I don't think anybody has a problem with controlling imigration - certainly not the left. We DO have a problem with tossing people out who were brought in as children - seeing as you shouldn't punish people for crimes committed by their parents. We do have a problem with the system not working well. We do have a problem with conflating immigration and refugees - they aren't similar and shouldn't be compared let alone conflated, and we definitely have a problem with stupid and pointless gestures like a border wall - seeing as 40% of illegal immigrants come in on aeroplanes anyway, and we do have a problem with ill-informed stupidities like thinking immigration is a major problem in the first place. It certainly isn't from Mexico. Mexican immigration has been negative for many years - far more people LEAVE the US to go to Mexico than the other way around.
We'll survive the fall of America (assuming it's NOT in the form of nuclear hellfire anyway) - just like we survived the fall of every other great empire to ever exist. We survived the fall of the Greek empire, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, both French Empires, the Empire of Great Britain...
That last one was at LEAST as much a cornerstone of the interconnected global economy as America was. They were having their own version of the current America/China competition/interdependence more than a century earlier. That empire fell - and another took it's place.
So it shall be when America's empire finally falls - as all empires must fall sooner or later.
Layoffs were inevitable. They would happen no matter what we did - because no human can compare with a robot at any price. Even a slave is more expensive than a robot because robots don't need to eat and sleep.
So in the meantime, we may as well pay people a living wage.
Yeah... but I don't think humans make very good glue.
Candles and soap though.. we should be great at making those, the amount of fat we carry around... we're actually the only primate that has a layer of fat year-round (that's more commonly found in marine animals who need it for warmth).
Too much automation and the savings in labour cost is outweighed by the losses in demand (demand can only exist as long as enough people are earning enough money that some of the ones who want your product can also afford it).
Now I am not panicking much. Automation is a good thing. It can create a much better society - but one thing is for certain: that society CANNOT be capitalist. A capitalist society cannot exist unless there are lots of viable means for people to earn a living - you can't have any business without customers.
So what kind of options are available ? Forget the history of the luddites, we've never seen automation on the scale that's now possible before and nothing in human history is any guide. But there are two historical events that are - they just aren't human history. The first is when cars displaced horses. Today there is less than 1% the horse population there was 150 years ago. The rest became glue. The second is dogs. Until the 19th century every dog on earth had a job. There were even dogs in restaurants running on a treadmill to keep the spit turning. Today ? The only dogs that have a job now are bloodhounds and seeing-eye dogs. Yet there's still a dog in almost every home. We've kept them around, in a life that's basically a 20-year holiday, while raising their standard of living and their life-expectancy - and without expecting anything in return. We did it, just because we like their company.
The question before humanity is: are we going to treat each other like dogs or horses ?
And when Lord Dampnut ends the Meals on Wheels (created by Republican Eisenhower by the way) and starves your granny to death - I'm sure that will make you feel so much better.
No, I'm not exagerating, The Orange Fuhrer's latest budget proposal includes complete defunding of both meals on wheels and food for peace.
They have 1.3 Billion people - and a reasonably young population. They could have a negative growth rate for the next 6 decades and they would STILL outnumber Americans.
Maybe - but that just confirms what I said earlier: hiring is a process utterly devoid of any rational thought. It's done on first impressions and instincts and prejudices. That's actually not good for business but it remains the way it works. Good hiring people would interview you if you had good qualifications - even if there were no internships, and ask why - because there are multiple explanations and some of them are things you *want* in candidates. Sadly - good hiring people are just about the rarest breed of humans on the planet. If I'm being generous I would say that it's because to keep costs down in the selection process they are forced to make snap decisions by excessive time pressure from the corporate overlords.
Unfortunately our school system doesn't really teach people how to get a job - and there are actual skills involved. Even if you don't have much of a network - knowing those skills are valuable and greatly improve your odds. Trouble is because we don't teach them in schools - the only people who do know them are the same ones with networks. But the reality is that a jobhunt means making a favorable impression on people who are making snap judgements. Knowing how to write a great cover letter is a rare and valuable skills - which can definitely compensate for bad bits on a CV.
