The lure of a liberal arts degree has always been to have a very well rounded education that just makes you a smarter person instead of just teaching a certain profession. In today's technological world, STEM education is performing a very similar role. Learning high level math provides extreme advances in our current economy regardless of your actual job.
Hopefully colleges start to understand this and increase the level of math that all college graduates are required to learn. Perhaps in 20 years the average Gen Ed requirements of a Bachelors will require 20+ credits of math related courses to help prepare students for the modern world.
Every time I hear about a terrifyingly invasive means of "improving performance" its targeted at developers. Is it just selection bias, or does the world actually hate us?
You really think developers are singled out here? There is an entire industry built upon business process improvement and operational management. I guess there probably are more invasive measures against professions like developers, but that is only because it has been hard to completely replace the profession with machines.
When you start having your bathroom breaks timed by your manager like some retail workers then you have it rough.
I wouldn't live in a place with inadequate bandwidth for a simple video stream.
Wow. You're quite picky.
How is that picky at all? Over 70% of homes in the US have broadband access, so he is not picking a rare factor when choosing a home. And for someone who uses the Internet regularly, having broadband speeds is a very important consideration.
I know I would never live in a home without access to non-satellite broadband. I also wouldn't live in an area with bad schools, high crime, excessive road noise, and those with a number of other undesirable factors. That still leaves me with quite a few options.
The scenario you describe is a very rare one, if you are being truthful that is. Very few areas with $900/month three story housing have enough property taxes to fund good schools (those that do are probably funded by large private companies in the area). Such an area is also likely to have neighbors of a low socio-economic status, and will therefore have a hard time supporting many cultural options in the area. There are probably places like the one you describe, but they are far more rare than areas with bad Internet service.
If drinking 100 gallons of water per day is bad for you, then drinking any amount of water is bad for you. I love you logic!
Drinking 100 gallons of water per day is bad for you because it dilutes the sodium in your body. And yes, drinking just one glass of water will dilute sodium in your body as well, just to a lesser degree (just like increasing minimum wage damages the economy just to a lesser degree). The analogy obviously breaks down because you need water to survive, but that is why I used a logical extreme instead of an analogy because analogies that can be applied broadly are rare. I am not really sure why you feel your ridiculous analogy says anything about my logical statement.
Remember that minimum wage does not just affect minimum wage workers and their employers. It affects everyone who pays for services done by people working minimum wage
And it also affects everyone who sells good and services, since these minimum wage workers can now afford more. That's usually considered a good thing.
In a completely closed system, increasing the minimum wage would have no effect other than shifting which products and services are most successful, and shifting income from the wealthy to the poor. But automation and a global marketplace mean that not all of the increased costs are given to the workers. Some of them are funneled into automation and into other economies with lower minimum wage. The automation at least gives the benefit of hiring engineers, but far less engineers are hired than the large number of low wage workers who are fired.
The jobs lost overseas are just lost. And not only low wage jobs are lost, because as the cost of living increases on the engineers then those jobs start to go away as well.
The bottom line is that if raising minimum wage from $7 to $700 will have a bad effect on the economy, then so will increasing $7 to $7.25.
Which makes just as much sense as saying that if rising price of a product from $7 to $7.25 will increase profits, then so will increasing it to $700.
What they actually say is that rising the product from $7 to $7.25 will increase the profit per widget sold. They also acknowledge that increasing the price will reduce the number of widgets sold, just like it would if they increased the price to $700. They then weight the benefit and the risk and determine a fair price. So I guess I agree completely with your analogy, since it is basically the same as mine.
Drawing conclusions from the second derivative of noisy data is not justified mathematically
If you take away drawing conclusions from the second derivative of noisy data then you would destroy the entire economics profession. Then we would have to rely on common sense ideas such as if you raise someone's wages without raising their usefulness, you hurt their job prospects and raise prices for everyone else in the economy. You make the lives of 9 people marginally better but you destroy the life of the 10th guy who can't find work now.
