7 ms·

Anecdotally I see this transition to higher production yield per person happening in real time, we are closing down some old factories and trying to re-train pe

Anecdotally I see this transition to higher production yield per person happening in real time, we are closing down some old factories and trying to re-train people to work in the new one being built in its place and it's very hard. A significant number of floor staff only have highschool degrees and are being speedrun through an associate's to stay with the company on a higher staff grade. Others are doing months of on the job training to be brought up to the level that they can still be employed. I know some just can't hack it and are quietly being let go. I know we are already asking our youth to mortgage their lives to get higher education, but what about a 50 year old woman who has been working for 30 years and still has 15 to go, but their job is completely gone? Do we send them back to college? This is already happening en mass in Japan, elderly are working entry level jobs because their old jobs are replaced. I think the college and retraining argument are only going to become more entwined in the next 20 years.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Its unpopular but one option would be to tax the wealthy to pay for additional services for the poor and underemployed. This is not my preferred way to deal with social issues but it strikes me as absurd to expect the 50 year old woman whose job has been automated away to struggle when there are people who could make that go away without any appreciable suffering at all. We have to consider how historical inequity has led to the status quo (for example historical union busting leaves the 50 year old worker with less today that she would have had otherwise) and what we may do to right those historical wrongs in the present.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > would be to tax the wealthy to pay for additional services for the poor and underemployed. There's not enough rich people to do that in the first place. You will end up taxing the whole middle class, which is effectively what politicians are increasingly doing, which brings everyone down
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    > There's not enough rich people I’m not sure that’s true. There are more rich people than ever and taxes are at their lowest point since ~1940
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      >> There's not enough rich people >I’m not sure that’s true. There are more rich people than ever and taxes are at their lowest point since ~1940 There are 2,640 billionaires in the world, 28 fewer than in 2022 (according to Forbes). Their total wealth is $12.2 trillion. Some portion (how much?) could certainly help a sizable number of people, but it is difficult to know how many and for how long.
      - ffgjgf1 3y ago
        There are several magnitudes more millionaires than that. > but it is difficult to know how many and for how long. Permanently? Finding out how many is the job of the IRS after the top marginal tax rates are increased by an extra 10-20%. The top capital gains tax rate is also much too low. Globalization and the removal of capital control resulted in a race to the bottom between countries offering ever lower tax rates. That’s a huge problem, it’s something only rich people can utilize and leads to continually increasing inequality.
        andsoitis 3y ago
        > There are several magnitudes more millionaires than that. According to the Distribution of Wealth page on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth), millionaires (> US $1M, i.e. incl. billionaires) own 46% of property, while the middle class (US $100 - $1M) own 39%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#/media/File:Global_Wealth_Distribution_2020_(Property).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#/media/...
        ffgjgf1 3y ago
- dools 3y ago
  Money doesn’t grow on rich people, you don’t need to increase taxes on the wealthy in order to ensure full employment with no inflation risk if you use a Job Guarantee
  - Kinrany 3y ago
    Making people do pointless work is stupid and cruel. If they can't do anything useful, just give them the same amount of money you were going to pay anyway.
    - dools 3y ago
      > Making people do pointless work Who is making people do pointless work?
      - Kinrany 3y ago
        Giving people money they need to survive conditional on them doing work that isn't economical is that.
        dools 3y ago
        > work that isn't economical What does this mean?
        Kinrany 3y ago
        Work that wouldn't be done in a free market
- madsbuch 3y ago
  In the end this is more a question of who should decide what people do. Money only has value when they are spend. If you lock money up in an account and never use it, it is practically taken out of the economy. Do, do we let governments circulate money for education, health, care, etc. or do we let corporations circulate money in the pursuit of more money? For me, it's a balance. Right now it does seem like the inequality has been raising (in particular under the pandemic) and we probably should try to redistribute a bit more. But the increasing interest rates are already leading us in this direction. And the social unrest will probably also accelerate salary increases over the next years – which in turn needs to be financed. I think the biggest issue we face are reaching multi-lateral agreements like the global minimum tax that can hand the power to tax companies back in the hands of governments (as it becomes unattractive to move to low-tax jurisdictions).
ekianjo 3y ago
> Do we send them back to college? This is a problem because most people thought that they would have a career or a job forever without learning anything for 30 years. If you ask me, this is a crazy thought that we have given them in the first place. We should tell kids that learning is a lifelong journey and that it does not stop once you leave school - if you sleep on your skills you WILL be replaced.
- pixl97 3y ago