My own CV shows that I don't have a degree, and the closest thing to an 'internship' I had was spending a few months at a local radio station translating the news into a local language. Yet when I started my first real jobhunt I was employed in a great position within a week. Why ? Because if you actually READ the CV you find that I was forced to drop out over financial problems in my final year, and had great grades before then - and I have been writing code since I was 7 anyway. By the time I could afford to go back... my experience was worth more than a degree would be, especially since I was told I could no longer get credit for the previous 2.5 years and would have to start from scratch.
How did I get that first job - where I spent 6 years working my way up in a startup from programmer to Chief Software Architect without a degree or any previous relevant experience ? A great cover letter, some research on the company and a fantastic interview. There-after - I was able to prove myself on the job. By the time I moved on I had a whole portfolio of open source projects to point at, 6 years of experience and a great deal of name recognition in the industry (though that came with the nature of that first job - I was frequently the public face of the company at conferences and such).
I haven't sent a job application in since - jobs come to me. But I had been taught how to write great cover letters and how to research a potential employer and how to have a great interview - these skills did not just come out of nowhere.
The trouble with consumption taxes are that they are extremely regressive - simply because the less you earn the more of your income you have to spend. Poor people often spend almost their entire income just on (crappy with roommates) rent and (not very good) food. A consumption tax on them comes down to a tax rate of 50% or more. While for a rich person - basic living costs are rarely more than 0.1% of their expenses - they are essentially not getting taxed at all.
You could exclude basic essentials (plenty of sales taxes do actually) to make it slightly less bad - but it still applies to everything, even road and fuel taxes. Because goods need to be shipped - and those taxes get added to the cost, so if you tax the road too much then you make it harder for the poor to buy food even if they don't use the road: because you just made the price of food go up.
Then there is the problem that some things need upkeep but we cannot restrict access to them. Sewage (water supply) is a classic. If somebody doesn't pay their water bill we cannot actually cut them off - because if we do we risk serious health problems for their entire neighbourhood. Last time I checked killing innocent people to punish a guilty person was not generally considered acceptable behaviour for a government.
>That report has been criticised for not controlling for socioeconomic status associated with names Funny how the very precis of the report states that it did.
But even if that was true - the assumption that black names are associated with a lower socio-economic status is ITSELF racist. Jut because the same assumption is made about some white names doesn't change that in any way. And I'm prepared to bet that while Clive and Sharon may do worse than Greg and Emily they don't do AS MUCH worse as Jamal does.
And even if you managed to ignore all that and assume this was purely evidence of classism you wouldn't achieve anything useful since classism is JUST AS EVIL as racism. I never used the word racism anyway - I merely summarized what the report said - I did not point at any particular name for the outcome it measured. You did that all your own... and your answer was basically "it's not beastiality it's pedophilia".
That doesn't tell you much - you have to consider what's been happening to the dollar as well.
And you have to consider impacts of events that had nothing to do with the country affected. The biggest downer on the Euro in the past year was Brexit - and there was nothing Germany could have done to prevent that, hell the country that did it was never even part of the Eurozone ! It's ot even their currency, and their own currency tanked as a result.
Trade-values of a currency is pretty much useless for determining their value in inflation terms anyway - no economist uses that, because the two things are so unrelated. To get an apples to apples comparison you have to compare buying power. That's a different calculation because the information serves a different purpose. You want to know what currency you should invest in to make a profit - you use the trade histories and trends. You want to know how well a currency is serving hte citizens - you use the buying power measurements.
In trade a dollar is worth 20 South Africa rand (roughly) - but this is ONLY really apparently for imported goods and even then only for those imported in small enough scale that the companies do not do regional pricing (computers used to be very affected by it, these day they barely shift because the market got big enough that it makes sense to price for the region). A Big Mac on the other hand (which is locally made and not affected by export prices) works out slightly cheaper for South Africans than for Americans in the buying power scales (which compares the money based on what ELSE you can buy for the same amount).
One could just as easily interpret that as the difference between the guy who had such focus on his degree that he did not have any other activities - and is likely to give the same devotion to a job.
