Could it be that technology creates more jobs than it destroys? Could it be for each typist job that is destroyed, two data entry jobs are created? This seems to be that case because we arguably have twice as many people working in the US right now.
Almost no one is arguing that technology destroys all jobs. But some people do believe that a certain level of technology will put most humans out of work.
For thousands of years we had technological advancements, but we still had work for horses to do. No matter what new tools were created we still needed horses to pull farm equipment and transport people. The emergence of trains didn't reduce the number of horses; in fact horse populations exploded because people got used to being more mobile. But in the early 1900s technology finally got good enough to do almost everything horses can do, but better. Now horses are barely used for labor outside of entertainment.
So history has shown that technology can coexist with a population of workers for thousands of years yet eventually make them obsolete. Humans are far more capable that horses, but we can't escape the uncaring advance of technology forever. Even if sentient AI never happens, technology will get good enough to do away with almost all manual labor and other non-creative jobs. And yes, this includes highly skilled but mostly uncreative jobs like doctors and lawyers.
> Gnostic Atheist That is total oxymoron of terms. Either you have knowledge or you don't. There is no inbetween.
A gnostic atheist has the knowledge that there is no god. (they do have knowledge, or at least think they do)
An agnostic atheist does not have faith in a god but understands that he/she doesn't know for sure. (they understand that they do not have the knowledge, hence being agnostic)
The researchers performed four studies, and only one was looking for mere correlation. Unfortunately that is the only one the summary mentions. One of the other studies primed the subjects with scientific words in a crossword puzzle, and just thinking about those words caused people to behave more morally. Now I am not sure how good the controls in their experiment were but it looks like they tried to remove correlation from the other three studies.
You can attack their methodology, but based on their research there really was a causal relationship between scientific thinking and moral behavior.
You do realize NASA's annual funding is $18 billion and social programs at the federal level $2,300 billion..... (Military btw is $600 billion annually)
Goes to show why the US is in such trouble. Wellfare programs are essential, but get relatively little money. But, the DoD, gets a crap load of money, with little or no benefit for the funds.
While I agree that our military is overfunded, you just said that social programs (which account for 45% of the federal budget) get relatively little money. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security alone dwarf defense spending. You can't be taken seriously if you spout such false statements even if you have a good point to make.
This isn't just Universities raising tuition because they can, but I do agree that costs can go down with enough incentives. All labor based industries (education, health care, etc) have had their costs greatly beat inflation unless the industry significantly benefits from automation. But colleges have very little incentive to embrace automation because the government will keep raising Stafford loan limits and semi-guarantee private student loans through the bankruptcy code.
If this assistance was reduced, Universities would find ways to cut costs and compete just like other industries. More undergraduate classes would have lectures online with in class time meant more for tutoring. More TAs could be used. More 2-year degrees could be created for careers that don't really need a full bachelor's degree.
Government assistance should still be part of the process because an educated workforce is definitely in the country's best interest. But I really think their financial involvement could be significantly diminished.
The total cost of having employees roughly tracks inflation.
The total cost of highly skilled employees has not tracked inflation for quite some time. That is why the upper middle class has exploded in the last 30 years while the rest of the middle class has shrunk. Any industry where very highly skilled employees are needed (upper education, medicine, etc) are going to have their payroll costs increase far above inflation.
Well, TFA says that revenues have been going up while the last couple years of layoffs have been going on (about 8k firings in 2011 & 20012). And they are cutting sales people in addition to engineers, so not all cuts are necessarily ones that would only improve the short term at expense of long term growth.
Since they have been able to increase revenues (not just profit) while cutting significant number of sales personnel it looks like their current cuts worked out for the best. Sometimes a company's needs change to a point where their labor needs change. Maybe management noticed some areas where they were being excessive and trimmed their costs.
As everyone knows they were talking about Amazon, but I assume your question was about the "lose money with impunity supported by the stock market" comment. Amazon is not a very profitable company. In fact Amazon it often takes losses quarters on end. I don't have the time to search for the actual figures, but I am pretty sure they have been operating at a loss since 3rd quarter 2012.
Wall Street still keeps their stock price up because of rising revenues so Amazon can borrow money with impunity to make up for these losses. This allows them to keep dropping prices even when they are losing money. A small company cannot do this. It isn't hard to raise revenues when you don't have to care about profitability or cash flow when setting your prices. This is why Geek.com was complaining that Wall Street allows large companies to succeed with business models which would put SMBs out of business.
I am not commenting on whether this is a good thing, but it is undeniable that it is happening.
I never said that my consulting company would move overseas. It would shut down and the jobs it would have won would be more likely to be won by overseas companies.
Rest assured, there are plenty of qualified people, I wanted to look for a new job due to poor treatment by management so I threw a stone and came up with a better job.