  If we keep jacking up the price of education to insanity levels while demanding ever more education you should expect the average person to embrace fascism. Fascism won't solve the problem, but fascist leaders will tell the people there are simple solutions to the intractable issues they've been presented with. Then all the violence and war that Fascism brings will occur. I'd rather work towards a more stable future myself, but politically I have no idea how we can get there.
  - seer 3y ago
    Why is university the only place people get educated? I finished a high school that incorporated a few years of the “higher” uni education into our curriculum - like maths and physics and such. Honestly it was quite nice as by that point most high schoolers are bored out of their minds anyway, sliding down into destructive patterns, and this kept things challenging and interesting. And also gave me the foundation to more easily learn the uni stuff that I needed on my own. With the current availability of anything on youtube and such it should be trivial or at least a lot cheaper to learn anything you have the desire to learn. I think schools should be there to instill into us that desire. Not saying unis are a bad idea - plenty of good things about them too, just I don’t think in our world they are a particular requirement - just make the schools system a few notches more demanding and we should be golden.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Accreditation. Simply put I could know everything, the problem is you now have to develop your own series of tests to ensure that I do and that I'm just not lying that I do. Making schools more demanding on a single path likely doesn't solve this either. You just stress out people that are not going to be academically great no how hard they try.
dools 3y ago
We need a federal job guarantee for a just transition: http://www.jobguarantee.org http://www.jobguarantee.org
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> what about a 50 year old woman who has been working for 30 years and still has 15 to go, but their job is completely gone? Do we send them back to college? One solution is that which the Nordic countries provide: a dole that is sufficient to cover basic cost of living, and enough community-organized events and cultural and educational infrastructure that the now terminally unemployed can (or can at least choose to) spend their days doing something besides drinking and getting soft.
wincy 3y ago
I didn’t graduate high school and am a software engineering team lead at a large corporation. I don’t really have much sympathy for these people. It’s important to stay plastic and keep learning through your life. About five years ago I got fired/quit from my second dev job and realized nobody was hiring node.js developers. So I looked at the local dev listings and saw the majority were .NET or Java. I spent the next month while unemployed reading an 800 page book on .NET (to be honest I got to page 400 or so before I was like “okay I get it”) and snagged a job as a mid level dev at a .NET shop in a Fortune 500 company. I didn’t even buy the book, I pirated it (apologies to Phil Japikse!). I think we need to teach people that learning stuff yourself is free if you know where to look. We teach everyone school is the only path to knowledge which is, quite frankly, the most expensive, slowest, and overall worst way to learn almost everything. Outside some limited domains most concepts necessary for gainful employment can be self taught. Isn’t that what the internet was supposed to do? What we all imagined when we’d talk, wide-eyed and endlessly optimistic, about the internet to people back in the 90s and early 2000s? Wasn’t it supposed to make information free? Which it has, for those of us who know how to look.
- hadlock 3y ago
  Given the substantial financial benefit you got from his (800 pages!) work, you probably owe it to him to buy a new copy of the book. Order it from your local book shop if you can.
  - wincy 3y ago
    Haha! I actually saw him at a conference last year and thanked him. You’re right though. I should definitely pick up a new copy, and display it prominently on the bookshelf behind my desk.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "I think we need to teach people that learning stuff yourself is free if you know where to look. We teach everyone school is the only path to knowledge which is, quite frankly, the most expensive, slowest, and overall worst way to learn almost everything. Outside some limited domains most concepts necessary for gainful employment can be self taught." While I agree with what you are saying and am also 100% self taught myself, I think a large portion of people (especially outside the tech world) just aren't able to pick up a book, read it, pick up the knowledge and put it into practice efficiently. Especially with no accountability or social pressure that sitting in a classroom provides... I am not arguing for college or university, but I think that just giving people (especially someone in their 40s or 50s) a book and expecting them to pick up new skills may be asking a bit too much...
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Rather than going "back to college" I think we need to find a way to bake it typical to just always be taking a class or two. Maybe it takes you a decade to get that degree, maybe you end up not needing it, but taking classes is better than sitting around in meetings all day. Besides, the security of not being pigeonholed in a single career is going to make people less fearful and more likely to take risks like starting new businesses.
throwawayvcc 3y ago
Wouldn't learn to code work for them?
Tangurena2 3y ago
> their job is completely gone Here in Kentucky, there are lots of people who worked in coal mines for several generations ("grandpa was a coal miner, dad was a coal miner, I'm a coal miner and my son will be a coal miner"). Coal is going the way of buggy whips. It is a dying industry. Automation is replacing some, and a collapse of customers wanting coal are getting rid of more. There are state and federal programs to help retrain workers. Yet the men affected frequently refuse the retraining. People still complain about the times in 2016 when Hillary campaigned and promised more retraining with stuff like "how dare that carpetbagger come here and tell us how to live"