Or the guy who came from poverty and held down two minimum wage jobs while studying just to survive, so he simply could not in any practical way have also had the energy, money and other resources required to join clubs and do internships. His pass is, in fact, a significantly greater achievement than the guy who did internships and got a cum laude and never once in his entire life HAD to eat Ramen noodles because he couldn't afford anything better.
No really. Not even Hillary. She called a TINY FRACTION of Trump voters 'deplorables' - she SPECIFICALLY qualified that statement to mean ONLY the white nationalists, islamophobes, homophobes and other crazies. And yes, all the crazies WERE Trump voters, and yes they ARE deporable.
But nobody, least of all Hillary, ever said all Trump voters were like them.
We just thought it was pretty fucking disgusting that you didn't mind sharing a tent with people like that.
The single most valuable thing I ever read in my life was a book on "How to write a great cover letter" (that may or may not have been the title - it was a long time ago).
But I remembered the advice in the book, and it has served me well. A great cover letter is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than a great CV, because that one paragraph is what determines whose CV's get read at all.
These days - the "cover letter' is the wording of the e-mail you attach your CV to. That's where you determine if the person whose job it is to filter out the time-wasters (most likely a professional head-hunter these days) will bother with your CV at all.
Once you have enough professional experience that stops mattering, recruiters start coming after you - and then you don't need to convince the company to read your CV anymore, the recruiters do that for you. But starting out - learn to write a good cover letter. In a few world tell them why you want the job, why you believe you'll be good at it and what makes you think you'll be a good fit for the company. Never go over one paragraph. Don't go into detail (that's what the CV is for). Just - very quickly - sell yourself as worth the time to read, by saying why you are excited to be applying.
Get the cover letter right - and you've won 90% of the battle - now you are only competing with the other 10% of people who got the cover letter right.
Consumers get less choice in the matter than you think. The supermarkets aren't exactly rushing to stock the more expensive locally made goods - and if they don't stock it, consumers cannot choose it.
>I think it mostly depends on what your degree is in. I'm a very recent graduate (May 2014) and I haven't had any difficulty finding work
Yeah... because Mechanical Engineers are not sought after, and their degree isn't hard at all right ?
Sheez, we live in a world where companies demand 10 years experience in technologies that were only invented two years ago. A world where companies would much rather poach somebody from a competitor with work experience than hire somebody who doesn't have that and train them in the gap between graduation and productive work. A world where the exact same CV will take 6 months longer to get an interview request if it has a 'black sounding' name on it. There's zero rationality in hiring practises, staff are now seen as a pure cost rather than an investment and there isn't a job out there that will NOT get done by a robot the very first day somebody builds one that can do it, right up to the CEO. The future is one where the only humans still involved in a business will be the shareholders.
Chris Rock used to joke that leaving school in 10th grade was his biggest mistake because "If you leave in 10th grade you're qualified for the exact same job as the guy who left in 2nd grade... in fact the guy who left in 2nd grade is more qualified than you because he has 8 years experience !" Now a variation of that is true of higher education. We're reaching a point where going to university is ceasing to be an economically sensible decision for anybody except those whose career goals are pure research and teaching - i.e. those who intend to work in academia itself, for life. Leaving with a B degree now is much like leaving high school in 10th grade, you're doing the same job as the guy who didn't go at all - and he has 4 years more experience than you, and he doesn't have a giant pile of debt that will take 30 years to pay off. He's probably your boss !
At this stage, the people who are best off for the near-term at least are the ones going to trade-schools and learning a job that's not easy to automate and can be readily done by starting your own small business with a loan from your parents for far less than college would have cost. Go learn to be a plumber. We're a long way from robotic plumbers and plumbers charge high rates for their services because nobody wants to deal with a flooding toilet for long enough to get a second quote and nobody haggles - and you will probably get to be your own boss. If you want to be a welder - great, but go into things like making burglar bars or security fencing for private homes. There's work there, there's no work for a welder in a factory anymore though. It will be some time before those jobs go away - and because you own the means of your own production, it's privatized communism - the only kind that works. DIgging through shit at 3am may not be a fun job - but it's a job you won't struggle to find employment for and it pays really well. And learning that trade is a lot cheaper than going to university.
