If your drug testing costs more money than is saved by it (which is proven so far)
Many people either don't know about this research or disagree with the methodology. When it comes to welfare, a very large percentage of the population believe there are intangible aspects of being given money for nothing which leftist researchers ignore.
I am completely on the side of stopping these ridiculous drug tests, but that doesn't absolve me of the responsibility of understanding the other side of the debate if I intend to change anyone's mind.
Your missing the point of this, its to show those in power that they should be careful what they ask for. This is tongue in cheek and will never be implemented for the wealthy, but perhaps it gives them an idea on how the shoe fits on the other foot.
On the other hand, it also shows a communication disconnect for those fighting against drug tests for welfare programs. The reason for the drug tests is so the people giving their money (taxpayers) have confidence the money is being spent appropriately. There really is no reason to "see how the shoe fits" because wealthy people are very used to following the demands of people they ask for money (investors). I am confident the financial due diligence checks for large investments is more invasive than a drug test. I would have chosen a drug test over producing the necessary paperwork for my recent home refinance, even though I would have passed both tests with ease.
The wealthy already understand that in almost all cases someone asking for money is not the one who sets the rules for how the money is given. They don't need this tongue in cheek proposal to learn that. They instead need to be taught why such a drug test would not be helpful in combating poverty in the first place, and this clown show doesn't help with that at all.
We've heard of H1-B visas being used to force IT workers to train their replacements. I often wonder if the AI developer realizes they're doing the same thing.
Its not just AI developers who do this, it is almost all software developers. In fact you are talking about anyone in an R&D-like field.
When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry my job was to help hospitals and pharmacies hire more pharmacy techs instead of pharmacists. When I worked in consulting I worked in many industries but my primary goal was to help companies solve immediate software needs without having to hire too much staff. Now that I work with CRM related software, I am responsible for helping my company only increase its staff by 10% while its revenue grows by 100%. The end result is that as we eat market share from other companies, the jobs lost in those companies are not added to mine.
I don't believe our economy is a zero sum game, but software is changing so rapidly there is no way for job growth in other sectors to keep up. Right now I complete a major project every quarter, and each time it increases the workload my coworkers can handle each week. For instance over the past two years our customer service department can handle over double the cases per staff member, and that doesn't even include new self-service options.
And everything we have seen over the past few decades is nothing compared to when natural language processing and image recognition reach or surpass human-level capabilities. This could easily be in the next 10 years, and then the service industry sees a disruption not seen since the green revolution. Except this time it will happen over 5 years instead of 50.
I'm highly skeptical that computer-driven automation is augmenting US GDP by a mere 6.25% (from $16 trillion to $17 trillion),
This article only looks at people actually working in the software industry, and other workers the industry supports (retail, real estate, restaurant, etc). It does not look at the impact this software has on non-software industries employees. For instance it doesn't factor in productivity increases for a business analyst working with a BI tool instead of paper spreadsheets, or a car built with software-driven robotics instead of by hand.
Just as previous waves of technological change (industrial revolution, steam engines, electrical engineering, automobiles) are largely responsible for the productivity increases of their time, the digital revolution is primarily responsible for most productivity increases over the last 40 years. You could make an argument that the software and computer hardware industry is actually responsible for $5 - $10 trillion of our current GDP.
Editor's note: The summary is written with inputs from an anonymous reader, who also shared the story. We've been unable to verify the claims made by the author.
Everyone is used to getting their news from social media anyway, so why bother verifying the claims before posting it as news?
This is a really interesting idea. Make everyone who is connected to the grid pay a fee for the infrastructure. Then let customers buy electricity from whomever they choose.
Great idea, let me know when you figure out who keeps the grid going and where all the energy is going to be stored.......
I market in bold the part which explains where the funding for keeping the grid going and storing the energy is taken care of.
Our development from "duh, me make fire" to "duh, remote control is broken, need new TV" took about 10,000 years. And we're still in no position whatsoever to fly to any other star than our own. Hell, even reaching the next planet is something we've been working on for half a century now.