So if you want to compare the trend of job growth increasing or decreasing, it looks like raising the minimum wage does hurt significantly.
What kind of jobs are being created? Are they minimum-wage jobs that you can't actually live on?
They are almost certainly not good jobs. They are probably some of the worst and lowest paid jobs in the country. But that just points out why job growth is a stupid metric to look at anyway. I would like to see an alternative employment figure of "households that make at least twice the poverty level" alongside any unemployment figures.
Growth in median wages would also be a statistic that is more meaningful for most people than job growth. Most people who complain about not being able to find a job could find one if they were willing to work for minimum wage. When people complain about an economy they usually are complaining because they can't keep up whatever standard of living they are familiar with.
I have an alternative theory... the minimum wage has no affect on job growth at all.
The majority of minimum wage workers are highschool students work in fast food [...]
Remember that minimum wage does not just affect minimum wage workers and their employers. It affects everyone who pays for services done by people working minimum wage. And those who pay for services done by people who pay for services done by people working minimum wage. And those who pay for services done by people who pay for services done by people who pay for services done by people working minimum wage. And so on.
It all ripples through the economy. High minimum wages eventually make everything more expensive, not just a McDonald's hamburger. That hamburger may only increase by 2 cents, but the ripple effects end up being much greater.
The bottom line is that if raising minimum wage from $7 to $700 will have a bad effect on the economy, then so will increasing $7 to $7.25. A drastically smaller bad effect, but a bad effect none the less. You then weigh that slightly weaker economy with the human element of caring for your fellow man, and come up with a reasonable minimum wage.
> A better metric is comparing how job growth is growing or stalling.
Yes. But you did it wrong. Simply picking the states with the highest and lowest rates doesn't even come close to measuring the effect of increasing the minimum wage.
What you need to do is compare growth rates before and after the change to minimum wage in each state and also compare those numbers to neighboring states and the national average.
Yes, I admit that I wasn't willing to put in the time to do statistically significant original research on this matter. I was merely pointing out that there are better ways of measuring it and did a quick calculation that is at least better than the one done for this story.
The reality is that it would take significant research to actually determine the effect of raising minimum wage. And with only 50 states with an insane number of independent variables, I am not sure how anything statistically significant could ever be "proven". The closest thing we have is the CBO estimates, which neither this story nor my back of napkin calculations refute in any way.
States with the healthiest job situations were the first to increase minimum wage. Inconceivable.
Well, it should be noted that only 5 of the states that raised the minimum wage this year have a Gross State Product per person above the national average (Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Colorado). The other 8 have below average economies, but are still gaining jobs at a faster rate. Also if you look at the job growth in 2013, these 13 states may have outperformed the average by 0.065% but they are on track to beat the average by 0.3554% this year.
So it looks like these states do not have the healthiest job situations, but still performed better than those who did not raise the minimum wage (by this ridiculous metric that is).
A better metric is comparing how job growth is growing or stalling. The four states with the highest minimum wages are California, D.C., Oregon, and Washington, who all have minimum wages about $9 per hour. Of those four areas, job growth has slowed by 27% on average year over year (comparing June 2013 - May 2014 to June 2012 - May 2013). If you look at the four states with the lowest minimum wage (Arkansas, Georgia, Minnesota, Wyoming), their job growth has grown by 26% on average year over year. So if you want to compare the trend of job growth increasing or decreasing, it looks like raising the minimum wage does hurt significantly.
Its important to remember that Microsoft is only losing about 5% of its non-Nokia jobs. That makes these cuts have far less impact to the company as a whole. I work in a small consulting company of about 40 people, so this would be the same as us letting go two members of our staff because of a restructuring. That wouldn't be insignificant, but it obviously wouldn't be a major shift for our company.
As I see it Microsoft really only has one major problem, and that is to find a way to capitalize on their R&D budget. They have the fifth largest R&D budget of any private company in the world. This far surpases companies like Apple and Google which are far better commonly known for their innovative products than Microsoft. If they could actually make use of this R&D Microsoft would be in great shape regardless of what eventually happens to Windows, Office, or XBox.