I wonder what the stats are like for lawyers. At one point 80% of American graduates were lawyers (no idea if this is still true - it was a long time ago) and clearly there was work galore for them (since only a small fraction of lawyers go into private practice).
It's a fundamental flaw to think of income tax as a tax on the individual - it really isn't in practise. What it is, in reality, is the one company tax that companies haven't figured out how to dodge. The people who can't negotiate salaries don't pay income tax either. The people who can - they negotiate for the nett they want, so the company has to budget their tax bill on top of that. The difference between your take-home pay and your cost-to-company is borne by your employer. If you seriously think that, absent the tax, they'd let YOU have the difference you are seriously deluded.
If the government abolished all personal income taxes tomorrow - companies across the board would instantly slash salaries massively. You'd still get the same pay (maybe a slight increase) they'll just pocket the difference. Income tax is a company tax that companies find hard to dodge. Ironically - if we make corporate taxes hard to dodge I would think it would make MORE sense to increase the corporate tax rates and get rid of income tax - it should be vastly more efficient. It's much easier to audit a few thousand businesses than a few million people.
VAT is a terrible choice, as is in any sales tax. Consumption taxes are the most regressive form of taxation there is - it would put the full burden of maintaining the state on those least capable of bearing it. Gary Johnson even realised this - which is why his consumption-tax approach required giving everybody a massive rebate to offset the regressive nature of it (which, if it were done, would be the largest entitlement program in the history of the world - when a libertarian is suggesting the biggest welfare program ever created the world has really gone crazy).
I know that the thought of a one-world-government fills people with panic - though nobody has ever yet given me a RATIONAL reason why that would be a bad thing if said world government was a democratic and free one with a strong constitution. As far as I can tell it's all panicky religion fear because the bible said Satan would create one - and it's perpetuated even by atheists (showing just how powerful religions memetics can be), but I've yet to see a rational argument against it. Sure you'd want decentralisation so you can adapt policies to local issues, but why would that be any different between the US states and the nation states of the world ? One possible advantage would be that you could synchronise the global tax rules and labour laws - so no more sweat-shops in China since minimum wage would be the same there - and now people compete only on merit, not geography, and of course - no more tax havens. No more hiding your money abroad and dodging your share of upholding the society you rely on.
That could, certainly, lead to a scenario where you could fund UBI with corporate taxes - and the more automated a company, the more you tax them (since they are employing fewer people, and since their wage bill has been cut so much, they can afford a slightly higher tax rate - if you don't overdo it, they'd still come out ahead and shouldn't grumble too much). Ultimately it's to the company's advantage if the people whose jobs are displaced have an income. High unemployment can begood for business because it drives wages down, but that is only beneficial as long as there are enough people with money so you still have customers.If too many people are displaced - then all the businesses would be bankrupt, even if they were 100% automated they couldn't pay the power bill for the robots without SOME customers. There must be a tipping point where the companies paying enough taxes to fund UBI is the only way to keep each other (and themselves) in business. There's no business at all without customers.
You lived through it ! You need citations for things that happened before your very eyes ? This was daily news reports in every major newspaper for well over a year. Its the entire first 45minutes of 'capitalism: a love story'.
And somehow you lived through 2008/9 so out of touch with your fellow citizens that you managed not to see this happening all around you ? Or perhaps your libertarian ideological leanings is to blame. There is no more perfect blindness than the cognitive dissonance of libertarians.
What do they mean they're launching it today ? I've had a 1080Ti since November - and I had a month-long import delay after ordering in October last year !
Slashdot Mirror
I would call that the practical realisation of the dog option.