The fact that you found a job so easily is evidence that companies are having trouble finding quality employees. I had a similar situation recently where I was put on a legacy maintenance project instead of the new development I wanted to work on. I found out about my unwanted assignment in a 10am meeting, and had interviews lined up before the end of the day (and a job offer within a few days). And I don't consider myself a rock-star developer, although IMHO I'm quite a bit above average. Companies are just that starved for decent employees.
IT communities in any city are very much a small work, it's not hard to find qualified people unless you're not willing to pay them what they are worth.
Companies cannot always pay salaries high enough to get employees to leave their current job. Companies have clients or customers that aren't necessarily going to pay more just because you claim your employees are worth it. If companies in our area are not willing to pay $150/hour for development work, that creates a ceiling for what compensation my company can offer our developers. If we cannot find developers at profitable rates, then either H1Bs are needed or jobs are lost to cheaper alternatives (like overseas labor).
The only objective evidence I have is that I have never met someone who is involved with hiring developers who has said how easy it is to find quality talent at market rates.
Which is a tautology due to the law of supply and demand, and thus proves nothing.
Supply and demand is not restricted to just the US market. Just like in manufacturing, US workers can price themselves out of the market. If it takes too much money to attract quality developers, the work just goes overseas.
The only objective evidence I have is that I have never met someone who is involved with hiring developers who has said how easy it is to find quality talent at market rates.
Then they aren't actually offering "market rates". The definition of market rate is "The term “market rate” refers to the level of compensation an organization must provide to enable it to effectively compete against other organizations in attracting and retaining qualified employees. "
They do pay market rates; well above market rates in fact. But at a certain point the salaries would be high enough that it makes more sense to just hire overseas developers. The use of H1-B workers (which close to half of our employees are) allows us to keep development in the US for the half of our workers that are citizens. Without those H1-B workers, the entire operation would simply shut down and off-shore consulting companies would be winning these bids.
Why? There is no shortage of domestic supply. If you disagree, please cite some objective evidence to back your claim.
The only objective evidence I have is that I have never met someone who is involved with hiring developers who has said how easy it is to find quality talent at market rates. You can be naïve and believe that salaries would rise with increased demand if we ended the H1B program, but the reality is that more work would simply go overseas. I work at a consulting company and if we had to pay our entry level developers $80k/year we would never win a bid against a primarily overseas firm. Almost the entire software development industry would move offshore, with the exception of a very small group of very highly paid developers that stay in the US.
This isn't a field like medicine, law, or garbage collection where proximity to the client is incredibly important, and we don't have strong organizations like the AMA or ABA who can create anti-competitive laws and procedures to keep wages artificially high. Any efforts to manipulate the job market like we do for doctors and lawyers are very unlikely to succeed.
as I have high blood pressure, when my doctor says cut back on salt, I do
Even though salt does not lead to high blood pressure, high blood pressure does make excessive salt intake bad for the body. It is basically the cause / effect link that the US public has backwards.
Generators have become a backup that few people use today.
Few people. Many businesses. Most large buildings. All hospitals.
In other words, the more critical it is to maintain service, the more likely there is an on-site means to provide that service.
I couldn't agree more. But people shouldn't confuse having on-site means to provide a service with using on-site means as the primary method to provide a service. I don't know of any hospitals that use their generators as their primary electricity generation method.
I'm sure if this had happened 100 years ago he'd be talking about moving everything to a building with electricity.
You don't even have to make an analogy about how something similar happened about 100-200 years ago, because almost the exact same thing occurred. The move to the cloud is the same thing as the move to centralized electricity production. Businesses and homes used to generate their own energy through generators before the electric grid was created. Eventually the electric grid became reliable enough that it was silly to generate your own power. Generators have become a backup that few people use today.
The same thing will happen with servers. I think it is fair to say that any companies large enough to have their own substantial generators today are the same companies that will always have on-site servers as either backups or storage for very sensitive information. But everyone else will store almost all of their data in "the cloud", or whatever other buzzword they call it in the future.
In the near future hosting the majority of your own servers will be as rare as producing the majority of your own electricity is today.
You ought to be required to work for free before you can get a job? Sounds a bit like bullshit protectionism to me.
Even if you did work for free (which isn't the norm in Engineering), that is still a better deal than the rest of college. In college you are paying them for your education. In an unpaid internship, at least you are getting the education for free.
Similar to today, except there is a minimum guaranteed pay.
What do you mean similar to toady? That's exactly today. It's called minimum wage, and it's hotly debated by economists as to whether the net effect on the system is positive or negative.
A minimum guaranteed pay is not the same as minimum wage. Minimum wage forces the company to pay the worker, which means if they output of the worker is not worth minimum wage the work is not done. Or the work is sent overseas, or it is done by robots. But if the minimum guaranteed pay is paid by government entities, it does not have any of the damages of a minimum wage. Someone may be willing to work for $3/hour if they are getting $2k/month from the government no matter what. That extra money would be like a 30% raise.
