The New Face of American Unemployment | Hacker News Reader

The New Face of American Unemployment

bloomberg.com

86 pointsedward136 comments

The manager of the wire mill in Scottsdale, Pennsylvania (pop. 4200 and dropping, 98% white, median income $32K, "archetypal Rust Belt town") says “We’ll just about hire anybody that we can get our hands on if the person comes in drug-free and they show up for work on time.” They still have problems finding people. Who would move there?

This is the plight of small-town America.

Well perhaps they should consider paying better wages or offering better working conditions if they truly have problems finding people.

"Well perhaps they should consider what literally anybody would have considered long before some HN rando suggested it."

It's not the jobs that make people not want to work there. It's everything around the jobs. Money has diminishing marginal value. For many, many people, not living in a heavily drugged-up rural area where nobody else has any prospects is going to outweigh any wage increases that aren't going to drown the company. People aren't spherical cows.

The company exists there because it's the closest thing to the Third World that exists in America, with the commensurate low worker compensation and the weak worker rights that that implies. Because it probably couldn't exist anywhere else.

(Whether that company's continued existence is valuable to the society that grants it its imprimatur is a different question entirely, and one where reasonable people can differ.)

> People aren't spherical cows.

And more importantly, people aren't in a vacuum.

Small cities and rural areas don't grow or wither by accident. They grow when the government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured. They wither when markets are captured and the network effects of oligopolized megacities become more valuable than genuine market experimentation.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...

I agree with you in general, but there is also the specter of international competition that is a lot harder to meaningfully regulate (we've seen what protectionist policies do, to all of our detriment).

Those network effects of big cities are not intrinsically tied to oligopolic structures. They're also just bigger and more attractive to a big chunk of the population, yeah?

How is China able to be so protectionist and so successful?

Because they can be an order of magnitude cheaper because the health of the workers they barely pay doesn't matter to them. This is starting, already, to change, if slowly, both due to external pressures (PR) and the rise, again slowly, of markets that are in turn cheaper and even less give-a-shit than they are.

(EDIT: Also, it's important to realize that that "success" very much does not extend to rural China. They're not airlifting money out there the way that we effectively do for our rural populations and so industry is even more concentrated than in the United States, when you adjust for relative population size.)

And this is the argument of the types who want to rail against OSHA and minimum wages and the like in America, but frankly, I like not living in a society with factory-crippled invalids and suicide nets on the windows so I am so very unsympathetic. It's an externality that I'm certainly not comfortable overall with, but the bright spot is that those dangerous, barely-paying jobs are a rear-guard action as we play out the clock towards ever-cheaper, more-pervasive automation; that said, the inevitably oppressive effects of modern capital owning that automation is why I am effectively, if not in name, a socialist in 2017.

A lot of that "success" is not real. China is building infrastructure that no one is actually using. Temporarily propping up the economy but not tied to long term gains.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/20...

That's a minor quibble compared to how far they've come from where they started.

>Those network effects of big cities are not intrinsically tied to oligopolic structures. They're also just bigger and more attractive to a big chunk of the population, yeah?

Well, they're certainly more attractive to young people nowadays, but at their core, they really offer a few things:

* Lots of skilled workers, all in one place.

* Lots of preexisting infrastructure, all in one place.

* Low per-capita cost of additional infrastructure.

On Hacker News there are occasional articles saying many programming jobs ought to offer remote-work as a fringe benefit. That sounds nice, but for a lot of areas of the country, it just wouldn't work. Hell, I remember living in a suburb of Boston, with commuter-rail access to the center city, which as late as 2003 did not have broadband internet in some parts of town.

To this day, there are still rural, exurban, and outer-suburban areas without the network infrastructure to make telecommuting really viable.

So while cultural attractions are nice, I think that they compete with extremely expensive housing, affordable transit, affordable network access, and job density as factors in where to live.

That's a fair cop, and I don't disagree as far as that goes. It's one of the reasons I really like your posts. =)

I do think, however, that there are social issues driving it, too, that go beyond fairness of competition (at least as is generally understood). When you leach out the less privileged from your communities (be they gay, brown, black, trans, etc.), you're going to incur a competitive disadvantage. Bigger cities, for the most part, are a lot more welcoming, and present significant attractive forces that aren't really purely economic in nature, and by themselves can be a big counterweight to stuff like more expensive housing.

> * Lots of skilled workers, all in one place.

A lot of software companies like to piss that advantage away by moving to some "technology hub" on the outskirts of major cities.

Neal Stephenson put it something like: "The world had finally settled on an average comfort of living approximately equivalent to an Indian goat-farmer," in his book "Snow Crash."

I guess a country would want to prevent that from happening, but on the other hand, wouldn't the human race strive to increase productivity and reduce scarcity to the point where the average lifestyle was a bit higher than an Indian goat-farmer? Because right now the average is I expect more along the lines of an untouchable.

> the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity

http://faculty2.ric.edu/rfeldstein/521_fall_08_files/excerpt...

government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured.

ROFLMFAO. It's government that causes markets to become captured. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

It's extremely unlikely for a true monopoly to form in the absence of government regulation.

Regulatory capture is by far not the only kind of capture, and a well-run government can avoid it. Just as a fair free market can avoid whatever you're goalpost-hauling at when you say "true monopoly". Of course, it's also much more likely that a market without regulation enables collusive behavior on the part of actors with the greater balance of power who don't have to answer to the society around them. Monopolies are not and have never been the only, or even the biggest, societal threat. Oligopolies and cartels exist because cooperating against the public is a better option for them than competing with one another and (as any game theorist will tell you) the first to be disloyal gains only a small edge at the cost of significantly reduced results for everybody.

