Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why job losses are a bad thing. The last generation of machines was built so well that people don't need new ones. Good! This should be a great thing.

Valuing growth over sustainability makes these backwards ass goals of hiring more, building more and growing. The way this is spun is pretty horrible.

Amazon and Wal-mart losing is a good thing for the environment and society as a whole.

You yell, "But people lose their jobs..." There are more jobs, plus why does everyone need a job anyway? Can people in Silicon Valley not make $150 ~ $250k a year, everyone else get a minimum income and we work together to make better art, smaller factories and a world that will last much longer by recycling and rebuilding and not needing to buy an endless supply of shit?!

"Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches." -Brave New World, Huxley.

View on HN

> You yell, "But people lose their jobs..." There are more jobs, plus why does everyone need a job anyway?

This is kind of silly. Job losses are a bad thing precisely because we don't yet live in a world where you can get by on a guaranteed minimum income without a job.

If you think it's worthwhile to push society in that direction, then great, but don't kid yourself that believing in it is the same as having already accomplished it.

Some european countries have already achieved this; your unemployment benefits after getting fired are a significant fraction of your previous salary, and slowly ramp down. You pay for it in taxes (and then some), but at least you know you can still make rent if you get canned.

You also pay for a bureaucracy to perform administration and fight abuse. That consumes a fraction of the system's resources. It's hard to argue that this adds much value, or any.

What this system boils down to is a compulsory savings scheme. So an alternative would be a voluntary savings scheme, which would have higher efficiency by not consuming resources for administration.

Of course the obvious downside to a voluntary savings plan is that it isn't effective at actually creating savings. We know this, because in the United States, we don't have compulsory savings plans, and thus have a voluntary system. So how's that working out? Not well. Approximately half of all Americans save 5% or less of their income[0], which isn't enough for emergency situations. Another study in 2013[1] said 27% had no savings at all. Now the main reason for this is quite simple. A lot people don't make enough to have anything so save.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/30/pf/income-saving-habits/ [1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/

i think maybe only Swiss here have really sustainable model; others I know are typical socialist let's-make-more-and-more-debt-with-unsustainable-social-benefits (happy to learn if it somewhere else it works and can work in foreseeable future too without creating huge debt, forcing people to work in their late 60' etc).

What Swiss specifically have - we all pay social deductions, within 3 pillars. If you end up unemployed, then you are entitled to 1-2 years of unemployment benefits in 70% of your former income, with some reasonable cap. That is if you worked 100%, in perm contract, at least a year in a row. Otherwise not entitled or payments are much lower.

You have to actively search daily for new job and prove it to your unemployment councilor, otherwise they will cut benefits. Those benefits are really structured in a way to pay you while you are looking for a job, not to have some extra long holidays on everybody's else budget.

Motivating setup, and since there is a social net of that 70% of my income, I am not frightened on the prospect of losing job and needing to store enough cash to live at least X months/years without any income. Handy when one has big fresh loan on his shoulders.

There's nothing particularly Swiss about it, similar schemes exist throughout Northern Europe.

In Norway you can get 1-2 years benefits at about 60% your previous annual income with a cap near median national income.

These are nice schemes but the caps are worrisome. Modern professionals in North America pile on so much debt (student loans of a few 100K, mortgage debt of a lot more, etc.) that the countries average income doesn't reflect reality. In the Bay area, I hear laments from people making 200K that they cannot make ends meet. It is a crazy world.

You can have your student debt repayments frozen here while unemployed, at the national bank's rate. Plenty of people with high mortgages too, but duh. We aren't living in a perfect world.

Right, they are obviously bad for the people losing their jobs and for the society. But are they bad for Intel? I think that was his point.

>I don't see why job losses are a bad thing.

You'll see it if you lose your job and can't find a new one, like it happens to millions of people the world over.

Add a medical or family emergency to that, and you'll totally get it.

Unemployment in the real world is not about some Sci-fi automation fantasy. Might be, but not yet. And even when historically it leads to new jobs or other benefits (something not always a given) the pain and trouble is still there for those unfortunate to be left on the wrong side of those new jobs.

The more jobs are lost, the quicker the demand to fix it, with Universal Basic Income or something similar. We know it has to happen eventually, but the sooner we man up and go for it, the sooner millions of people can get relief from their suffering.

I don't see why job losses are a bad thing.

As long as we move quickly to "you don't need a job to live" because otherwise these job losses are destroying people's lives.

Unless these folks had degrees in Working At Intel, losing a job is not the same as becoming permanently unemployable. Job loss sucks. But it's pretty hyperbolic to say it's destroying peoples' lives. Particularly for skilled workers, finding a new job isn't all that far out.

>Unless these folks had degrees in Working At Intel, losing a job is not the same as becoming permanently unemployable.

A 50 year old Intel employee might find it quite difficult to get a new job any time soon. Not to mention that where they live they'll have some other thousands ex-colleagues recently fired looking for similar type of jobs.

We're talking about thousands of people -- few of them will be highly sought after chip gurus. In fact obviously it's the less sought after ones that will be let go.