All of the time spans you give here are inconsequential when compared to the age of the universe. Even if it took us 10 million years to go from current technology to quick interstellar travel, if life is not unique to Earth then we are either the first sapient species or the only one. 10 million years is simply not a long time at this scale.
Star systems started forming within a billion years of the big bang (source), over 13 billion years ago, and it took less than 5 billion years for life to reach its current state on Earth since its creation. That leaves over 8 billion years for potential sapient civilizations to emerge before us. One physist claims it would take 5 - 10 billion years to colonize the entire known galaxy even with current propulsion technology.
We may find out life is so rare we are either the only ones or among only a few dozen inhabited planets. But if life is common at all, it is very likely there are intergalactic civilizations which have been around for billions of years. That is what leads many people, myself included, to believe life is an extreme rarity.
What makes us think that anyone else in this universe is actually so far ahead of us to be able to fly about between the stars AND have the hubris to assume that someone this advanced would actually want to have anything to do with us?
We have people on our planet devoting their careers to researching earth worms, so it doesn't take hubris to believe that out of potentially near infinite civilizations there may be some who have scientists interested in studying pre-interstellar civilizations like us.
Betty makes baskets. Patty makes pies. Each day Betty makes a basket and trades it for one of Patty's pies. But then Mike the manufacturer comes along and can make 10 baskets per day. So now Patty can trade one pie for ten baskets, and she is slightly better off (since she doesn't need that many baskets). But Betty is worse off. So, obviously, she should stop making baskets and start making pies. She spends two years retraining herself to make quality pies, and goes $100k into debt (for schooling and keeping food on her kids' table during schooling). Now she is slightly better off than she was originally too.
Now Mike builds another machine that can make 10 pies in a day. Betty and Patty no longer have any competitive advantage. Relative to each other they are no worse off than they were in the beginning, but compared to the rest of society their skills are next to useless. As long as they eat a diet of only pies and never need any consumer goods other than baskets they are fine. But that is not the case.
Both of them are now unemployed and looking for a new industry, but Betty is already $100k in debt because she gained skills which ended up not being useful for long. Welcome to the new economy.
If a bug happens to everyone, it's damned easy to fix. But the annoying bugs don't. For the annoying bugs, 1% of your users are having the bug, their reports seem legit, but dozens of people have tried to reproduce it and can't. So you have evidence that someone's system is breaking the rules, you just can't see it.
So kind of like the people who see ghosts, or those with psychic abilities that we just cannot seem to reproduce in lab experiments?
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't.
Without ANY bugs? Really? The only way this idea works is if you have a divine programmer who cannot make any mistakes who created the universe. This is more like scientology than science.
Whose to say there aren't bugs? As a physics major in college I could certainly be convinced many aspects of general relativity and quantum mechanics could be considered bugs. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light? Oops. Quantum entanglement and superposition? We'll fix those in version 2.5. Hopefully by version 4 we can finally get the world to run by what you call Newtonian physics with no exceptions.
I don't even see why this is such a bad deal. You get a few months of a heads up to start networking and looking for work. You get a month or two of pay while interviewing for your next job, and then move on with your career. The other option is for the company to just lay off everyone, which is worse for both sides. Its not like these employees could reasonably have expected to work at this same company until retirement. This isn't the 1960's.
I would welcome such a deal if my company offered it. I would only be pissed if they used this to cheat me out of my 15% target bonus, which based on my performance I treat as regular salary. Staying on my employer's good side would also likely put me at the top of the list for contracting once the outsourcing firm fucks everything up.
We are NO closer. It may not even be possible. Holy fuck. We don't even know what intelligence IS. What you see now are a handful of clever algorithms that the media have labeled AI but are not intelligent in the least.
This is the most dangerous misconception being have about the potential dangers AI poses to our society. We see movies with examples "strong AI" enslaving and warring with humanity and believe that is the existential threat. It is of course one potential threat, but because it is so unlikely in the near future it should not be in the forefront of peoples' minds.