Microsoft engineers are clearly being funded well enough to help Microsoft grow in the future, they just need better leadership to take advantage of their work instead of just writing salary checks.
If you are not making $45 or more an hour you are being robbed. Programmers are massively underpaid compared to the skillset we need to do our jobs. Why the hell do we tolerate deflating the job down to the level of a factory worker?
First off, $45 per hour is not too high. After factoring in benefits that probably equates to a salary of about $65k per year. So while I agree that making less than $65k per year is low for all but junior developers (or those working in very low cost areas), I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that most developers are underpaid. The average salary of a developer is about $90k per year, which is an incredibly high salary. And this is an average salary. From my experience your average developer doesn't spend much more time outside of work improving their skills than your average professional outside the field.
Perhaps the top 10% of developers spend far more time learning outside of work than the top 10% of non-developer professionals, but they also tend to get paid much more (and are usually in consulting or are entrepreneurs). I was able to get past the 6-digit salary hurdle in under 10 years in the field (in a low cost of living area), and that was after making many stupid career damaging mistakes in my early 20s. And I didn't even need to take many risks to get there.
Almost the only jobs that allow you to make this kind of money without significant training are ones where you are essentially gambling with your career. I have quite a few friends / colleagues in sales and management, and plain old luck has a huge impact in which ones fail and which ones win out big. On the other hand every single skilled developer I know has done exceptional in their career.
Musk may say he's neutral, but Tesla's actions make it clear that it is hardly neutral.
Nothing in that article you posted provides any examples of Tesla not being neutral. Identifying that unions could hurt profitability is not being negative towards unions, it is just being honest. If I list on a project plan that there is a risk one of my team leads could leave the company therefore causing delays, I am not being negative towards those employees. I am only identifying that it is possible they could hamper the project.
There is a single statement the article makes which claims the operating management has been opposed to unions, but no examples are provided.
NOBODY is reasonably secure in their jobs but upper management.
I don't believe that is true. Upper management may be a very secure position because they do require the skills I mentioned (especially communication skills), but management is not the only secure career tract. In fact, the road towards upper management is not a very secure career tract at all. I don't know any friends who had successful careers before 2007 who isn't doing well in their career, but I know three middle management guys who haven't found a decent job in years.
And I should have clarified that people who are secure have secure careers, not secure jobs. NOBODY has a secure job, but many people have secure careers.
If you are really worried about computers taking jobs, then going to trade school is a horrible idea. We have no idea what technology will make obsolete over the next 40 years, so learning a specific trade will always run the risk of the trade being automated. Wireless power could put 75% of electricians out of work. Automated HUD displays in your Google Glasses 5.0 that explain EXACTLY how to do any home improvement project could put 75% of other handymen out of work as well, especially if median wages drop and everyone is forced to do more home improvement projects themselves. Lawyers and Doctors could have huge portions of their jobs automated by information retrieval and data mining, requiring a mere fraction of the number we have today. Garbage men, truck drivers, farmers, etc. could be replaced by automated vehicles. This possibilities are endless.
The only people who are reasonably safe are those with strong problem solving and communication skills. That is it. A very small percentage of people with strong creative skills will be the last to lose their jobs before we either get replaced as a species or start living our lives in blissful leisure while our robot butlers do everything.
and please spare me the bullshit that most of that shit matters, it doesn't, even I like reading about it because it is interesting, but it's in no way actually beneficial to society as a whole practically and is just a pissing contents between folks who write needless papers for a living
Many of the fields of study we now use as the backbone of the modern era started out as mere intellectual curiosities, and often stayed that way for centuries until practical applications were invented. Scientists started seriously studying electricity in the 1600s, but we found few practical uses for it until the late 19th century. The scientists studying theoretical physics and astronomy today are no different than the likes of Michael Faraday, who never created useful inventions from his research in electricity.