The only real threat to an entrenched oligopoly or a cartel in your sufficiently-free market is a necktie party on the streetcorner, and that in practice is rare 'cause paying for guns takes money.

and a well-run government can avoid it.

Which is about as likely as the proverbial "sufficiently smart compiler".

Oligopolies and cartels exist because cooperating against the public is a better option for them than competing with one another and (as any game theorist will tell you) the first to be disloyal gains only a small edge at the cost of significantly reduced results for everybody.

But in reality, cartel members cheat all the time. Take OPEC, for example, where members are always producing more than their official limits.

Except over and over again online -- and even more if you've ever gone to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in a small town -- these business owners do what the valley does. Whine they can't hire, and refuse to raise wages.

I collect these links because I find it funny; I'd paste some but I'm on the wrong computer.

But my guess is lots of these places are paying shit wages for shit work with low or no benefits and few advancement options. It's weird they can't seem to find decent employees, eh?

This also matches my experience with family that still live in a similar area. Employers whine endlessly about the lack of workers for their $14 and hour factory job with expensive shitty health insurance. On the other hand, my brother runs his own chain of pizza restaurants in the midwest. He starts at 50% over minimum wage and pays for health insurance. Guess who has no problems hiring as many reliable employees as he needs?

I grew up in a town where this was going on. Some just complain, you're right. Others literally can't make the math work, and I watched a local company submarine themselves for trying.

There are few advancement options because there are few ways to advance. They're dead-end jobs, and there's a wage ceiling because their competitors don't have to play by the same rules. They're jobs that won't exist in twenty years, maybe not even ten, because of a number of factors; the question is not how to better employ the people who would be their workers, but how to give everybody a baseline-decent life regardless of "work" (in an economy where most "work" is rapidly becoming less important).

Sure, some businesses aren't going to work out / the economics don't work.

Others are like the wire manufacturer MLP Steel: there will (probably) continue to be a need for someone who can make custom stuff fast, and that requires you to be local so it's a couple day delivery instead of a month being shipped from China. But their claim is they pay "$12 to $20 an hour, plus health care and benefits", which means they start you at $12. The fuck do they expect for $12 an hour? That's under $20k/year after taxes, in an area where craigslist suggests it's going to cost you $700/mo to rent and heat a place to live. Again, my brother who runs pizza restaurants starts employees at $16.

A side issue that all those funny links have is they always randomly intermix requiring years of experience and they won't hire anyone without a degree or years of experience, which mostly fake claims about hiring anyone off the street... who also happens to have a Mech Eng degree and be willing to take $1/hr more than McDonalds and given those criteria not be involved in drugs or prison.

And as a side note it stereotypically required in all employer anecdotes about alcohol and drug abuse to point out that the drunks are trivially detectable as non-functioning but the painkiller addicts are extremely high functioning and indistinguishable in performance from sober people yet we have to discriminate against them anyway, just for fun apparently.

From experience: it's not that difficult to tell from very brief interaction when someone is drunk. It's a lot harder to tell when someone is using narcotics to the point where you can't trust them with dangerous machinery and the lives of their fellow workers.

If you think this is "discrimination", I very strongly question whether you've any experience at all dealing with semi-functional narcotics abusers. Because your superficial dismissiveness does not track with the seriousness of the problem.

I don't think narcotics are the issue. Nobody wants to hire an addict, yeah. The trouble is, as he said, trying to get a trained mechanical engineer to live and work in an area with few other employers, for $1/hour more than McDonalds. That's just not a very good return on the skillset investment.

The employer who said he wouldn't hire narcotics users is not hiring mechanical engineers, though, he's hiring factory workers for steel-drawing machines. They're operators and tradesmen, not engineers. It doesn't require a degree--it requires the ability to learn and the ability to not mis-handle machines to the (potentially fatal) detriment of your coworkers. Which narcotics (and other drugs) kind of screw with.

"This work takes years of training"

The ability to buckle down and study something as a project for a couple years is very expensive in employees. You can hire an engineer who can definitely do it, or a non-STEM bachelors grad who might be able to do it, or take your chances with a kid off the street. $12/hr is probably not going to find that caliber of employee.

Some google work indicates McDonalds is paying a minimum of $10/hr nationwide as of this year. For an extra two bucks the employer thinks he's going to get Warner Von Braun himself... in a city where the average job pays $18/hr. Good luck with that.

The trades don't get $12/hr. Millwright average pay across the nation including non-union jobs is twice that at $24/hr.

(edited to add, I accidentally deleted a paragraph claiming that three millwrights could trivially outproduce perhaps nine general laborers, which makes the guys claims about expense especially weird. Its very expensive to employ the far left corner of the bell curve)

Dude is asking for vaguely millwright caliber of employee for half price and is shocked, shocked I tell you, that all he's getting is drug addicts trying to keep their unemployment benefits going.

I can ask all day for subcontractors to work under me for $8/hr and the lack of serious applicants tells absolutely nothing useful about the software development field or the social problems of the USA. Thats the fundamental problem of this story.

"I only pay peanuts and I'm only getting monkeys, so this is a national crisis worthy of national coverage" No, not really.

Exactly. Part of creating a viable business is figuring out a way to charge enough to pay for the workers you need. Though whining to reporters turns out to be free. If employees started at $20/hour, perhaps with paid training for 3 months at $12/hour, I confidently predict he would have zero trouble hiring. Either he needs to raise prices, raise the productivity of his workers, or pay himself less. Maybe all of the above.

Common symptoms of manufacturers who "can't hire" are a lack of interest in training people and whining that local tech schools aren't churning out workers (on the workers' dime!) with the exact skills they want, who will jump for $12/hour. I reiterate the parallels with the tech industry.

