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Comment by scruple | Hacker News Reader

> how long you have to do what?

It seemed fairly obvious from the GP: How long they have before they get laid-off and struggle to find employment in the technology industry.

> i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine

I've lived on $0 a day, seeing as I've literally been homeless and dead broke in my life, but today I have a demanding career, a spouse, children, dogs, a home, etc., and all of them are massively dependent on me.

I don't think I'm personally at-risk of losing my job today but, like the GP, I also have to regularly engage with my brain to keep my anxiety about the future of the technology industry at bay.

edit/ And that's just me, I'm a US citizen and CBP can't come deport me because my Visa expired. There are other things at stake here for a lot of people beyond the simple act of earning an income.

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Reduce expenses, save liquid cash. It's always good advice, but especially now.

Having six months of outflows liquid in a special savings account goes a long way for peace of mind.

I think OP also was concerned that our tech jobs get automated away. If that turns out true, a career change and finding a new job will take much longer than six months.

Common sense isn't.

This is an unreasonable fear. If your job can be automated, you should be out of work. If you are delivering actual value, you will always have opportunities.

Someone is still going to be doing the automating. Computers can't think.

According to the immigration lawyers I've talked to, nobody gets deported for overstaying a tech work visa.

ICE has priorities, and this is very far from being one of them.

You might not get deported, but overstaying a visa will cause you trouble if you are ever planning on getting a new visa afterwards, be it dual-intent or just to visit. Not being able to attend an on-site meeting or conference because you took "too long" to pack up and leave after having your life uprooted from one day to the next still sucks, even if it isn't as traumatizing as being raided in the middle of the night.

> I have a demanding [...] spouse

Many people can relate to that.

On a more serious note, there is not much we can do about all this, really. We neither have the complete picture nor know what hides behind the corner. So relaxing a bit (while still taking the time to learn some new skills...) is not bad advice.

We can vote. We can unionize. We can push for better healthcare, education, labor, etc., policy. The status quo is the problem here, IMO, which I believe is the source of much of the anxiety many of us experience in this era.

It speaks strongly to how hostile capitalism is to human happiness that the thought of making work easier and faster scares us.

Future benefits of technology will primarily be enjoyed by the 1% with the other 99% becoming poorer and working (hours wise) more.

Happiness cannot be measured and managers cannot manage something that cannot be measured. You see?

> Future benefits of technology will primarily be enjoyed by the 1% with the other 99% becoming poorer and working (hours wise) more.

The history of technology & capitalism is quite the reverse.

A few years back, a steamboat from the 1850s was discovered buried in the muck in the Missisoupi. Archeologists rushed to dig it up and discover what it was carrying. They had the same notion you did. They were shocked that the steamboat was not carrying luxury items at all. It was loaded to the gills with manufactured stuff for ordinary folks. Things like factory made shoes, textiles, tools, pots, pans, dishes, bottled food, nails, hardware, etc.

You see the same thing today with, for example, the iphone. That machine was made for everyone, not just the 1%. And it made Apple the richest company in the world.

Look at what wealthy tech companies make - they make stuff for ordinary people.

> That machine was made for everyone, not just the 1%.

Umm, what?

The iPhone is meant to be a status symbol, not "for everyone".

iPhone was a status symbol in 2007-2008.

iPhone is "affordable luxury" like coach handbags and other junk that targets the average consumer.

You've misunderstood my comment. I'm not talking about stuff. I'm talking about quality of life.

The next generation will have a lower quality of life than ours. They will have less wealth, they will work more, they will experience less.

I don’t know if this is true. I’m happy making a 20 year bet on some long term betting system, pick your platform and I’ll wager $20 in 2023 dollars that median wage, wealth, and quality of life will be greater in 2043.

Just looking back to 2003 compared to now and there’s so much more information and opportunity compared to 20 years ago. It’s not uniform and there are certainly some parts worse (housing) but I think that just the example of smart phones shows a huge leap of businesses and life improvements available now. I expect improvements to be available 20 years from now.

> I’ll wager $20 in 2023 dollars that median wage, wealth, and quality of life will be greater in 2043.

For who? Real wages have been falling for decades. 'Quality of life' is amorphous. Do we have a higher quality of life than people did 20 years ago? We're fatter, we have less wealth, we spend more time commuting, it's basically impossible to buy a house for most people.

I'd disagree with your assessment that we are better off than we were in 2003.