No one knows what the next technology will be to usher in the next age of mankind. The study of multiverses may bring about faster than light communication, and quantum mechanics may bring the computational power of thousands of today's supercomputers into your cellphone. Or maybe they will do none of those things, but we can be sure some other intellectual curiosity will change the way we live our lives.
I for one think we spend far too little on intellectual curiosities. Increasing funding that goes towards basic scientific research ten fold would be a good place to start.
In Austin, people are being priced out of their homes because they voted for every social program out there, and now the taxes are too damn high.
That is bullshit. I quickly went to Zillow and the first house I saw in Austin was on the market for $674,900 and had $4500 in property taxes per year. No one buying a house worth that much should be complaining about $375 per month in property taxes. I don't doubt that people in Austin are complaining about the taxes, I just think they are full of shit. The progressives who are actually trying to redeem Texas would be lucky for them to move away to where they don't feel schools need to be funded properly.
And how long did evolution take to make an ant? How long from there to a human?
In case anyone is wondering, it took about 2.6 billion years for ants to evolve, and another 0.1 billion years for humans to evolve. So anyone comparing self driving cars to ants is making the prediction that Strong AI will take another 3 years or so to become reality.
Until a machine can come up with an idea of it's own, it's not intelligent.
Other than hopeful thinking, there is no reason to believe humans come up with ideas of their own either. I really hope that free will exists, but most likely all of our decisions are just the result of stimuli to the brain. And perhaps some random chance thrown in by quantum mechanics. It appears to be free will because it is too complex for us to understand, but that is most likely an illusion.
I agree that it is silly for anyone to make predictions about when Strong AI will become a reality, but looking at the failures of AI predictions of the past is no indication that it will not eventually occur. With the exponential rate that computer grow in processing power, the final move to Strong AI will be very sudden and completely unexpected probably even 10 years before it happens.
My favorite explanation for just how quick processing power could escalate is a description of how Lake Michigan would be filled with water if done with the same speed that computers advance. source. If you started in 1940 adding a single fluid ounce, and doubled that amount each 18 months, after 70 years (2010) you would only have a few inches of water. Just like creating Strong AI, it would seem like a futile task. But in the next 10 years you would have 40 feet of water and by 2025 it would be full. A task that looked hopeless in 2010 based on the past 70 years of experience would be finished in only 15 more years.
We may not have Strong AI for another 200 years, but the only thing I am confident of is that the task of creating general artificial intelligence will appear impossible even 5-10 years before it finally happens.
I've been teaching for 10 years, mostly to low income high risk kids and I've come to the conclusion that rich people do not want their kids going to school with my kids.
This is sadly one of the few effective ways to ensure your school is high achieving. Just make sure only upper middle class students attend. I just bought a house in the best school district in my state (arguably of course, there are 2-3 others that are just as good) and there will be very few working class students going to my children's schools. The district doesn't keep them out by making the taxes higher than neighboring areas, or by making schools charge parents, but instead by zoning housing so that only $300k+ homes are built within school limits. The average home value of the district is just over $450k, and this is in the Chicago suburbs not San Fransisco or New York. Tax rates don't have to be higher for these schools, because the higher home values ensure that total revenue is higher and that only upper middle class students can attend.
The way our schools are funded is very unfortunate, but I have to accept that I am doing everything I can to take advantage of the situation. Possibly risking my children's future just to take a stand seems pretty silly.
School vouchers have failed everywhere they've been tried.
Other than just asking you to cite your source, a quick google search can easily prove this statement is false. Well perhaps not false, but we would never know because there is so much "proof" on both sides of the argument. For instance the first post I found was a Wall Street Journal article showing that D.C. voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91%, compared to their public school average of 56%. There are plenty of people explaining these types of results away as not being caused by the voucher system alone, but it is pretty ignorant to just assert school vouchers are all failures.