Strong AI putting 100% of people out of work is not a likely problem in the next 50 years. But more sophisticated weak AI such natural language processing, computer vision, and autonomous robotics with the potential of putting 20-80% of humans out of work is a significant possibility. Not guaranteed by any means, but perhaps more likely than not in the next 50 years.
Humans have been able to stay ahead of the curve because the basic human abilities of pattern recognition mad even low skilled labor very useful after each labor disruption. But a new reality where one human workers assisted by numerous weak AI systems can do the work of 10 people today will make it very hard for our society to adapt. It won't be like the industrial revolution where we had 100 years to adapt, or the first computer revolution where we had 30-40 years to adapt. This will happen over 10-20 years, and each individual industry could see disruption occur on an inflection point that lasts perhaps only a few years.
We will have to change to a society which accepts that large percentages of workers at any given time will need to be retrained for new work at any time. College grads could find their projected profession not exist any more and need to go right back to school. 50 year olds will find themselves back at square one when their industry dies. This has already happened to many and we have done little to help them. But once it is happening to almost anyone it can no longer be ignored.
This is the real problem. It is not an unsolvable problem though, as long as we accept it exists.
Not that easy. Out of 275 citizens how many can afford a political campaign? If you are not rich or have backing of the rich, you don't count.
Perhaps a silly question, but did anyone ever consider how that might be part of the problem?
I would assume that most presidents / prime ministers / etc. of other developed countries are also very well connected to big business interests, and have a substantial net worth. I'm having trouble finding the net worth of leaders in the developed world, as the top leaders are mostly monarchs with billions of dollars, but does anyone know how many developed countries are led by people with a net worth under perhaps $5 million?
You have to account for an aging population when looking at participation rates, and so looking at the range of 22 to 60 is probably more instructive to also take into account early retirement
The most official figures I know of for working adult participation rates look at ages 25-54. This peaked at around 85% in the 90's, moved down to around 82-83% after the '01 recession and has been steadily moving down towards 80% since the Great Recession. There was a slight bounce up in 2015 back towards 81%. This basically works out to around 4 million people who would have been in the workforce during the 90's economy who are not in the workforce in our current economy.
So the AC's claims that an extra 5% of the US population is out of work when in a better economy they would be working is pretty close to accurate. Although I don't agree with his reasons for why this has happened at all.
[An] economy built on pipe dreams such as this is in deep, deep trouble.
Once people stop dreaming our economy will stall to a level not seen in hundreds of years. Most of human history has shown a 1-2% rate of economic advancement until the industrial age. The dreamers are the ones who have given us the advancements our ancestors 200 years ago couldn't even have dreamed of.
I would say if the world true wants more "workers capable of and willing to architect quality software systems" it needs to offer that 200k+ salary or more and apparently the real problem is there is a shortage of "workers capable of and willing to architect quality software systems" at 60k a year.
I completely agree that we need to pay highly skilled software engineers higher salaries to attract more of them. As I said in my two posts, the highly skilled software architects will likely make even more money than they do today, so $200k+ would probably be the norm. But that will be a minority of the software development industry. I believe the vast majority of programmers will eventually be paid salaries closer to CAD operators today. You will have one architect / engineer being paid $250k for each 5-20 programmers being paid $60k. Not that different than the gap between mechanical engineers and CAD operators.
And just like management, in reality they ain't worth jack shit. But in our economy, they make you rich.
Just in case anyone has ever wondered if our economy has anything to do with reality...
You should not throw stones in a glass house, since these statements are so divorced from reality you are in no position to insult others.
(Paraphrasing Dead Poet's Society) Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But friendship, love, literature, theater, sport, these are what we stay alive for. Software engineering may be the career I chose, and I believe it adds great value to society. But the entertainment value professional athletes provide to society is worth just as much if not far more. If you think Lebron James is not worth his salary, watch a Cavaliers / Warriors game end then a 76ers / Timberwolves game. There is little comparison when it comes to entertainment value. And everyone playing in these two games are among the top few hundred players in the world, yet the top few dozen players are truly in a different league.