No, you don't. There is a thing called "welfare" and "unemployment". You are proposing a system that you now say guarantees $50k/year to a household but REQUIRES 10 hours a week of work (which your initial proposal did not)
I never proposed that at all. I said that the guaranteed $50k per year didn't necessarily have to be given without work (meaning it may work that way, or maybe it won't). Perhaps $30k is guaranteed without pay and $20k is given if you work 10 hours per week. Or $40k is given to everyone. It would take far more than two people pontificating online to come up with a system that actually works, but the basic concept of a guaranteed basic income is not a new idea. We already have something similar in our current welfare system, although I don't think our current system will be enough in the near future (10-20 years out).
You really think many smart rich people are going to want someone who is around just 10 hours a week and costs them massively in increased taxes?
They won't have a choice on the tax increases so they might as well get whatever benefit they can. As the number of poor people grow, politicians will have to cater more to them to even get elected. It is getting harder and harder for companies to buy politicians because of how many people are benefiting from liberal policies and it will keep getting harder (Romney got twice as much money from super-PACs, but still lost to Obama).
Neither would I. But $50k/year is a lot more than "a few dollars a day". That's $136 dollars per day, every day, weekends included.
I never said the employer would pay $50k/year. Most, and possibly all, would come from welfare programs.
And you also don't seem to realize that when talking about the future, exact dollar amounts are worthless. No one knows the PPP of the future world compared to today. It took about 20 hours of labor weekly to produce food for one person in 1900. Now it takes about 2 hours. It took between 2-3 times as many man hours to build a house in 1900 than it does today, and our homes are much bigger.
Most of our productivity advancements have been spent on higher quality goods, larger homes, larger and faster cars, more food variety, more mobility, and more entertainment (I'm surely leaving many things out). But at some point we will need to start finding ways to give people a good quality of life without continuing to expand the resources they "require".
$50k/year MORE in taxes to fund this massive guaranteed payout scheme. And even more interesting, that extra $3.5 trillion would be on top of the $850 billion they already pay in taxes.
I use the number $50k to symbolize a lifestyle comparable to a family that makes $50k today. Obviously I wasn't talking about $50,000 physical dollars because I would have no idea what level of inflation will occur in the future. If you actually thought I meant $50,000 physical dollars, you should have at least assumed that was only $20-30k in today's dollars.
Because of increased productivity today's $50k/year lifestyle may only require $20k in inflation adjusted dollars 50 years from now. I have no way of knowing that, but I have listed my reasons for believing this will happen.
So you're going to claim the increases in productivity through technological advancements over the last 100 years as benefits to a system that you propose that hands people $50k/year and has them working only 10 hours per week? That's patently dishonest. You need to show that there will be a productivity increase from YOUR proposal
I never claimed that my proposals will increase productivity. I said they would be made possible because of the increased productivity I assume will continue based on the past 100 years of history. I do actually think my proposals will be more productive than the alternative, because I think the only alternative is massive revolts (that are very damaging to economies).
Do you not realize what you just proposed? An involuntary servitude system where the poor get to work as "assistants" to the rich. Not involuntary? If you want to eat...
You already have to work if you want to eat. I simply proposed a potential line of jobs that don't exist today because of minimum wage laws that could become a large portion of the workforce. I wouldn't do my own dishes or my own laundry if it only cost a few dollars per day to have these things done for you. And many people would love to have jobs where all they had to do is work 10-20 hours doing household chores but still have a lifestyle comparable to today's middle class. You may call them servants, but they would probably far prefer that lifestyle over working two jobs at McDonalds and Wal-Mart just to make ends meet like many do today.
The people willing to do menial jobs like flipping a burger (if that isn't done by robots) will get a standard of living higher than $50k/year.
Why would they? They don't get that now. Are companies in your universe going to start paying well above minimum wage for entry-level part time jobs? Wow. $70k for flipping burgers. You do realize that those burgers will cost triple what they cost today, don't you?
They wouldn't be paid $70k per year for flipping burgers. They would be paid $20k for flipping burgers which is similar to what they are paid now (make it $15k/year if that makes you feel better). The rest of the money comes from welfare programs that everyone gets (including the rich, although it is debatable that they are "getting" anything since their taxes are paying for it).
Here's those mythical productivity increases that I corrected you on in another post. Having a bunch of 10 hour per week employees isn't going to boost productivity and it will increase costs.
You didn't correct anything. It is undeniable that worker productivity as gone up tremendously over the past few hundred years. That is why 90% of us are not working on the farm anymore. The amount of resources that humans consume now is astronomical compared to even a hundred years ago. Our supermarkets probably through away more food per person than was even consumed in 1900.
You just pointed out a situation no one was talking about (having 3 people work 30hr/wk instead of 2 working 45/wk) that has no bearing on the total productivity of a society. You are correct that companies often are better off with 1 employee working his ass off than 2 employees working part time, but that is just because of our current set of regulations. Regulations could just as easily be created that benefit part time jobs, such as you don't have to payroll taxes on the first $3k each employee makes each month.
