So could we agree that as capitalism produces enough abundance to slowly abolish scarcity and make many entire professions non-earners in the free marketplace, it also creates unpleasant levels of unemployment? Or, in short, that the increasing inability to earn a living from one of many high-skill professions (software, law, science, general-practice medicine, etc.) is a class contradiction of capitalism?
Was that article ever submitted to Slashdot?
Cool straw men and rationalization, bro.
The answer is actually relatively simple (especially when you hear the end of the story): she was offered a job picking biomedical stocks on Wall Street, and took it. So the answer is: money has been reallocated from research to finance, making it more financially feasible for a trained researcher to pick research stocks than to actually do research.
Capitalism has abstracted its way away from actual productivity and into financial masturbation.
But when they get there, they find themselves forced to room with several people to get by, living in conditions no better than they did at home in order to send a significant chunk of their pay home. It's the tech equivalent of the "Alberta Oilsands Lifestyle" -- long hours, brutal living expenses, and relatively high pay for short periods followed by trips home to survive unemployment while looking for the next contract.
My God, you just described my life in Boston in miniature. Well, I did a little better than that, but my friends who didn't study at hard at school have done exactly like this.
Except that not everyone does it. From the number of OWS and pro-Union Ohioan whiners, I'd say that it's a definite minority who successfully adjust.
Got any evidence that OWS protesters are mostly unemployed, or have mostly failed to qualify themselves for today's good jobs? I seem to remember a news story about a 31-year-old unemployed woman with a biomedical PhD. That ought to qualify her for a job in today's research-driven "knowledge economy", right?
Except that public spending on research has plummeted for the past couple decades exactly as Wall Street has driven corporations to cut their R&D spending. So now we've got out-of-work PhDs.
Coders don't fly the banner of allegiance because management doesn't fly the banner of allegiance. They can't make long-term promises when it's possible they'll get bought up after 2 or 3 years. What can you possibly offer me aside from salary + Bonus? Stock? 401K? Incentive plan? Who even takes those seriously these days? Fact: If you aren't reviewing your employee's and asking them every 6-months to a year what makes them happy, don't expect to keep em'. You can only burn the smart ones once.
Time off work. It's one of the few things that cannot POSSIBLY lose value.
I agree with the epithet "iBust". I completely disagree with the notion that Apple or Google will go under.
Google is now the world's premier advertiser. Apple has more cash-on-hand than any government on the planet, all from product revenues. The rest might crash and burn, but these two have sustainable business models based on selling stuff to people who want it.
Does "Eli" sound like a female name? Only to Gentiles...
Person with small kids? Inshallah one of these days I'll have kids.
But in my case: person with a girlfriend, person with friends, person with hobbies.
I was actually referencing my own graduate work in AI involving PROLOG and a custom language we created to assist in non-routine problem solving within software agents.
That actually sounds pretty cool. Got a publication link?
Sometimes people need work done RIGHT NOW. Like... you know... they are competing against another startup and first one there wins. Or they are about to lose a major customer and they need someone to build what they need right now. You can't walk in the door and do that job just because you have an IT degree. It's just not happening. I can't walk in the door and do certain work. I would have neither the experience in the particular technologies nor the background to understand wtf they want me to do. People that have those... they're scarce. Many many programmers know code and could give a shit about the business they support. For that reason, they're not scarce to their employer. Or to any other employer.
So custom-built commodities are scarce, while mass-produced ones are non-scarce? Amazing, why didn't I see it before?
I completely agree, but I have one objection: a normal job is 9-5, not 8-5. Once you start saying 8-5 you're already normalizing the notion of 9-hour workdays or of taking an extra, unpaid hour for lunch. In most professional jobs outside the tech sector, nobody sees anything wrong with eating lunch away from your desk and, gasp, not working another hour to make up for it.
You seem to have missed my point and gone off on a big crotchety rant. My point was: I'm scarcer than a lot of the hot-shots who think they're scarce, but on a conscious level I'm not scarce. If I'm scarce, I'm artificially scarce: I invested time learning things that other people could learn (or if someone actually trained them at their job), and I did things that other people could do -- all if they had the time from earning this month's rent. People could do the same with your skills and experience, I guarantee it. I'm not scarce. You're not scarce. No mere laborer is so scarce that he can't be replaced if the need is dear enough. If your employers felt they needed to, they would throw you out on the street and train me or some other monkey to take your job.
Welcome to capitalism.
And you can be both scarce and useless (for example, being the only one that knows some language nobody needs).
Oy mate, I'm the only one who knows the language I'm creating. No shit. I don't expect others to know it, or consider it a job skill. Lay off that one.
"Value proposition" is a business term. It means: how do they actually make money? And that's their problem: they create lots of value but capture none of it for themselves in the form of revenue. They're essentially operating as highly-leveraged charities.
I quite understand compound interest, actually, I was just assuming a closed system where I can't pull shares of stock out of thin air into which to pour the dividends. Shares are a scarce resource, and if everyone is playing buy-and-hold like I am, the equilibrium created will be little trading volume of those shares for a high market price.
And, again, you missed the fundamental point: most stocks, especially stocks with decent growth prospects, do not pay dividends. You talk condescendingly about Americans? I agree: our whole financial and investment system is focused on building The Big Payoff as soon as you can get it rather than building long-term wealth of the kind represented by dividends. Companies are sitting on record cash reserves, and they're largely using it to export production or execute stock buybacks. How many are paying dividends to their shareholders? Not that many.
On the other hand, let's you and I both do our research, and we'll see what we can find. I currently own a small number of stocks in my own professional sector, so I'm going to go double-check that they don't pay dividends and see if I can find something that does.
And where is this additional stock coming from? No, seriously, where do we just find more shares of the company lying on the street?
Of course, we can use the dividends to purchase them at market price, but depending on how many other people own the stock for precisely this reason, it might well be time to diversify.
And, you missed the original point, which was that this strategy only even works if you can find a stock with dividends and buy boatloads of it. Most stocks today do not pay dividends.
Furthermore, coders, especially the "talented" ones, don't exactly fly the banner of allegiance. They'll leave at the first opportunity to make more money. If you don't let them take control of a project, they'll either do it their own way, or go somewhere else that lets them do it their own way. Have you heard of open source software? Nothing ever gets done because they keep "forking" things when they have their own ideas!
Hey, some of us would prefer shorter hours and more vacation time! Money's not everything...
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
