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bearishgurl
Participant[quote=no_such_reality]Your too busy pontificating from the chip on your shoulder to realize you’re not even part of the same discussion the rest of us are having.[/quote]
Sorry you feel that way. Unlike you, I just don’t feel all these “labor jobs” are going anywhere.
Participant[quote=Blogstar][quote=all][quote=Blogstar]del[/quote]
You are missing CTRL+ALT.[/quote]
Thanks.BG, you could be missing something because you are making a lot of assumptions…it’s that simple. Not to say I have a crystal ball.[/quote]
The only “assumptions” I have made here is that the US far northern, mountainous and coastal residents will continue to need (and purchase) the food and gas which is grown and produced in the nation’s midsection. And long-haul trucking companies and the railroads will continue to carry it all to its destinations.
These things aren’t going to change in our lifetimes, IMO.
Participant[quote=no_such_reality]This is from Mother Jones
The good job they’re referencing here is equivalent to about $37K with benefits.
You may notice down trends that started in 2000 for College educated. I suspect those lines will begin to look like high school lines over the next thirty years unless we make fundamental changes or advances. That percentage is the percentage of that group of workers. i.e. ~20% of the some college work force have good jobs.
In aggregate, the rate is about 25%.[/quote]
$37K annually will go a l-o-o-ong way in a lot of US markets. And with or w/o benefits, a $37K salary will qualify an individual for a small healthcare subsidy and a family for a huge healthcare subsidy to sign up on their state’s exchange.
Even $24-$27K job for ONE household member will allow a family of 2-4 to rent a 2-3 bdrm house, condo or apt (without rental assistance) in many US markets (and perhaps still qualify for SNAP/EBT). And at that income level, they can qualify for “free” healthcare.
Your Mother Jones chart doesn’t specify if the “college or more” line represents ALL persons who attended college or trade school at one point or only the college graduates.
If only 25% of the college-educated of working age have “good” jobs (jobs paying $37K + benefits?), then we, as a nation, have to ask ourselves if college is actually worth the money for the masses OR if the fault of underemployment is due to a former student’s “unemployable” major (on a case-by-case basis).
I suspect it is due to the latter, combined with a refusal to relocate for a good job.
Participant[quote=SD Realtor]nsr stop slamming your head against the wall and the headache will go away.[/quote]
SDR, sorry to hear you now have a headache but you still haven’t told us if you would prefer your late-paying out-of-state tenant apply for and collect all the aid she is qualified for so she can pay your rent in a more timely manner :=]
Participant[quote=no_such_reality]Didn’t you just describe family dynamic, environment and support?[/quote]
If that includes good, geographically-available jobs, yes.
ParticipantI think the fear of the American poor rioting (and threatening the “haves”) is being trumped up just a bit here.
I fundamentally believe that most of those EBT/SNAP patrons of the cleaned-out Louisiana Walmart WOULD take a decent FT job if offered to them.
This little experiment was borne out of massive numbers of Hurricane Katrina victims successfully resettled in the Houston, TX area, and also in the states of NE and MN (both completely antithetical to their culture). All except the senior citizens went on to complete their job training or educations and/or take FT or PT jobs to support their families.
There wasn’t much difference, if any, in the “family dynamics” of those hurricane victims and today’s LA residents standing in line to “overcharge” their EBT cards at Walmart.
The state of LA has never had nearly enough jobs of any kind to offer their resident citizenry. Much of the state is not even buildable due its high water table and swampland. The LA residents who never left after Katrina stayed for two reasons:
1) They had a home on higher ground or a relative’s home on higher ground to move into; or
2) their damaged homes were still habitable AND they were able to get enough in insurance proceeds to repair their homes and move back in.
Even though Shreveport (where the recent EBT “shopping spree” took place) is a different area than New Orleans, the culture is the same. I’m speaking here of food, family customs and religion. It is very hard for longtime residents to just pick up and leave, especially senior citizens. This particular culture is present only in the state of LA and cannot be duplicated anywhere else.
