actually a very good piece of advice. Now that I'm in my late thirties and an established professional, I am shocked at how many of my peers don't know how to cook, clean, handle money, or their domestic affairs in general. These are invaluable skills to have, and form the basis for many good jobs.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Considering that 25 years ago, someone talking about "the internet" would have been largely met with baffled stares, it's pretty sure that most of the jobs that are going to exist in the first world in 40 years may not have even been imagined yet.
Then again, considering politicians inability to let ANY special interest group go unsatisfied, just about any job is "safe" - if the buggy-whip manufacturers had had better lobbyists, they'd still be employed too.
-Styopa
If this same advice were given to a man? You, by virtue of assuming that a mere suggestion that another be a homemaker is a misogynistic, are yourself, being a misogynist. Being a homemaker is a valid life-choice for either gender.
Sorry, you're incorrect in both accounts.
You're going to cite advice from a site who's sole goal is to sell you more credit cards?
Credit cards are always, and forever will be a scam. If you have the cash, use the cash. If you don't, you shouldn't be buying it.
For some real info... follow this link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
What should be most interesting to you is that "Credit Cards" weren't even a "Thing" until the Supreme Court struck down predatory lending laws in the 1970s... Let me restate that... Preditory lending laws prevented credit cards from being legal.
Mortgage rates have nothing to do with why you shouldn't pay off your home loan. Your home loan is your single biggest tax deduction, and unless congress changes things, will remain so for the rest of your life. The higher the interest rate on the loan, the larger the deduction so the as long as the interest rate is competitive with the market it's still a good thing. If you can get a better rate from another bank you should, and if rates country wide are terrible, you should probobly pay it down quite a bit... bot not totally pay it off.
And I want to be clear here, I'm talking about a first home... if you own 2nd and 3rd homes that's different... The deduction you get from that loan in enormous. More importantly, when you retire and start collecting on your 401k, that 401k is going to get taxed! And now that you're retired and paid off your loan, you'll have no deduction at all! While you're drawing on your 401k you need to be using your home loan deduction to reduce that tax burden. You should plan to have that loan paid off around the time the 401k runs out... then you switch to your Roth IRA which you've already payed the taxes on. If you plan correctly, you shouldn't be paying taxes after your homes paid off.
But yes, perhaps I should have been more detailed... That's why I said you should go take a class. Don't listen to me, don't listen to anyone on slashdot or even your friends. Get educated, figure it out for yourself. There is so much mis-information on these topics you can only really trust someone that you're paying (a true fiduciary under contract or a professor.)
For more info on other reasons you should wait to pay off your home-loan, see this: http://www.aarp.org/money/inve...
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
I strongly disagree with this. Credit cards aren't scams. The problem is that people use them irresponsibly. The best way to treat credit cards is as charge cards: you pay the entire balance at the end of the month and only rarely and only for very good reason ever use the high-interest line of credit the cards give you. It's much better to use credit cards than debit cards as the credit cards offer stronger protection against liability for identity theft, and it's better to use credit cards than cash because cards are simply more convenient. As long as you pay off the balance every month, you don't get shafted. Now, if you don't have the self-control to do that, then, sure, don't get them, just like if you don't have the self-control not to get yourself shit-faced drunk every time you see a container of alcohol you shouldn't keep alcohol in your house. But, in both these cases, the first attempt at solving the problem should be gaining self-control rather than avoiding the underlying issue by treating the symptom.
The difference between a 401k and a Roth IRA, and why you need both and why paying off your house before retirement is bad.
Well, you missed Roth 401(k)s and traditional IRAs. Give those some love, too. It's usually only better to use Roth vehicles when you're young or, for whatever reason, not making much money, and, in that case, you should double down and use Roth everything. Regarding paying off your house, yes, sometimes it's best to hold onto a mortgage, but it's also sometimes not, so you need to learn how to do the calculations. Remember, any money paid past the minimum payment on a mortgage goes straight to the principal, and you'll never pay interest on that portion of the principal again. That's a pretty good reason to make extra payments, and the mortgage deduction is sometimes a red herring because you lose your entire standard deduction by taking "advantage" of it.
The last thing I'd like to mention is a really, really important thing I think you left out: never take out student loans. Again:
NEVER. TAKE. OUT. STUDENT. LOANS.
Taking out student loans is 50 times more risky than taking out a credit card. If you fuck yourself up with a credit card, you get to declare bankruptcy and erase the debt. If you fuck yourself up with a student loan, you're an indentured servant until you pay it back. It's that bad. I don't care how low the interest is. I don't care how much money you THINK you'll be making when you graduate. It's never worth the risk, and you should never do it, whoever you are and whatever your situation is. If you can't afford college, go to a community college, get an Associate's degree, and work in data entry or something until you can afford college. Taking Pell grants, or other grants, or scholarships is great, and you should try to do well in high school both to get some merit-based scholarships and to get AP credits that I know from personal experience can let you do a 4-year degree in 3 years. But never student loans. THOSE are scams.
Oh, and one last thing: don't fuck yourself up by having a kid until you are completely and totally financially secure. Just don't.
---linuxrocks123
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
...anyone who has tried to migrate cobol code can tell you this. The cobol code will never go away as it is future-proof. Further, anyone who can code in cobol will always have a job since no one is learning cobol, for the same reason that no one learns medieval torture techniques.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
The difference between a 401k and a Roth IRA, and why you need both and why paying off your house before retirement is bad.
Only in America. Yeah, to everything you write.
In rest of the world, paying off your house is the *first* think you want to do.
Humans are suckers for the story that, although human life AND the environment has ALWAYS got better and better, we are actually about to collapse in a heap as our environment implodes.
Unless you pay large sums from general taxation to a Green priest. That scam isn't going away soon either.
Kurzweil should not be taken seriously anymore...no 'futurist' should be taken seriously...it's all TED talk hype-BS...at best...at worst it's a PhD thesis!
Sure, technology could advance to the point where most menial tasks are automated and only the mentioned 'skill' jobs (several posts have listed them in other comments)
yes...that can/will happen...
AWESOME
it's a win-win-win...practically a utopia in fact...a techo utopia where political systems like 'libertarianism' and 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are wholly unnecessary and we can all **share** in the bounty and **evolve** to whatever we will become once we get past meeting our basic survival needs
unless...
your value system depends on competition and scarcity
THEN
you have to make ***artificial scarcity*** to maintain your structure
technology is the ultimate anarchist...it's ***HUMANS*** who choose to make the technology reinforce the status quo
Thank you Dave Raggett
But the laws of physics are the same Timbuktu such that you can be replaced by inexpensive overseas engineers.
I honestly don't know what's future-proof. Even manual "creative" labor can be done by remoted-controlled robots when bandwidth gets cheap enough.
Perhaps tell her to stop trying to second-guess the future and just pick what she likes and learn a variety of related skills surrounding that topic, including technical, physical, business, and sales.
Table-ized A.I.
You cannot future proof Jobs. Hes dead.
This is terrible advice. Credit cards are the easiest way to build credit. The advice should actually be: Pay off your credit card in full every month.
You're a victim of marketing by the credit card companies. This is not true, there are plenty of ways to get far better loans at far cheaper rates that will increase your credit rating at a far faster rate.
This is how I improved my credit without a credit card. It sounds complicated but it only took me about an hour at the bank to set this up:
Go to the bank, ask for an unsecured loan. I told them I just wanted to build up my credit and they thought it was a great idea.
Put that money from the loan into a bank account. We'll call this "Savings"
Have your paycheck direct deposited into the "Savings" account.
Have the payment for this loan sent via electronic transfer from the "Savings" account every month.
Setup a second account called "BILLS" and a third called "SPENDING"
All bills that are at a fixed rate (like you car loan) come out of "Bills"... a bills that are variable come out of "Spending"
Transfer the part of your paycheck that will cover the "bills" to "bills" automatically...
Take the remainder of your paycheck minus the interest from the unsecured loan to spending... (unless you want to save some)
TARE UP the debit card attached to this "Savings" account. Give the password and any other information you need to access it to someone you know will give you a hard time if you ask for it... i.e. your mom
You now spend your money with your "Spending" card. You cannot access that loan, it will get paid on time, every month, no matter what. You have no revolving credit. You will never miss payment on a bill. You will never spend money that you cannot. Your credit score will sky rocket. Mines currently over 830.
If you think about it, you can probably come up with your own plan along those same lines. It's not hard. Now look at credit cards and the risks involved. I personally know dozens of people that are bankrupt due to credit card debt. For absolutely no reason at all...
Nah healthcare is a bubble waiting to burst. One flue outbreak or servere heatwave and those jobs are gone.
Never own a credit card. ... the basics of Auto loans and home loans
Get a credit card to build up your credit score so you can actually get a loan. Few places will give loans to people with no credit history. Best way to get a history is to have credit card.