If you guaranteed me $50k/year for the rest of my life, I'd walk out tomorrow.
Guaranteed doesn't necessarily mean you don't work at all. It could mean that there are a large number of part time 10-20 hour per week jobs. Probably personal assistant jobs for the wealthy and upper-middle class that are too hard to do with robotics.
If you told two teenaged kids that you'd give them $50k each without having to work for it, or $50k per "family" if they get married, you'd see a lot more unmarried couples. You must be horribly naive if you think that $100k per year tax free isn't going to be a huge draw.
Sorry that I didn't write a 5000 word document listing exclusions and exceptions, and instead expected people to understand my obvious point instead of being pedantic. I meant $50k per household. That may be given out as $25k per adult, or by some other means, but my point had nothing to do with the details of how the money is distributed.
And I just picked out two numbers (50k & 150k). I am not debating exactly what the numbers would be, but I think they probably would be close to these figures when adjusted for future purchasing power parity.
Who would you hire to do all the minimum wage jobs? Who is going to flip your burger or bus your table or put gas in your car or pick the vegetables or.... Do you really want someone who is too stupid to figure out that a free $50k/year is much better than getting minimum wage doing much of anything?
The people willing to do menial jobs like flipping a burger (if that isn't done by robots) will get a standard of living higher than $50k/year. $50k would come from welfare and $20k from their paychecks. Wages would rise to whatever level is necessary to get people to do the job, or until robotics is cheaper. Similar to today, except there is a minimum guaranteed pay.
The problem would be, in the long run, that guaranteeing people $50k/year without working means that you'd have to tax those who work and make $150k so much that they might as well take the free $50k and stay home.
No, in the long run productivity increases will make it so that the average person only has to work 10 hours per week to live a decent life. Today most productivity increases go to the rich, but if unemployment ever got too high they would have to increase welfare programs to stop revolts from forming.
Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future.
They tried that in France, didn't work out very well. In fact more people are part-time than fulltime now because of it.
I don't understand your post. The entire point is to have more people working part time instead of full time. But increased safety nets (welfare program) would be necessary to stop quality of life from decreasing as the number of hours worked decrease (paid for by the increased productivity of the general economy).
The very fundamental problem is there is to much labor available. If you want to fix it you raise the cost, not dollar value, of labor. What we should do is adopt (preferable non gender biased) policies that strongly encourage single income households, and dare I say strongly discourage the import of finished goods except for nations that are vary similar to our own in terms of cost of labor.
I agree that the problem is there is too much labor, but it absolutely should not be fixed by encouraging any productive citizens to stop working. If two engineers marry and have kids, encourage them both to work. If two high school drop outs marry and have kids, encourage them both to stay home (or work menial part time jobs).
If you had a system where everyone was guaranteed a family income of $50k, but the average working family has a family income of $150k, I think most people capable of being productive in tomorrow's economy will decide to work instead of staying home (or working crappy part time jobs). And there will be enough resources to do this in the future as long as productivity keeps increases, and the wealthy decide to spread the wealth a bit more to stop from being strung up by the poor masses.
These are mutually exclusive. Welfare programs have to be paid for by taking money from somebody. If you're reducing the amount people work, you're cutting their pay (ask all the government workers who now have mandatory furloughs; less working hours is a cut in pay), and then on top of that you're asking to take more money from them to provide money for people who are not working.
They are only mutually exclusive if productivity never increases. Our society has been able to function more or less effectively even when the rich get the lion's share of the benefits of productivity increases because the average person has also had their standard of living increase. But once automation really sets in to the point where the middle class is not necessary for our modern economy (like 98% of civilized human history), the wealthy will either have to start mass murdering protestors or start giving the newly unemployable masses a good quality of life.
We have seen a strong expansion of the upper middle class over the past few decades (which almost didn't exist before the 80s). I see this continuing until there are three clear classes: lower class, upper-middle class, wealthy. The upper-middle class and wealthy will have to give the lower class a standard of living high enough to prevent revolt, which will probably mean part time jobs and welfare programs.
Here is our opportunity to lessen our average work week to be less than 40 hours. Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future. In my opinion either the percentage of part time workers will continue to rise or the number of unemployed will start to rise. Hopefully we decide to fix the social problems caused by this with welfare programs instead of higher minimum wage laws this time (since small minded regulations create these problems in the first place).
I generally buy non-fiction books; usually to learn something new or get a new viewpoint on a topic I am already familiar with. In both cases I find that online reviews are far more helpful than thumbing through a book at the book store. If I don't know much about the topic, how will I know the quality of the book's contents? And if I am looking for a new viewpoint, I am unlikely to give the book an honest chance with a short skim. Online reviews and short snippets that I find with Amazon's "Look Inside" are good enough.
I used to love Borders and Barnes & Noble, but now even if I go to a bookstore I am still on Amazon looking at reviews.