Add a recent mortgage, medical issue or kid at college and here goes their pension savings (or worse). Have the same layoff happen to their spouses near the same time (which it's not that rare), and they're pretty much screwed.

Really, it's as if people have no real world experience with these things...

That depends if you can apply for redundancy you can lose the good people.

Most of the UK's mobile industry was staffed by Ex Cellnet/BT who took Redundancy with some massive TAX free payouts - Senior Guys could get 5 figure payoffs and an extra 6 years on your pension.

The head of Vodafone in the UK was an example and as soem one said at his level they threw in a gold plated wheelbarrow for you to take your cash away in.

This is largely a problem because of the pitiful savings rate in the US. If you've been saving 0% of your pay, being laid off at 50 is a disaster. If you've been saving 30-50%, this is likely to be a non-issue. Highly paid people in this country spend way too much of the money they earn.

Not only in the US, and not only because of being "highly paid" but "spending too much".

In most of the world, including large parts of western Europe, unless you're upper middle class and higher, it's either hand-to-mouth or smallish savings (nowhere near 30%).

Which parts of western Europe?

I see via google that minimum wage in Germany is 1473 euros per month for a full time worker.

According to [1], food, housing, necessary household items, and public transportation look like they could reasonably total less than 800 euros per person. Add another 100 for having fun and for the occasional wardrobe expense, and you still get to save nearly 40%.

Having children ruins all of this, of course, but that's pretty easy to avoid.

[1] https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/berlin

Germans save around 9 to 11% of their disposable income, of which the average (post taxes) amount is around 25-30.000. This puts their annual savings to around $2200 to $3300.

That's nowhere near being able to save 30-40% of your pay, as the parent said. And Germans are some of the biggest savers in Europe. For places like France, crisis stricken "PIIGS" (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece etc) and especially the UK it's even worse.

There's a large difference between being able to and choosing to save that much. I didn't say that it was the norm, but it's certainly possible if you have a near-median salary. Not doing so is a choice if you make a reasonably good salary, albeit an extremely common one that most people don't make consciously. It requires consciously tracking your spending, and being willing to forgo or at least cut back on some of the luxuries that have become much more common in the US and presumably Europe in the past 30 years (like eating out frequently). In return, you can get better financial security, even without an astronomical salary.

You paint a contrived scenario and then lament it. What is the purpose?

Where do you have stats showing all of these job cuts will happen in the same location? Where are the stats that show when a person loses their job, their spouse is also likely to lose their job?

It is not a contrived scenario. My dad was laid off 5 years before retirement and guess what? All his skills were working in the Intel organization and nobody is going to hire a senior manager in folsom a few years before retirement. Please try to be a bit more compassionate, it actually effects real people.

The "contrived" scenario is something that has been played again and again. as opposed to the "no worries" attitude.

As for the same location: typically companies have so-called offices in a few locations --not individual people equally distributed around the country.

Plus, who said that their spouse is "equally likely to lose their job"? It's just an example of a thing that can happen, and does happen, not something that anyone claimed inevitable or "as likely"...

20% of suicides are linked to unemployment.

you have "turtles all the way down" of bubble mentality

A relative few Silicon Valley elites living like kings while everyone else lives in a tiny box trying to raise their families on their meager Basic Income stipend doesn't sound like a utopia to me.

How does that work? If I have a meager income I'm not buying an iPhone or a desirable target for ads from Instagram.

Apparently it works just as djslumdog says -- people like him/her will continue doing the small amount of important work that can't be automated, and will be compensated handsomley to do so. They will fly around the world, enjoying vacations, live in large homes, eat lavish meals.

Everyone else will live in 100 square foot apartments in Soviet-style concrete bunkers, eating ramen (or possibly Soylent). But they won't need to work! They'll spend their entire day painting and composing music!

A lot of people here push this vision, and of course they always imagine themselves to be part of the elite. It really is insufferable.

Poor people are among the most overweight because food is so cheap in the US. I don't see why implementing Basic Income would magically make food expensive or make people have to "eat ramen or possibly Soylent."

Anyway, the world you are so worried about is already here. A small number of people do continue to do important work that can't be automated. Most other work is unecessary busy work. Artists and musicians already live off of government largesse, either by taking "McJobs" that are artificially highly paid because of government minimum wage, or by actually being on welfare.

Since people can't wrap their heads around the concept of Basic Income, we end up with hordes of people paid to do stupid shit that doesn't matter. The endgame is that we're all government employees in a Dilbertesque hell. Moving papers from one pile to another and back again. Digging holes and then filling them again, since letting people decide what to do during the workday would be too disruptive.

Using the big number of overweight people as a sign that healthy food is available cheap is an amazing feat of backwards logic IMO. A significant cause of overweight is that your diet is too imbalanced and your body is missing certain important nutrients while getting too much of others. That is the exact opposite of healthy food. And in fact, the "cheap food" most people consume is exactly that - fast food and high-calorie snacks. That sounds a lot more like the concrete-bunker-and-ramen theory again...