I'm sure to get hammered but being more well rounded by going to a liberal arts school will mean if her chosen field ends up being not ideal she'll have a little more background to fall back on. Also it does help to be able to "talk" the same language as other groups in a company. In any profession, the rockstars will always be able to find and hold onto work. If you aren't 100% sure you are a rockstar then you aren't, then the next best thing is to be one of the few people that can interface between the rockstars and managment/marketing/sales.
All consumer debt is a scam.
The only debt you should ever take on should be for a first home, and you should pay it off as fast as possible.
You will always be further ahead financially if you never pay interest charges.
There is also a small argument for a car loan if you need one to get a job and can't come up with the cash.
My friend tried to get a $1500 car loan when he was in college. He has held a job since he was around 13, was at his current job for several years, has lived at the same local address for over a decade, he had a great GPA, he could have easily paid off the $1500 in a few months, but he was going to college and had some unexpected expenses.
All of the banks in our area out right refused to give him a loan because he had no credit history. Even the bank he had used since a teenager and had direct deposit for the past few years. They plain told him that even if he had the worst credit score possible, they'd give him a loan, but no credit history meant no loan.
In the end he had his parents co-sign, but the point is no credit history means no credit. It's a catch 22. Credit cards on the other hand, are given out like candy. Easy credit history.
I'm in a situation myself where I can't get a house loan. I've had the same salary job for the past 10 years I alone make over 2x the the average house hold income, I've been averaging a 6% raise per year as a programmer, I've been living in the same apartment for 6 years, no late rent and my land lord loves me. Yet I can't get a house loan because of my lack of credit history. The banks have all told me to get a credit card and start using it to pay my bills to help build my credit history.
I'd say "marry someone wealthy."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
Nonsense. Get a card that gives you cash back and then run everything possible through it... but manage your finances to ensure that you can always pay off the balance every month. Ideally, spend only what you have in your bank account, but spend it through the card.
It's like getting a 1-3% discount on everything.
Yeah, obviously the discount is being built into the price of what you buy, but you're going to be paying that regardless.
NEVER. TAKE. OUT. STUDENT. LOANS. Taking out student loans is 50 times more risky than taking out a credit card. If you fuck yourself up with a credit card, you get to declare bankruptcy and erase the debt. If you fuck yourself up with a student loan, you're an indentured servant until you pay it back. It's that bad. I don't care how low the interest is. I don't care how much money you THINK you'll be making when you graduate. It's never worth the risk, and you should never do it, whoever you are and whatever your situation is. If you can't afford college, go to a community college, get an Associate's degree, and work in data entry or something until you can afford college. Taking Pell grants, or other grants, or scholarships is great, and you should try to do well in high school both to get some merit-based scholarships and to get AP credits that I know from personal experience can let you do a 4-year degree in 3 years. But never student loans. THOSE are scams.
I'm a bit surprised by the absolutisms being tossed around this thread. The problem with yours, in particular, is that HR drones are demanding more and more education from the proles, and without a bachelor's degree, someone born into poverty has no way to escape. Obviously, the degree is not a guarantee of escape, but it does increase the odds. Student loans were a godsend for my brothers and me, and without them, none of us would have had a chance in hell of doing anything with our lives that did not involve scraping a grill for minimum wage.
don't fuck yourself up by having a kid until you are completely and totally financially secure
Another absolutism, and this, too, is problematic. "Completely and totally financially secure" is a condition that does not exist for anyone but the super-rich, as the crash of 2008 so clearly demonstrated. By this logic, nobody but the 1% should ever have kids. It also assumes that kids are a burden, but anyone with that kind of mentality really ought to get themselves fixed (I'm not spewing hyperbole; someone who hates kids really should not be having them at all).
We can agree to disagree about credit cards. I don't think that credit scores are all that important, as I'm from the school of "if you can't pay it all at once, don't buy it," with the only exceptions being a house or a car (and I hate the fact that owning a car is actually a necessity where I live).
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
Suggesting she become a homemaker despite her explicit request for career information and knowing nothing about her other than her gender -- yes, almost certainly misogyny.
Homemaker is a career, and it does take certain skillsets that are developed over a lifetime. It's an important career chosen by many women throughout history. Consider what happens if the next generation is not nurtured and educated.
And it is a future proof job - can't outsource child making and rearing, and she has capabilities unique to her sex. (eg: half the potential competition of other career paths) Kids are also an effective retirement plan when raised well.
Even if you don't think it's the best option, it's a valid option, and a noble one.
So do you want me to show the research on AI producing video game levels, or entire games? Or the research on generative music? Or the system Hollywood uses to bracket screenplay return?
There is no "future proof" job. Which fortunately means there's no jobs and no money.
The thing is, while having credit is good, using it is terrible. If you can dependably pay off your credit card before you start paying interest on the "loan", then it's a good deal. It improves your credit without costing you much. (Most cards have a yearly fee, or some other entanglement, so it WILL cost you something. You've got to be able to be sure that what it costs you is LESS than the benefit it provides.)
OTOH, don't count on your credit rating. That can be destroyed without any action on your part by other actors. My wife had to fight for months, hours a day, to get her credit repaired because someone with the same name had died in a hospital without paying their bills. They didn't even live in the same city. And that guy was a man. This didn't help much. SHE had to find out what the problem was with no help from the credit agencies, and they still wouldn't stop hounding her until she mailed each of them a copy of the death certificate. (And that didn't stop some of the bastards.)
I think credit agencies may be full of scum one, or maybe two, steps worse than corporate lawyers.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
EXCEL
Microsoft EXCEL
Invest in rental property and develop a passive income stream. Sure there will be work to do yourself to get established.. They aren't making new land. We will need some place for all the young immigrants.
what about medicine? It's going to be a VERY long time before patient care will be automated. She could start with nursing than eventually advance to being a doctor.
The legal job market is horrible and has been for some time. There is a massive oversupply of attorneys in the US and a massive undersupply of work for them to perform. I was a programmer for about a decade before I went to law school and became an attorney. I did about 4 years of litigation including picking juries and trying cases on my own. After 4 years, I gave up on it because:
-it was enormously stressful. The stakes are incredibly high in most areas of law.
-it's not portable. If I find a coding gig in another state, I can pack my bags and leave the next day. A lawyer has to pay thousands of dollars, wait months to take and pass the bar (which is not necessarily easy as it requires you to become an expert in all sorts of areas of law you don't care about).
-you deal with (relative to programming) incredibly unpleasant people all the time. This is doubly true if you practice criminal law or family law.
-it's a constant struggle to bring in money- after 4 years of programming, I was at about six figures. I think I have a grand total of 2-3 classmates (out of about 200) who have done that well as lawyers.
-the work isn't intellectually challenging- most successful attorneys do the same cookie cutter thing day after day after day. It's incredibly boring compared to programming.
-and yes, even patent law is incredibly hard to break in to (in any sort of reliably lucrative way).
-and yes, I went to a top tier school- outcomes are horribly bad unless you go to HYS.
Everyone has been predicting that the bottom will fall out of IT for decades, but the fact remains that the innate talent necessary to become a useful software engineer is rare and will continue to be rare. My salary before and after my legal career has been about twice as high as my most lucrative years practicing law. On top of that, my hours are half as demanding, my work environment is pleasant and I almost never have to travel for work, let alone constantly flying around for depositions and pre-trial hearings.
Anyone who has the talent for programming and goes to become a lawyer instead is a moron.
My ass ...
Teach her to learn in a private school from a young age so she can forge connections.
Teach her to form connections with connected people. That's literally all it is - one big nepotism vat. Rifkin's just a pawn that can't see - has no idea really...
That's all that "experience is everything, your CS degree means nothing" means.
It's just the jobs for the boys nepotism culture. Your quals DON'T matter people. The only people that are blind to that are the privileged. They think their skills actually had something to do with it just because they have skills. They would have been successful anyway. They were chosen to be successful anyway regardless.
If you're like me, you go it alone. You have nothing I know what my CS degree did for me - nothing..
Any specific trade you learn is subject to random technological revolutions. You need to learn as much math as you can cope with, because it's at the core of any engineering or science, which are the jobs that add value. You need to learn basic finance, even if your real accounting is going to get done by computers or professionals. You need to learn a bit about demographics, because that's one of the big things that drives what technologies and jobs and financial practices are going to be around in any given decade. You need to learn some hands-on skills so you can fix your own stuff, build your own art projects, and have some generally satisfying competence for dealing with the real world. You need to learn to write clearly for almost any job you've got.
A demographic example - the Baby Boom echo of WW II is getting ready to retire (traditional retirement for a few, running out of jobs they're in shape to do for others.) So there's going to be a need for increasing medical care, and for figuring out how to organize communities that can cope with them (traditionally these were either called "cities" or "extended families" or eventually "nursing homes".) There's going to be a need to build or retrofit houses that let you fit a wheelchair through the bathroom door. But financially, there's going to be a lot of capital around that wants to be turned into income, and fewer people working to earn that income. That means that interest rates and stock dividends are probably going to be lower, pension funds are going to be in trouble because the ratio of workers to retirees is lower, and there's going to be a smaller source of taxes on working people to support the retired people who don't have savings or who thought that the Social Security Trust Fund was anything other than a tax on the future generations. (How much of that stuff did I think about during my career? Very little :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Welding. It's great money, a specialized skill, transferable to almost any local/regional economy, stable technology, and you get a union.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I have doubt in what those pawns say. They have no idea. Human development index is low in China. I'm not surprised the book "Third great nepotism and societal destruction parade" sold very well there. Those people aren't really free. They're gullible many of them - gullible to blind minions like What's his name and the other fella.
prostitution?!