Where do you think the better wages come from?

And then the calculus changes and it's overall cheaper for people to buy from overseas factories. There's nothing inherently wrong with that either, but it doesn't solve the "we need jobs" problem that politicians claim to be trying to solve.

>> And then the calculus changes and it's overall cheaper for people to buy from overseas factories.

Import taxes can fix that. Our poorest citizens can't compete on price with the middle class in some of the poorest countries.

Cheap imports allow for cost savings so the money otherwise spent on expensive domestic goods could be made elsewhere.

We tried raising tariffs to protect local businesses and consumers in the 1930s and all we got was a lousy world war.

The only time broad tariffs genuinely worked in America's interests was under Jefferson, when his devastating tariff hikes jump-started the industrial economy.

I'm no history expert, but I think it's fair to say that a solution for a pre-industrial backwater might not work as well when it comes to a (then unimaginable) technological, military, and economic superpower.

To paraphrase Paul Krugman on government spending, trade is a two way street where your spending is my income and my spending is your income.

Its not that simple. Remember the the predominance of American economy is not self-generated: it is a part of the world economy. Now, when you create artificial barriers like import taxes, American businesses become less competitive in the world market, as such tarriffs do not exist there. Over time, they stop innovating until they reach a crisis point.

e.g. see what happened to the big American automakers. They have a monopoly on trucks in the US and yet they became uncompetitive to the point of almost going bankrupt.

Import taxes might give you a win in the short-term, but they are harmful over the long-term, especially when our trading partners retaliate. This makes American manufacturers / exporters less competitive in overseas markets. And as Jack Ma said "when trade stops, war starts". Reducing international trade is a Bad Thing in the general sense.

How do you know they can afford to do either? Many businesses are barely scraping by. I think many folks used to startups flush with VC cash are very disconnected from this reality.

And conversely, the people who say they can't find work should accept lower wages and move to where the work is.

Meanwhile, all of these people should keep their hands out of the pockets of the rest of us. (To be fair, the non-workers are far more likely to take my money than the non-employers.)

I live in a small town myself, which has its own struggles finding enough people for all the jobs. The biggest thing I've noticed when having conversations with out-of-towners is that those people do not believe the jobs exist at all, at any price point. Somehow we've collectively built up this idea that there are simply no jobs to be found outside of the cities, period. With that, nobody outside the local region even thinks to see what jobs are available in these places while on the job hunt.

I have a feeling this idea of no jobs really was, more or less, true at one point in time and the preconceived notions simply haven't kept up with the ever changing landscape of the world. This isn't the only example of where information seems to severely lag reality.

I'm sure that a job exists for me in Smallville, USA.

But I don't need a job; I want lots of jobs. In my city, there are, within a 30 minute commute (Muni willing!), tens of thousands of well-paying, interesting jobs I can jump to if my current company goes south.

Having options empowers workers. It's no surprise that most workers gravitate to places where they're empowered.

Bingo. I've lived in Smallville, USA. Single tech job within a 60 minute commute. Maybe 10 in the surrounding counties.

In a city, if you lose your job or voluntarily want to move on, there are at least a few others nearby. In small town USA, you have to move--likely to another state! Too risky. No way I'd move back.

It seems a little myopic to only look at tech jobs. In fact, I'll be surprised if anyone interested in working in tech struggles to find a job at all. But in terms of the number of people employed, tech is not that big of an employer, and software development specifically only accounts for about 0.8% of the workforce. There are more farmers than that.

Back to the topic at hand, there are 7,635,000 unemployed Americans. There are 5,040,000 vacant jobs. The vast majority of those counted as unemployed theoretically could have a job, but for various reasons they don't. A big reason, as we've been discussing, is that they live in cities while the jobs are often in small towns.

Your story is sound for a tech professional who can jump around from job to job on a whim, but someone who is already struggling with unemployment has proven that the city cannot offer them what it can offer you. At the same time they don't even realize that other options exist (again, not rejecting the job, but not realizing that they exist at all).

> hose people do not believe the jobs exist at all, at any price point.

I used to live in a small town rural area. There were 4 employers of software engineers. I worked for one large one (~500? sw engineers), the other two were universities with poor pay and uninteresting tech prospects, and the fourth had 30 people total. I believe there's a fifth company now.

If I wanted to do more things with my career than work for one company for the next 20 years, I had to move. Remote jobs aren't very good for people without connections (because connections typically form through personal contact, something difficult in rural areas), and freelancing/consulting at the junior end is excellent for someone who excels in marketing themselves and building webapps.

Moving to a city lets me do things with my career as I want, not what the sole company wants. If the company crashes, my career is not in disarray and I don't have to move.

I simply can not recommend to anyone who is looking to make something of themselves to move to a rural area. The connections, niches, specialties, opportunities are just not found in rural areas. You have to build them up manually and it's simply not possible without deploying tremendous effort just to tread water in relation to the you-that-moved-to-a-city.

It's of course plausible that a senior person with a lifetime of connections and a deep specialty can live in Nowhere, USA, and have a solid life. But those simply don't hold true for junior/midlevel people.

A software developer does not exactly seem representative of the general population though, and especially not representative of the population that are in need of work! If we're just talking about what careers we have, then as a farmer, I imagine the employment prospects in the city are downright horrible for someone like me.

Employment prospects for farmers are dismal, as automation and modern methods make possible more land farmed under fewer people.

There are just more jobs in cities. this is why housing is such a terrible crunch in cities... crap regulations on housing development, but zillions of jobs and people crowding in for them.