I don't think anybody has a problem with controlling imigration - certainly not the left. We DO have a problem with tossing people out who were brought in as children - seeing as you shouldn't punish people for crimes committed by their parents. We do have a problem with the system not working well. We do have a problem with conflating immigration and refugees - they aren't similar and shouldn't be compared let alone conflated, and we definitely have a problem with stupid and pointless gestures like a border wall - seeing as 40% of illegal immigrants come in on aeroplanes anyway, and we do have a problem with ill-informed stupidities like thinking immigration is a major problem in the first place. It certainly isn't from Mexico. Mexican immigration has been negative for many years - far more people LEAVE the US to go to Mexico than the other way around.
I wouldn't mind that :)
Canada is awesome.
I WISH my country was run like Canada is run.
We'll survive the fall of America (assuming it's NOT in the form of nuclear hellfire anyway) - just like we survived the fall of every other great empire to ever exist. We survived the fall of the Greek empire, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, both French Empires, the Empire of Great Britain...
That last one was at LEAST as much a cornerstone of the interconnected global economy as America was. They were having their own version of the current America/China competition/interdependence more than a century earlier. That empire fell - and another took it's place.
So it shall be when America's empire finally falls - as all empires must fall sooner or later.
Layoffs were inevitable. They would happen no matter what we did - because no human can compare with a robot at any price. Even a slave is more expensive than a robot because robots don't need to eat and sleep.
So in the meantime, we may as well pay people a living wage.
Yeah... but I don't think humans make very good glue.
Candles and soap though.. we should be great at making those, the amount of fat we carry around... we're actually the only primate that has a layer of fat year-round (that's more commonly found in marine animals who need it for warmth).
You know what else they don't do ? Buy shit.
Too much automation and the savings in labour cost is outweighed by the losses in demand (demand can only exist as long as enough people are earning enough money that some of the ones who want your product can also afford it).
Now I am not panicking much. Automation is a good thing. It can create a much better society - but one thing is for certain: that society CANNOT be capitalist. A capitalist society cannot exist unless there are lots of viable means for people to earn a living - you can't have any business without customers.
So what kind of options are available ? Forget the history of the luddites, we've never seen automation on the scale that's now possible before and nothing in human history is any guide. But there are two historical events that are - they just aren't human history. The first is when cars displaced horses. Today there is less than 1% the horse population there was 150 years ago. The rest became glue.
The second is dogs. Until the 19th century every dog on earth had a job. There were even dogs in restaurants running on a treadmill to keep the spit turning. Today ? The only dogs that have a job now are bloodhounds and seeing-eye dogs. Yet there's still a dog in almost every home. We've kept them around, in a life that's basically a 20-year holiday, while raising their standard of living and their life-expectancy - and without expecting anything in return. We did it, just because we like their company.
The question before humanity is: are we going to treat each other like dogs or horses ?
And when Lord Dampnut ends the Meals on Wheels (created by Republican Eisenhower by the way) and starves your granny to death - I'm sure that will make you feel so much better.
No, I'm not exagerating, The Orange Fuhrer's latest budget proposal includes complete defunding of both meals on wheels and food for peace.
Hey, look on the bright side. For once the USA may actually show up to a world war on time...
They have 1.3 Billion people - and a reasonably young population. They could have a negative growth rate for the next 6 decades and they would STILL outnumber Americans.
Maybe - but that just confirms what I said earlier: hiring is a process utterly devoid of any rational thought. It's done on first impressions and instincts and prejudices. That's actually not good for business but it remains the way it works.
Good hiring people would interview you if you had good qualifications - even if there were no internships, and ask why - because there are multiple explanations and some of them are things you *want* in candidates. Sadly - good hiring people are just about the rarest breed of humans on the planet. If I'm being generous I would say that it's because to keep costs down in the selection process they are forced to make snap decisions by excessive time pressure from the corporate overlords.
Unfortunately our school system doesn't really teach people how to get a job - and there are actual skills involved. Even if you don't have much of a network - knowing those skills are valuable and greatly improve your odds. Trouble is because we don't teach them in schools - the only people who do know them are the same ones with networks. But the reality is that a jobhunt means making a favorable impression on people who are making snap judgements. Knowing how to write a great cover letter is a rare and valuable skills - which can definitely compensate for bad bits on a CV.