Slashdot Mirror
Could it be that technology creates more jobs than it destroys? Could it be for each typist job that is destroyed, two data entry jobs are created? This seems to be that case because we arguably have twice as many people working in the US right now.
Almost no one is arguing that technology destroys all jobs. But some people do believe that a certain level of technology will put most humans out of work.
For thousands of years we had technological advancements, but we still had work for horses to do. No matter what new tools were created we still needed horses to pull farm equipment and transport people. The emergence of trains didn't reduce the number of horses; in fact horse populations exploded because people got used to being more mobile. But in the early 1900s technology finally got good enough to do almost everything horses can do, but better. Now horses are barely used for labor outside of entertainment.
So history has shown that technology can coexist with a population of workers for thousands of years yet eventually make them obsolete. Humans are far more capable that horses, but we can't escape the uncaring advance of technology forever. Even if sentient AI never happens, technology will get good enough to do away with almost all manual labor and other non-creative jobs. And yes, this includes highly skilled but mostly uncreative jobs like doctors and lawyers.
> Gnostic Atheist
That is total oxymoron of terms. Either you have knowledge or you don't. There is no inbetween.
A gnostic atheist has the knowledge that there is no god. (they do have knowledge, or at least think they do)
An agnostic atheist does not have faith in a god but understands that he/she doesn't know for sure. (they understand that they do not have the knowledge, hence being agnostic)
The researchers performed four studies, and only one was looking for mere correlation. Unfortunately that is the only one the summary mentions. One of the other studies primed the subjects with scientific words in a crossword puzzle, and just thinking about those words caused people to behave more morally. Now I am not sure how good the controls in their experiment were but it looks like they tried to remove correlation from the other three studies.
You can attack their methodology, but based on their research there really was a causal relationship between scientific thinking and moral behavior.
You do realize NASA's annual funding is $18 billion and social programs at the federal level $2,300 billion. .... (Military btw is $600 billion annually)
Goes to show why the US is in such trouble. Wellfare programs are essential, but get relatively little money. But, the DoD, gets a crap load of money, with little or no benefit for the funds.
While I agree that our military is overfunded, you just said that social programs (which account for 45% of the federal budget) get relatively little money. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security alone dwarf defense spending. You can't be taken seriously if you spout such false statements even if you have a good point to make.
This isn't just Universities raising tuition because they can, but I do agree that costs can go down with enough incentives. All labor based industries (education, health care, etc) have had their costs greatly beat inflation unless the industry significantly benefits from automation. But colleges have very little incentive to embrace automation because the government will keep raising Stafford loan limits and semi-guarantee private student loans through the bankruptcy code.
If this assistance was reduced, Universities would find ways to cut costs and compete just like other industries. More undergraduate classes would have lectures online with in class time meant more for tutoring. More TAs could be used. More 2-year degrees could be created for careers that don't really need a full bachelor's degree.
Government assistance should still be part of the process because an educated workforce is definitely in the country's best interest. But I really think their financial involvement could be significantly diminished.
The total cost of having employees roughly tracks inflation.
The total cost of highly skilled employees has not tracked inflation for quite some time. That is why the upper middle class has exploded in the last 30 years while the rest of the middle class has shrunk. Any industry where very highly skilled employees are needed (upper education, medicine, etc) are going to have their payroll costs increase far above inflation.
Well, TFA says that revenues have been going up while the last couple years of layoffs have been going on (about 8k firings in 2011 & 20012). And they are cutting sales people in addition to engineers, so not all cuts are necessarily ones that would only improve the short term at expense of long term growth.
Since they have been able to increase revenues (not just profit) while cutting significant number of sales personnel it looks like their current cuts worked out for the best. Sometimes a company's needs change to a point where their labor needs change. Maybe management noticed some areas where they were being excessive and trimmed their costs.
As everyone knows they were talking about Amazon, but I assume your question was about the "lose money with impunity supported by the stock market" comment. Amazon is not a very profitable company. In fact Amazon it often takes losses quarters on end. I don't have the time to search for the actual figures, but I am pretty sure they have been operating at a loss since 3rd quarter 2012.
Wall Street still keeps their stock price up because of rising revenues so Amazon can borrow money with impunity to make up for these losses. This allows them to keep dropping prices even when they are losing money. A small company cannot do this. It isn't hard to raise revenues when you don't have to care about profitability or cash flow when setting your prices. This is why Geek.com was complaining that Wall Street allows large companies to succeed with business models which would put SMBs out of business.
I am not commenting on whether this is a good thing, but it is undeniable that it is happening.
I never said that my consulting company would move overseas. It would shut down and the jobs it would have won would be more likely to be won by overseas companies.
Rest assured, there are plenty of qualified people, I wanted to look for a new job due to poor treatment by management so I threw a stone and came up with a better job.