You need to get over yourself and realize there are plenty of ways to add value to the world above and beyond engineering.
We have not come anywhere close to fulfilling our economy's need for workers capable of and willing to architect quality software systems. Developed economies currently employ nearly 100% of these people and push their salaries to a low of $150k to well over $200k per year. This doesn't even count those who go into business for themselves.
Most companies have to deal with software developers whose skills and abilities top out at a senior software developer level because of the lack of elite employees. Salaries are at or probably even above what the market can bear for software architects (if you believe we are in a bubble), which is mostly constrained by how valuable companies view their software systems. As more companies view their IT systems as a competitive advantage, salaries will continue to go up.
I seriously doubt our economy will ever reach a point where there is more supply of software architect-level workers than there is demand. Until we have human-level AI that is. This is obviously just an opinion though so who knows?
No, there won't be "high paid computer science guys". The only way to get a high pay is to have anything to do with finance or management. Anyone who actually creates a product is paid pebbles, only pushing numbers counts!
There will absolutely be highly paid computer science guys, and they will likely be higher paid than they are today. But there almost certainly won't be as many highly paid computer scientists as there are software developers today (calculated as a percentage of population that is).
There will still be a need for researchers, and they will still be highly paid because their skill sets will always be rare (until genetic engineering can control intelligence and work ethic). And there will still be a need for software architects, although the name of that profession may change. My opinion is individuals who hold software architect-like roles now will be the ones eventually getting a professional engineering license, and everyone else will be low paid programmers akin to CAD operators today.
I would agree that the position of senior software developer making $150k without any managerial responsibilities will mostly be replaced with $60k programmer positions. There will be many more of these positions and they will not require much training. There will also be more highly paid software architect / software engineer positions that there are today, but they will be the minority in the field. This is just my opinion of where our industry will end up 20 years from now.
Immunization isn't 100% effective indeed, and it isn't 100% harmless also. THAT is why some people decide not to vaccinate.
I 100% agree with these three statements. Many people are poorly educated and/or irrational enough to allow biases and poor quality advisors to cause such a poor, dangerous, and deeply irresponsible decision. Similar to a parent shooting up heroine in front of his kids, not all parents are able to make the best decisions for their kids (no matter how deliberate their decision is). And while the alternatives of taking the children away are probably even worse than their substandard care, taking away some of a substandard parent's rights away in favor of the rights of their children is often a moral imperative.
Further, since the Neurenberg trial it was internationally decided that NOBODY could be forced to undergo a medical treatment without their fully informed consent.
So, people do have the right not to get vaccinated.
You are correct that we cannot force medical treatment on adults. But we can create laws to prevent child abuse, such as denying necessary vaccinations.
Aren't visas like this for jobs skills that are lacking in the US? This was a construction job. thousands of people could have been imported from Detroit, Buffalo, etc.
Wrong type of Visa. B1 Visas are meant for business professionals to temporarily enter the country for negotiations, meetings, interview staff, perform research, etc. This type of abuse is outright fraud. The problem is not simply poorly written laws (or at least not primarily that). The problem is enforcement of those laws. It may be prohibitively difficult to prevent this type of abuse, but I assume there is also a drastic lack of enforcement of these Visa regulations.
Tesla is able to rightly say they never hired these fraudulent visa holders and expects its subcontractors to follow immigration and other labor laws. Forcing all companies to perform detailed audits of all their subcontractors which goes above and beyond what even the federal government does is probably not reasonable. But increased scrutiny of all B1 visa requests would probably solve a great deal of abuse (certainly not all abuse though).
Slashdot Mirror
If your drug testing costs more money than is saved by it (which is proven so far)
Many people either don't know about this research or disagree with the methodology. When it comes to welfare, a very large percentage of the population believe there are intangible aspects of being given money for nothing which leftist researchers ignore.