If you supplement with protein powder which is cheap also, count calories, lift weights, fast food is just fine for not getting fat. Lots of people on /r/fitness have done McDonald's or chipotle.

> The endgame is that we're all government employees in a Dilbertesque hell.

I once heard about the British Colonial Office. The time when it had the most employees was precisely the time when it was dissolved because Britain did not have colonies anymore. They were all just shuffling papers around all day.

I sadly don't have a source for that. Does anyone have a link, by any chance?

> Does anyone have a link, by any chance?

C. Northcote Parkinson, 1955. http://www.economist.com/node/14116121

"A glance at the figures shows that the staff totals represent automatic stages in an inevitable increase. And this increase, while related to that observed in other departments, has nothing to do with the size - or even the existence - of the Empire."

What I don't know is where Parkinson got his own figures from. Some of them are cited in the article, but I think not this one.

But what's the alternative? Don't give anyone even the meager means of living? Communism? (that worked out well). In the coming years, tons of people will be out of jobs and incapable of participating in the shrinking not yet automated away economy, what do we do?

you don't get it? basic income IS communism, we/they also had a guaranteed income because everybody had to have a job (=income), even if the job didn't make sense.

elites (political in communism vs actually still working people in BI scenario) have amazing life with various luxuries. rest will be allowed to exist and not die of starvation and have a lousy place for sleep. truly bright future...

You haven't answered the question: what is the alternative?

At least with BI, you don't have to toil away at a time-wasting job that's just busy-work: you can do something you enjoy, and maybe we'll all get lucky and you'll write the next Harry Potter series and become a multimillionaire, while paying a bunch of taxes to keep the system going. If not, at least you have the dignity of not digging holes and then filling them back in all day long to justify your paycheck.

If you don't like this, then let's hear your alternative. The only alternative to this that I can think of is to ban automation, or strictly regulate it so that any automation which does a job that humans can do is banned (allowing only automation which does things that humans cannot do). Do you really want to go that route?

Pedantic but an iphone is probably a way better purchase than most things if you are low income.

For $400 you get a device that will let you watch movies, play games, check email, get phone calls, etc.

Granted you could also get a cheaper phone but this replaces your TV and computer! Smartphones are really high-value!

Why do you think only iPhone can do that? Pretty much any 50$ used smartphone can do all those things.

Honestly, $50 smartphones tend to suck a lot. Even the highest-end Firefox OS phone for a while had major keyboard lag. Chances are trying to use things like Skype/VOIP over them would be painful....

I think if you're looking to invest in one useful thing, a good phone would be a great purchase. Maybe the Moto G at $200?

Amortized over a year, you're talking about a lot of bang for the buck.

I still use Samsung Galaxy S3 with Cyanogenmod I bought for 60€ that still meets my needs. If you are on a budget, buying a new, shiny smartphone is a waste of money imho as you can get a cheap, used but fully functional one for much lower price.

So do i on Cyanogenmod 10 (Android 4.4.4) and it handles all web/music/video needs. I guess the latest games that you wouldn't really want to play on a mobile anyway might have issues.

The S3 generation of hardware has stood up very well.

My only reason to upgrade would be for some good security hardware that can support full disk encryption with no slowdown.

>> watch movies???

How do you expect that person with meager income to pay for the network bandwidth and usage bill?

>>Smartphones are really high-value!

This I agree wholeheartedly. At least for people like me, who enjoy reading books, smart-phones (with sites like project Gutenberg) provide such an utopia that I feel like living in heaven. Of course, I know that smart-phones don't solve all problems automatically, but from knowledge-seeker's PoV, smart-phones are of great value.

Also, I understand that not all people like to read, but that's a different thing to ponder upon.

Don't worry. For BI to occur, the kings will first fall. Remember, they chose this course, and will follow it until the end-- they always do.

It's important to distinguish "a bad thing for the economy in general" from "a bad thing for an individual's share of the economy". Job loss without a corresponding drop in production is a good things for the economy as a whole - it's getting what's demanded more efficiently. It's terrible for the unemployed individuals in question, since they lost the leverage they were using to extract a larger share of the total economic output.

Yeah, but what's the societal point of efficiency when wealth has become so concentrated, that the economic ladder has been pulled up?

While that might be a nice long term view, it isn't fun to go through the entire process for the average person, heck it's not even pleasant for many of the "1%ers".

If a lot of companies suddenly go bust that are today supposedly getting in the way of innovation, it might be good for long term innovation, but in the short term, say 10-15 years it can really be hell. Not to mention that in this 10-15 year period while the economy is hemorrhaging it makes the entire economic ecosystem very vulnerable, and significantly reduces its capacity to deal with external attacks.

That is while US companies may start failing, who's to say that a foreign company won't take its place. Then you have to start taking isolationistic measures, which is a whole other mess.

The ideal scenario would be to see these companies slowly, over a period of decades fade out, and be replaced by others, which I honestly don't see happening as of yet in SV, but things like this generally do come out of the left field.

So if we see these companies shrink rapidly, with no one else to take the mantle, I honestly think it would be a dangerous situation as it can be a catalyst for something bigger.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com