The fact that you found a job so easily is evidence that companies are having trouble finding quality employees. I had a similar situation recently where I was put on a legacy maintenance project instead of the new development I wanted to work on. I found out about my unwanted assignment in a 10am meeting, and had interviews lined up before the end of the day (and a job offer within a few days). And I don't consider myself a rock-star developer, although IMHO I'm quite a bit above average. Companies are just that starved for decent employees.
IT communities in any city are very much a small work, it's not hard to find qualified people unless you're not willing to pay them what they are worth.
Companies cannot always pay salaries high enough to get employees to leave their current job. Companies have clients or customers that aren't necessarily going to pay more just because you claim your employees are worth it. If companies in our area are not willing to pay $150/hour for development work, that creates a ceiling for what compensation my company can offer our developers. If we cannot find developers at profitable rates, then either H1Bs are needed or jobs are lost to cheaper alternatives (like overseas labor).
Which is a tautology due to the law of supply and demand, and thus proves nothing.
Supply and demand is not restricted to just the US market. Just like in manufacturing, US workers can price themselves out of the market. If it takes too much money to attract quality developers, the work just goes overseas.
The only objective evidence I have is that I have never met someone who is involved with hiring developers who has said how easy it is to find quality talent at market rates.
Then they aren't actually offering "market rates". The definition of market rate is "The term “market rate” refers to the level of compensation an organization must provide to enable it to effectively compete against other organizations in attracting and retaining qualified employees. "
They do pay market rates; well above market rates in fact. But at a certain point the salaries would be high enough that it makes more sense to just hire overseas developers. The use of H1-B workers (which close to half of our employees are) allows us to keep development in the US for the half of our workers that are citizens. Without those H1-B workers, the entire operation would simply shut down and off-shore consulting companies would be winning these bids.
Why? There is no shortage of domestic supply. If you disagree, please cite some objective evidence to back your claim.
The only objective evidence I have is that I have never met someone who is involved with hiring developers who has said how easy it is to find quality talent at market rates. You can be naïve and believe that salaries would rise with increased demand if we ended the H1B program, but the reality is that more work would simply go overseas. I work at a consulting company and if we had to pay our entry level developers $80k/year we would never win a bid against a primarily overseas firm. Almost the entire software development industry would move offshore, with the exception of a very small group of very highly paid developers that stay in the US.
This isn't a field like medicine, law, or garbage collection where proximity to the client is incredibly important, and we don't have strong organizations like the AMA or ABA who can create anti-competitive laws and procedures to keep wages artificially high. Any efforts to manipulate the job market like we do for doctors and lawyers are very unlikely to succeed.
as I have high blood pressure, when my doctor says cut back on salt, I do
Even though salt does not lead to high blood pressure, high blood pressure does make excessive salt intake bad for the body. It is basically the cause / effect link that the US public has backwards.
Generators have become a backup that few people use today.
Few people. Many businesses. Most large buildings. All hospitals.
In other words, the more critical it is to maintain service, the more likely there is an on-site means to provide that service.
I couldn't agree more. But people shouldn't confuse having on-site means to provide a service with using on-site means as the primary method to provide a service. I don't know of any hospitals that use their generators as their primary electricity generation method.
I'm sure if this had happened 100 years ago he'd be talking about moving everything to a building with electricity.
You don't even have to make an analogy about how something similar happened about 100-200 years ago, because almost the exact same thing occurred. The move to the cloud is the same thing as the move to centralized electricity production. Businesses and homes used to generate their own energy through generators before the electric grid was created. Eventually the electric grid became reliable enough that it was silly to generate your own power. Generators have become a backup that few people use today.
The same thing will happen with servers. I think it is fair to say that any companies large enough to have their own substantial generators today are the same companies that will always have on-site servers as either backups or storage for very sensitive information. But everyone else will store almost all of their data in "the cloud", or whatever other buzzword they call it in the future.
In the near future hosting the majority of your own servers will be as rare as producing the majority of your own electricity is today.
You ought to be required to work for free before you can get a job? Sounds a bit like bullshit protectionism to me.
Even if you did work for free (which isn't the norm in Engineering), that is still a better deal than the rest of college. In college you are paying them for your education. In an unpaid internship, at least you are getting the education for free.
What do you mean similar to toady? That's exactly today. It's called minimum wage, and it's hotly debated by economists as to whether the net effect on the system is positive or negative.
A minimum guaranteed pay is not the same as minimum wage. Minimum wage forces the company to pay the worker, which means if they output of the worker is not worth minimum wage the work is not done. Or the work is sent overseas, or it is done by robots. But if the minimum guaranteed pay is paid by government entities, it does not have any of the damages of a minimum wage. Someone may be willing to work for $3/hour if they are getting $2k/month from the government no matter what. That extra money would be like a 30% raise.
You already have to work if you want to eat.
