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Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

Man, fuck this world.

Go into a STEM job? Well, maybe you'll get hired, maybe you won't, you have to hope that you picked an area that was hot 4 years ahead of time and that the people managing recruitment don't have their heads up their asses. Also you need to hope that any company isn't already in the process of globalizing or outsourcing said STEM jobs because they can do those cheaper elsewhere (see IBM story yesterday).

And if you didn't go into STEM, well, fuck you because STEM is the only college that's any good by 95% of all accounts.

And if you didn't go into college, then fuck you because you're going to do back-breaking labor with no guarantee of financial security.

Something's gotta change or things are going to be grim. They're already getting grim.

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Things have always been grim. The crows are just coming home to roost in America. Why do you think so many Indians and Chinese people are doctors or engineers? Fear. It is not about competence. It is not about passion. It is the fear that drives them. Because life is hard there without a safety net. A life where health care has to be paid for out of pocket. A life where your daughter's marriage requires piles of money.

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it”

What is the solution? I don't know. The future is going to belong to people who refuse to let themselves be nothing. It is not going to be about STEM jobs, math or science or art. The future is something you are going to have to find. Or become irrelevant. Scary, but sometimes that fear is useful.

> Because life is hard there without a safety net.

As opposed to the US, where the safety net is so ample and awesome and...

...oh wait. Nevermind.

If I get hit by a car here, I can ER treatment. In India, a person can spend precious minutes on clogged roads while hospitals turn that person away just because they don't deal with the fucking paperwork of dealing with a dead body.

Yes, your situation here is awful too. But that is only a taste of the hell hole that exists out there. There is a reason that immigrants still come to these shores. It is because the hell here is paradise compared to the hell out there.

I am actually an immigrant, so I feel I'm quite informed as to the existing differences, thank you. Currently, the biggest debate I have with myself is whether I should go back, or not. It's best for the present moment that I stay here. It's best for the future that I leave. Decisions, decisions...

An immigrant from what country?

I am asking because HN comments by people who have lived in the US and in another country are the best way I have found to learn about countries outside the US.

USA is probably the only place in the world where a car accident may do less long-term damage to quality of life than the ER bill for that accident.

In all of the "first world" and many of the "third world" ER is actually quite okay, and all of them will fix noncritical damage pretty much equally good, in EU probably even better than USA. But only in USA it carries a risk to be billed with something moderately comparable to an annual salary.

Exactly.

>Things have always been grim. The crows are just coming home to roost in America. Why do you think so many Indians and Chinese people are doctors or engineers?

I think the crows are coming home to roost for America in more ways then one. It isn't just the choices we make, but our very ideology that is devouring us (so to speak). We believe in the free market and competition. We're capitalists. We used to be capitalists mostly within our own borders. Now technology has transformed our chains of distribution and communication to the point where we're capitalists with no borders. Globalization is here, intensifying, and our religion of capitalism has won converts the globe over.

It isn't that Indians and Chinese are choosing more lucrative career paths (working with your assumption there, -I'm not sure myself), -they've also got the fastest growing middle class on the globe. That's not because they are doctors and engineers. They've got what were our manufacturing jobs too. This is the logical outcome of what we preach as a country.

As long as you aren't too nationalistic, it looks like a good thing as wages continually shift and flow to the cheapest labor pools on the planet, lifting those people up, but that's really overly simplistic. What concerns me is the gap between the richest and the poor and middle class. In America it's growing, but it's a concern anywhere on Earth if it gets too large.

Hold on ...

Life in India and China for the middle class isn't as bad as your comment makes it out to be (perhaps unintentionally). Human beings have an amazing ability to adapt. Health care and other costs in many developing countries aren't totally insane. The big difference is hope for progress - the middle class is growing in many developing countries. Also, people have a support network that would seem surprising to a westerner. E.g. the joint family system.

This message has affected me emotionally. I don't know why. Something about the urgency of it, and the humanity.

I suppose my guess is that something will grow organically out of what we have. I don't think it will be ideological.

One example might be localization. If Amazon is subject to the same taxes as a brick and mortar business, it might become less important and local businesses more important.

If not, we're all going to end up in the Army. See you in the cybercorps!

Being a laborer is always going to be a tenuous existence. Owning capital is what buys you security. In a future where everything is automated and produced by robots, the only existence that isn't tenuous will be for people who own those robots.

I'm probably right of center, but you don't have to be a leftist to realize that Marx had great insight into the relationship between labor and capital, an insight that will be crucial to understanding how society will evolve as the necessity for labor is automated-away.

> crucial to understanding how society will evolve as the > necessity for labor is automated-away

People have been worried about the necessity for labor being automated away for centuries. Do you really think that this time it's different?

I'm always pretty skeptical of that kind of argument, though in this case I do have some uncertainty.

I think the key difference is that an automated loom replaced one kind of worker, while robots and computers can replace workers across the economy. It's your judgment call whether that's a qualitative difference or just a quantitative one.

But surely the kind of robots that pack boxes at amazon won't be the same kind that build Teslas.

Just like the kind of machine that wove cloth isn't the same kind of machine that forms plywood.

Just like the kind of software that checks my taxes won't be the same as the code that reads my MRI looking for cancer.

I'm not sure if the difference you describe fully explains what we might see.

> Owning capital is what buys you security.

Owning profitable capital buys you security, but that's basically a tautology. Plenty of people invest heavily in means of production and fail. In fact, the risk of investing in capital is almost certainly much greater than the risk of just trading your labor for a paycheck.

Also you need to hope that any company isn't already in the process of globalizing or outsourcing said STEM jobs because they can do those cheaper elsewhere

Yeah, man, fuck them for giving jobs to poorer people!

How dare companies only hire workers that they believe provide utility and could lead to increased profit?

You're missing the point: by dehumanizing workers to achieve the most profit you're making them a disposable commodity and denying large swaths of the population the means to provide for themselves.

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