My own CV shows that I don't have a degree, and the closest thing to an 'internship' I had was spending a few months at a local radio station translating the news into a local language. Yet when I started my first real jobhunt I was employed in a great position within a week.
Why ? Because if you actually READ the CV you find that I was forced to drop out over financial problems in my final year, and had great grades before then - and I have been writing code since I was 7 anyway. By the time I could afford to go back... my experience was worth more than a degree would be, especially since I was told I could no longer get credit for the previous 2.5 years and would have to start from scratch.
How did I get that first job - where I spent 6 years working my way up in a startup from programmer to Chief Software Architect without a degree or any previous relevant experience ? A great cover letter, some research on the company and a fantastic interview. There-after - I was able to prove myself on the job. By the time I moved on I had a whole portfolio of open source projects to point at, 6 years of experience and a great deal of name recognition in the industry (though that came with the nature of that first job - I was frequently the public face of the company at conferences and such).
I haven't sent a job application in since - jobs come to me. But I had been taught how to write great cover letters and how to research a potential employer and how to have a great interview - these skills did not just come out of nowhere.
The trouble with consumption taxes are that they are extremely regressive - simply because the less you earn the more of your income you have to spend. Poor people often spend almost their entire income just on (crappy with roommates) rent and (not very good) food. A consumption tax on them comes down to a tax rate of 50% or more. While for a rich person - basic living costs are rarely more than 0.1% of their expenses - they are essentially not getting taxed at all.
You could exclude basic essentials (plenty of sales taxes do actually) to make it slightly less bad - but it still applies to everything, even road and fuel taxes. Because goods need to be shipped - and those taxes get added to the cost, so if you tax the road too much then you make it harder for the poor to buy food even if they don't use the road: because you just made the price of food go up.
Then there is the problem that some things need upkeep but we cannot restrict access to them. Sewage (water supply) is a classic. If somebody doesn't pay their water bill we cannot actually cut them off - because if we do we risk serious health problems for their entire neighbourhood. Last time I checked killing innocent people to punish a guilty person was not generally considered acceptable behaviour for a government.
>That report has been criticised for not controlling for socioeconomic status associated with names
Funny how the very precis of the report states that it did.
But even if that was true - the assumption that black names are associated with a lower socio-economic status is ITSELF racist. Jut because the same assumption is made about some white names doesn't change that in any way. And I'm prepared to bet that while Clive and Sharon may do worse than Greg and Emily they don't do AS MUCH worse as Jamal does.
And even if you managed to ignore all that and assume this was purely evidence of classism you wouldn't achieve anything useful since classism is JUST AS EVIL as racism. I never used the word racism anyway - I merely summarized what the report said - I did not point at any particular name for the outcome it measured. You did that all your own... and your answer was basically "it's not beastiality it's pedophilia".
That doesn't tell you much - you have to consider what's been happening to the dollar as well.
And you have to consider impacts of events that had nothing to do with the country affected. The biggest downer on the Euro in the past year was Brexit - and there was nothing Germany could have done to prevent that, hell the country that did it was never even part of the Eurozone ! It's ot even their currency, and their own currency tanked as a result.
Trade-values of a currency is pretty much useless for determining their value in inflation terms anyway - no economist uses that, because the two things are so unrelated. To get an apples to apples comparison you have to compare buying power. That's a different calculation because the information serves a different purpose. You want to know what currency you should invest in to make a profit - you use the trade histories and trends.
You want to know how well a currency is serving hte citizens - you use the buying power measurements.
In trade a dollar is worth 20 South Africa rand (roughly) - but this is ONLY really apparently for imported goods and even then only for those imported in small enough scale that the companies do not do regional pricing (computers used to be very affected by it, these day they barely shift because the market got big enough that it makes sense to price for the region).
A Big Mac on the other hand (which is locally made and not affected by export prices) works out slightly cheaper for South Africans than for Americans in the buying power scales (which compares the money based on what ELSE you can buy for the same amount).
One could just as easily interpret that as the difference between the guy who had such focus on his degree that he did not have any other activities - and is likely to give the same devotion to a job.