Possibly lesbian porn.
Being born in Wisconsin in 1972, I witnessed the death of the very tail end of the small farmer era in America, or at least it felt like I did. However, over the past 10 years, I feel like I've also seen the rise of boutique-type agriculture which focuses on providing a limited quantity of very specific, artisan-quality crops raised using specific (often "Organic", "Sustainable" or "Perma-culture") methods. Instead of producing a certain number of tons or bushels of commodity crops to be sold to distributors, these farmers sell directly to specific customers, such as restaurants or CSA buyers. Buying these products are sort of a lifestyle choice, not a necessity/cost choice, so maybe it'll be durable in the face of ever-cheaper commodity foods - maybe. It's technically possible to make a good living growing food, however, marketing, CRM and really good order fulfillment now are just as important as the actual digging in the dirt. If nothing else, your kid might be better prepared for a post-apocalyptic/retro-subsistence economy! ;-)
@chiknkoop
Your niece should study whatever she finds interesting or what she's good at. Basing what she's going to do for the rest of her life on what might or might not happen in the job market in the future a good way to set herself up for being unhappy.
Doesn't matter what she does as long as she can be a leader. Those skills can be engrained in her early on, but you cannot major in leadership. Kind of like what OP was saying about arts and humanities, in that leadership is one of those intangible qualities, but this quality demands a much higher pay check.
Major en Physics, and Philosophy. Minor on art and programming.
Before the Industrial revolution, Philosophy and Arts were the top topics to learn. The idea is that first you need to understand what living is about (Philosophy) and you need to be able to appreciate beauty.
Industrial Revolution needed people to be able to read and perform task, thats why it got replaced by Math and Language.
Keep the basics, Philosophy (to understand what life is about), Physics (in case of desperation), art (minor in art, to be able to appreciate beauty), and programming (with special focus on basic compute theory), so you have a good foundation on how to take advantage of the more advanced technologies that might appear.
My 2 cents.
There's currently a serious glut of lawyers in the US market, and not just in LA and NYC. Sure, graduates from Harvard Law and its peers are going to have an advantage, doing high-end corporate law, but news articles I've been reading recently say that for average-quality law students at average-quality law schools, some ridiculous amount like 1/3 don't have a real law job within a year out of school, and the pay scales don't match the level of student-loan dent they have to pay off for most of them. A lot of the entry-level jobs are things like public defenders (get paid dirt, heavy case loads), or small-town business/real-estate (plumbers get paid better.)
And farming? Are you kidding? Americans may have a warm place in their hearts for farmers, especially if their grandparents farmed, but their grandparents got their butts off the farm and moved to the city for good reasons. And that was before mechanized agriculture radically changed the number of farm workers it took to grow food, and pushed us toward monoculture agribusiness that needs maybe 3% of the US population to grow most of the food, and most of the farm labor is low-paid migrant work. If you inherit some land or are willing to move to a dying town out on the prairie, sometimes you can make it pay off, or and there are some places you can do specialized-market farming and do ok at it, but it's tough work that won't put your kids through college.
Corrections? Yes, the US has far more prisoners per capita than China or even Soviet Russia used to, and until we end the drug war and have some time for its spin-off crimes like the gang business to die down, it'll probably stay big business for another few decades, but most of the work is morally about one step above being a slave-owner and financially it's two steps above minimum wage, competing with a labor pool of people who need a job that doesn't require an education, just a mostly-clean criminal record and adequate citizenship papers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
.. who the %@(&# is going to buy the products that make the company money? Without consumerism, what's going to survive (looking at how the world's currently structured). Won't need ads, which will take down pretty much all of the "new economy"...
AI can create art just fine, this has been concretely demonstrated in a few experiments, it is just that there are millions of people who are willing to do the same for free or minimum wage so their is absolutely no reason to program computers to produce consumable entertainment. Also getting a JOB in art just sounds horrible.You do not become an artists because your Uncle told you that it was a profitable career path.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The last decade has been one huge push everyone into tech movement, definitely going to be far far too many people by the time current high school students get to it in 3-4 years (if not already).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Exotic dancers will probably do well over the next century or so and call girls can do well if they are really sharp looking and smart enough to handle the trade. Very few jobs will exist for humans in any area of work much sooner than most people think. Obviously society will have to pay people not to work. Freedom might become a much more real concept when people are freed from monetary demands. The very notion of concepts such as socialism, communism and capitalism will become quaint and obsolete concepts. The very basic fact that all people need to confront is that "TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNED TO ELIMINATE HUMAN EFFORT". We are at the toggle point at which technology may actually pay off for humanity. So far the advance of technology has caused as much pain as joy.
The university I went to would get really annoyed at you if you called their School of Human Ecology (originally called Home Economics) misogynist. If you wanted to study nutrition, or child development, or textile technology, that was the place to go, and if you wanted to be pre-med and could only afford in-state tuition, you could do it there or at the ag school.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
had one nothing in over 30 year except try to sell vitamins as a cure to aging.
Stop reading his crap.
It fields will be fine, as well plumbing, electrician, civil engineer, numerous of scientific fields, hedge fund manager, actuaries, entertainer as so on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is she ordinary or exceptional? An exceptional person will do well in any subject. As long as they have passion and a strong drive.
If she is fairly ordinary, be careful for engineering related jobs. People who graduate with business degrees and a 2.9 GPA can still get jobs better than that of high school grads. But engineering grads with 2.9 GPAs will rarely practice in their field.
People who get engineering degrees because of the money or because their parents told them to are likely not to have the passion and drive that someone truly interested in the profession will have. They aren't going to stay up to 3:00 in the morning trying to figure something out, or code on the weekend for fun.
Strive for a degree is something they are passionate about. Look at people who are 10 years, 20 years out of school and successful as role models. Find out what they studied, and if you are interested in where they are now, do what they did to get there.
Mike
Skilled construction trades will always pay top dollar.
Yes, they are usually hard work, often in harsh environments.
Plumbers, Electricians, Glaziers, Carpenters, drywallers, floor installers, roofers, etc..
Get a trade, you will always be able to get a job that pays at least reasonably well.
If you do not mind moving, then it should pay quite well.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
There is no way to know what jobs will be in-demand in the future. Technology changes so fast that all such predictions are meaningless.
And it doesn't much matter anyway, because soon Yellowstone will erupt and that will be the end of humanity as we know it. All human ambition will be buried under ash and snow.
make your own damn future. Stop looking for future proof. Don't listen to your family. Find what you love, make that work, dumbass. Keep acting.
Old me is irritated and young me..oh so very irritated.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You can get a credit card that allows you to pre-pay. By doing so, you will have zero risk, and, strangely enough, those build your credit just as well as any other credit card will. Plus you can still buy crap online, if that's the reason you wanted one.
You can also build up credit in other ways, such as through regular utility/telecom bill payments (this will depend on where you live). Credit cards are a high risk device. The advice given would be very sound for many, but should be moderated with the option of using a pre-paid credit card.
The issue with your method is it ignores the possibility of the advice being taken by someone who lives with no savings. Thus, the money will be available to pay the credit card, but not for the ball joint that just blew out on your car the day the bill was due.
I graduated in EE in '69. Over my career everything changed at least once or twice. What I found most important was an understanding of the fundamentals behind the practices. That is, the underlying theory, physics and mathematics. With a firm grounding in those and a feel for how to apply them, I could keep up with the changes. I suspect it is the same in most fields.
A couple of earlier posters noted she should do what she really loves to do, and that is of course correct, but concentrate on the basics at first. All else will change. Don't fight the changes, adapt to them, and exploit them. If you love what you are doing, it is part of the adventure.
Still, life is a crap shoot. It takes a little bit of luck as well as careful preparation. Aristotle said count no man fortunate until he is dead.
Get a job for a year while living at home, save it all up, buy some lonely planet books, and go traveling. *then* decide what to do with your life after seeing the world. Sometimes a diversion is necessary, I think that too many people jump right out of high school into College with no idea about what they really want to do, or any perspective on the world at large.
Since automation has started taking more jobs then provided(a little over a decade ago) I would say it isn't backwards at all.
After driverless cars come driverless construction equipment.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Until you become the last person on earth, anyway.
Strippers don't have much to worry about.
Pay is better than the army, too..
You forgot to say "Private" student loans. Federal student loans have very generous provisions on forgiveness so if you have ultra-high balance you probably will get some forgiven if you use Income-Based Repayment. Plus, the interest are deductible (as adjustment to income) on your federal tax return.