> Employment prospects for farmers are dismal

You might be surprised, especially if you have the necessary skills. There is a farm labour shortage going on. I feel like you are just echoing my point here: That people don't even realize what jobs exist when they are outside the city.

> There are just more jobs in cities.

Well, of course there are. There are more people. However, the unemployment rate where I am is more than half that of the nearest large city (and population isn't decreasing). If you don't already have a job, rural areas are increasingly more likely to provide you one.

> this is why housing is such a terrible crunch in cities...

Not really, because when housing becomes expensive, your profitability from your job decreases to the point where it is no longer worth even doing. Sure, if you are software developer making six figures in SF, you are still okay (although possibly still selling yourself short[1]). But someone making minimum wage in SF? They're paying to have a job!

In truth, people want to be in cities for the lifestyle, especially for the large dating pool. Rural areas definitely fall short on those aspects.

[1] https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017

Strangely, I've never been hit up by a recruiter from Smallville. Though it's about 3/week for the city. I've worked as a carpenter for many years in both Smallville and ?Largeville? I never had a LinkedIn, or a resume online.

I feel like I worked with a lot of competent people with no options because in both locations, if you want a skilled labor job, you go in person to the office at 730 in the morning before the crew bosses leave for work.

This doesn't work if you live in another city or town. There's some Craigslist/ad in the paper but since that usually confined to a town or region that can be limited.

It's predominantly a employer's market with the employee reaching out to the employer, where we in tech in the city are mostly used to an employees market where the reverse is true. (Though all the jobs I've had, I've found myself and reached out to the employer)

Also, in a world where you are expected to change jobs for a raise or advancement, having options and access to other employment options is a big deal. In these two ways, the Smallville job market is underserved.

I'm just curious: what would it take, in terms of wages and working conditions, for you to move to a town in the middle of nowhere with 4200 people, 98% of whom are white, and where poverty and drug abuse are rampant?

I can't imagine taking a job there for anything less than upper seven figures, and even then I'd just work there for a year or two and then move back home and retire young.

I'm a Jewish atheist lesbian trans woman. In a town like that, I'd probably get lynched and/or raped for just one of those words.

I can't imagine anyone who's not white moving to any place that's 98% white, and even most of my white friends would balk once they realized they wouldn't be able to get good sushi there. And of course, there's nothing to do, very few people to talk to who aren't on meth...

Jesus, I'm a pretty big fan of living in sparse places, but I still don't want to live any further away from civilization than an exurb of a major city.

People shouldn't downvote you. I'm a Jewish non-theist straight male, and I share a lot of the same concerns.

Mind, a small town without rampant poverty and drug abuse, and particularly in a non-religious area... that's another thing. It's easy to skip the stupid sushi shops, and if you live somewhere within driving distance of the sea you can buy fish and make your own damn sushi. It's especially easy to skip if a reasonable professional salary goes so much further, speeding up a timeline towards personal financial freedom.

But no, I definitely don't feel safe about living in a place where only the church-men are holding back violence born of altered minds and raw despair.

> In a town like that, I'd probably get lynched and/or raped for just one of those words.

These places have problems, and I understand that you are being hyperbolic, but it's a bit much. It's like a demographics-inverted version of Trump's inner city warzone stuff. They're just people, and they aren't that different.

The wages are a part of it. Scottdale is less than 30 miles from where I live. I know Western Pennsylvania.

Experienced tradesmen can make really good money in this area but the downside is that they have to work long hours in harsh conditions. If they were paying more money, they'd be able to pull in qualified candidates from further away but they'd also attract more undesirables. They'd still have to separate the wheat from a lot of chaff.

Monetary compensation isn't all of it though. There is a surprisingly extensive problem with opiate addiction here in Western Pennsylvania. In the past 5 years, I have had four friends or acquaintances die from definite overdoses and several who are possible(likely) overdoses.

I'm from a suburban, middle-income area and we have heroin addicts all over the place. Ten years ago they were eating pills but with the crackdown on prescription pill mills, they have moved on to heroin.

Small town America is a market inefficiency, it's time to move on.

I don't imagine this sentiment would go down well with most Americans (who I assume live in small towns?) but this is so damn true. There was a small period in history where small-town economies were sustainable (post WW2) but these towns seem to have completely failed to reinvent themselves in light of changing economic conditions. OTOH you have American cities and urban areas innovating like crazy and leading the push towards sustainable living, clean energy etc and creating new markets with lots of jobs.

One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities. So we have a situation where the cities are attracting people from other countries often many oceans away, and the people living in the same state are unwilling to move out of their home towns.

I live in a small city surrounded by small towns. I get it. The world moves too fast and most of our life is spent sleeping or looking at screens. The only time you put the screen down you experience reality.

I could handle all of that, but to add geographic separation from your family and friends of many years? For many people, being poor with family outweighs being lower-middle-class far away.

I live in one of California's larger cities. Some of my relatives live in a resort town that is flooded with city people during the season. When driving I sometimes find myself waiting my turn at a tricky intersection, behind a family member who I know is not impaired or anything. Yet they take FOREVER to negotiate the intersection. EVERY thing is slower in that town. And I have relatives in Oregon who live in a university town but hate going to Portland, which is equally slowly paced to me as the university town. Same deal. And come to think of it, they would have family in Portland so there wouldn't necessarily be isolation, just change. I think this confirms the general impression that the young might make the move to the city for a job, but the less young have a bigger adaptation to make.

It would be interesting to see some good polls on this.

> I don't imagine this sentiment would go down well with most Americans (who I assume live in small towns?)

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...

It's complex. But populationwise, we're mostly in larger towns.

> One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities. So we have a situation where the cities are attracting people from other countries often many oceans away, and the people living in the same state are unwilling to move out of their home towns.

this is novel for America. Traditionally Americans moved all the time.