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

Its unpopular but one option would be to tax the wealthy to pay for additional services for the poor and underemployed. This is not my preferred way to deal with social issues but it strikes me as absurd to expect the 50 year old woman whose job has been automated away to struggle when there are people who could make that go away without any appreciable suffering at all. We have to consider how historical inequity has led to the status quo (for example historical union busting leaves the 50 year old worker with less today that she would have had otherwise) and what we may do to right those historical wrongs in the present.

ekianjo 3y ago
> would be to tax the wealthy to pay for additional services for the poor and underemployed. There's not enough rich people to do that in the first place. You will end up taxing the whole middle class, which is effectively what politicians are increasingly doing, which brings everyone down
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > There's not enough rich people I’m not sure that’s true. There are more rich people than ever and taxes are at their lowest point since ~1940
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    >> There's not enough rich people >I’m not sure that’s true. There are more rich people than ever and taxes are at their lowest point since ~1940 There are 2,640 billionaires in the world, 28 fewer than in 2022 (according to Forbes). Their total wealth is $12.2 trillion. Some portion (how much?) could certainly help a sizable number of people, but it is difficult to know how many and for how long.
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      There are several magnitudes more millionaires than that. > but it is difficult to know how many and for how long. Permanently? Finding out how many is the job of the IRS after the top marginal tax rates are increased by an extra 10-20%. The top capital gains tax rate is also much too low. Globalization and the removal of capital control resulted in a race to the bottom between countries offering ever lower tax rates. That’s a huge problem, it’s something only rich people can utilize and leads to continually increasing inequality.
      - andsoitis 3y ago
        > There are several magnitudes more millionaires than that. According to the Distribution of Wealth page on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth), millionaires (> US $1M, i.e. incl. billionaires) own 46% of property, while the middle class (US $100 - $1M) own 39%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#/media/File:Global_Wealth_Distribution_2020_(Property).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#/media/...
        ffgjgf1 3y ago
dools 3y ago
Money doesn’t grow on rich people, you don’t need to increase taxes on the wealthy in order to ensure full employment with no inflation risk if you use a Job Guarantee
- Kinrany 3y ago
  Making people do pointless work is stupid and cruel. If they can't do anything useful, just give them the same amount of money you were going to pay anyway.
  - dools 3y ago
    > Making people do pointless work Who is making people do pointless work?
    - Kinrany 3y ago
      Giving people money they need to survive conditional on them doing work that isn't economical is that.
      - dools 3y ago
        > work that isn't economical What does this mean?
        Kinrany 3y ago
        Work that wouldn't be done in a free market
madsbuch 3y ago
In the end this is more a question of who should decide what people do. Money only has value when they are spend. If you lock money up in an account and never use it, it is practically taken out of the economy. Do, do we let governments circulate money for education, health, care, etc. or do we let corporations circulate money in the pursuit of more money? For me, it's a balance. Right now it does seem like the inequality has been raising (in particular under the pandemic) and we probably should try to redistribute a bit more. But the increasing interest rates are already leading us in this direction. And the social unrest will probably also accelerate salary increases over the next years – which in turn needs to be financed. I think the biggest issue we face are reaching multi-lateral agreements like the global minimum tax that can hand the power to tax companies back in the hands of governments (as it becomes unattractive to move to low-tax jurisdictions).

ekianjo 3y ago

> Do we send them back to college? This is a problem because most people thought that they would have a career or a job forever without learning anything for 30 years. If you ask me, this is a crazy thought that we have given them in the first place. We should tell kids that learning is a lifelong journey and that it does not stop once you leave school - if you sleep on your skills you WILL be replaced.