New Economic Perspectives
Mortgage rates have nothing to do with why you shouldn't pay off your home loan. Your home loan is your single biggest tax deduction...
Maybe if you have a million dollar home. Most people who own modest homes don't pay out that much interest. Even if they do pay a lot out in interest, say $10,000, that still works out to be around a $200-300 write off. Spend $10,000 to save $200? Great advice!
The vast majority of people get their biggest deduction from having children and using the standard deductions. Small business owners get to write down a lot of their business expenses. Mortgage interest deductions aren't the deal they're made out to be.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
This is quite possibly the worst financial advice I have ever seen. Forget about credit. You realize credit cards provide you with free money for 30 days, that is INSURED against all fraud/false claims, and most importantly, offers cash-back (or travel/movie/your interests) rewards by using it?
If you are responsible and pay off your credit card and never accrue/pay any sort of interest, you will actually gain money by using them (through rewards, and the ability to invest the money you spent for free for 30 days!), and be protected by VISA/MasterCard/whatever against bad purchases (someone trying to rip you off).
The only people who say "never use credit cards" are those with no self control, and thus wrongly assume others have no self control either. I have never held credit card debt (unless it was special 0% offers), and every year I get a few hundred dollars just for using it (no annual fee). In addition, several times I have made online purchases, but never received the item, called VISA, and they immediately refunded my card and dealt with the seller.
My German credit card is directly linked to my bank account. It is really a debit card but its a Visa so I can buy stuff online and use it for a hotel on vacation etc. My bank account can be overdrafted though with rates like you'd have on a CC. By both the Credit Crad AND the Debit Card. Now tell me how that makes the Credit Card bad?
My Canadian CC has cash rewards. I use it for everything and pay it back at last twice a month so that my checking account directly sees what I'm spending. Whats bad about that?
In both situations, if I cant spend money properly I'm SOL. But hows th CC bad?
I think you've inadvertently made a very strong point. Transportation is a super-critical part of any economy and human beings are absolutely terrible at it. Even the best drivers in the world are not that great at all when you think about it. Most people are terrible at driving. Automation of transportation, if we're lucky, will happen. We just can't do it now because the technology isn't there. And, also, I think it's childish this idea that automation is taking the jobs away - people are getting rid of the jobs, not robots.
Tell her to study home economics.
Ok, I'm sure dude here was trying to troll and all... but...
Any kid strait out of highschool needs, desperately, to have true home economics down. And I don't mean cooking.
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
Proper management of credit is crucial. The details of that vary over time. Not having credit, having too much credit can both hurt.
The basics of double entry bookkeeping.
Totally agree with this. Amazingly, this is being forgotten by nearly all "new paradigm" math (like phone apps). And when it is used, it doesn't take into account modern aggregation abilities of computers. We have not yet seen how bad banks will be porked with an information economy over insecure protocols.
The basics of Auto loans and home loans
The basics aren't good enough. The pros abuse consumers, even with consumer protection laws.
The difference between Mutual Funds and Index funds and why you should always go with an index if you can.
Untrue. While most "financial advisors" aren't worth their fees, the indices are controlled by external macroeconomic events.
What a fiduciary is, and why you should never take investment advice from someone that you don't have a contract with.
Man, that sounds like those quaint objectivists. Contracts are only worth what they can be sued on, and that is extremely expensive.
The difference between a 401k and a Roth IRA, and why you need both and why paying off your house before retirement is bad.
No, you don't need both, and there is an inherent problem with basing far-future retirement needs on current tax laws which are changing. You should pay off your first house ASAP, then invest in moderately leveraged real estate. You have no idea if there will be extreme inflation in the future, wiping out liquid investments - as happened in several South American countries that people were formerly using as examples to make people switch from defined benefit accounts to user-directed accounts - which in the end is a way to make the rich richer and less the middle class.
You should be investing at least 10% of your income into retirement. Really, 10%.
Only if things continue as they are - and they won't.
In the vast majority of cases you will get paid the same if you get your degree from a tech school, where your tuition will total under $10k as you would from a state or private college where you're going to pay that much per semester! (i.e. go to a tech school unless you want to be a doctor)
I came from a very poor family. My parents pulled themselves up through hard work. They didn't know a lot of that stuff, I had to go out in the world and learn it on my own. But I see a LOT of kids come out of school and just have no clue. They get financially ruined by scam artists as soon as they walk off the stage at HS graduation. They go to a state university to get a nursing degree when hospitals are so desperate for nurses they're actually paying dental assistants to go to school in my local area!
It doesn't have to be that way. Educate your kids on this stuff. If you don't get it all yet, go with them. My life completely turned around when I took some pretty simple 1 week courses at the local community college.
Somewhat true, but missing some important info. My dad said it best 50 years ago:
Learn a trade.
Get educated.
Understand what is happening in the world.
Then whatever happens, you can get a job, or better.
He also noted 50% of CEO's were lawyers. That hasn't changed much.
Don't bother.
Thanks to India you can get so called "IT professionals" at a dime a dozen. There are so many of them that they've been doctoring certificates just to get an edge.. but come to an actual incident, what they love to do most is dramatise, call and let you do their job instead.
Even corporations (MS, Oracle, etc..), Banks ( BoA, JPMC, etc..) Telecoms, everyone... are outsourcing to them to cut cost, not caring about quality.
You'll be competing with those schmucks if you go IT, Programming, System Administration, etc.
I would recommend as a better close alternative, to dig into networking. It's a big field with so much potential, and one can clearly spot the difference between an outsourced schmuck who just wants to make other hard working engineers' lives a living hell, or someone who really knows what they're doing.
Not art.
If she's not college material, send her to trade school to learn a construction trade. Having a trade means she'll be employable. Some jobs are never going to go away -- there will always be construction jobs.
If she's college material I'd recommend two paths: lf she has a math or science bent, engineering. If STEM isn't her thing, as a first step send her to an accredited business school. Follow that with a good trade school. Having the business degree means she'll be able to operate at a higher level in the industry, handling the business with the background necessary to not screw it up.
Engineering and construction jobs will never go away. You have to keep up with new technologies, techniques and trends but you'll be able to find a job.
.
Construction, electrician, plumber, welder. You can't offshore these jobs, they must be done here. There are jobs everywhere because everyone wants a house. People will always want a house so the jobs are safe. It's not glamorous like a rock star, but it pays well and there are plenty of jobs.
Until you know you can pay your credit card every month, ensure your limit is lower than your income so you can't be tempted.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
One has to be super passionate to want to be in this cut throat education program.
One of the biggest lies from law schools is placement after graduation. Sure School A boasts 90% employed, they just don't tell you that most of them aren't in the legal profession.
If you want future proof, there is accounting and mortuary. There is always death and taxes. No machines will take those away.
But the main thing one should have is good analytical, problem solving, and written and oral communication skills. Everything else is OJT.
A woman choosing to be a homemaker is quite different than telling someone that they should be a homemaker just because they're a woman.
This is terrible advice. Credit cards are the easiest way to build credit. The advice should actually be: Pay off your credit card in full every month.
You're a victim of marketing by the credit card companies. This is not true, there are plenty of ways to get far better loans at far cheaper rates that will increase your credit rating at a far faster rate.
Unless you found loans that have negative interest rates (i.e. pay you to borrow money from them), I don't see how you can beat 0% rates you can get from a credit card and pay off every month.
Maybe credit cards from your bank work differently, but for the cards from my bank, I get a statement every month for the purchases I made in the month, and then if I pay the full amount before the deadline (a few weeks after the statement), then I don't have to pay any interest. That's FREE loan from the moment I made the purchase to the time I pay.
Oliver.
First, I have a lot of sympathy with the "maths" and "maths & science" suggestions, since a good maths degree can take you anywhere, but I have to suggest blacksmithing. There is a *reason* that "Smith", "Smit", "Schmidt" and the many other variants are common. Fun, useful, relies on very little high tech resources, and even works when the grid goes down. There are a lot of people out there earning a living making beautiful ironwork, but probably still not *too many*. Tell her to strike while the iron is hot! ;-)
NO! I don't mean to be rude. I work with some great OBs but it is a terrible job. I work IT at a hospital and I work every department at every level. MDs are not going away so any field will do; surgeons especially cardiac are treated very well. Robots are coming in but as a tool for surgeons. Anesthesiologists are raking it in but that may be more prone to automation in the future. Nephrologist, neurologist, pathologist, the list is never ending, pick something you'll love (bioinformatics?). OBs have the worst patients, crappiest hours, highest malpractice insurance. This advice is from MDs. Unless she has an inalienable passion to be an OB, avoid it at all costs
Here's one way to get by without student loans: be a dental hygienist and save your money, then when you have enough, go to college. You'll need two years of community college and you'll need to take a licensing exam. You'll also need to put your hands in people's mouths eight hours a day, but you'll have gloves. There are other ways to bootstrap yourself; you just have to look.
http://www.ada.org/en/home-ada...