If it’s any consolation, the mammoth Walmart corporation got stuck with the tab because they did not adhere to LA Dept of Children and Family Services rules:
Two Walmart stores in Louisiana will have to foot the bill for unauthorized purchases made by food stamp recipients who went on a wild shopping spree after a glitch in the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) system gave them unlimited spending power for two hours, according to state officials.
In an ABC News report, Trey Williams, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, said retailers who chose not to adhere to emergency procedures limiting sales up-to $50 per cardholder during an emergency would be responsible for any additional amount spent over eligible benefit balances…
And Mississippi, where the “riots” happened due to EBT glitches, is the poorest state in the nation. Again due to the dearth of good jobs available there for its residents. If you take a lot of those residents, put them in a u-haul and relocate them, you might be surprised to see that a lot of them are gainfully employed within months.
Participant[quote=CDMA ENG]I think everyone here, with a rare few, understands the problem.
As the reduction of labor, and by extension people, continues due to automation, and other such things, it makes me wonder what will be the drivers for population reduction.
And reduction is the key issue here for a greater disturbution of wealth, education, and social well-being…
SDDuuuude once showed me a study showing that most likely it would be the price of resources.
China is trying to be proactive with a “One Child Policy”.
MISH thinks it will be war…
One could argue that it would probably be a combination of the first and the third but either way the demand for physical… and intellectual labor (though disportantionly physical) is disappearing and unless something is address proactively then the third option is mostly likely…
Fortunately we, as a country, are very good at the third… that does not mean I condone it.
CE[/quote]
Are the rest of the US all of a sudden going to stop needing the food and gas and oil that the country’s midsection produces … all with PHYSICAL LABOR jobs??
What about gradually? I don’t think it will be uncommon that new gas-powered vehicles will still be running 30 years from now. And they are STILL being manufactured today. And will the rest of the country’s residents have no need for the meat, dairy, grain and produce (grown in flyover America) in the coming decades?
I understand automation is used successfully in factories but humans are still needed to supervise it. Gen X/Y have been leaving family farms to attend college elsewhere for decades … and perhaps never returning. How will this change?
Sorry, but I just don’t see Americans surviving on MREs and seaweed briquettes in any of our lifetimes. I see Gen Y getting living-wage jobs, partly due to massive boomer retirements from here on out. That is, those Gen Y who are serious about majoring in an employable field and willing to relocate, if necessary.
Am I missing something??
Participant[quote=no_such_reality][quote=bearishgurl][quote=no_such_reality]The world fundamentally needs to change. Automation is, and will continue, to largely make 90% of the population irrelevant from a labor standpoint.
The vast majority of the population, not only don’t have the education, they don’t have the family dynamic, they don’t have nutrition, they don’t have the raw life enrichment experiences necessary to develop the raw mental horsepower needed to be part of the creative class.
The question is how will we get over the hump before we rip ourselves apart.[/quote]
The emphasized portion of this statement is a very “elitest” attitude, IMO. Regardless of a job applicant’s educational level, only a very small portion of jobs available in the US are “creative.”
[/quote] BG, you’re missing the point. The point I made, that you then reiterated is that few, of the total, jobs are creative. Creative as in make something, create, not assemble. In LAUSD, a 1/3rd of the students don’t graduate. That’s not elitist attitude on my part, that’s a fact from LAUSD. Even farming is becoming ‘creative’.
Will we always need farmers? Yes, but as we’ve discussed in a previous thread, the machines on the farm now make it so that a family of four can do the work of 100 from as little as 40 years ago. That’s my point, we need 4 now, no longer a 100. That’s the dynamic I’m worried about. It also requires a lot of a knowledge. And the raw horsepower is that willpower you mention to do it, everyday. Research and find answers, to build the marketing network to sell their product.
It’s also not elitist to recognize that it isn’t just genetics or the child’s stick-to-it-ness. It’s family support, teacher support, it’s having parents that provide a lifestyle that provides safety and experiences to grow from. Can a completely average kid from the ghetto make it? Sure, but let’s be honest, it’s rare, not because there anything inherently wrong with the kid, but because his environment (on average) has stacked a much higher and steeper mountain to get there.