Or the guy who came from poverty and held down two minimum wage jobs while studying just to survive, so he simply could not in any practical way have also had the energy, money and other resources required to join clubs and do internships. His pass is, in fact, a significantly greater achievement than the guy who did internships and got a cum laude and never once in his entire life HAD to eat Ramen noodles because he couldn't afford anything better.
You mean the scientific fact ?
http://scholar.harvard.edu/fil...
Or is Harvard not a sufficiently scientific source for you ?
Nobody has EVER called Trump voters deplorables.
No really. Not even Hillary. She called a TINY FRACTION of Trump voters 'deplorables' - she SPECIFICALLY qualified that statement to mean ONLY the white nationalists, islamophobes, homophobes and other crazies.
And yes, all the crazies WERE Trump voters, and yes they ARE deporable.
But nobody, least of all Hillary, ever said all Trump voters were like them.
We just thought it was pretty fucking disgusting that you didn't mind sharing a tent with people like that.
The single most valuable thing I ever read in my life was a book on "How to write a great cover letter" (that may or may not have been the title - it was a long time ago).
But I remembered the advice in the book, and it has served me well. A great cover letter is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than a great CV, because that one paragraph is what determines whose CV's get read at all.
These days - the "cover letter' is the wording of the e-mail you attach your CV to. That's where you determine if the person whose job it is to filter out the time-wasters (most likely a professional head-hunter these days) will bother with your CV at all.
Once you have enough professional experience that stops mattering, recruiters start coming after you - and then you don't need to convince the company to read your CV anymore, the recruiters do that for you. But starting out - learn to write a good cover letter. In a few world tell them why you want the job, why you believe you'll be good at it and what makes you think you'll be a good fit for the company. Never go over one paragraph. Don't go into detail (that's what the CV is for). Just - very quickly - sell yourself as worth the time to read, by saying why you are excited to be applying.
Get the cover letter right - and you've won 90% of the battle - now you are only competing with the other 10% of people who got the cover letter right.
Consumers get less choice in the matter than you think. The supermarkets aren't exactly rushing to stock the more expensive locally made goods - and if they don't stock it, consumers cannot choose it.
>I think it mostly depends on what your degree is in. I'm a very recent graduate (May 2014) and I haven't had any difficulty finding work
Yeah... because Mechanical Engineers are not sought after, and their degree isn't hard at all right ?
Sheez, we live in a world where companies demand 10 years experience in technologies that were only invented two years ago. A world where companies would much rather poach somebody from a competitor with work experience than hire somebody who doesn't have that and train them in the gap between graduation and productive work. A world where the exact same CV will take 6 months longer to get an interview request if it has a 'black sounding' name on it.
There's zero rationality in hiring practises, staff are now seen as a pure cost rather than an investment and there isn't a job out there that will NOT get done by a robot the very first day somebody builds one that can do it, right up to the CEO. The future is one where the only humans still involved in a business will be the shareholders.
Chris Rock used to joke that leaving school in 10th grade was his biggest mistake because "If you leave in 10th grade you're qualified for the exact same job as the guy who left in 2nd grade... in fact the guy who left in 2nd grade is more qualified than you because he has 8 years experience !"
Now a variation of that is true of higher education. We're reaching a point where going to university is ceasing to be an economically sensible decision for anybody except those whose career goals are pure research and teaching - i.e. those who intend to work in academia itself, for life.
Leaving with a B degree now is much like leaving high school in 10th grade, you're doing the same job as the guy who didn't go at all - and he has 4 years more experience than you, and he doesn't have a giant pile of debt that will take 30 years to pay off. He's probably your boss !
At this stage, the people who are best off for the near-term at least are the ones going to trade-schools and learning a job that's not easy to automate and can be readily done by starting your own small business with a loan from your parents for far less than college would have cost. Go learn to be a plumber. We're a long way from robotic plumbers and plumbers charge high rates for their services because nobody wants to deal with a flooding toilet for long enough to get a second quote and nobody haggles - and you will probably get to be your own boss. If you want to be a welder - great, but go into things like making burglar bars or security fencing for private homes. There's work there, there's no work for a welder in a factory anymore though.