I stand by my statement that taking out student loans is an incredibly risky thing to do. Yeah, you can do it and have everything work out. It can also fuck up your financial future more than if you took out a mortgage, bought a house, set it on fire (accidentally) without having insurance, maxed out all your credit cards, and then wrecked your Tesla which you took out a car note to buy (and didn't have collision coverage for). Is "never" too strong? I don't think so.
"Completely and totally financially secure" was meant in a relative sense. Even the 1% aren't completely and totally financially secure, as the French Revolution demonstrated. What I meant to say was done with your education, settled into your career, in a marriage you expect to last, that type of thing.
Finally, in modern times, unless you're a subsistence farmer, children are, objectively, a burden. For some people, the burden is worth it because they enjoy having children. Pets are also a burden. Maintaining a boat is a burden. Owning and maintaining a house is a burden. Most things in life are optional, and the optional bits often come with costs of time and money. Those costs we can refer to as burdens. Just because something is a burden doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just means you should do a cost/benefit analysis beforehand.
Oh, and, yeah, cars suck. You're right on that.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
I think it's childish this idea that automation is taking the jobs away
History has also shown us that it doesn't happen. I remember the 90s when computers were set to take away all the office jobs, the same paranoia happened during the industrial revolution.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I am an engineer, AOE 1992. And it isn't even present-proof, much less future proof.
Let me try a better answer, twofold.
First, google peak prosperity (peak prosperity dot com) and read or watch the crash course. That's what's coming. Understand that -- and you're well on your way to being futureproofed.
Now, as for the career, I suggest that it is less important what career she is in, and more important that she is more likely to get a job than her peers. So, how to do that? Well, taking it to an extreme...
(1) Two years in the workforce, doing something *related* to what she wants to do. (20 years old)
(2) Two years at a trade school, getting a trade degree related to what she wants to do. (22 yrs)
(3) Two years in the workforce, building on what she's learned. (24 yrs)
(4) Two years at a community college, getting a two year degree with 4-year possibilities. (26 yrs)
(5) Two years in the workforce, building on what she's learned. (28 yrs)
(6) Two years at a 4-year institution, getting her bachelor's degree (30 yrs).
Now, when she graduates, she's going to have real world experience.
(7) two years in the workforce, using her BS at near-top pay level compared to her peers (32 yrs)
(8) two years getting MBA, if it seems appropriate (34 yrs).
(9) into management. With a skill set unrivaled by other managers.
Marriage and kids work in well on the plan -- especially if the husband is doing the same.
Barber?
When we (hypothetically) revert to the stone age there won't be much need for, say, dermatologists. Or anesthesiologists, for that matter, since we will no longer have access to all the fancy drugs they use. Certainly in that scenario the ability of an OB to affect outcomes will be diminished, but you'd probably still be better off with an OB during delivery than without one. Working in the E.R. and knowing how to deal with random trauma would also be a good choice in a low-tech post-apocalyptic future.
http://www.aptitudeinstitute.com/index.html
Common dangers to your career and wages are:
1. Because we can, that's why.
Ways to protect your career and wages are:
3. Union or government position.
Until everything breaks loose, that is. Then #3 doesn't apply. Ummm.... I work in bridge construction doing engineering. The pay was so low that when Obamacare kicked in, I found myself losing money and quit. Now the company is struggling to make do without me, but ... see #1 above. I'm trying an alternative path, now.
But your last paragraph is nonetheless pretty good. I suggest reading "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" (available for free, in pdf, online) by Don Lancaster, and getting in the habit of having a money machine at all times.
A woman choosing to be a homemaker is quite different than telling someone that they should be a homemaker just because they're a woman.
Yeah, it's like telling a 6'10" black dude that he ought to go out for basketball. What a horrible piece of advice to give. She should totally become an entertainer and dance for me. Like a monkey. Dance, monkey, dance! Show us your tits! You wanna pay the rent right?
Speaking personally, I have immense respect for a homemaker, raising the next generation of children who will care for me in my old age and be fit peers for my progeny. I have the same respect for a loyal husband and father. Not a whole lot of respect for anything else though. Wow, you work at a bank/a lab/dance and sing on stage... like I give a sweet flying fuck.
I don't owe anyone my respect, no matter how much I'm browbeaten. I have far more respect for the woman who makes me coffee, works two jobs and still cares for her husband and children than I do for the likes of Ada Lovelace and Steve Jobs.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
True, I was looking at the commentary sweeping us unto the Utopian future not the stone age. But you're right, it could go that way (and there would be no malpractice but the hours and clients are still terrible. I think really many of the comments are good for a single generation, then spin the wheel and go again...
In a majority of cases, a prepaid credit card is actually a secured card with the same interest rate and credit implications as a regular card. It limits your risk if you can't budget but you still get a negative rating. Most utilities in the overwhelming areas of the US do not report positive history, only reporting bankruptcies and unpaid debs. The advice to avoid a creidt card is ill advised at best.
Yes. That is objectively true. Tall plus black does not equal basketball prodigy.
You have only succeeded in showing that you are a racist piece of shit as well as a misogynist.
If you had a hint of self-awareness about you, you'd realize that this sort of thing is why you're couch-surfing with the dwindling number of people whose pity for you overwhelms their disgust.
So our biotech company is folding, and people are scrambling for jobs
our VP/marketing is in the Airport, and she runs into a guy , a rich guy, she hasn't seen in ten years
She says, yadda yadda, company going under, microarray slides, yadda..
and the guy says, I've been looking to aquire microarray technology....
I mean, you can't make this crap up
anyway, maybe your daughter is interested in money and career, and maybe she ain't
However, there are two things I feel pretty confident about:
for most Americans, the primary or major source of retirment income is soc sec
hence, the most important thing she can do is vote for democrats who pledge to support soc sec
for most working americans, their most important financial asset, far bigger then their house, is the ability to earn a wage
hence, disability insurance is like really important ( i would think that people who consider themselves logical and mathy can figure this one out...)
I tend to be highly skeptical of the "Utopian future" where everybody is replaced by robots. Will some jobs be replaced by automation? Sure. But I suspect it will be way fewer than folks on this thread expect.
In terms of a post-apocalyptic future you can prepare in one of two ways. You can hoard up a bunch of supplies and focus on being self-sufficient, i.e. learning how to farm, hunt and make your own clothes, or you can do a little of that but also learn a skill that's likely to remain valuable after the apocalypse. That's where I was going with obstetrics and trauma treatment. This approach is also a hedge against the case where the apocalypse never actually happens. You get to be compensated well right now, which isn't always the case with the guy living in a bunker with lots of guns and canned goods.
Yeah, I think it FEELS like automation is replacing people but it's really just shoring up big traditional problems in orgamizations. It seems like there are a lot of people in the world who make careers out of these kinds of jobs - I don't have an answer for that. I remember what Accounts Payable departments looked like in the mid 90s - a LOT of paper and staff who were basically doing data entry that would eventually be done via process refinement. It would blow my mind, people would just sit in chairs all day and do mind numbing work, it was obvious that those positions were there because the companies just didn't have technology or methods at the time to do it any other way. Those jobs aren't around any more, I can't figure out how someone can say with a straight face that automation gobbled up those kinds of jobs.
and gop land jail / prison doctor and other staff.
The GOP wants to get rid of ER laws and then the only way to get to see one is to go to jail / prison and sue use the us constitution cruel and unusual punishment part to get a doctor.
we need a shorter education system so people can learn new skills with out having to go school for years or having to play college credit transfer games.
When some kind of an badges system can work better.
What ever happened to do whatever interests you? Works for me, YMMV.
Administrators? They still have those? Seems like a lot of companies just have their developers handle all sysadmin, network admin, and database admin tasks.
'Of two things you can be certain; death and taxes,'
Funerals, tax inspector >> guaranted jobs
I work developing AI. I hate to tell you this, but infomatics is first on the chopping block.
using real money = visualisation of Your financial condition
whenever You open Your wallet for a payment, You are immediately confronted with reality
that's idea behind "never use credit card"
Hmm, I get a couple of free airplane tickets a year from my credit card and have yet to pay a dime in interest. Guess I'm totally getting shafted.
Also, the interest on my home loan doesn't even come close to the standard deduction. It doesn't for most people.
At current rates, your home loan would need to be around $250000.00 for the interest deduction to be more than the standard deduction for a married couple.
2) It must be something where eventually other people do the work while you make the money. Don't become a freelancer.
Of course if the technological revolution is also accompanied by an actual social revolution where those seen as parasitical are put up against a wall, this is probably a risky strategy. Stick with "scaleable" and also acquire skills that help you direct people in the particular solution you're creating.
Bad advice. Take it from someone who has plenty of skills: Nobody is interested in them. Most companies train their employees themselves anyway, and the last thing they want is people with their own mind and interests. Tell her to become a lawyer, that's the most future proof profession.