The mental horsepower, or to borrow a phrase from some guys from Harvard and Yale, cognitive load carrying capacity, is large. Environment, training, experience and safety net determine how quickly stressers burn up your cognitive load. There’s a very recent interesting study about cognitive load and how it doesn’t really matter if you’re rich or poor, if you’re given stressors, like financial difficulties, that take up your cognitive load, you start to make bad decisions, rich or poor, you make the characteristic decisions that lead to being poorer.[/quote]
nsr, that all depends on what you define as “family support, teacher support” and “having parents that provide a lifestyle that provides safety and experiences to grow from” and where you are defining “the ghetto” to be.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I see the former to be a much broader array of “support people” for kids (who may or may not be related to them) and I see a broader array of successful “family compositions” in America than you do. And in the latter, I likely feel there is a broader range of suitable areas to raise a family in than you do.
After all, wasn’t Barack Obama raised by a grandparent?
Ivy league academics aside (who likely have never been employed in the “real world” themselves), I really believe it is all up to each individual kid how much drive they have to succeed. It is not uncommon for three siblings, all who grew up in the same home with the same parents have vastly different levels of “life success” from each other.
Participant[quote=jeff303][quote=bearishgurl]
America needs and will continue to need all kinds of workers, not just “creative types.” It’s not for elitest-types (or wanna-be elitest-types) living in SoCal (where fresh produce is in abundance and relatively cheap) to decide whether a midwestern diet of home-canned fruits and vegetables from a home garden, meat butchered and packaged locally or fish caught locally, milk pasteurized locally and real mashed potatoes with homemade gravy isn’t “nutritional.” Nor are they qualified to decide whether most Americans possess the “raw life enrichment experiences” or “family dynamic” necessary to develop the “raw mental horsepower” or whether they might already possess the “raw mental horsepower” to begin with.Get up at 4:00 am 6-7 days per week to start chores on your “working farm or ranch” and tell me how much “raw mental horsepower” is needed to sustain that type of discipline, year in and year out.
Sorry, but it’s not the same thing as stopping off at Starbucks on your commute to a desk job in SoCal where you will report to a cubicle between 8 and 9 am, immediately put your flip-flopped feet on the desk and pipe up your laptop for the day in your supposedly “creative job.”[/quote]
I don’t think anyone is disparaging people who obviously work very hard in more physically-oriented jobs, or discounting their discipline or worth to society. The point is that like it or not, these jobs will gradually go away. The free market demands that profits continue to grow every quarter, and the easiest way to achieve that growth is to reduce labor costs via automation. It has been happening throughout history and will continue to do so. Whereas many farmers used to be required to tend to one farm, now a single farmer can manage a much larger land area through the use of technology. And one day, almost no farmers will even be out physically on the fields; a small number of them will just be overseeing the operations of robots harvesting the fields.
I agree with others that say there will be some sort of major upheaval, probably in my lifetime. The only hope I can see to alleviating this outcome is something like essentially free universal power (fusion or similar), or mass rollout/usage/hacking of 3D printing. For the time being, wealth will continue to flow upward at an ever increasing pace, since the already wealthy are the ones who will own the profits from increased automation.[/quote]
I disagree on a couple of your points, jeff.
First of all, jobs such as a police officer and a teacher are not going away. There are MANY jobs working with PEOPLE where a human needs to report to work and interact with PEOPLE all day. Most of these jobs are not “creative” but have procedures which have been laid out for decades.
And I don’t see where owning robots will be more economical for farms than paying the (mostly) migrant farmworkers the wages that they currently earn. Especially since humans will have to “oversee” the work of robots.
Contrary to popular belief on this forum, “wealthy” people come in all stripes, jeff. For example, “wealthy” or even “extremely wealthy” people may be those who control leases for thousands of acres of ranchland passed down through their families. “Wealthy” people also control 2-12 separate mineral rights (gas and oil) leases passed down through a family which may generate a monthly annuity for life for a dozen or more family members.