Slashdot Mirror
The lure of a liberal arts degree has always been to have a very well rounded education that just makes you a smarter person instead of just teaching a certain profession. In today's technological world, STEM education is performing a very similar role. Learning high level math provides extreme advances in our current economy regardless of your actual job.
Hopefully colleges start to understand this and increase the level of math that all college graduates are required to learn. Perhaps in 20 years the average Gen Ed requirements of a Bachelors will require 20+ credits of math related courses to help prepare students for the modern world.
Every time I hear about a terrifyingly invasive means of "improving performance" its targeted at developers. Is it just selection bias, or does the world actually hate us?
You really think developers are singled out here? There is an entire industry built upon business process improvement and operational management. I guess there probably are more invasive measures against professions like developers, but that is only because it has been hard to completely replace the profession with machines.
When you start having your bathroom breaks timed by your manager like some retail workers then you have it rough.
I wouldn't live in a place with inadequate bandwidth for a simple video stream.
Wow. You're quite picky.
How is that picky at all? Over 70% of homes in the US have broadband access, so he is not picking a rare factor when choosing a home. And for someone who uses the Internet regularly, having broadband speeds is a very important consideration.
I know I would never live in a home without access to non-satellite broadband. I also wouldn't live in an area with bad schools, high crime, excessive road noise, and those with a number of other undesirable factors. That still leaves me with quite a few options.
The scenario you describe is a very rare one, if you are being truthful that is. Very few areas with $900/month three story housing have enough property taxes to fund good schools (those that do are probably funded by large private companies in the area). Such an area is also likely to have neighbors of a low socio-economic status, and will therefore have a hard time supporting many cultural options in the area. There are probably places like the one you describe, but they are far more rare than areas with bad Internet service.
If drinking 100 gallons of water per day is bad for you, then drinking any amount of water is bad for you. I love you logic!
Drinking 100 gallons of water per day is bad for you because it dilutes the sodium in your body. And yes, drinking just one glass of water will dilute sodium in your body as well, just to a lesser degree (just like increasing minimum wage damages the economy just to a lesser degree). The analogy obviously breaks down because you need water to survive, but that is why I used a logical extreme instead of an analogy because analogies that can be applied broadly are rare. I am not really sure why you feel your ridiculous analogy says anything about my logical statement.
And it also affects everyone who sells good and services, since these minimum wage workers can now afford more. That's usually considered a good thing.
In a completely closed system, increasing the minimum wage would have no effect other than shifting which products and services are most successful, and shifting income from the wealthy to the poor. But automation and a global marketplace mean that not all of the increased costs are given to the workers. Some of them are funneled into automation and into other economies with lower minimum wage. The automation at least gives the benefit of hiring engineers, but far less engineers are hired than the large number of low wage workers who are fired.
The jobs lost overseas are just lost. And not only low wage jobs are lost, because as the cost of living increases on the engineers then those jobs start to go away as well.
Which makes just as much sense as saying that if rising price of a product from $7 to $7.25 will increase profits, then so will increasing it to $700.
What they actually say is that rising the product from $7 to $7.25 will increase the profit per widget sold. They also acknowledge that increasing the price will reduce the number of widgets sold, just like it would if they increased the price to $700. They then weight the benefit and the risk and determine a fair price. So I guess I agree completely with your analogy, since it is basically the same as mine.
Drawing conclusions from the second derivative of noisy data is not justified mathematically
If you take away drawing conclusions from the second derivative of noisy data then you would destroy the entire economics profession. Then we would have to rely on common sense ideas such as if you raise someone's wages without raising their usefulness, you hurt their job prospects and raise prices for everyone else in the economy. You make the lives of 9 people marginally better but you destroy the life of the 10th guy who can't find work now.
So if you want to compare the trend of job growth increasing or decreasing, it looks like raising the minimum wage does hurt significantly.
What kind of jobs are being created? Are they minimum-wage jobs that you can't actually live on?