This is the fasted growing sector of the economy; for the midterm election we are on track to spend as much as the last presidential election. When you add in related jobs at dark money PACs I don't see how you could not have exceptional job security.
No, I'm not incorrect.
You should note I'm not an American, so half the things you are quoting are just totally irrelevant (mortgage interest deduction on first house, 401k, etc.). Even if I were American, your first link is basically irrelevant and your second link is good but not really contradictory, and a mortgage interest deduction doesn't necessarily make interest rates good -- it's possible for cash to be better than a mortgage loan.
It's actually bizarre, you said: "If you have the cash, use the cash. If you don't, you shouldn't be buying it.". Then you argue that you shouldn't pay off your home. That's contradicting your advice.
However, it's not contradictory to using a credit card. There's 0 interest, that's 0, if you pay in full every month. The cost is carrying a piece of plastic, a potential vector for thieves, ineligibility for "cash discounts" (which most people who pay cash don't get...), and if you're stupid, charging more money than you can pay every month -- I don't make that last mistake, but that's where you're worried and that's where predatory lending comes into play; the rest is the same as debit cards. And if your card does annual fees, that -- most people would be better off with a no-fee card. The benefit is chargeback ability, liability protection, whatever rewards they offer, ability to buy things on the Internet, an infinite series of one-month interest free loans, and FICO score improvements.
Note: interest rates are low right now in many places so keeping the house debt is currently a good option in many, many cases, and I do have a mortgage that I could pay off in cash today if I wanted, but I'm leaving it there to come to term because I think I'll continue to do better on the market. It will come to term long before I retire though, assuming I still live there, especially because where I'm from 30 year fixed-rate mortgages aren't a thing like they are in the US.
That's all.
"It's expensive, stupid, last only seconds - but makes your mouth hurt for days - it's BEE IN A BALLOON" - Kibo 3/1/95
You will always be further ahead financially if you never pay interest charges.
Demonstrably false, as an absolute statement. If you could get a loan in late 2008 / early 2009, it was a great time to buy blue chip stocks, and you made out like a bandit when they all bounced back.
This goes back to the fact that people see 0 as a magic number. And to be fair, it is a little bit magic -- there's a jump discontinuity in interest rates between having $1 and having -$1. But it's not so magical as that. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money, as you acknowledge with the car loan (that same argument goes to a small business loan).
There's a reason you see hugely profitable businesses issuing debt all the time.
...since nobody will have any extra money (due to the robots taking all the jobs) to throw at unnecessary things.
[...] and why paying off your house before retirement is bad.
Also an oversimplification, this one dangerous. There was a time when mortgage rates were higher than some credit card rates...
Agreed. In addition, even when it makes sense to keep your mortgage for financial reasons, one should not overlook the great emotional benefit of having no mortgage.
"Paying off your house before retirement is bad" also means "You should be in debt for all of your working life" and that's not appealing to a lot of people on an emotional level. Debt is slavery.
I don't think that it is accurate to say predatory lending laws prevent cards from being LEGAL. They may have prevented them from being profitable enough to grow beyond the upper/upper-middle classes. Amex, Carte Blanche and Diner's club were created in the 1950's.
Having a credit card and using it wisely is an important and vital skill to have - paying off in full each month to get a cut of the interbank fee just makes sense. And if you are really careful taking advantage of interest free / other special offers can really pay off too.
Just because mortgage interest is tax deductible does not mean that you should not pay off your mortgage. No matter how much interest you pay when you deduct it you will only get back a PORTION of it so you are still net out of pocket in almost all situations. When you start taking into account "real" interest rates and rates of inflation then sometimes your advice might make sense. That said, I do have a mortgage and its nice to see the deduction but I am still paying a lot more in interest than it is saving me on my taxes.
Yes, they're so desperate for nurses that they're driving nurses with 40+ years experience right out of the profession (because 1) they make too much money, and 2) nurses actually give a shit about patient care, which tends to eat into the profits). They're so desperate for nurses that they almost never hire two uncertified techs at 1/3 a nurses salary each instead of hiring a floor nurse. They're so desperate for nurses that when the nurses join a union, they create scenarios in which they can fire the union president on a pretense (True story, the president was on call for the OR, and they deliberately chose the case so she would be unqualified to recover the patient, then fired her for abandoning the patient). They're so desperate for nurses that they would never consider giving nurses COL raises without being arm-twisted into doing it, despite making tens of millions in profit each year (Partners Healthcare, who own Massachusetts General Hospital and dozens of other hospitals in New England).
My mom just retired from nursing after nearly 45 years in the profession. There wasn't a single nurse at her retirement party that was under 40. Hospitals SHOULD be desperate for young or experienced nurses, but they don't give a shit about anything other than how much nurses cost them. They'll do shit like opening new dedicated outpatient surgical centers (think knee scopes, cataract surgery, laparoscopic abdominal surgery, tonsils, wisdom teeth.. anything you don't need an overnight stay for) where the nurses don't have a union, so that they can take the profit-making cases away from the hospital WITH unionized nurses, and then claim that the union is what's making the hospital lose money.
Nursing is a profession under siege. They're set up to fail at every turn by greedy administrators. I have no idea why they're training hygienist to be nurses, but I'll bet you they're LPNs that they can pay a pittance (certainly less than a hygienist makes).
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
And this surprises you on slashdot?
I would say Subsea engineering. Most schools offer it as a part of a 5 years course. 4 years of Civil engineering and then 1 year of Subsea engineering.
A simple civil engineering degree is very strong as well. Lot of applications in Mining, Construction, Petroleum and Architecture.
This career path should be quite stable for the future. Check it out
Prison Guard.
I agree with most of what you advise, and am encouraged by the fact that at least some high schools are looking to improve financial literacy. However...
Nonsense. Get a credit card, but also set up an automatic payment to pay it off in full each month. You then get the fraud protection and convenience of a credit card without having to pay any interest.
And for me, having been out of the country for quite a while, it's the only practical way to build up a credit history at the moment.
She will, by and by, find what it is she likes to do and wants to do. She will try a few things along the way to that discovery.
Teach her to be flexible, to find an aspect to love in every job, to recognize opportunities that will let her do what she likes to do.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
because everyone said they'll decommission those system tens of years ago and they are still live and kicking ... and usually running in places where the money is, like banks :D
You're really not getting money back from credit cards. The vendors mark up their prices to account for the fees they have to pay to the credit card companies for those transactions.
Really what you're doing is getting a portion of the markup back from the credit card company. You get 1%, the object you purchased was 3% marked up, 2% goes to the credit card company. (Over simplified, but that's the idea).
A more correct way of looking at it is you're not paying full markup for an item that people who pay in cash do. :)
In relativistic terms, you still have a financial advantage over those individuals - if that's what's important to you
Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system?
Anyone familiar with the BS processes and positions the grow up around SDLC knows this will never, ever happen. Businesses love to highly overcomplicate software development, often turning simple, single person projects into impossible to complete, 20+ person clusterf*cks.
And it's too bad - most of the work I've encountered suggests that a ton of developers do indeed need to be kicked out of the industry.
Here's one way to get by without student loans: be a dental hygienist and save your money, then when you have enough, go to college.
It's completely unrealistic to expect anybody who wants to go to college and isn't wealthy to become a dental hygienist. The suggestion reeks of ivory tower thinking. As you said, it still takes two years of schooling to become one. How will those two years be paid for? What I did was I went to a local tech school for my A.A.S., then transferred all of my credits to a small local 4-year college to complete my B.A. This way, I kept my costs, and by extension, my loans, to a minimum. It will take less time for me to pay those off than it will take to pay off my car, and was a much, much better investment as far as I'm concerned.
I stand by my statement that taking out student loans is an incredibly risky thing to do.
Buying a house is risky. Buying a car is risky (arguably moreso than a student loan). Credit cards are risky. All of these things can be done, though, if someone can make a truly informed decision apropos the risks and benefits of each, and formulate a backup plan in case everything goes to shit. "Never" certainly is too strong. "Minimal loans if you absolutely need them, and proceed with caution" is far more realistic. None of this, of course, addresses the actual problem, which is the obscene increase in college costs over the last few decades, but that's out of scope here.
Even the 1% aren't completely and totally financially secure, as the French Revolution demonstrated.
Except that they were financially secure; in fact, their excessive financial security is what caused the Revolution in the first place. But if you have some examples from living memory, do feel free to share.
At least we agree on cars, though.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
What would you say that the automated systems that allowed the process refinements did to those kind of jobs then? Frankly, automation replacing those people sounds like a pretty good description, especially since the process refinement allowing those people to be terminated could have only come about using automation.
That is all.
Be a CPA! Work for a few years at a larger firm, learn the ropes, save up a bankroll, and then strike out on your own. Seriously! The Tax Laws never get simpler, and the rich cannot survive without a talented CPA. Take a minor in business, so you know what you're doing when you strike out on your own. Look around to see who's making money, or who's paying their employees well, and target them for customers. You are dealing with fairly minor work, all intellectual - no physical labor, 30 or 40 hour work weeks, lots of time off in the summer/fall/early winter. It's a sweet racket!