I am completely on the side of stopping these ridiculous drug tests, but that doesn't absolve me of the responsibility of understanding the other side of the debate if I intend to change anyone's mind.
Your missing the point of this, its to show those in power that they should be careful what they ask for. This is tongue in cheek and will never be implemented for the wealthy, but perhaps it gives them an idea on how the shoe fits on the other foot.
On the other hand, it also shows a communication disconnect for those fighting against drug tests for welfare programs. The reason for the drug tests is so the people giving their money (taxpayers) have confidence the money is being spent appropriately. There really is no reason to "see how the shoe fits" because wealthy people are very used to following the demands of people they ask for money (investors). I am confident the financial due diligence checks for large investments is more invasive than a drug test. I would have chosen a drug test over producing the necessary paperwork for my recent home refinance, even though I would have passed both tests with ease.
The wealthy already understand that in almost all cases someone asking for money is not the one who sets the rules for how the money is given. They don't need this tongue in cheek proposal to learn that. They instead need to be taught why such a drug test would not be helpful in combating poverty in the first place, and this clown show doesn't help with that at all.
God forbid we get actual robot doctors.
Which is one of the first things Watson started training to become after it won Jeopardy.
We've heard of H1-B visas being used to force IT workers to train their replacements. I often wonder if the AI developer realizes they're doing the same thing.
Its not just AI developers who do this, it is almost all software developers. In fact you are talking about anyone in an R&D-like field.
When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry my job was to help hospitals and pharmacies hire more pharmacy techs instead of pharmacists. When I worked in consulting I worked in many industries but my primary goal was to help companies solve immediate software needs without having to hire too much staff. Now that I work with CRM related software, I am responsible for helping my company only increase its staff by 10% while its revenue grows by 100%. The end result is that as we eat market share from other companies, the jobs lost in those companies are not added to mine.
I don't believe our economy is a zero sum game, but software is changing so rapidly there is no way for job growth in other sectors to keep up. Right now I complete a major project every quarter, and each time it increases the workload my coworkers can handle each week. For instance over the past two years our customer service department can handle over double the cases per staff member, and that doesn't even include new self-service options.
And everything we have seen over the past few decades is nothing compared to when natural language processing and image recognition reach or surpass human-level capabilities. This could easily be in the next 10 years, and then the service industry sees a disruption not seen since the green revolution. Except this time it will happen over 5 years instead of 50.
I'm highly skeptical that computer-driven automation is augmenting US GDP by a mere 6.25% (from $16 trillion to $17 trillion),
This article only looks at people actually working in the software industry, and other workers the industry supports (retail, real estate, restaurant, etc). It does not look at the impact this software has on non-software industries employees. For instance it doesn't factor in productivity increases for a business analyst working with a BI tool instead of paper spreadsheets, or a car built with software-driven robotics instead of by hand.
Just as previous waves of technological change (industrial revolution, steam engines, electrical engineering, automobiles) are largely responsible for the productivity increases of their time, the digital revolution is primarily responsible for most productivity increases over the last 40 years. You could make an argument that the software and computer hardware industry is actually responsible for $5 - $10 trillion of our current GDP.
Editor's note: The summary is written with inputs from an anonymous reader, who also shared the story. We've been unable to verify the claims made by the author.
Everyone is used to getting their news from social media anyway, so why bother verifying the claims before posting it as news?
This is a really interesting idea. Make everyone who is connected to the grid pay a fee for the infrastructure. Then let customers buy electricity from whomever they choose.
Great idea, let me know when you figure out who keeps the grid going and where all the energy is going to be stored.......
I market in bold the part which explains where the funding for keeping the grid going and storing the energy is taken care of.
Our development from "duh, me make fire" to "duh, remote control is broken, need new TV" took about 10,000 years. And we're still in no position whatsoever to fly to any other star than our own. Hell, even reaching the next planet is something we've been working on for half a century now.
All of the time spans you give here are inconsequential when compared to the age of the universe. Even if it took us 10 million years to go from current technology to quick interstellar travel, if life is not unique to Earth then we are either the first sapient species or the only one. 10 million years is simply not a long time at this scale.