They are almost certainly not good jobs. They are probably some of the worst and lowest paid jobs in the country. But that just points out why job growth is a stupid metric to look at anyway. I would like to see an alternative employment figure of "households that make at least twice the poverty level" alongside any unemployment figures.
Growth in median wages would also be a statistic that is more meaningful for most people than job growth. Most people who complain about not being able to find a job could find one if they were willing to work for minimum wage. When people complain about an economy they usually are complaining because they can't keep up whatever standard of living they are familiar with.
I have an alternative theory... the minimum wage has no affect on job growth at all.
The majority of minimum wage workers are highschool students work in fast food [...]
Remember that minimum wage does not just affect minimum wage workers and their employers. It affects everyone who pays for services done by people working minimum wage. And those who pay for services done by people who pay for services done by people working minimum wage. And those who pay for services done by people who pay for services done by people who pay for services done by people working minimum wage. And so on.
It all ripples through the economy. High minimum wages eventually make everything more expensive, not just a McDonald's hamburger. That hamburger may only increase by 2 cents, but the ripple effects end up being much greater.
The bottom line is that if raising minimum wage from $7 to $700 will have a bad effect on the economy, then so will increasing $7 to $7.25. A drastically smaller bad effect, but a bad effect none the less. You then weigh that slightly weaker economy with the human element of caring for your fellow man, and come up with a reasonable minimum wage.
> A better metric is comparing how job growth is growing or stalling.
Yes. But you did it wrong.
Simply picking the states with the highest and lowest rates doesn't even come close to measuring the effect of increasing the minimum wage.
What you need to do is compare growth rates before and after the change to minimum wage in each state and also compare those numbers to neighboring states and the national average.
Yes, I admit that I wasn't willing to put in the time to do statistically significant original research on this matter. I was merely pointing out that there are better ways of measuring it and did a quick calculation that is at least better than the one done for this story.
The reality is that it would take significant research to actually determine the effect of raising minimum wage. And with only 50 states with an insane number of independent variables, I am not sure how anything statistically significant could ever be "proven". The closest thing we have is the CBO estimates, which neither this story nor my back of napkin calculations refute in any way.
States with the healthiest job situations were the first to increase minimum wage.
Inconceivable.
Well, it should be noted that only 5 of the states that raised the minimum wage this year have a Gross State Product per person above the national average (Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Colorado). The other 8 have below average economies, but are still gaining jobs at a faster rate. Also if you look at the job growth in 2013, these 13 states may have outperformed the average by 0.065% but they are on track to beat the average by 0.3554% this year.
So it looks like these states do not have the healthiest job situations, but still performed better than those who did not raise the minimum wage (by this ridiculous metric that is).
A better metric is comparing how job growth is growing or stalling. The four states with the highest minimum wages are California, D.C., Oregon, and Washington, who all have minimum wages about $9 per hour. Of those four areas, job growth has slowed by 27% on average year over year (comparing June 2013 - May 2014 to June 2012 - May 2013). If you look at the four states with the lowest minimum wage (Arkansas, Georgia, Minnesota, Wyoming), their job growth has grown by 26% on average year over year. So if you want to compare the trend of job growth increasing or decreasing, it looks like raising the minimum wage does hurt significantly.
source
Sounds like your ex's workpace needs to unionize.
No, sounds like her uncle worked for one of those grocery stores like Dominicks that are dropping like flies because their costs are too high.
And here is the problem in America. Your kind can rot in hell....
What for? Do you think no employee should ever be let go for performance reasons?
Its important to remember that Microsoft is only losing about 5% of its non-Nokia jobs. That makes these cuts have far less impact to the company as a whole. I work in a small consulting company of about 40 people, so this would be the same as us letting go two members of our staff because of a restructuring. That wouldn't be insignificant, but it obviously wouldn't be a major shift for our company.
As I see it Microsoft really only has one major problem, and that is to find a way to capitalize on their R&D budget. They have the fifth largest R&D budget of any private company in the world. This far surpases companies like Apple and Google which are far better commonly known for their innovative products than Microsoft. If they could actually make use of this R&D Microsoft would be in great shape regardless of what eventually happens to Windows, Office, or XBox.
