Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?
Now we’re expected to become “one of the top ten”... what exactly? How is that supposed to work? What about those of us with families for goodness sake. We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.
"These figurative "low-hanging fruit" from the title include the cultivation of much free, previously unused land; the application and spread of technological breakthroughs, particularly during the period 1880–1940, including transport, refrigeration, electricity, mass communications, and sanitation; and the education of large numbers of smart people who previously received none."[0]
The party is over. Americans are at the top but they aren't getting any higher, and everyone else in the world is catching up. That means Americans have to compete with the rest of global middle class.
> We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.
If it's true that America really is that way, my advice is look abroad because life is not about your job.
But I'd posit that salaries are not a zero-sum game, in the microcosm or the macrocosm.
Within a company each department head likely gets a certain amount of raises to distribute within their department, maybe enough to give most people X%, but also enough to give 2 or three 1.5X%. The company itself has a limited amount it can spend on labor costs.
Within a country there is the monetary supply. There is approximately $1.5 trillion physical currency in circulation. That equates to about $5k per person. Yes there is money that is not backed by physical currency, but the more of that you create (or the more physical currency you create) the higher inflation goes. If we want UBI then we need to back it with something. The Saudis backed it with their annual oil profits, Alaskans the same, and the Norwegians straight out created an investment fund from oil surplus profits. Getting to a workable UBI is not going to be a stopgap fix, and will likely take around 50 years to implement correctly.
It's doable from a technical perspective, in a number of ways. I worry about the political perspective. Our parties are divisive and one party can tear down any of the works of a past administration. So what is to prevent the UBI investment fund being repurposed, similar to Social Security's outcome.
Nope.
What is going on here is the person from India gets to now enjoy a much higher quality of life (because 50% of a U.S. salary gets you a lot in India) while the person from California sees their effective take home pay decrease (because their costs continue to grow but not their salary)
Definitely not a race to the bottom but it sucks to be the person from California.
globalization is happening whether we want it to or not.
> we shouldn't protect our interests
I made no comments either way.
... but, sure, let's think about this.
If you were to pass rules and regulations to stop globalization from happening, what would the top 3 be?
Rule 1: International trade deals forbid offshoring of manufacturing. Example, cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price. This is universal and enforceable by dissolution of companies that don't comply.
Rule 2: Stringent regulations to prevent Tax and location based gaming of Rule 1. Ford doesn't get to pay taxes in Tahiti, incorporate a mailbox in Mexico so they can make their cars there, but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.
Rule 3: Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies, importantly those companies will be competing in similar regions. It's not like AWS and Amazon. It's like two Amazons. I'm sure figuring out the codebase and IP will make many jobs for lawyers and engineers. Maybe less for the MBA's.
EDIT: For rule 3 I forgot to add that the break up forces innovation as similar companies are competing now in the same market. It's an engine of growth built into the system.
This is the broken window fallacy.
Sure, but then the buyers of said cars from Ford has to pay the premium.
The heavy growth of Amazon, Walmart has proven that the U.S. customer does not care about well paid workers, their benefits or their health - why would they agree to pay more for cars?
> but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.
Fair enough. This point is basically Ford gaming the system by taking more out (take advantage of US infrastructure) than what they put in (taxes, local worker compensation)
> Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies
You and I can do this already.
You and I can get together today and force Google or Amazon to be broken up.
However, a broken up Google or Amazon is more powerful than Google or Amazon itself.
There's a practical limit to how expensive a share can get before majority can't afford it anymore. "NYSE: BRK.A" is not the norm, it's an exception. If BRK split itself up, they would, overnight, become way more valuable.
Google has already broken itself up because of this.
The only reason Bezos has not broken Amazon up is because its tremendously profitable AWS and Amazon's North American retail operations allows it to fund and offset the not so profitable (yet) international retail businesses.
Once those are profitable, Bezos will happily break them up before you or I get to it.
Regulations never help.
It cannot. It can, at best, move issues around.
The day we regulated minimum wage, we removed the only tool an unemployed, untrained but happy-to-be-employed-if-possible person had to entice an employer.
When given a choice between an unemployed, but trained person vs. an unemployed, untrained person both at minimum wage, I know who to choose every time. The unemployed, untrained person cannot even get on unemployment!
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Another way of thinking of this: can you be considered top 10 within a pool of 100 applicants?
Also, who is "top ten" is extremely subjective, based on the company, who is evaluating, and niche. I would guess that within a 100 developer cohort there's not a lot of overlap between the top ten embedded c++ developers and the top ten react developers, and even the top ten that can do both c++ AND react.
> Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?
That doesn't sound very interesting.
At the same time, there are plenty of jobs (in the USA) you could do 16 hrs a day and still not make enough money to provide for your basic needs.
I don't think people have to be top ten or something like that to be useful, but being a meat-based robot is hardly compelling for either side anymore. You need to have at least some skill and you need to make sure you keep developing as the world around you also develops. With human expansion the rate of change itself has changed, and not even a luddite would be unaffected by that.