Star systems started forming within a billion years of the big bang (source), over 13 billion years ago, and it took less than 5 billion years for life to reach its current state on Earth since its creation. That leaves over 8 billion years for potential sapient civilizations to emerge before us. One physist claims it would take 5 - 10 billion years to colonize the entire known galaxy even with current propulsion technology.
We may find out life is so rare we are either the only ones or among only a few dozen inhabited planets. But if life is common at all, it is very likely there are intergalactic civilizations which have been around for billions of years. That is what leads many people, myself included, to believe life is an extreme rarity.
What makes us think that anyone else in this universe is actually so far ahead of us to be able to fly about between the stars AND have the hubris to assume that someone this advanced would actually want to have anything to do with us?
We have people on our planet devoting their careers to researching earth worms, so it doesn't take hubris to believe that out of potentially near infinite civilizations there may be some who have scientists interested in studying pre-interstellar civilizations like us.
Your example in reality:
Betty makes baskets. Patty makes pies. Each day Betty makes a basket and trades it for one of Patty's pies. But then Mike the manufacturer comes along and can make 10 baskets per day. So now Patty can trade one pie for ten baskets, and she is slightly better off (since she doesn't need that many baskets). But Betty is worse off. So, obviously, she should stop making baskets and start making pies. She spends two years retraining herself to make quality pies, and goes $100k into debt (for schooling and keeping food on her kids' table during schooling). Now she is slightly better off than she was originally too.
Now Mike builds another machine that can make 10 pies in a day. Betty and Patty no longer have any competitive advantage. Relative to each other they are no worse off than they were in the beginning, but compared to the rest of society their skills are next to useless. As long as they eat a diet of only pies and never need any consumer goods other than baskets they are fine. But that is not the case.
Both of them are now unemployed and looking for a new industry, but Betty is already $100k in debt because she gained skills which ended up not being useful for long. Welcome to the new economy.
If a bug happens to everyone, it's damned easy to fix. But the annoying bugs don't. For the annoying bugs, 1% of your users are having the bug, their reports seem legit, but dozens of people have tried to reproduce it and can't. So you have evidence that someone's system is breaking the rules, you just can't see it.
So kind of like the people who see ghosts, or those with psychic abilities that we just cannot seem to reproduce in lab experiments?
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't.
Without ANY bugs? Really? The only way this idea works is if you have a divine programmer who cannot make any mistakes who created the universe. This is more like scientology than science.
Whose to say there aren't bugs? As a physics major in college I could certainly be convinced many aspects of general relativity and quantum mechanics could be considered bugs. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light? Oops. Quantum entanglement and superposition? We'll fix those in version 2.5. Hopefully by version 4 we can finally get the world to run by what you call Newtonian physics with no exceptions.
I don't even see why this is such a bad deal. You get a few months of a heads up to start networking and looking for work. You get a month or two of pay while interviewing for your next job, and then move on with your career. The other option is for the company to just lay off everyone, which is worse for both sides. Its not like these employees could reasonably have expected to work at this same company until retirement. This isn't the 1960's.
I would welcome such a deal if my company offered it. I would only be pissed if they used this to cheat me out of my 15% target bonus, which based on my performance I treat as regular salary. Staying on my employer's good side would also likely put me at the top of the list for contracting once the outsourcing firm fucks everything up.
We are NO closer. It may not even be possible. Holy fuck. We don't even know what intelligence IS. What you see now are a handful of clever algorithms that the media have labeled AI but are not intelligent in the least.
This is the most dangerous misconception being have about the potential dangers AI poses to our society. We see movies with examples "strong AI" enslaving and warring with humanity and believe that is the existential threat. It is of course one potential threat, but because it is so unlikely in the near future it should not be in the forefront of peoples' minds.
Strong AI putting 100% of people out of work is not a likely problem in the next 50 years. But more sophisticated weak AI such natural language processing, computer vision, and autonomous robotics with the potential of putting 20-80% of humans out of work is a significant possibility. Not guaranteed by any means, but perhaps more likely than not in the next 50 years.