Microsoft engineers are clearly being funded well enough to help Microsoft grow in the future, they just need better leadership to take advantage of their work instead of just writing salary checks.
If you are not making $45 or more an hour you are being robbed. Programmers are massively underpaid compared to the skillset we need to do our jobs. Why the hell do we tolerate deflating the job down to the level of a factory worker?
First off, $45 per hour is not too high. After factoring in benefits that probably equates to a salary of about $65k per year. So while I agree that making less than $65k per year is low for all but junior developers (or those working in very low cost areas), I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that most developers are underpaid. The average salary of a developer is about $90k per year, which is an incredibly high salary. And this is an average salary. From my experience your average developer doesn't spend much more time outside of work improving their skills than your average professional outside the field.
Perhaps the top 10% of developers spend far more time learning outside of work than the top 10% of non-developer professionals, but they also tend to get paid much more (and are usually in consulting or are entrepreneurs). I was able to get past the 6-digit salary hurdle in under 10 years in the field (in a low cost of living area), and that was after making many stupid career damaging mistakes in my early 20s. And I didn't even need to take many risks to get there.
Almost the only jobs that allow you to make this kind of money without significant training are ones where you are essentially gambling with your career. I have quite a few friends / colleagues in sales and management, and plain old luck has a huge impact in which ones fail and which ones win out big. On the other hand every single skilled developer I know has done exceptional in their career.
Musk may say he's neutral, but Tesla's actions make it clear that it is hardly neutral.
Nothing in that article you posted provides any examples of Tesla not being neutral. Identifying that unions could hurt profitability is not being negative towards unions, it is just being honest. If I list on a project plan that there is a risk one of my team leads could leave the company therefore causing delays, I am not being negative towards those employees. I am only identifying that it is possible they could hamper the project.
There is a single statement the article makes which claims the operating management has been opposed to unions, but no examples are provided.
NOBODY is reasonably secure in their jobs but upper management.
I don't believe that is true. Upper management may be a very secure position because they do require the skills I mentioned (especially communication skills), but management is not the only secure career tract. In fact, the road towards upper management is not a very secure career tract at all. I don't know any friends who had successful careers before 2007 who isn't doing well in their career, but I know three middle management guys who haven't found a decent job in years.
And I should have clarified that people who are secure have secure careers, not secure jobs. NOBODY has a secure job, but many people have secure careers.
2nd the above. Send her to a trade school.
If you are really worried about computers taking jobs, then going to trade school is a horrible idea. We have no idea what technology will make obsolete over the next 40 years, so learning a specific trade will always run the risk of the trade being automated. Wireless power could put 75% of electricians out of work. Automated HUD displays in your Google Glasses 5.0 that explain EXACTLY how to do any home improvement project could put 75% of other handymen out of work as well, especially if median wages drop and everyone is forced to do more home improvement projects themselves. Lawyers and Doctors could have huge portions of their jobs automated by information retrieval and data mining, requiring a mere fraction of the number we have today. Garbage men, truck drivers, farmers, etc. could be replaced by automated vehicles. This possibilities are endless.
The only people who are reasonably safe are those with strong problem solving and communication skills. That is it. A very small percentage of people with strong creative skills will be the last to lose their jobs before we either get replaced as a species or start living our lives in blissful leisure while our robot butlers do everything.
and please spare me the bullshit that most of that shit matters, it doesn't, even I like reading about it because it is interesting, but it's in no way actually beneficial to society as a whole practically and is just a pissing contents between folks who write needless papers for a living
Many of the fields of study we now use as the backbone of the modern era started out as mere intellectual curiosities, and often stayed that way for centuries until practical applications were invented. Scientists started seriously studying electricity in the 1600s, but we found few practical uses for it until the late 19th century. The scientists studying theoretical physics and astronomy today are no different than the likes of Michael Faraday, who never created useful inventions from his research in electricity.