pixl97 3y ago
If we keep jacking up the price of education to insanity levels while demanding ever more education you should expect the average person to embrace fascism. Fascism won't solve the problem, but fascist leaders will tell the people there are simple solutions to the intractable issues they've been presented with. Then all the violence and war that Fascism brings will occur. I'd rather work towards a more stable future myself, but politically I have no idea how we can get there.
- seer 3y ago
  Why is university the only place people get educated? I finished a high school that incorporated a few years of the “higher” uni education into our curriculum - like maths and physics and such. Honestly it was quite nice as by that point most high schoolers are bored out of their minds anyway, sliding down into destructive patterns, and this kept things challenging and interesting. And also gave me the foundation to more easily learn the uni stuff that I needed on my own. With the current availability of anything on youtube and such it should be trivial or at least a lot cheaper to learn anything you have the desire to learn. I think schools should be there to instill into us that desire. Not saying unis are a bad idea - plenty of good things about them too, just I don’t think in our world they are a particular requirement - just make the schools system a few notches more demanding and we should be golden.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Accreditation. Simply put I could know everything, the problem is you now have to develop your own series of tests to ensure that I do and that I'm just not lying that I do. Making schools more demanding on a single path likely doesn't solve this either. You just stress out people that are not going to be academically great no how hard they try.

dools 3y ago

We need a federal job guarantee for a just transition: http://www.jobguarantee.org http://www.jobguarantee.org

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

> what about a 50 year old woman who has been working for 30 years and still has 15 to go, but their job is completely gone? Do we send them back to college? One solution is that which the Nordic countries provide: a dole that is sufficient to cover basic cost of living, and enough community-organized events and cultural and educational infrastructure that the now terminally unemployed can (or can at least choose to) spend their days doing something besides drinking and getting soft.

wincy 3y ago

I didn’t graduate high school and am a software engineering team lead at a large corporation. I don’t really have much sympathy for these people. It’s important to stay plastic and keep learning through your life. About five years ago I got fired/quit from my second dev job and realized nobody was hiring node.js developers. So I looked at the local dev listings and saw the majority were .NET or Java. I spent the next month while unemployed reading an 800 page book on .NET (to be honest I got to page 400 or so before I was like “okay I get it”) and snagged a job as a mid level dev at a .NET shop in a Fortune 500 company. I didn’t even buy the book, I pirated it (apologies to Phil Japikse!). I think we need to teach people that learning stuff yourself is free if you know where to look. We teach everyone school is the only path to knowledge which is, quite frankly, the most expensive, slowest, and overall worst way to learn almost everything. Outside some limited domains most concepts necessary for gainful employment can be self taught. Isn’t that what the internet was supposed to do? What we all imagined when we’d talk, wide-eyed and endlessly optimistic, about the internet to people back in the 90s and early 2000s? Wasn’t it supposed to make information free? Which it has, for those of us who know how to look.

hadlock 3y ago
Given the substantial financial benefit you got from his (800 pages!) work, you probably owe it to him to buy a new copy of the book. Order it from your local book shop if you can.
- wincy 3y ago
  Haha! I actually saw him at a conference last year and thanked him. You’re right though. I should definitely pick up a new copy, and display it prominently on the bookshelf behind my desk.
JimtheCoder 3y ago
"I think we need to teach people that learning stuff yourself is free if you know where to look. We teach everyone school is the only path to knowledge which is, quite frankly, the most expensive, slowest, and overall worst way to learn almost everything. Outside some limited domains most concepts necessary for gainful employment can be self taught." While I agree with what you are saying and am also 100% self taught myself, I think a large portion of people (especially outside the tech world) just aren't able to pick up a book, read it, pick up the knowledge and put it into practice efficiently. Especially with no accountability or social pressure that sitting in a classroom provides... I am not arguing for college or university, but I think that just giving people (especially someone in their 40s or 50s) a book and expecting them to pick up new skills may be asking a bit too much...

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Rather than going "back to college" I think we need to find a way to bake it typical to just always be taking a class or two. Maybe it takes you a decade to get that degree, maybe you end up not needing it, but taking classes is better than sitting around in meetings all day. Besides, the security of not being pigeonholed in a single career is going to make people less fearful and more likely to take risks like starting new businesses.

throwawayvcc 3y ago

Wouldn't learn to code work for them?

Tangurena2 3y ago

> their job is completely gone Here in Kentucky, there are lots of people who worked in coal mines for several generations ("grandpa was a coal miner, dad was a coal miner, I'm a coal miner and my son will be a coal miner"). Coal is going the way of buggy whips. It is a dying industry. Automation is replacing some, and a collapse of customers wanting coal are getting rid of more. There are state and federal programs to help retrain workers. Yet the men affected frequently refuse the retraining. People still complain about the times in 2016 when Hillary campaigned and promised more retraining with stuff like "how dare that carpetbagger come here and tell us how to live"