> this is novel for America. Traditionally Americans moved all the time.

I always thought that moving to the "big city" when you are young was a part of the American tradition while I was growing up (my parents and the parents of most of my friends did so), but perhaps I was mistaken.

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-47.h...

Take a look. :-(

Growing up in the northern suburbs of Dallas, it was simply treated as a given that my classmates and I were all the children of transplants. Often, our parents came here from much bigger cities because they got tired of urban life and the associated high cost of living and wanted an inexpensive house in the safety of the suburbs. Funnily enough, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA is now the fourth-largest metro area in the entire country precisely because of people like my parents and my classmates' parents.

My parents are both from NYC, and I never thought it odd even in the slightest that they moved halfway across the country about five years before I was born.

> One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move;

Moving is a huge hassle, and expensive. If you confine your employment opportunities to small towns, it's likely your next job is over 200 miles away. An out of state move costs easily over $1000 and doing that every year is not financially viable for most people. If you want to stay put, your job search gets very tough.

I did the whole "work in small town" thing for a while, and managed to do it with only moving a few times. Not knowing for sure where you'll be living in a few years takes its toll. Finally threw in the towel and moved to a metro area.

And if you're starting in one of those small towns, not making much money, how long does it take to save up enough to make the move? Not just the cost of the move but the downpayment for that new apartment, getting the basics set up, and parking.

It's even worse if you decide to move to the "big city" after your local options have run dry. Odds are you burned through your savings, added some debt, and are in over your head..

> One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities

Most of them can't move. They couldn't afford any city housing.

> One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities

Most of them can't move. They couldn't afford any city housing. They are often economically trapped in their situations.

Did you want to drive to work in a bulletproof motorcade? Because this is how you get heavily armed mobs.

I think the theory is you geographically segregate, with the people of the mob pointing their guns at each other and their children (and the furriners), while the elites isolate themselves in dense, expensive metropolitan areas and neighborhoods that have more in common with Shanghai, London, and Dubai than with Iowa.

Voila! No motorcade necessary.

Great plan. I suppose a quick review of where food comes from is in order?

By 2050, the majority of the food supply for the ~20 American arcologies will be sourced from a network of regional factory farms patrolled by lethal autonomous drones.

The most prosperous arcologies, of course, will be fed by overseas trade received into nearby autonomous port systems.

(Seriously, why aren't port operations already entirely automated?)

Oh, cool. Carry on then.

(Seriously, why aren't port operations already entirely automated?)

At the better ports, they are.[1] That's the Port of Rotterdam.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo

Most of them will die from meth and/or heroin long before they turn into heavily armed mobs

Rural USA - and I grew up there - is optimized for mining, farming, ranching, and logging. The bulk of the money has shifted elsewhere, and the economy has moved on.

I don't myself see a future for the rural US outside of the 4 interests above - it's collapsing inward as automation and time rolls on. I would like to see a future. But the network effect of urbanized areas is tremendous and forms a vortex of attraction for all sorts of things.

But this isn't new - WW1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_'em_Down_on_...

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyhttp://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/and...

and Hofstadter in his book Age of Reform (regarding populism/progressivism in the 1870-1925 era) remarks that the migration to the cities was taking place in the 1800s.

You white people hurry up and die was seen as surprisingly unpopular as a campaign slogan in the last election.

I mean you can want them to die off all you want, and encourage political and economic moves to eliminate them and their economic base and their culture and their religion, but until you genocide the last of them, you might not like the voting results.

That's basically the 2016 election in a nutshell.

Of course once they're killed off, who do you intend to replace them and is it going to be any better and who's next on "the list"?

There are white people in cities and suburbs too, you know. And actually, many people would be satisfied to subsidize rural areas or enforce anti-concentration laws that help them thrive. We just want them to return the favor.

Rural voters who vote for "free markets", though, are voting for Silicon Valley and for Wall Street. Those are the industries that the free market has favored! If you voted for a free-market candidate and you work in one of those two, congratulations. The definition of insanity, though, is doing the same thing over and over, while hoping for a different result.

If work from home becomes more prevalent, it might not be so.

My relatives have this same issue. Uncle owns his own auto shop and has had 20+ people working for him at times, now it's 5. They are always looking for workers, but have a very hard time finding 'decent' ones. It's not the pay that is the issue, they are ~10% above market for the area.

Its the education and the drugs. They are a 'dry' shop and that means no beer or anything else. Would you want a drunk or oxy-head working on your brakes or transmission? Neither does my Uncle. Lawyers aside, it is really tough to work with a drunk or a tweaker and get them into work on time. They steal things to finance their habits.

The education issue is also big. Auto-repair requires a fair bit of math these days and literacy. And I don't mean reading words one at a time, I mean remembering what the start of a sentence was by 10 words in. You have to be fluid in your reading and can't be deciphering what a word is like an Egyptian hieroglyph. Most diagnostics occur via online forums in auto-repair and you have to read and carry out instructions in a timely manner. This is far above most HS grads in that area (reasons are complicated).

The hollowing out of these areas of the US is a collective blame. Passing the buck off to ignorant racists masks the real issues of drug policy and education policy that must be solved. We must empathize with the tweakers, the bosses, the racists and the coastal liberals to solve this.

"Would you want a drunk or oxy-head working on your brakes or transmission?"

I don't want someone who's inebriated (or withdrawing, or with altered priorities) attempting to do anything where they have to be safety-conscious.