As someone who works in IT Audit, there is always something to audit. Even as automation of jobs becomes more common, those controls surrounding the automation still need to be reviewed and tested.
As an example, an application may have formerly had an accounting team to price invoices that is now being automatically priced by the data that is fed to the application from another application or database. 2 things need to be audited here: the queries that price the invoices and the interface between the application and the other application/database.
It depends. Some tasks are super repetitive and tedious, a person does the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. Some people can do these kinds of jobs for decades, but as a species we generally detest situations where chronic repetition is involved and we're always trying to automate these things. Have you seen a package delivery sorting facility? Pretty automated. And before they were automated, they had people moving the packages around. Robots and automation didn't get rid of the jobs, we did. We got rid of them because we want things cheaper, delivered faster and reliably. We did this.
... go in to robotics.
I have to think of everything.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I think your niece probably shouldn't be asking you for advice.
I said consumer debt.
Borrowing money to make more money can make sense, but that is not consumer debt. Consumer debt is borrowing money to buy stuff now that you can't actually afford.
I've got two pieces of advice here, but I'll start with a story. I have a friend looking at retirement. He is a case manager at an insurance company and a former breathing technician - just short of a nurse, to help people with asthma. His hobbies are music and karate, running and yes, he gets hired to play gigs and teach at the local YMCA. On weekends, he dresses up in all gold (he paints himself Gold) and he is a living statue at tourism places - but he plays music! This is unique and the tips flow. He also gives asthma/breathing/life/wellness seminars. Looking at retirement, yes, his financial ad visor said he could afford it - but he did the math in moving to 20+ hours a week at the jobs above and if things go well it almost replaces his day-job income! (If he can do if full-time for a couple years it should exceed his day job income.) Two Morals: First, do a lot of things - not just one. Computer Science AND writing, or perhaps CS AND accounting, or engineering AND art - it doesn't matter. Make it possible for one thing to generate money at night while doing the other. Ideally, have three or four things. When one wanes, do the other ... and pick up another one at night. Think of your skills as a venture capital portfolio and make multiple bets.
Second: Computers will not replace art and performance, and won't replace construction jobs anytime soon. Learn a skill that allows you to make a living, even if it is just playing music in a public place with a hat out, or selling pottery. Carpentry and electrician work isn't hard to get and the skills are not terribly hard to learn.
Student loans are only a risk for those getting bad degrees. What was that /. post before, 8% of student loans make up 50% of all student debt? Student loans aren't the issue, easy access to loans to idiots is the issue. Taking out $15k in student loans to get a degree with a 30 year running 100% job placement with $80k starting wages was probably a good investment for me.
My biggest concern right now is making sure I get enough exercise. Darn these 7 hour work days with 2 hour lunch breaks and great benefits and no after hour call-ins. Lots of demand for my type of work.
Not all consumer debt is a scam. Short term debt that is payed off monthly is just leverage. Long term consumer debt is slavery though.
It is far from clear that studying the arts in college will improve your creativity, let alone whether it will do so to a greater extent than some other field. On the other hand, studying can definitely expand your knowledge, and the right sort of knowledge will allow you to apply your creativity. For example, an understanding of technology will not necessarily guarantee a lifetime job in engineering, but if we assume that technology will be important in the foreseeable future, then that knowledge will, in general (and other things being equal), put you in a better position than someone whose education consisted of watching and discussing old movies.
Two rules of thumb (and nothing more): study things that are important, and not too narrowly (at least to start with.)
can't outsource child making and rearing
*cough* public school system *cough*
has capabilities unique to her sex.
What kind of sexist bullshit is this? What? Men can't raise children?
My father always said, "people will need to eat, people will get sick, and people will die". A career that deals within any one or all three should keep you employed...at least until you starve, get sick, or die.
Women have no significant inherent advantage over men as homemakers. They can give birth, but that is basically irrelevant. They can breast-feed babies, but a man can feed the kid with a bottle containing formula (personal experience here). Everything else can be done equally by men and women.
Moreover, "homemaker" isn't a particularly good career option if she's looking for steady employment. If I lose my job as a software developer, I can get another such job. If a woman loses her homemaker job, she may well not be able to get another one.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Tell her to study home economics.
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it. .
This is terrible advice. Credit cards are the easiest way to build credit. The advice should actually be: Pay off your credit card in full every month. If you won't be able to pay it off, don't buy things with it.
The rebuttal: "This is too hard for some people" is not a reasonable response to this. This is a trivially easy behavior pattern to adopt. If you can't do this, I don't believe it is possible to be financially secure. This is the smallest, easiest, step in playing the game of our society's financial system.
Hello there, I worked in the industry, your response is actually terrible. It's not the "lowest common denominator" it's actually the vast majority of people, yes even the majority that claim to be handling them perfectly, that are making the banks rich. Do not have a credit card, trust me, most people are not half as clever as they think they are. 95% of people who are smart and know exactly how to make it work in their favor still fail to do so consistently. Even the few who are sometimes end up in a relationship with someone who suddenly is not or have unanticipated life changing circumstances that pretty much change the game they were winning into one that they are losing.
Please stop promoting this horrible advice, you can use a debit card or pre-paid account for online purchases. Credit cards are 100% unncessary.
Using the credit is good. Using it in a way that means you pay interest is much less so. (I don't have any cards with a fee, but that may be a reflection of my credit rating). Even if the card has an annual fee, it won't be much, and the credit rating you can build up with it is far more valuable.
If you're looking a major loan, like a mortgage, you might want to switch to mostly cash purchasing for a while. Once when we refinanced, our credit card debt was at the level where they worry about it. (The way we use it, there's always new charges on it before we pay the old ones.) Fortunately, having built up a great credit rating made that not matter.
I'd count on my credit rating more than I'd count on my health. Not all that many people get their credit trashed by others. It really sucks when it happens to you, but from what I've seen it really isn't that common.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Credit card debt is free if you pay the card off every month, and you get a certain amount of extra time that way.
Actually paying interest for something besides a car or home may be worthwhile, but consider it very carefully. Figure out the real cost and whether it's worthwhile to pay it.
Paying off a house or car may or may not be worthwhile. I could wipe out my home loan in a week or so, but my investments are doing better than the interest rate (when adjusted for the income tax deductions). My wife's current car loan is less than 1% interest, so I could remove money from said investments and lose out on considerably more income than we'd pay in interest.
Never follow absolute rules (well, maybe this one). Try to understand why they exist and make your own calculations.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Homemaking is hardly limited to women. But really the only future-proof jobs are: 1) Prostitution 2) Drugs, including legalized MJ Neither is limited to XX or XY chromos.
In order of what will be in the most demandæ
Health: physical therapy, massage therapy (really any kind of therapy), counseling, nursing
Government and security: forensics, criminal investigation, law, politics
Buying and selling: real estate, sales, procurement
Career: education, human resources
Human Experience: food services, entertainment, virtual design and arts
Avoid doctor, engineer, scientist, accountant, finance, IT as these do not have enough of a human element to them and can easily be automated by intelligent machines.
The best advice you can give her is to follow her passion. If she can get up every morning excited about what the day has in store, she's naturally more likely to excel in her chosen field.
Homemaking is hardly limited to women. But really the only future-proof jobs are: 1) Prostitution 2) Drugs, including legalized MJ Neither is limited to XX or XY chromos.
You're using a different definition of "future-proof" there.
Think about the level of demand for a 60 year old prostitute, versus a 30 year old one.
can't outsource child making and rearing
*cough* public school system *cough*
How exactly do you plan to outsource child making to the public school system?
How effective do you think the public school system is at replacing parents?
has capabilities unique to her sex.
What kind of sexist bullshit is this? What? Men can't raise children?
Last I checked, men don't have wombs. Or breasts.
I guess at some point there'll be artificial wombs ... but still, men who want children need a woman. And if they're halfway competent, they'll want her to keep mothering them.
Okay, off-topic but I can hack a 1 point karma drop.
Bill, what even is that url?
http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy5...
What is even the point of "preview.tinyurl.com"?
It goes to an Evening Sun article by Craig Paskoski here:
http://www.eveningsun.com/news...
And it's filled with some of the loudest javascript I've seen. What do you gain by hiding it in a tinyurl?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Women have no significant inherent advantage over men as homemakers. They can give birth, but that is basically irrelevant. They can breast-feed babies, but a man can feed the kid with a bottle containing formula (personal experience here). Everything else can be done equally by men and women.
They have a psychological advantage raising kids in the early years. Giving birth is not irrelevant, especially given the current legal system.
Moreover, "homemaker" isn't a particularly good career option if she's looking for steady employment. If I lose my job as a software developer, I can get another such job. If a woman loses her homemaker job, she may well not be able to get another one.
Being desirable for marriage and staying married are both skills. A poor homemaker may end up getting "fired" (which is not that frequent) - but so can a poor software developer.
