Per source:
“ The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources and method of calculation.”
https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
In my experience “Go to person” in a mature product has 2 stages:
(1) person who performs somewhat repetitive jobs
(2) person who is trusted to own projects in a given area
Being able to get rid of (1), either through automation or delegation, allows you to go to (2). If you’re stuck on (1) for too long, it’s better to leave.
Mid level engineers will come from building something like GitHub, Netflix or Gmail over the weekend using powerful AI. The skills of current senior engineers will be much easier to gain since the feedback loop for software architecture and design will be down to hours instead of quarters.
Being able to architect massive software systems well, will be expected from a new graduates.
The role of junior software developers will not be needed, just as we don’t need people doing multiplication by hand.
This seems the likely end result. We'll always need SWEs, of course, but gone will be the days of entire dev teams working toward a common product.
I suspect SWE may trend toward other ailing fields like law with individual devs working on entire 'cases' and it being very competitive; rather than the recent "20min Js tutorial on YT to SF startup" industry.
Senior developer aren't senior because they can type code very fast. They are senior because they can take on responsibilities and make decisions. A junior that types code very fast is a junior that types code very fast.
The key here is what are you taking responsibilities and decisions for. Senior engineers take decisions which consequences will be apparent in a year or two. If productivity increases to the point where features that take months to deliver take days, the decisions made _currently_ by senior engineers can be taken by fresh graduates.
There’re still going to be senior roles, but their scope will be much bigger and expertise sought will be different than what senior engineers do currently. No one will hire a senior engineer just because they can architect and deliver a scalable SaaS product on a short timeline.
Engineers who learn and adapt
will be fine. Engineers who dropped learning the moment they graduated from college… not so much.
People don’t buy stuff in bitcoin because of the high transaction costs, and low adoption in points of sale. If you believe that bitcoin price will go up in the future, you would buy bitcoin instead of pizza using dollars.
Isn’t it illegal to use DNA data for purposes of health insurance? How would insurance company be able to use it?
Companies like kaiser run both hospitals and insurance, yet they can’t use your full medical history when determining your insurance risk.
The bigger issue imho is companies using biometrics as a secure authentication, but at least in USA that’s going to be no worse than SSN mess.
Legislation is sensible and in larger insurers this promise will probably be kept. But if the info is available, people will look it up. Long time disease risk is interesting to many people.
If you leave your door open, people are still not allowed to steal you things. Do you leave your door open?
I disagree on the housing point. With basic income, people who can’t afford housing in expensive areas would move to towns with cheap housing/land but less lucrative/efficient work. There’s no housing shortage in rural areas.
I have lived in areas that were gentrifying. Everyone knew that rents were going up and would continue to go up, but few were willing to leave. People with small nest eggs preferred to blow it on higher rents than invest it in relocation. The general attitude I saw was 'I have a right to live here so I will, even if I can no longer afford it.'
Not only that but people have an emotional investment; "This is my home", "All my family lives here", "It's all I've ever known", etc. Moving to someplace cheaper may not be an improvement overall. Financially maybe, but what's that worth if all your friends live across the state, or you can't just hop into a nearby pub (if that's your thing) like you used to, or you have to drive for an hour to get to work instead of a 15 minute bike ride?
Because moving to places with lower cost of living, to speak extremely broadly of course, means less income compared to cost of living, meaning a lower standard of living. But with a guaranteed income, a lower cost of living would always mean a benefit to standard of living.
This is true in theory but not in practice in my experience. I presently live in one of the bottom 5 states in terms of population density and there are multiple manufacturing plants that require no experience, are paying 60k+ for new hires, and are in extremely low COL areas. By the way, they can't find enough people to apply and are having to aggressively advertise to fill entry-level spots. I think the issue is more information asymmetry. If people knew the jobs existed and knew what they paid I'm sure at least some % would be willing to move, but no one discloses that out of that gate, unfortunately.
People are not exclusively driven by economics, nor are they immune to economics. For a lot of people, moving to a place with lower COL would mean giving up community and family in their high COL areas. Those networks provide a lot of security that doesn't appear on the books.
These are quality of life trade-offs that are different for everyone.
Of course, the younger or more flexible you are, areas like yours might be a good opportunity, but it's not a obvious win for every entry level job aspirant.
I think the other problem is what happens next. Without the nexus of a city you are stuck at that place or the 4 or 5 similiar places. Good or bad variety can offer more.
Because moving itself is expensive, and you can't just move and automatically have a new job. With basic income, you can afford to move, and don't have to worry too much about the time you'll spend looking for a new job.
If they like their current house they'll work hard to pay for it.
If they can't find a job or don't like their current home that much they can use their UBI to move and make room for a more productive citizen to move into the city. This makes the allocation of housing more efficient.
Because relocating requires a tremendous effort: new housing, job, occupation, acquaintances, etc.
Because a lot of that cheap land is cheap for a reason: low/no data service, harsh weather, insufficient community.
Because "basic income" is free: the whole point of UBI is a basic income which one can get by on - non-zero effort to work at all withers against the prospect of being comfortable doing nothing; there is no imperative incentive to work.