I mean, duh, but most shops aren't dry to begin with. Odds are that your last brake or oil change was done well past any legal limits. Especially if it is a franchised place. Independent and local auto-shops are your best bet for quality service. The franchise places may have 'rules' but they are overlooked usually as the franchise owner has pressure from above. Generally, they get the bottom of the barrel employees that have washed out of the independent shops for being piss-ants.

This goes triple for YourMechanic and anything else that smells like Uber-but-for-auto-repair. Those techs are flat-backing on a neighborhood sidewalk in whatever rain or heat there is, likely in huge violation of local ordinances and HOAs, with whatever tools they got in their truck. It's a shit job with big risks that only real addicts and drunks are going to take when they have no other options. Turns out, auto-repair is hard and can't be done without a lift or a pit.

At the same time, would I work at a place that says I can never have a drink? Maybe for a couple years for more money, but not forever.

I don't think he's saying that everybody employed by the autoshop needs to be a straightedge teetotaler; he's saying "don't drink or do drugs at work. When you show up to work, you need to be sober and clean".

Actually, no, I work for a giant megacorporation and anyone with access to vehicle keys cannot have any drug record or any drinking related offense for insurance reasons, absolute zero tolerance (except for management employees of course). If a driving privs field circus tech gets an alcohol related offense even on personal time, even not involving a vehicle, they're out a job permanently, ditto anything drug related. At best they can apply for another non-driving position but that never seems to work out.

So I find it incredibly likely that a car mechanic driving cars in and out of a service bay and taking test drives after a brake job etc is almost certainly a zero tolerance environment.

It's entirely possible to enjoy some drinks without having drug or alcohol related offenses on your record, though.

This is more of a small business and as employees are hard enough to find in the first place; drinking off the job is fine. DUIs are not. Heck, knowing my Uncle, I doubt that he'd really care if you smoked pot or whatnot, you just can't get courts involved as then the insurance companies will drop you.

For work, it's the addictive drugs that are the real worry. Addicts steal things out of cars, they don't come in because they are on a bender, they show up high, etc. Drunks do this too, but they stay sober for longer. Most people relapse though and then you have to fire them. It happens a lot and for a lot of reasons, but they still have to go.

I'll note: my uncle is very much a rarity in auto-repair. If you go into the back room of most auto-shops, you'll find a fridge of Buds or Coors. Guys may have one or two during lunch. Its not that big of a deal typically. Also, Crank gets it's nickname because the Hell's Angels used to hid the meth in the crankshafts of their choppers. Hallucinogens are not common as they don't take the edge off like opioids or booze. Hucking dirty transmissions in 100+ heat while covered in grease and grime is not a good idea for your back. Its a problem, yes, but the US fleet is maintained by guys on god-knows-what and has been since Al Capone's rum runners. Check the writing on your transmission or oil-pan, in yellow grease pen it'll have the initials of the guy that last worked on it, his phone/shop name, and maybe a lewd drawing of him smoking something.

There's a big difference between "no drinking" and "no drinking relating offenses"; it's the same as the difference between "no sex" and "no sex crimes".

Dry sounds like no drugs or alcohol period. If it's what you suggested then that's much more understandable

Part of the problem is that the people who are able to show up reliably, clean and sober, to do the work tend to be able to find work that pays better.

Sure, your uncle's shop pays ten percent above market wage for the area, but that doesn't mean a lot, because the people he's trying to hire aren't limited to that market.

I used to work in a bakery, and my wage went from 9 bucks an hour to 13 within a year of starting; at the time, minimum wage was 7.25. I have absolutely zero doubt that I was making at least ten percent more than the market value for the position I was hired at. A year after I started making 13 dollars an hour, I quit my job and went back to school for computer science, got hired out of school, and now I'm living in California making ~125,000 a year. There's just not enough money in baking to get that kind of salary, even if you own the location.

There should be a continuous pool of young kids, in theory.

Similar to your story I went from around 2x minimum wage at a grocery store as night shift manager and going to class during the day, to around about 8x doing software stuff, but the school I attended while working night shift hasn't exactly closed.

So where's the kids? There should be another CS department senior student making what would now be $15/hr at that store.

Note that $15/hr is more than the steelworks pays new hires. If you can show up on time and sober, there's no point in working at a dirty exhausting dangerous loud steelworks for $12/hr if you can boss high school kids around for $15/hr in a suit and tie.

In CA, minimum wage for a mechanic without tools is 2x the state minimum; that's ~$20/hr now, right?

In auto-repair there are no young guns anymore, the High Schools got rid of shop, let alone auto-shop, about 30 years ago. Besides, chicks don't dig grease under the fingernails. Almost no HS grads have the chops to become mechanics, they really need to go to Tech Schools beforehand. Some of those Tech Schools are really bad, but some can be good (Las Modanas in the East Bay). In the end, the pay is shit because the owners can't charge the customers enough. Most shops, like restaurants, close quickly because people won't pay. Also, ~90% of my uncle's business is in credit cards. Pre-2008 it was ~30%. The economy has really never recovered for most people.

the High Schools got rid of shop, let alone auto-shop

As someone who values the ability to build and repair things, I'm sure glad I live where I do. HS around here still has multiple shop classes. My kid just finished basic fabrication (mostly bending brake work and riveting) and is now enjoying Welding.

Bingo! If the kid has any brains, he'll get out of the business or open his own shop within 5 years, typically. That or fall into meth and fuck his life up. The auto business, if you are good with the books, can be very lucrative. Most people are not,so it sucks. My Uncle sent my cousins to college with no loans, owns his house, and rents out 2 others. The current auto-repair business records my Aunt keeps were recently appraised at $5M due to the completeness and rarity of them. He has done well, but mostly because he is smart, hard-working, and got lucky. He has had bad business failures too, but he makes due through his brains and muscle. To me, he is the model of a Yeoman Jeffersonian.