Staying married isn't necessarily a skill. It can be a test of endurance, given an abusive husband. A woman should at least have a viable plan B should her husband become an alcoholic, or die, or become incapacitated, or find somebody younger and prettier, or anything like that. Homemaking as a career is very risky.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You realize credit cards provide you with free money for 30 days, that is INSURED against all fraud/false claims, and most importantly, offers cash-back (or travel/movie/your interests) rewards by using it?
Absolutely not free. You pay about 2% of every purchase to gain these benefits.
Plumbing, carpentry, furnace repair, A/C repair... they'll always break eventually and need repair.
Real hands-on things that can't be "offshored".
Exactly. They were financially secure, they just weren't physically secure...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/story/07/0...
While I agree with the validity of your points for the next 10 to 20 years, in the longer term, better design and better tools will make it cheaper to completely rebuild houses so they are lower maintenance, more energy efficient, and easier to clean and maintain by robotics or by modular snap in replacements like the grandparent poster suggested. The only reason not to bulldoze older housing in a world of cheap energy and cheap robotics would be for historical preservation reasons or perhaps sentimentality (although Virtual Reality could address some of the sentimentality aspect).
This is similar to how people are now generally getting rid of old computer equipment (especially cellphones) when a capacitor or battery goes bad rather and replacing it with something new rather than trying to take it apart and repair the component like 50 years ago. "Computers" used to cost millions of dollars and take up rooms, now you can put a few in your pocket. I don't know what the equivalent shift for housing is, but we will no doubt find out. Some speculations are VR and pods like the Matrix or like in Marshall Brain's "Manna", or even just complete simulation of uploaded humans "living" in silicon RAM instead of air-filled wooden houses?
See also Marshall Brain's "Manna" for a suggestion of how computer-given instructions delivered by wearables could turn almost every profession, even plumbing, into a micromanaged low-wage nightmare before general robotics arrive: ... Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance. The software would speak to the employees individually and tell each one exactly what to do. For example, "Bob, we need to load more patties. Please walk toward the freezer." Or, "Jane, when you are through with this customer, please close your register. Then we will clean the women's restroom." And so on. ... And Manna was starting to move in on some of the white collar work force. The basic idea was to break every job down into a series of steps that Manna could manage. No one had ever realized it before, but just about every job had parts that could be subdivided out.HMOs and hospitals, for example, were starting to put headsets on the doctors and surgeons. It helped lower malpractice problems by making sure that the surgeon followed every step in a surgical procedure. The hospitals could also hyper-specialize the surgeons. For example, one surgeon might do nothing but open the chest for heart surgery. Another would do the arterial grafts. Another would come in to inspect the work and close the patient back up. What this then meant, over time, was that the HMO could train technicians to do the opening and closing procedures at much lower cost. Eventually, every part of the subdivided surgery could be performed by a super-specialized technician. Manna kept every procedure on an exact track that virtually eliminated errors. Manna would schedule 5 or 10 routine surgeries at a time. Technicians would do everything, with one actual surgeon overseeing things and handling any emergencies. They all wore headsets, and Manna controlled every minute of their working lives.That same hyper-specialization approach could apply to lots of white collar jobs. Lawyers, for example. You could t
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Suggesting she become a homemaker despite her explicit request for career information and knowing nothing about her other than her gender -- yes, almost certainly misogyny.
Homemaker is a career, and it does take certain skillsets that are developed over a lifetime. It's an important career chosen by many women throughout history. Consider what happens if the next generation is not nurtured and educated.
And it is a future proof job - can't outsource child making and rearing, and she has capabilities unique to her sex. (eg: half the potential competition of other career paths) Kids are also an effective retirement plan when raised well.
Even if you don't think it's the best option, it's a valid option, and a noble one.
Chez nous (Canada), women are in construction industries, in taking over the gardening/snow removal businesses, plumbing, motor mechanics, refrigeration systems and electricity. These are skills that will be required for centuries to come.
And while they may be at 80% of the "professional rate", the lifespan for the former is longer, both in age, and in working years, and in pension years.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
IMO, teaching your niece financial self-defense is far more important than any specific career path. Whether she pulls in seven figures as a CEO or is making minimum wage at a fast food restaurant, she should:
* Spend less than she earns.
* Build an emergency fund.
* Invest the rest.
* Avoid debt whenever possible. Pay debt down as fast as possible.
* Get a side gig to increase income. Bonus: makes you less reliant on full-time job.
There are a ton of websites with ideas about living a frugal lifestyle. She'll have to think outside the box and get used to a ton of negativity from people who insist it can't be done, but it's the best way to live a future-proof life I can think of.
Your home loan is your single biggest tax deduction, and unless congress changes things, will remain so for the rest of your life.
Tax deductions are overrated. Yes, if you get one for behavior that you'd engage in already, it's great. But manufacturing them doesn't make sense. A deduction only nets you a small percentage of what you spent. It'll vary depending on your tax bracket, but could be as low as 15%, and at best only returns 40% on each dollar you spend. I don't see how giving the bank $10,000 in interest each year in order to get back $3,000 from the government is beneficial -- I'd be $7k better off without the interest and the deduction.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Of course it is, and the misogyny was obviously there. But studying home economics isn't the same as being a homemaker, either.
And when I was in high school, it was periodically suggested that I should try out for basketball, because I was one of the taller kids in the class. (It wasn't suggested by anybody who'd seen my klutzy attempts to actually dribble a basketball, but playing defense mainly meant getting in other people's way and then handing off the ball to somebody faster, which I could sometimes manage.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Staying married isn't necessarily a skill. It can be a test of endurance, given an abusive husband. A woman should at least have a viable plan B should her husband become an alcoholic, or die, or become incapacitated, or find somebody younger and prettier, or anything like that.
Staying married is a state.
Picking a husband worth keeping is a skill. Developing habits and capabilities that make one desirable to such a husband is a skill.
Homemaking as a career is very risky.
All careers are risky - and I'll note that most divorces are initiated by women, the "hotter replacement" risk is lower than it seems.
The question is if the risks and rewards are in line with one's values and desires.
The point of putting it in a URL shortener is that Slashdot limits the number of characters you can put in a signature. Sorry if the news article has lots of Javascript; I run NoScript and AdBlockPlus, so I don't see any of it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Thing is, if I lose my job, there's plenty of other jobs out there that I can get, and I can work there without being intimately and sexually involved with the companies. Finding a husband to support one is a lot dicier, and I know one woman who wound up with a really bad choice.
Picking a promising husband is a skill. Picking one that won't change for a variety of reasons, and won't die before the woman is already of retirement age, is a whole lot harder.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
LOL. If Kurzweil's future ever comes true, then even sex will be outsourced via the exponential evolution of today's cam sex. Be careful of getting a virus though.
Thing is, if I lose my job, there's plenty of other jobs out there that I can get, and I can work there without being intimately and sexually involved with the companies. Finding a husband to support one is a lot dicier, and I know one woman who wound up with a really bad choice.
Thing is, how many women want to die alone and barren, but with a well-paid career?
Obviously it'd be great to have a husband and kids and the well-paid career - but given a choice between one or the other, I think most women would pick the former.
Telling girls that they should pick up those skills is on average going to be a net gain. The few who 100% want nothing to do with men and do so for their entire life are the only ones who would "lose out" by picking up these skills. (As if they don't need home-making if single)
Having some home-making skills does not exclude one from picking up job skills.
Okay, so you are just using sexual stereotypes? The women I know often do get into marriage and motherhood, and also have job skills. The former is important, and the latter can be absolutely vital, particularly when a woman has children and no husband.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If I got a 3% (or really > 1%) discount using cash, I'd probably use it. As it is, I usually don't get that discount so I use my credit card, where I DO get the discount.
In cases where I'm buying from a person I know well, or a business i paritcularly want to support, I'll often pay cash to help them out a little extra. If I'm buying from BigCorp, I'd rather give myself 1% than give them 2%.
I would imagine that most of us understand this concept, that the money used to pay for rewards are coming from the fees that the credit card companies charge vendors.
www.clarke.ca
Okay, so you are just using sexual stereotypes? The women I know often do get into marriage and motherhood, and also have job skills. The former is important, and the latter can be absolutely vital, particularly when a woman has children and no husband.
Please read what I'm saying more carefully.
At no point have I said women should not get job skills. My every response has been to point out that it is worthwhile and reasonable to suggest she pick up home-making skills (ex: home econ).
That is not equivalent of "don't learn any job skills" in any shape or form. Homemaking IS a job skill; it can be used in a paying job, as well as to support a family. This interpretation of "learn home econ/homemaking" as "be useless" is utterly illogical.
They work side-by-side with the laywers...who you think pulled the leavers to allow the real estate bubble to form? Credit agencies are just the lawyer and banker attack dogs....simple as that. Real eestate agents are the salesmen....all the same organization, more or less.
The only upside is that the process is more public than it used to be and there is at least a modicum of oversight these days.
-Matt