Humans have been able to stay ahead of the curve because the basic human abilities of pattern recognition mad even low skilled labor very useful after each labor disruption. But a new reality where one human workers assisted by numerous weak AI systems can do the work of 10 people today will make it very hard for our society to adapt. It won't be like the industrial revolution where we had 100 years to adapt, or the first computer revolution where we had 30-40 years to adapt. This will happen over 10-20 years, and each individual industry could see disruption occur on an inflection point that lasts perhaps only a few years.
We will have to change to a society which accepts that large percentages of workers at any given time will need to be retrained for new work at any time. College grads could find their projected profession not exist any more and need to go right back to school. 50 year olds will find themselves back at square one when their industry dies. This has already happened to many and we have done little to help them. But once it is happening to almost anyone it can no longer be ignored.
This is the real problem. It is not an unsolvable problem though, as long as we accept it exists.
Not that easy. Out of 275 citizens how many can afford a political campaign? If you are not rich or have backing of the rich, you don't count.
Perhaps a silly question, but did anyone ever consider how that might be part of the problem?
I would assume that most presidents / prime ministers / etc. of other developed countries are also very well connected to big business interests, and have a substantial net worth. I'm having trouble finding the net worth of leaders in the developed world, as the top leaders are mostly monarchs with billions of dollars, but does anyone know how many developed countries are led by people with a net worth under perhaps $5 million?
You have to account for an aging population when looking at participation rates, and so looking at the range of 22 to 60 is probably more instructive to also take into account early retirement
The most official figures I know of for working adult participation rates look at ages 25-54. This peaked at around 85% in the 90's, moved down to around 82-83% after the '01 recession and has been steadily moving down towards 80% since the Great Recession. There was a slight bounce up in 2015 back towards 81%. This basically works out to around 4 million people who would have been in the workforce during the 90's economy who are not in the workforce in our current economy.
So the AC's claims that an extra 5% of the US population is out of work when in a better economy they would be working is pretty close to accurate. Although I don't agree with his reasons for why this has happened at all.
[An] economy built on pipe dreams such as this is in deep, deep trouble.
Once people stop dreaming our economy will stall to a level not seen in hundreds of years. Most of human history has shown a 1-2% rate of economic advancement until the industrial age. The dreamers are the ones who have given us the advancements our ancestors 200 years ago couldn't even have dreamed of.
I don't watch sports and I'm fine.
I doubt anyone consumes 100% of all entertainment options available, but that doesn't make any of those options worthless.
I would say if the world true wants more "workers capable of and willing to architect quality software systems" it needs to offer that 200k+ salary or more and apparently the real problem is there is a shortage of "workers capable of and willing to architect quality software systems" at 60k a year.
I completely agree that we need to pay highly skilled software engineers higher salaries to attract more of them. As I said in my two posts, the highly skilled software architects will likely make even more money than they do today, so $200k+ would probably be the norm. But that will be a minority of the software development industry. I believe the vast majority of programmers will eventually be paid salaries closer to CAD operators today. You will have one architect / engineer being paid $250k for each 5-20 programmers being paid $60k. Not that different than the gap between mechanical engineers and CAD operators.
And just like management, in reality they ain't worth jack shit. But in our economy, they make you rich.
Just in case anyone has ever wondered if our economy has anything to do with reality...
You should not throw stones in a glass house, since these statements are so divorced from reality you are in no position to insult others.
(Paraphrasing Dead Poet's Society) Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But friendship, love, literature, theater, sport, these are what we stay alive for. Software engineering may be the career I chose, and I believe it adds great value to society. But the entertainment value professional athletes provide to society is worth just as much if not far more. If you think Lebron James is not worth his salary, watch a Cavaliers / Warriors game end then a 76ers / Timberwolves game. There is little comparison when it comes to entertainment value. And everyone playing in these two games are among the top few hundred players in the world, yet the top few dozen players are truly in a different league.
