I used to do consulting in banks. I met several Cobol programmers. However, they thought of their role as CICS programmers. CICS is a mainframe transaction management tool. All of them also did assembly in CICS.
Not forever, but longer than anyone who is already able to qualify for a mortgage can wait. It will go on until baby boomers start dying in large numbers. That won't happen until the mid 2030s. By 2050 housing will be a buyer's market.
I had an OLPC. My children liked the apps, but struggled with the keyboard because they kept fat fingering the keys. They were little at the time, younger than the target audience. I can't imagine bigger hands trying to type on that keyboard.
I agree, there is no way to raise a new round with an ex-employee owning 45%. At best, new investors will convert the equity to a note that limits the upside in dollars.
If you're in the bay area, the Redwood City airport was near what is now the 101/Woodside Road interchange; the section of Woodside Road between El Camino and 101 wasn't built until the late 1950s. The airport's runway ran from the Redwood City municipal yard, across Woodside Road, through the post office, towards Summit High School. The offices were roughly near the Denny's.
The big reason to get a ghost writer is because writing books is easy, editing them is hard. Amazon's search algorithm dings books for every little grammar, wording, and punctuation error. Unless you were an English major, you will spend 75% of your time getting every sentence perfect. Hiring someone to edit costs about the same as hiring someone to write.
We will never know because they aren't going to stop raining money. Specific stocks, bonds, cryptos, properties, and currencies will go down, some to zero, but, the sum of all assets will keep going up for a very long time.
Sounds like allot of jobs, low pay, no real responsibility, no future. But how to get a job like that:
Lately, I see allot of jobs where the title is "engineer", but role is actually tier 3 support, because all the real engineering is done offshore. The only requirement for those jobs is to speak English reasonably well, and have your two feet in the USA.
Assuming that neither FTL travel nor communication are possible, and that other intelligent species have life times similar in length to ours (ok, maybe twice as long as ours), how does a society spanning dozens of light years work? It would take more than a generation for information, never mind things, to get from one end of the bubble to the other. How would culture work? How would the economy work? Is it really the same society at both ends of the bubble?
Inflation won't be a problem for a long time. There is allot of slack in the labor market. The article states there are about 10 million people in the UK who would like a new job. That is a small fraction of the hundreds of millions in the rest of world who are looking for work. Until a nearly all of them have a good job, wages will stay low. Eventually there will be more jobs than people who want them, in 50 years or so. Our current monetary system won't work in that world, but I will be too old to care.
Anything that is marketed as a collectable is not a good investment. The thing must have some other use, a use that causes some (hopefully most) of them to be damaged or destroyed. The one exception to this seems to be sports trading cards, because, as the article says, there are only so many rookies every year. And even fewer who become superstars.
Closer: A few aliens arrive, look around, decide it is too hard to live here, then go home. But, they leave behind viruses that reduce the population by 90%. 100 years later, aliens come back in much larger numbers, this time to stay. At that point they offer the alloy.
What I see around silicon valley is that rent is down allot, condos and attached house are down a little. But asking prices for single family houses are still rising. And the good ones are still getting multiple offers over the asking price. There is plenty of tear down and build a bigger house going on, too, which drives up prices even faster by reducing the supply of smaller houses.
>> an increase in labor supply due to women entering the labor force
If you were born before between 1935 and 1955, this might have affected your career progression. Maybe. Because the more workers meant a bigger economy and therefore more jobs overall. If you were born before 1925 or after 1975, it had zero effect.
TSLA owns all its dealerships, distributors, and importers. It is more vertically integrated, designing and manufacturing more of their own parts. What is the sum of the business value of all the traditional automakers dealers, distributors, importers, parts companies, etc? I'll bet its in the trillions. Now, that said, I would not buy TSLA stock at its current price
I read something once from Warren Buffett, that for any job, a person needs enough IQ to do it, but more doesn't help, and too much more hurts. And for nearly all jobs that involve working with other people, (including investing), an IQ of 120 is enough. That agrees with the correlation between IQ and income breaking down as IQ increases.
She is very right that the tech job market changed in 2001. I have a former coworker who lost his job in 2017. He had not been in the job market since 1995. He was shocked how things had changed. His direct quote: "It used to be easy to find a tech job. Now it is hard. I couldn't understand why in the last few years I was able to hire people who I thought were over-qualified. But I now see that I'm under-qualified".
It's not illegal to have two jobs, but usually for a FTE salaried job, you employment agreement says must tell your employer about any other jobs you have, including part time and hourly. A big reason why companies don't want you to have another tech job is that you might not really being doing either job, you outsource one or both of them. That breaks confidentiality laws when you give your subcontractor access to documents, data, source code, names of your coworkers, etc.
Health care. The actuarial cost of gold or platinum health plan for a 25 year old single man is about $600 per month. The cost for a couple in their 50's, with two college age children, is about $3,000 per month.
Sitting around the house playing video games and watching netflix all day makes teenagers happier than going to school, getting some exercise and having a job? What a revelation.
The small city I live in is paying people's rent to avoid having small landlords go bankrupt. Because bankruptcy owned buildings can stay vacant for years, while the courts figure out who gets what. All that time, no property taxes are paid.
Gold goes up when interest rates go down. The interest rate on gold is always negative - there is cost to storing it. But usually you can find someone who will pay interest on dollars. So there is a cost to holding gold over dollars, the lost interest plus the storage cost. Right now that number is close to zero. It may become negative, that is, cheaper to store gold than hold dollars. That's why gold is going up.
I've posted this before on HN: Tech interviews are designed to find people who are happy in a role where their level of responsibility begins and ends at: "Here's your coding assignment. Go do it". The interviews are designed to eliminate people looking to get in the door, then quickly move into or up to a non-coding position.
I have two children in college. One college announced a similar plan, half of students on campus at a time. If the plan is followed through, then, the class of 2022 will spend 17 straight months on campus, from January 2021 until graduation in May 2022. The college held an online question and answer for parents. The question of burn out for the class of 2022 came up. The school president's answer was: That's a problem we would love to have. Basically, the school thinks there will be several more complete shutdowns over the next few years.
Server side javascript didn't catch on the first time around because you couldn't create threads. Because in the early 2000's, all technical interviews asked about Java style multi-threading. At some companies, the first round of technical interviews was a very, very detailed discussion about the Java threading model. If you didn't pass, you didn't get to round two. So everybody wanted to use threads.