No, you don't. There is a thing called "welfare" and "unemployment". You are proposing a system that you now say guarantees $50k/year to a household but REQUIRES 10 hours a week of work (which your initial proposal did not)
I never proposed that at all. I said that the guaranteed $50k per year didn't necessarily have to be given without work (meaning it may work that way, or maybe it won't). Perhaps $30k is guaranteed without pay and $20k is given if you work 10 hours per week. Or $40k is given to everyone. It would take far more than two people pontificating online to come up with a system that actually works, but the basic concept of a guaranteed basic income is not a new idea. We already have something similar in our current welfare system, although I don't think our current system will be enough in the near future (10-20 years out).
You really think many smart rich people are going to want someone who is around just 10 hours a week and costs them massively in increased taxes?
They won't have a choice on the tax increases so they might as well get whatever benefit they can. As the number of poor people grow, politicians will have to cater more to them to even get elected. It is getting harder and harder for companies to buy politicians because of how many people are benefiting from liberal policies and it will keep getting harder (Romney got twice as much money from super-PACs, but still lost to Obama).
Neither would I. But $50k/year is a lot more than "a few dollars a day". That's $136 dollars per day, every day, weekends included.
I never said the employer would pay $50k/year. Most, and possibly all, would come from welfare programs.
And you also don't seem to realize that when talking about the future, exact dollar amounts are worthless. No one knows the PPP of the future world compared to today. It took about 20 hours of labor weekly to produce food for one person in 1900. Now it takes about 2 hours. It took between 2-3 times as many man hours to build a house in 1900 than it does today, and our homes are much bigger.
Most of our productivity advancements have been spent on higher quality goods, larger homes, larger and faster cars, more food variety, more mobility, and more entertainment (I'm surely leaving many things out). But at some point we will need to start finding ways to give people a good quality of life without continuing to expand the resources they "require".
$50k/year MORE in taxes to fund this massive guaranteed payout scheme. And even more interesting, that extra $3.5 trillion would be on top of the $850 billion they already pay in taxes.
I use the number $50k to symbolize a lifestyle comparable to a family that makes $50k today. Obviously I wasn't talking about $50,000 physical dollars because I would have no idea what level of inflation will occur in the future. If you actually thought I meant $50,000 physical dollars, you should have at least assumed that was only $20-30k in today's dollars.
Because of increased productivity today's $50k/year lifestyle may only require $20k in inflation adjusted dollars 50 years from now. I have no way of knowing that, but I have listed my reasons for believing this will happen.
So you're going to claim the increases in productivity through technological advancements over the last 100 years as benefits to a system that you propose that hands people $50k/year and has them working only 10 hours per week? That's patently dishonest. You need to show that there will be a productivity increase from YOUR proposal
I never claimed that my proposals will increase productivity. I said they would be made possible because of the increased productivity I assume will continue based on the past 100 years of history. I do actually think my proposals will be more productive than the alternative, because I think the only alternative is massive revolts (that are very damaging to economies).
Do you not realize what you just proposed? An involuntary servitude system where the poor get to work as "assistants" to the rich. Not involuntary? If you want to eat ...
You already have to work if you want to eat. I simply proposed a potential line of jobs that don't exist today because of minimum wage laws that could become a large portion of the workforce. I wouldn't do my own dishes or my own laundry if it only cost a few dollars per day to have these things done for you. And many people would love to have jobs where all they had to do is work 10-20 hours doing household chores but still have a lifestyle comparable to today's middle class. You may call them servants, but they would probably far prefer that lifestyle over working two jobs at McDonalds and Wal-Mart just to make ends meet like many do today.
The people willing to do menial jobs like flipping a burger (if that isn't done by robots) will get a standard of living higher than $50k/year.
Why would they? They don't get that now. Are companies in your universe going to start paying well above minimum wage for entry-level part time jobs?
Wow. $70k for flipping burgers. You do realize that those burgers will cost triple what they cost today, don't you?
They wouldn't be paid $70k per year for flipping burgers. They would be paid $20k for flipping burgers which is similar to what they are paid now (make it $15k/year if that makes you feel better). The rest of the money comes from welfare programs that everyone gets (including the rich, although it is debatable that they are "getting" anything since their taxes are paying for it).
Here's those mythical productivity increases that I corrected you on in another post. Having a bunch of 10 hour per week employees isn't going to boost productivity and it will increase costs.
You didn't correct anything. It is undeniable that worker productivity as gone up tremendously over the past few hundred years. That is why 90% of us are not working on the farm anymore. The amount of resources that humans consume now is astronomical compared to even a hundred years ago. Our supermarkets probably through away more food per person than was even consumed in 1900.
You just pointed out a situation no one was talking about (having 3 people work 30hr/wk instead of 2 working 45/wk) that has no bearing on the total productivity of a society. You are correct that companies often are better off with 1 employee working his ass off than 2 employees working part time, but that is just because of our current set of regulations. Regulations could just as easily be created that benefit part time jobs, such as you don't have to payroll taxes on the first $3k each employee makes each month.