I have such relatives in both categories and can assure you that they would be considered “wealthy” or even “extremely wealthy” by the Piggs. What do they look like? They’re dressed in Levi 501’s and a flannel shirt today with a t-shirt on to strip down to if it gets too hot. They left home this morning at 7:00 am and hit the road in their 2002 dually pickup with their circa 1964 plaid coffee Thermos, a packed ice chest, gallon push-button drink cooler, safety glasses and hardhat in tow 🙂
In a lineup, you might not be able to tell them from the Walmart SNAP/EBT crowd.
They don’t have time to sit and blog with you and me because they’re busy checking on and even supervising their many “biz enterprises” and will arrive back home between 5:30 and 6:00 pm this evening to a home-cooked dinner.
And some of them are past retirement age but enjoy what they are doing.
And, to my knowledge, they never had any problems with “family dynamics” or lack of “raw life enrichment experiences.”
Participant[quote=flyer]Agree with these viewpoints.
The sad thing is that, IMO, even those in future generations with the family background, education, etc., etc., will still struggle to live the lives of their dreams, so don’t be deluded into thinking these trends will only affect “the masses.”
We’re already seeing evidence of this in increasing numbers with some of our kids friends, all of whom were raised in RSF. So far, our kids, who are in their late 20’s, are doing well after college, but I would say, rough estimate, over 50% of their friends are not. By well, I mean the ability to achieve your dreams/goals in life.
What’s really unbelievable, is when you ask their parents what the kids are planning to do after college, many of them just try to avoid the subject–since they probably have no idea. Sad.
A sign of things to come? Only time will tell.[/quote]flyer, you’ve posted before here that your kids (like mine) left SD County to pursue their dreams. IMO, THAT is the key to success for local Gen Y college graduates. It is possible that some of your neighbors’ kids majored in degrees that will not land them any meaningful employment and that is the reason they can’t find a job. Another reason is that they are unwilling to relocate because they would have to move away from parents’ homes, which offer a better lifestyle than they can afford on their own. This is partly a parent-enabled phenomenon, IMO.
IMO, the key to success for local young college graduates today is to major in highly employable fields in college and be willing to relocate ANYWHERE to get their career started. They can always return to SD County, later . . . after they have moved up the career ladder in their field and can command a much higher wage.
All is not lost for Native San Diegan college students and recent grads who are serious about majoring in an employable field and finding a suitable “first job” for themselves … wherever that may be.
Participant[quote=no_such_reality]The world fundamentally needs to change. Automation is, and will continue, to largely make 90% of the population irrelevant from a labor standpoint.
The vast majority of the population, not only don’t have the education, they don’t have the family dynamic, they don’t have nutrition, they don’t have the raw life enrichment experiences necessary to develop the raw mental horsepower needed to be part of the creative class.
The question is how will we get over the hump before we rip ourselves apart.[/quote]
The emphasized portion of this statement is a very “elitest” attitude, IMO. Regardless of a job applicant’s educational level, only a very small portion of jobs available in the US are “creative.” The vast majority of jobs have been long-ago described in a classification manual and desk manual (for performance evaluation benchmarks) and are within organizations which have many rules and regulations for employees to follow. For example, a public school teacher and police officer (both great careers to aspire to) are not “creative” jobs in an of themselves, but they are needed in society.
America needs and will continue to need all kinds of workers, not just “creative types.” It’s not for elitest-types (or wanna-be elitest-types) living in SoCal (where fresh produce is in abundance and relatively cheap) to decide whether a midwestern diet of home-canned fruits and vegetables from a home garden, meat butchered and packaged locally or fish caught locally, milk pasteurized locally and real mashed potatoes with homemade gravy isn’t “nutritional.” Nor are they qualified to decide whether most Americans possess the “raw life enrichment experiences” or “family dynamic” necessary to develop the “raw mental horsepower” or whether they might already possess the “raw mental horsepower” to begin with.
Get up at 4:00 am 6-7 days per week to start chores on your “working farm or ranch” and tell me how much “raw mental horsepower” is needed to sustain that type of discipline, year in and year out.