Some of the best and hardest workers I've ever worked with had alcohol and drug problems.

It comes down to the individual. These people have problems, and both are pushed by large corporate interests(alcohol culture/companies, pharmaceutical companies/doctors).

Should companies take risks on them? Not all of them, no. But they shouldn't simply be passed off as 'drunks' or 'oxy-heads'. There's lots of very smart, honest hard working people out there that suffer from these problems.

"The Decline of Middle America and the Problem of Meritocracy", from 2009

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/05/the-decline-of-mid...

The median income is $32K. The joker in the story is being put up as some kind of typical employer and is offering $12/hr and up and you know thats marketing speak for all new hires get $12/hr and not a penny more unless he's the bosses cousin or something.

Huh. $12/hr assuming full time pay is a whopping staggering $24K and I bet there's no bennies. If the median income is in that city is at least 30% higher he must be one of the crappiest paying employers in that entire city.

Lets keep rollin with the analysis. Zillow for that city is a mess, but we'll call the "average home value" is $120K for this "average employee" making a staggering $12/hr. Now we run the numbers and that means housing costs five times annual income. Thats not survivable at lower incomes, its not like health insurance or car repair or food is any cheaper merely because your boss is one of the cheapest employers in the entire city.

I can see why he gets very few applicants that aren't high... anyone who's sober enough to do the math can figure out his pay is literally unsurvivable yet his competitors pay quite a bit more making them, if not survivable, at least less unsurvivable.

Wikipedia notes "Scottdale's crime rate is less than 40% of the national average". Its not that the people are bad, its that they tried to imply the cheapest sweatshop is somehow indicative of ... anything. Wikipedia further notes that "About ... 8.3% of the population were below the poverty line" so the article implies everyone there is unemployed or has the world's cheapest boss, yet 90+% of the population seem to be doing too well financially to work at the steelworks, its not a significant policy problem so much as one dumpy employer.

> I can see why he gets very few applicants that aren't high... anyone who's sober enough to do the math can figure out his pay is literally unsurvivable yet his competitors pay quite a bit more making them, if not survivable, at least less unsurvivable.

This is a problem with a variety of manufacturing gigs. I've seen it before, it's not a pretty situation, specially when margins are low. :-(

1: Single-payer health care. Employer health care is a huge headache for any company that wants to scale. The costs are also too high for individuals and it depresses the economy as a whole. This really should be a no-brainer.

2: Bring back the WPA. Dismantling it was one of the biggest stupid mistakes in American history. Just pay people to show up and work. It doesn't matter if a private contractor is more efficient or if the work can be done more effectively with expensive machines, just pay people to show up and work.

Here in Ithaca, NY, many of our beautiful gorge trails were built under the WPA. They have lasted for nearly 100 years, and aside from the occasional falling rock landslide, I bet they could last for 100 more.

I don't know about you, but I would be far more comfortable with the idea of starting companies if my backup plan included a state guarantee of work and health care. I may be a software developer but nobody is above picking up a shovel and doing honest work for honest pay.

I would like to see the WPA redone - we have a lot of infrastructure to work on - the American Civil Engineering Society gives the US a D+ grade on our infrastructure (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/). Since it's a public benefit, having people in public service to do that would be pretty grand.

My heart is broken by individual stories like this one, but I have a hard time sympathizing with these overwhelmingly conservative areas who lectured us "tax and spend liberals" about welfare queens and bootstraps when times were good for them. They were offered retraining and reeducation by the Clinton campaign and overwhelmingly rejected it. I'm happy to help these net-entitlement-consumers via my taxes, but their plight is hardly a priority given that they seem to have no interest in taking proactive steps to fix it.

Funny - I have much the same feelings as you, but I believe in individual guilt rather than collective.

If an individual human doesn't seek work, does lots of oxy/other drugs [1], and refuses to do work that Mexicans are happy to do, I similarly don't consider their plight a priority. I hold this view regardless of who demographically similar people voted for.

I'm curious why are your sympathies based on collectivist voting habits rather than individual behaviors. To me that's just such a strange way to view things.

[1] I recently learned that approximately half of the male leisure class take pain medication daily, and they mostly just sit around watching TV and playing video games. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...

Possibly these people don't want help and retraining from the Clinton campaign.

What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the point their labor is worth something again.

Will this happen? And if it does will they be able to step in and fill the jobs? I'm not confident but I think that's what is desired. Not government programs.

> What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the point their labor is worth something again.

No, what they want is time to rewind to where it was when they were doing well. They've been sold the lie that immigration restrictions and tariffs will achieve (or at least approximate) that.

> Will this happen?

No. In fact, rising tariffs will (indirectly) make their labor worth less.

"the lie"

debatable.

You are free to present your argument.

That is my argument.

I am skeptical that retraining solves much:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/27/512060753/episo...

It's ironic that you bring up mythology about welfare queens, while supplying something what I suspect is an equivalent myth of people being unwilling to take proactive steps to help themselves..

I hear 'retraining' brought up a lot, what does this entail? What do people get retrained in and do they want to be retrained in that thing?

The first chart is a good example of why a pie chart is usually not the correct choice for data visualization. Pie charts are usually quite hard to read, but this one is particularly bad as it has an animation looping through different years' data; it's impossible to discern the actual trends at a glance.

Much better would be a simple line graph with the trends for each series. More fancy, and perhaps a slightly better way to emphasize the narrative of the article, would be plotting the relative change from the first year (2007) for each series.

+1 I was thinking the same thing myself. Pie charts are for elementary school kids.

"Nearly half of U.S. children now have at least one parent with a criminal record." That's somewhat dystopian.