Rural areas are expensive, but heavily subsidized, from roads to Telecom and other utilities. This is only reasonable now because we need people out there growing food. It's crazy to spend money on moving people to the prairie instead of just building more housing in cities where people want to be.
I think social mobility from poverty to middle class is more relevant to most people than mobility from millionaire to billionaire class. According to The Global Social Mobility Report 2020 [1] South Korea has higher level of social mobility than United States.
As a metric, "social mobility" does not mean what most people intuit it means. Someone who, in real PPP terms from the same base, doubles their income may be wildly "socially mobile" in one country and not in the other, even though their absolute outcome is identical. This is because it is a function of income distribution which varies widely and is partly a function of country size.
Many people who are "socially mobile" in a country with compressed income ranges, like Denmark, will be objectively worse off economically (PPP) than many people who are not "socially mobile" in a country with wide income ranges, like the US. Income distributions need to be similar for social mobility comparisons.
Most people readily prefer a "non-socially mobile" increase in income if it is greater in absolute PPP terms than smaller "socially mobile" income increases. In these comparison cases, which are not uncommon, there is literally no benefit to being "socially mobile" in a country with compressed income ranges.
> The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history.
That’s a reach. Global interconnected private enterprise was widespread before both ww1 and ww2. We haven’t had a war between major global powers after ww2 because of MAD and Pax Americana.
That depends on your relative definition of "widespread." Was globalization widespread in 1919 compared to 1819? Absolutely.
But the globalization of our collective economies in 2019 is dramatically higher than it was in 1919.
Also, how was the US able to fund the massive buildup of arms and the Manhattan Project...which ultimately led to Pax Americana and MAD? By taxing the massive wealth generated by private enterprise.
Warfare is down even between nations who wouldn't fall under the definition of MAD (no nuclear weapons programs). How do you explain that if not for the aligned incentives created by a global economy?
This is a completely backwards and incorrect perspective on history. Funds from taxing private enterprises were not what funded the war and the postwar boom; on the contrary massive Government deficit spending sustained both the war and the postwar economic boom.
On the contrary, the idea the US government created this money from nothing is the backwards perspective. How does government deficit spending happen? Via the sale of debt (ie. Treasury bonds).
The reason people are willing to buy US government debt is because they are confident the US government will be able to pay them back, with interest. Why are people confident in the US government's ability to pay...and where does this money come from? The strength of the growing US economy and the money the government will derive from taxes on this growth.
Or conversely, let's look at what the US government spent that money on: supplying the war machine via US industrial capacity. That industrial capacity wasn't created out of thin air. Take a look at Detroit for example. Absent the existing industrial capacity enabled by the automotive industry, the allies would likely have not won the war.
Both the ability of the US government to deficit spend, and the things they spent that money on, were a direct result of the strength of the US's private enterprise.
There is absolutely nothing about private enterprise that enabled deficit spending or confidence in US’s future. The War Department collaborated very closely to retool existing industries and also help create entirely new ones by sharing technology and designs with the private contractors; it could have simply nationalized them and there would literally be 0 change in confidence in US treasury bonds. Fundamentally, the distinction on how you choose to organize your means of production doesn’t really matter all that much, and certainly doesn’t matter as much as you seem to believe.
The fact that USSR was able to ramp up its industrial output, maybe not as high as USA but much higher than most other countries, refutes your point that private enterprise was not really needed for war effort. Because USSR, due to communism, had no private industry.
If you include the millions who died in various famines as well as those that were executed directly by Stalin, the number of victims of the USSR has been estimated to be anywhere between 6 and 15 million people.
The Soviet Union has to be the worst counterpoint to anybody arguing against private enterprise.
When valve picked up dota, league of legends was the most played multiplayer pc game in the world. I think it’s more likely that valve was afraid of exodus of pc gamers from their platform.
A bit of both. A group of people in Valve did become fascinated by Dota, though IIRC the leading figure was Robin Walker (of Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2 fame). That's why TF2 started sprouting MOBA-influenced weapons, for instance. But at the same time the business case for adopting Dota must have been quite clear, and surely was discussed seriously. (Valve also had plenty of experience in successfully bringing other people's existing games or mods in-house: TF and CS, Portal and Left 4 Dead.) Meanwhile Blizzard apparently continued to refuse all offers from the Dota developers.
There’s an arbitrary line between handshake and battery, yet most people and the law system can see the difference.
Claiming there’s no qualitative difference between someone giving $100 dollar to their child as a birthday gift, and inheritance of billion dollars, seems like a weak argument.
Then it should be obvious, no? Is $1 million ok? That’s a small single family home in Palo Alto in disrepair.
So how about $5 mil? Nice larger lot home in Palo Alto that some dying parents bought in 1940. Not even retirement money in the bay but could be middle class retirement in Alaska.
Where is your “obvious” line? Your handshake/battery analogy is shitty because it involves a victim and medical/first responder reports.
We’re talking about setting some line where we feel as a society it’s morally ok to start taking money that has already been taxed strictly based on “that seems excessive” without any logical criteria.