It will be some time before those jobs go away - and because you own the means of your own production, it's privatized communism - the only kind that works.
DIgging through shit at 3am may not be a fun job - but it's a job you won't struggle to find employment for and it pays really well. And learning that trade is a lot cheaper than going to university.
I wonder what the stats are like for lawyers. At one point 80% of American graduates were lawyers (no idea if this is still true - it was a long time ago) and clearly there was work galore for them (since only a small fraction of lawyers go into private practice).
It's a fundamental flaw to think of income tax as a tax on the individual - it really isn't in practise. What it is, in reality, is the one company tax that companies haven't figured out how to dodge. The people who can't negotiate salaries don't pay income tax either. The people who can - they negotiate for the nett they want, so the company has to budget their tax bill on top of that. The difference between your take-home pay and your cost-to-company is borne by your employer. If you seriously think that, absent the tax, they'd let YOU have the difference you are seriously deluded.
If the government abolished all personal income taxes tomorrow - companies across the board would instantly slash salaries massively. You'd still get the same pay (maybe a slight increase) they'll just pocket the difference. Income tax is a company tax that companies find hard to dodge.
Ironically - if we make corporate taxes hard to dodge I would think it would make MORE sense to increase the corporate tax rates and get rid of income tax - it should be vastly more efficient. It's much easier to audit a few thousand businesses than a few million people.
VAT is a terrible choice, as is in any sales tax. Consumption taxes are the most regressive form of taxation there is - it would put the full burden of maintaining the state on those least capable of bearing it. Gary Johnson even realised this - which is why his consumption-tax approach required giving everybody a massive rebate to offset the regressive nature of it (which, if it were done, would be the largest entitlement program in the history of the world - when a libertarian is suggesting the biggest welfare program ever created the world has really gone crazy).
I know that the thought of a one-world-government fills people with panic - though nobody has ever yet given me a RATIONAL reason why that would be a bad thing if said world government was a democratic and free one with a strong constitution. As far as I can tell it's all panicky religion fear because the bible said Satan would create one - and it's perpetuated even by atheists (showing just how powerful religions memetics can be), but I've yet to see a rational argument against it. Sure you'd want decentralisation so you can adapt policies to local issues, but why would that be any different between the US states and the nation states of the world ? One possible advantage would be that you could synchronise the global tax rules and labour laws - so no more sweat-shops in China since minimum wage would be the same there - and now people compete only on merit, not geography, and of course - no more tax havens. No more hiding your money abroad and dodging your share of upholding the society you rely on.
That could, certainly, lead to a scenario where you could fund UBI with corporate taxes - and the more automated a company, the more you tax them (since they are employing fewer people, and since their wage bill has been cut so much, they can afford a slightly higher tax rate - if you don't overdo it, they'd still come out ahead and shouldn't grumble too much).
Ultimately it's to the company's advantage if the people whose jobs are displaced have an income. High unemployment can begood for business because it drives wages down, but that is only beneficial as long as there are enough people with money so you still have customers.If too many people are displaced - then all the businesses would be bankrupt, even if they were 100% automated they couldn't pay the power bill for the robots without SOME customers. There must be a tipping point where the companies paying enough taxes to fund UBI is the only way to keep each other (and themselves) in business. There's no business at all without customers.
You lived through it ! You need citations for things that happened before your very eyes ?
This was daily news reports in every major newspaper for well over a year. Its the entire first 45minutes of 'capitalism: a love story'.
And somehow you lived through 2008/9 so out of touch with your fellow citizens that you managed not to see this happening all around you ? Or perhaps your libertarian ideological leanings is to blame. There is no more perfect blindness than the cognitive dissonance of libertarians.
No. And fuck you.
PS. There is no language called "Mexican".
Yeah, memory failure - it is the 1050 I got, which I got in October when it launched.
I'm not home so couldn't check for myself if the model matched.
What do they mean they're launching it today ? I've had a 1080Ti since November - and I had a month-long import delay after ordering in October last year !