No one knows what the next technology will be to usher in the next age of mankind. The study of multiverses may bring about faster than light communication, and quantum mechanics may bring the computational power of thousands of today's supercomputers into your cellphone. Or maybe they will do none of those things, but we can be sure some other intellectual curiosity will change the way we live our lives.
I for one think we spend far too little on intellectual curiosities. Increasing funding that goes towards basic scientific research ten fold would be a good place to start.
In Austin, people are being priced out of their homes because they voted for every social program out there, and now the taxes are too damn high.
That is bullshit. I quickly went to Zillow and the first house I saw in Austin was on the market for $674,900 and had $4500 in property taxes per year. No one buying a house worth that much should be complaining about $375 per month in property taxes. I don't doubt that people in Austin are complaining about the taxes, I just think they are full of shit. The progressives who are actually trying to redeem Texas would be lucky for them to move away to where they don't feel schools need to be funded properly.
And how long did evolution take to make an ant? How long from there to a human?
In case anyone is wondering, it took about 2.6 billion years for ants to evolve, and another 0.1 billion years for humans to evolve. So anyone comparing self driving cars to ants is making the prediction that Strong AI will take another 3 years or so to become reality.
Until a machine can come up with an idea of it's own, it's not intelligent.
Other than hopeful thinking, there is no reason to believe humans come up with ideas of their own either. I really hope that free will exists, but most likely all of our decisions are just the result of stimuli to the brain. And perhaps some random chance thrown in by quantum mechanics. It appears to be free will because it is too complex for us to understand, but that is most likely an illusion.
I agree that it is silly for anyone to make predictions about when Strong AI will become a reality, but looking at the failures of AI predictions of the past is no indication that it will not eventually occur. With the exponential rate that computer grow in processing power, the final move to Strong AI will be very sudden and completely unexpected probably even 10 years before it happens.
My favorite explanation for just how quick processing power could escalate is a description of how Lake Michigan would be filled with water if done with the same speed that computers advance. source. If you started in 1940 adding a single fluid ounce, and doubled that amount each 18 months, after 70 years (2010) you would only have a few inches of water. Just like creating Strong AI, it would seem like a futile task. But in the next 10 years you would have 40 feet of water and by 2025 it would be full. A task that looked hopeless in 2010 based on the past 70 years of experience would be finished in only 15 more years.
We may not have Strong AI for another 200 years, but the only thing I am confident of is that the task of creating general artificial intelligence will appear impossible even 5-10 years before it finally happens.
I completely agree that it is a very bad idea for you to procreate.
I've been teaching for 10 years, mostly to low income high risk kids and I've come to the conclusion that rich people do not want their kids going to school with my kids.
This is sadly one of the few effective ways to ensure your school is high achieving. Just make sure only upper middle class students attend. I just bought a house in the best school district in my state (arguably of course, there are 2-3 others that are just as good) and there will be very few working class students going to my children's schools. The district doesn't keep them out by making the taxes higher than neighboring areas, or by making schools charge parents, but instead by zoning housing so that only $300k+ homes are built within school limits. The average home value of the district is just over $450k, and this is in the Chicago suburbs not San Fransisco or New York. Tax rates don't have to be higher for these schools, because the higher home values ensure that total revenue is higher and that only upper middle class students can attend.
The way our schools are funded is very unfortunate, but I have to accept that I am doing everything I can to take advantage of the situation. Possibly risking my children's future just to take a stand seems pretty silly.
School vouchers have failed everywhere they've been tried.
Other than just asking you to cite your source, a quick google search can easily prove this statement is false. Well perhaps not false, but we would never know because there is so much "proof" on both sides of the argument. For instance the first post I found was a Wall Street Journal article showing that D.C. voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91%, compared to their public school average of 56%. There are plenty of people explaining these types of results away as not being caused by the voucher system alone, but it is pretty ignorant to just assert school vouchers are all failures.