Sorry, but it’s not the same thing as stopping off at Starbucks on your commute to a desk job in SoCal where you will report to a cubicle between 8 and 9 am, immediately put your flip-flopped feet on the desk and pipe up your laptop for the day in your supposedly “creative job.”
Participant[quote=SD Realtor]NSR I cannot argue with that point. It makes sense.
However I am discussing the entitlement mentality.
Okay for example, I have several midwest rentals. Alot of them are in working class neighborhoods. One of my tenants is chronically late on rent. All the time. However she always ends up getting it to me. She is in her 50’s with two good for nothing kids and two grandkids. She has no education. She gets some child support. She makes ends meet by getting housekeeping, babysitting and eldercare jobs. She uses care.com. She has no certifications. She works hard and is able bodied. She could collect welfare and SNAP and all that but she says as long as she is able to work she would feel very bad about taking support.
I think more and more, hers is a mentality that is vanishing amoung lower end working class. It is easier to throw in the towel.
Look at the SNAP program. In 2000 it was $17B and now it is $78B. Over 47 million on it. Stats show that the once on it, most stay on it. Then there is another $40 millions spent on advertising and outreach. There are recruiters and events actively recruiting more people for it…
I am in favor of the assistance.. it is yet another entitlement to an ever growing safety net. However all of the recruiting and quotas… it just serves the purposes of promoting dependency rather then weaning people off of it.[/quote]
I’m reading about one of SDR’s out-of-state tenants here who can apparently qualify for various types of aid and is not taking any. That is a typical mindset of boomers and beyond in much of America’s “flyover country.” It’s called PRIDE. Would SDR prefer that she avail herself of some of that aid so she can pay the rent on time? Or stop trying to “help” her “good for nothing” kids, and, by proxy, her grandkids, so she can pay the rent on time?? Obviously, if her “good for nothing” kids have kids, then they must be on aid, no? And are able to share some of that aid with grandma, who may take care of her grandkids whenever she is available to do so?
Believe it or not, there are THOUSANDS of these “good for nothing” 18-45 year-old parents still living with THEIR parents right here in SD County … yes, even in RSF. This problem isn’t confined to “working class neighborhoods.”
I’m won’t speak for him but I’m sure flyer can attest to this.
Participant[quote=no_such_reality]Yea, that was my thought. 3 years probation on house.
Granted given up part of the pension probably sucks, but how much pension did he forfeit?[/quote]
He was only mayor for about nine months so I can’t imagine he was even vested in the City pension plan and if he was, he didn’t lose much. I am unaware that a Congressional (Federal) pension has any sort of reciprocity with state and local govm’t pension systems. Even if it was, whatever was going to be added onto his pension due to City service is likely minuscule.
Being convicted of a work-related felony (or pleading guilty to one) is the ONLY way a public servant can lose some or all of their pension.
Filner’s Congressional pension cannot be touched.
I haven’t yet seen the terms of Filner’s probation.
Participant[quote=all][quote=spdrun]Wait, so students get credit for giving the teacher something which their parents PAID for?(!) Wouldn’t that result in wealthier students getting higher grades — poorer students might borrow the book or want to re-sell it after they’re done. Sounds pretty discriminatory and bizarre.[/quote]
As bizarre as a 3rd grader coming home with ‘what does my teacher like to receive for her birthday’ writeup?[/quote]
I believe you. I don’t care anymore. We’ve already paid for the yearbook, sr pics, cap and gown, homecoming, 2 SAT tests, SAT test prep and thousands more for “extracurricular activities” this year. There is still prom and likely a few other things left. Eventually, my kid will move a tassel from one side of their head to the other and then will be gone.
The public schools in CA can do whatever they want, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m giving myself essentially the same advice I gave Pigg ER when he stated here that he pre-paid his MR but was disgusted with how his contribution to his CFD(s) might end up being spent.
“You’ve paid your dues and are on a downhill slide now. You’re free. Let it go.” :=)
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