You need to get over yourself and realize there are plenty of ways to add value to the world above and beyond engineering.
We have not come anywhere close to fulfilling our economy's need for workers capable of and willing to architect quality software systems. Developed economies currently employ nearly 100% of these people and push their salaries to a low of $150k to well over $200k per year. This doesn't even count those who go into business for themselves.
Most companies have to deal with software developers whose skills and abilities top out at a senior software developer level because of the lack of elite employees. Salaries are at or probably even above what the market can bear for software architects (if you believe we are in a bubble), which is mostly constrained by how valuable companies view their software systems. As more companies view their IT systems as a competitive advantage, salaries will continue to go up.
I seriously doubt our economy will ever reach a point where there is more supply of software architect-level workers than there is demand. Until we have human-level AI that is. This is obviously just an opinion though so who knows?
No, there won't be "high paid computer science guys". The only way to get a high pay is to have anything to do with finance or management. Anyone who actually creates a product is paid pebbles, only pushing numbers counts!
There will absolutely be highly paid computer science guys, and they will likely be higher paid than they are today. But there almost certainly won't be as many highly paid computer scientists as there are software developers today (calculated as a percentage of population that is).
There will still be a need for researchers, and they will still be highly paid because their skill sets will always be rare (until genetic engineering can control intelligence and work ethic). And there will still be a need for software architects, although the name of that profession may change. My opinion is individuals who hold software architect-like roles now will be the ones eventually getting a professional engineering license, and everyone else will be low paid programmers akin to CAD operators today.
I would agree that the position of senior software developer making $150k without any managerial responsibilities will mostly be replaced with $60k programmer positions. There will be many more of these positions and they will not require much training. There will also be more highly paid software architect / software engineer positions that there are today, but they will be the minority in the field. This is just my opinion of where our industry will end up 20 years from now.
I'd rather be ass-raped with a dildo covered in fish hooks than use Windows on my phone.
I admire your resolve. But given a choice between the two, Windows phone sounds pretty good to me.
the dildo won't send your credit card info to hackers
I would give those hackers a signed power of attorney to prevent being ass raped by a dildo covered in fish hooks.
How is this confusing? It said Asian American not Chinese American. India is part of Asia.
Immunization isn't 100% effective indeed, and it isn't 100% harmless also. THAT is why some people decide not to vaccinate.
I 100% agree with these three statements. Many people are poorly educated and/or irrational enough to allow biases and poor quality advisors to cause such a poor, dangerous, and deeply irresponsible decision. Similar to a parent shooting up heroine in front of his kids, not all parents are able to make the best decisions for their kids (no matter how deliberate their decision is). And while the alternatives of taking the children away are probably even worse than their substandard care, taking away some of a substandard parent's rights away in favor of the rights of their children is often a moral imperative.
Further, since the Neurenberg trial it was internationally decided that NOBODY could be forced to undergo a medical treatment without their fully informed consent.
So, people do have the right not to get vaccinated.
You are correct that we cannot force medical treatment on adults. But we can create laws to prevent child abuse, such as denying necessary vaccinations.
Aren't visas like this for jobs skills that are lacking in the US? This was a construction job. thousands of people could have been imported from Detroit, Buffalo, etc.
Wrong type of Visa. B1 Visas are meant for business professionals to temporarily enter the country for negotiations, meetings, interview staff, perform research, etc. This type of abuse is outright fraud. The problem is not simply poorly written laws (or at least not primarily that). The problem is enforcement of those laws. It may be prohibitively difficult to prevent this type of abuse, but I assume there is also a drastic lack of enforcement of these Visa regulations.
Tesla is able to rightly say they never hired these fraudulent visa holders and expects its subcontractors to follow immigration and other labor laws. Forcing all companies to perform detailed audits of all their subcontractors which goes above and beyond what even the federal government does is probably not reasonable. But increased scrutiny of all B1 visa requests would probably solve a great deal of abuse (certainly not all abuse though).