> They will have less wealth

Somebody gets to pay for this:

https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...

and it's gonna be you and me.

Capitalism is the most successful economic system ever created and is responsible for more human happiness, prosperity and health than anything else. I'm not sure where all the anti-capitalism rhetoric is coming from lately. You really think there is more human happiness in North Korea or in Russia under Stalin? Maybe read up on your history.

I can't speak for GP but: (frame of reference: I'm a political moderate and not a socialist)

I appreciate that capitalism has been better than any of its competitors in every case to date in raising living standards. There's no question.

But I still think it isn't equipped to handle automation and AI on a very large scale. If I'm right it'll become painfully obvious as soon as something approaching or close-enough to AGI appears. And the trajectory we're on seems to make that appear to be something we'll see in the 2020s rather than the 2100s or beyond as I previously thought.

If by 2029 90% of the knowledge work humans do today can be done more cheaply by a LLM, that's a tremendous shock to the system. Especially if they'll be able to start to write code efficiently and create new AI models to solve problems, we could rapidly see easier problems like self-driving cars solved in a few years. Which leaves as available human jobs "politician" (presumably robots are banned from holding office) as well as any forms of skilled and unskilled manual labor that require walking around. If computer vision etc become good enough it's not hard to conceive of a bipedal android that can do tasks like build houses, deliver packages from a truck, etc.

In this situation, the vast majority of Americans would not have "jobs" in that no business wants their labor when a machine is cheaper and better. Capitalism dictates that those 90% starve. See the problem?

Note: I'm not saying the above will come true. Just that if the technology part does come through, I'm arguing capitalism as-is simply will not work anymore. And the breakdown would hurt everyone. The wealthy won't have any consumers to sell to when all consumers are unemployed.

Capitalism works imho because of scarcity. When 'labor' isn't really scarce anymore due to AI, that is a fundamental change that is bound to totally transform the game. It's like playing Mario Bros with gravity turned to 10000% so you can't jump. The game controls and level design then no longer make sense.

That doesn't mean it's without faults that cause real harm to people.

> You really think there is more human happiness in North Korea or in Russia under Stalin? Maybe read up on your history.

I'd encourage you to read up more on current affairs! Capitalism is global. How happy do you think impoverished people in Vietnam are? How about people exposed to toxic chemicals for their entire lives?

Your understanding of capitalism is based on a 50 year blip. You should read up on your history.

Vietnam still considers itself communist, which really means corruption with some capitalism sprinkled in (how else are they going to get free money).

Capitalism is not why they are exposed to toxic chemicals as you say. It's the corruption...which won't be solved if we are using some other system.

I lived in Vietnam for a couple of years, very recently. I could drive around with no license and pay police officers some cash if I got caught. Sometimes they would shake people down when they were low on money, especially around Chinese new year. This was also in a big city.

I also wonder what your alternative would be? Your post reads like you are in the antiwork subreddit. Most people have this romanticized view of communism and socialism that we will somehow have exactly what we have now, but you won't have to work (or you will be given a home by the government).

It's funny how many people fight so hard to have someone else pay their bills.

>Capitalism is not why they are exposed to toxic chemicals as you say. It's the corruption...which won't be solved if we are using some other system

It's not corruption. It's capitalism. Who do you think funds the corruption in Vietnam? Don't look to closely at Nike or Apple's connections in SE Asia.

Vietnam was just an example. Capitalism firms expose billions of people all over the world to unsafe conditions to maximize profit, even in the United States and Europe.

> Your post reads like you are in the antiwork subreddit.

Your post reads like every conservative in existance. It's not capitalism's fault! It's just everything that exists in a capitalist system!

>Most people have this romanticized view of communism and socialism that we will somehow have exactly what we have now, but you won't have to work (or you will be given a home by the government).

I'm not sure why you are rambling about communism or socialism. You understand that there are a lot of economic and societal theories in the world. You don't have to buy into binary narratives.

>It's funny how many people fight so hard to have someone else pay their bills.

It's funny how many privileged people refuse to acknowledge the huge amount of human suffering caused by capitalism.

Right. Only blame Nike. Not the terrible governments that allow such conditions. Governments have the ultimate power. They can use the military or put people in prison.

If you look at Vietnam before capitalism and after. It's a big difference. But I don't think you care about this.