If you guaranteed me $50k/year for the rest of my life, I'd walk out tomorrow.
Guaranteed doesn't necessarily mean you don't work at all. It could mean that there are a large number of part time 10-20 hour per week jobs. Probably personal assistant jobs for the wealthy and upper-middle class that are too hard to do with robotics.
If you told two teenaged kids that you'd give them $50k each without having to work for it, or $50k per "family" if they get married, you'd see a lot more unmarried couples. You must be horribly naive if you think that $100k per year tax free isn't going to be a huge draw.
Sorry that I didn't write a 5000 word document listing exclusions and exceptions, and instead expected people to understand my obvious point instead of being pedantic. I meant $50k per household. That may be given out as $25k per adult, or by some other means, but my point had nothing to do with the details of how the money is distributed.
And I just picked out two numbers (50k & 150k). I am not debating exactly what the numbers would be, but I think they probably would be close to these figures when adjusted for future purchasing power parity.
Who would you hire to do all the minimum wage jobs? Who is going to flip your burger or bus your table or put gas in your car or pick the vegetables or .... Do you really want someone who is too stupid to figure out that a free $50k/year is much better than getting minimum wage doing much of anything?
The people willing to do menial jobs like flipping a burger (if that isn't done by robots) will get a standard of living higher than $50k/year. $50k would come from welfare and $20k from their paychecks. Wages would rise to whatever level is necessary to get people to do the job, or until robotics is cheaper. Similar to today, except there is a minimum guaranteed pay.
The problem would be, in the long run, that guaranteeing people $50k/year without working means that you'd have to tax those who work and make $150k so much that they might as well take the free $50k and stay home.
No, in the long run productivity increases will make it so that the average person only has to work 10 hours per week to live a decent life. Today most productivity increases go to the rich, but if unemployment ever got too high they would have to increase welfare programs to stop revolts from forming.
Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future.
They tried that in France, didn't work out very well. In fact more people are part-time than fulltime now because of it.
I don't understand your post. The entire point is to have more people working part time instead of full time. But increased safety nets (welfare program) would be necessary to stop quality of life from decreasing as the number of hours worked decrease (paid for by the increased productivity of the general economy).
The very fundamental problem is there is to much labor available. If you want to fix it you raise the cost, not dollar value, of labor. What we should do is adopt (preferable non gender biased) policies that strongly encourage single income households, and dare I say strongly discourage the import of finished goods except for nations that are vary similar to our own in terms of cost of labor.
I agree that the problem is there is too much labor, but it absolutely should not be fixed by encouraging any productive citizens to stop working. If two engineers marry and have kids, encourage them both to work. If two high school drop outs marry and have kids, encourage them both to stay home (or work menial part time jobs).
If you had a system where everyone was guaranteed a family income of $50k, but the average working family has a family income of $150k, I think most people capable of being productive in tomorrow's economy will decide to work instead of staying home (or working crappy part time jobs). And there will be enough resources to do this in the future as long as productivity keeps increases, and the wealthy decide to spread the wealth a bit more to stop from being strung up by the poor masses.
These are mutually exclusive. Welfare programs have to be paid for by taking money from somebody. If you're reducing the amount people work, you're cutting their pay (ask all the government workers who now have mandatory furloughs; less working hours is a cut in pay), and then on top of that you're asking to take more money from them to provide money for people who are not working.
They are only mutually exclusive if productivity never increases. Our society has been able to function more or less effectively even when the rich get the lion's share of the benefits of productivity increases because the average person has also had their standard of living increase. But once automation really sets in to the point where the middle class is not necessary for our modern economy (like 98% of civilized human history), the wealthy will either have to start mass murdering protestors or start giving the newly unemployable masses a good quality of life.
We have seen a strong expansion of the upper middle class over the past few decades (which almost didn't exist before the 80s). I see this continuing until there are three clear classes: lower class, upper-middle class, wealthy. The upper-middle class and wealthy will have to give the lower class a standard of living high enough to prevent revolt, which will probably mean part time jobs and welfare programs.
Here is our opportunity to lessen our average work week to be less than 40 hours. Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future. In my opinion either the percentage of part time workers will continue to rise or the number of unemployed will start to rise. Hopefully we decide to fix the social problems caused by this with welfare programs instead of higher minimum wage laws this time (since small minded regulations create these problems in the first place).
I generally buy non-fiction books; usually to learn something new or get a new viewpoint on a topic I am already familiar with. In both cases I find that online reviews are far more helpful than thumbing through a book at the book store. If I don't know much about the topic, how will I know the quality of the book's contents? And if I am looking for a new viewpoint, I am unlikely to give the book an honest chance with a short skim. Online reviews and short snippets that I find with Amazon's "Look Inside" are good enough.
I used to love Borders and Barnes & Noble, but now even if I go to a bookstore I am still on Amazon looking at reviews.