Definitely, but they keep it pretty vague. I'm assuming they're not just counting felonies, but also maybe someone who had some minor incident when they were a teenager.

I could see a lot of parents having some stupid minor on their record from when they were a bit more reckless.

Most crimes committed by minors in the US are expunged from their records when they come of age.

I believe you're slightly misreading chucknelson. I don't think he said "minor" to mean "underage", but rather "not felony". ("Minor" may have a distinct meaning from "misdemeanor", but IANAL.)

And unfortunately, teenage bad judgment doesn't automatically end on the 18th birthday...

If the crime was committed when they were 13-17, it would usually be erased when the person turns 18. And then it wouldn't show up in any studies.

They're including everything from traffic violations to felonies. I guess it wouldn't be as interesting of a statistic if they explained what it actually was.

> between 70 million and 100 million Americans, or as many as one in three American adults—have some type of criminal record. Many have been convicted of only minor offenses, such as misdemeanors—and many only have arrests that never led to a conviction.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015...

This is the source of the stat.

Traffic violations now count as "criminal record"? According to what definition of "criminal"?

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but this is so intuitively wrong that I wonder if you (or the article) is using a non-standard definition of "criminal". If not, is this a change? Has it always been defined this way?

Two thoughts:

1. I guess this is the origin of "lies, damn lies, and statistics". You can manipulate statistics to paint any picture you want, really.

2. They're probably pulling the information from the number of people who have an FBI number or an SID number. You get one of those if you've ever been so much as charged, regardless of whether or not you get convicted. Here's an example of a source that cares whether or not you even have such a number: when I legally changed my name a few years ago, my court petition had a section that said "Have you ever been charged with a Class A or B misdemeanor or a felony? [] Yes [] No. If yes -- write your FBI or SID numbers, if known: FBI #_______ SID#_______"

OK, but then my question becomes "are traffic violations class A or B misdemeanors"? IANAL, but I think that in almost all cases the answer is "no". You don't get 3 months in jail for speeding (unless there's been a total miscarriage of justice, or unless there was more involved than just the speeding).

Or you can't pay. Or you can't pay your car anymore and can't go to court.

There are two types of crimes: criminal and civil. In most states, traffic violations are covered by criminal law. This is why many forms that ask about a criminal record say 'excluding traffic violations', or something to that effect.

Even a speeding ticket?

Yes.

Kind of. Speeding tickets are generally under criminal law. However, they are in a procedural limbo where they are treated in many respects as civil. There is a concern that things like speeding cameras would not hold up under criminal law if they were significantly challenged, but to my knowledge, that has not happened at a high enough level yet.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/

> There are two types of crimes: criminal and civil.

Nope, "crimes" are by definition "criminal".

> In most states, traffic violations are covered by criminal law.

That's...complicated. Minor traffic offenses (often styled as "infractions") are treated in so.e ways as if they were crimes, but are generally not technically criminal (they neither have the kinds of penalties that require them to be crimes nor afford the procedural protections that are constitutionally required for criminal charges.)

I don't believe you are correct. Based on this article, it seems they are considering everyone with an arrest record.

https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/just-facts-many-americans...

Regardless, at some point every one of those parents was hauled before a judge by armed agents of the State and deprived of life, liberty or property. That's a psychologically scarring experience. The helplessness that one feels once in the judicial system is not something I'd wish on half of the population.

Here is the link of the report referenced in the article. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015...

Has anyone advocated, in states where the war on drugs is receding, retroactively sealing (and banning discrimination based) nonviolent drug offenders' records?

Yes, although advocacy has been much broader than that. It's generally called, "Ban the Box," (for the checkbox asking about recent felony convictions you often see on job applications).

Perhaps it would be more successful if it were more targeted. That's an interesting thought.

No, "ban the box" is not about sealing records, or even prohibiting background checks, it simply is about prohibiting "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" (which is not restricted to either recent or felony convictions) as a front-end filtering question.

It's also untrue.

One of the fun side effects of living in a country with the highest number of prisoners (by total count and per capita) in the world.

"For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them." - Thomas More

really? Surely not.

I hope not

Note one of the white elephants in the room. Ageism.

Scares the hell out of me to be frank...

Scares the hell out of me too. I think the ageism problem will eventually get solved. But my concern is will it get solved in time for me?

In the meantime, I try to think up things I can do to combat it and I pretty much completely draw blanks. I'm seriously considering exploring small bootstrapped start ups in my free time for no other reason than to hopefully have an income stream I can use should I find myself out of a job due to age.

Yeah, one of these stories is not like the others.

'“It just kills me to sit here, and not work, and have the abilities that I do,” he said. “I call it a rainy day that turned into a rainy month that turned into a rainy year.”'

He's in Buffalo (NY presumably), not exactly Smalltown. Based on the calls/callbacks he says he's getting, there are employers that are looking for people with his skills ... who are young.

I don't understand. Are those five stories suppose to be representative of today's unemployment problems?

Because if they are. We need more social programs to help these people. Not more "job creators".

Social programs don't make campaign donations.

Social programs aren't self-sustaining. You can't count on them to exist for longer than an election cycle. Setting up some businesses would make a medium-to-long term difference, and people wouldn't have to constantly worry about their benefits being cut.

Edit: I don't mean that concentrating capital and picking winners is good either. Helping individuals start their own small businesses would be better, and it would probably lead to less inequality than dumping cash into a single big "job-creating"... thing.

This is exactly right. I would also add that culturally, living on "benefits" is highly frowned upon in American society today so this probably has psychological effects on the recipients as well. Conversely, the ability to get a job and keep it is the source of much pride and admiration.

Seen from that optics, the war on drugs makes all its' sense.

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