Why do you think children have to work in these countries? If not for companies like Nike, they would have nothing and no ability to feed their family because of the government in power.

You are the privileged one. Not understanding actual human suffering.

All systems contain human suffering. Capitalism allows for actual freedom.

You still haven't given me an example of a better system.

> Capitalism is the most successful economic system ever created and is responsible for more human happiness, prosperity and health than anything else.

Fun fact: "The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")" [0]

Both Blanc and Proudhon were socialists.

Further more, I would argue that kindness and sexual intercourse have been responsible for more human happiness than our current economic system, although it's possible that by "everything else" you meant "any other economic system", in which case maybe you would have a point, with the caveat that perhaps more primitive economies (your stereotypical 'merry band of hunter gatherers') would have, on average, healthier and happier inhabitants.

Or that 'socialist' Danes tend to be much happier than 'capitalist' Americans.

Or that with the regulatory capture of most industries by big company lobbying, our current economic system would more correctly be described as corporatism, where the means of production are owned not by individuals but by corporations.

And you could also argue that the North Korea/USSR were less happy than Western countries due to democratic, liberal governments being nicer than authoritarian ones.

^_^

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

Yet capitalism is responsible for the greatest elimination of poverty in human history (comparing people in extreme poverty 50 years ago until today).

I think it’s a transitional economic force though. Like it works for getting super poor, super inefficient systems up to moderate and then starts scooping up and concentrating.

I feel like being able to complain about capitalism is a luxury created by capitalism and people who are too poor complain about other things (like starving to death). Similarly to the shift from dying from infectious disease to dying from chronic disease due to eliminating or reducing preventable disease. It’s not that vaccines cause cancer and diabetes, it’s that vaccines stop people dying earlier of vaccine preventable diseases.

IMHO, a union would make a big difference here. I get that the "future of the economy is uncertain", it also strikes me as unreasonable that every time the stock market moves around I have to worry about losing my job.

> Amazon is undergoing the largest layoffs in company history after it went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.

I think the root cause is one layer of abstraction away from the stock market: the federal reserve. It's federal reserve policy, primarily interest rates, that drive these boom and bust cycles. The stock market/companies are just riding the wave.

Sure, the last few years are an extreme example. But I don't believe it's just the Fed, there are other factors at play.

I've only been old/educated enough to follow it since around 2000, and there's been a direct correlation between fed policy and the markets. After 9/11 they dropped rates which created the housing bubble, then when they tried to raise interest rates the housing bubble popped in 2008, so they lowered rates again. We've been at near 0 percent interest for years, creating the current bubble/inflation. They are now putting downward pressure on the money supply which is causing the banks to crash, housing is not far behind, etc.

This isn't to suggest there's no other factors, but monetary policy is a major driving force in the boom/bust cycle.

Unionization didn't really help in the heavily unionized rust belt when the jobs went overseas.

offshoring labor is the companies' answer to unionization.

Why would a company entertain demands of Spoiled Tech Dudes Union, whose work can be performed by people overseas equipped with ChatGPT for a fraction of cost?

This could be not too distant the future, if IT workers decide to unionize

Unions can improve pay and conditions, they can't really do anything about market forces.

Here in the UK the unions are medium-strong and haven't prevented self checkouts, ticket sellers being replaced with machines, etc.

What you need is strong labor laws. A universal three or six month notice period in favour of the employee would do wonders to prevent overhiring and overfiring.

Telling how the supporting comments on this subthread were downvoted so thoroughly. Even as tech workers are finally having the jackboot of American hypercapitalism pressed against their own throats they defend the neoliberal model. It’s really pathetic, but most are so thoroughly politically illiterate that I can’t [totally] blame them, even though they built their own bubbles in many cases.

> The jackboot of hypercapitalism pressed against their own throats…

Tech workers are the most privileged class of workers in the whole world. No one will take you seriously when you say these things. Also the metaphor doesn’t make sense. I wish we could keep this Reddit style, front page politics off our tech website.

>Tech workers are the most privileged class of workers in the whole world

Which is why it only takes a layoff or threat of layoff for many of them to feel like the world is ending. Not to minimize the impact that a layoff can have on someone.

HN is not just a "tech website". Never has been. You seem to not understand what hacker means.

This is a website that caters to tech workers; how exactly do you propose to keep politics involving tech workers out of a discussion site filled with tech workers talking about things in the tech worker industry? It's impossible.

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