crdoconnor

In the UK people didn't move because the jobs were more attractive. They moved because the enclosure movement stripped them of land and they had nowhere else to go. They hated working in factories.

There are pamphlets by early industrialists who advocated this as a way of dealing with labor shortages in their factories and the natural idleness of peasants.

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You typically have to pay a lot more if public sector jobs and wages aren't being cut.

His conclusion: most of those >40% would be able to borrow money to cover an unexpected $400 expense, and only 14% of all people truly would be unable to meet a $400 obligation.

That's pretty much exactly how I interpreted the original.

Somewhat ironic since we were told in no uncertain terms that automation would cause the exact opposite to happen.

As far as I understand it this hypothesis that was tested with the study done by dube, lester, Reich and the effect was found to be undetectable.

Minimum wage is elastic in (your) theory but in practice it appears the majority of companies opt to take the hit in profits rather than fire people.

It's rather like saying that you can interview a musician without asking them to play.

Yes, nerves play a part. That's why it's good to start easy and ramp up difficulty gradually, giving the interviewee a few easy wins to build up their confidence before getting them in to the harder stuff.

Frankly I find the most unnerving interviews (coding and questions) to be the ones where you have to second guess what the interviewer wants to hear. Where the question/task is difficult, but the desired outcome straightforward it's much less stressful.

If you're a developer who doesn't consider automation or improved tooling to solve repetitive tasks you're probably not a very good developer.

I've often been surprised by what has come out in a coding test that hasn't emerged in a conversation. People who seemed dull and uninspired in conversation ended up being brilliant and vice versa. There's no substitute I think.

that's a good way to filter for enthusiastic juniors. it's not such a great way to select for experience.

Also because it's hard work that reduces the employer's dependency on that developer.

As close to the code as possible means a code comment, not a commit message.

>after spending more than two decades writing software I seriously doubt that a side project gets you professional advantages.

>Imho more important are soft skills that are not in the focus of most technically savvy people.

I find that this is mostly true outside of tech hubs, especially in non tech companies, but not necessarily in tech hubs.

Hard technical skills are much more valued relative to soft skills in, say, Facebook than in, say, an insurance company or HMO based in Houston.

I feel like there's an element of wanting to have and eat ones cake here. Programming isn't so different to playing a music instrument - you become better through a lot of deliberate, sustained practice. like it or not, people who have the time and inclination can jump ahead of others in competence the same way a musician who practices 8 hours a day can.

It's not particularly compatible with having kids, but it makes you a better musician.

I'm all in favour of finding better ways to let programmers who don't have side projects stand out but I don't think that devaluing side projects is the way to do that.

I've noticed a strong negative reaction from some people who have kids. There's a weird kind of expectation from some that because they don't have time to work on side projects (which is fair; kids suck up time like nothing else), that others who don't have kids and do have the time shouldn't be able to derive any kind of professional advantage over them from it.

>There is nothing whatsoever preventing automation of craft beer

In theory there's nothing to prevent the automation of any process. The question is cost.

For craft beer there's 10,000 different kinds for every 10 million liters drunk, all with a completely different brewing process and consumer tastes keep changing in this market because consumers seek novelty.

Whereas for Budweiser there's just one, unchanging process.

So yes, it is much harder to automate than Budweiser brewing and is much more labor intensive.

It's far from the only market where this happens, too.

The flip side of money being created by creating loans is that it is extinguished when those loans are paid back.

Taxes also effectively perform the same function - destroying money (consider what would happen if all current tax money were burned and all government spending were printed - economically no different).

This side of the equation doesn't get a commensurate level of attention.

When lawmakers reacted to the emergency they thus listened only to the people who created the disaster - they were the only people they could see who understood what was going on.

It's a little better now with people like Elizabeth Warren. The left still needs to understand finance better though or we'll all get totally screwed again come the next crisis.

In the 1930s the answer was to create a job guarantee in the form of a massive public works program. That's how stuff like the Brooklyn Bridge and the LA Griffith Observatory got built.

The other option is to keep the retirement age down. I'd like to know why so many people who believe in this automation revolution are instead advocating for the exact opposite on the grounds that we actually really have the opposite problem...

You can't take both sides of this fence. Either the automation revolution is real and retirement ages can be lowered or it isn't and articles like this are spouting horseshit.

The question is can people change their taste in manufactured goods quicker than a robot can adapt?

A robot that builds shoddy shoes that people don't particularly want any more getting cheaper isn't compelling.

A robot that makes Budweiser 5% more efficiently isn't compelling if what people really want is craft beer.

Just once I'd like to see a balanced study on automation that:

* Properly takes into account jobs created by technology as well as destroyed.

* Properly takes into account jobs destroyed by austerity (e.g. government budget cuts).

* Doesn't conflate outsourcing with automation - e.g. statistically pretending that because a job no longer exists in the US, that it doesn't exist at all or (worse), as the ball state university study did, literally (and probably deliberately) mixing cost savings from automation and cost savings from outsourcing.

Instead all we get is the steady drumbeat of that old investor pipe dream - the idea that employees are an unnecessary expense that will soon be dispensed with as soon as we find a deep learning model thats sophisticated enough and studies like the ball state U one that argue that the investor pipedream is coming true at the same time as (weirdly) showing their political affiliations by arguing for lower corporation taxes.

At the same time the investor automation hysteria has been good for my wages, so... maybe I should just shut up.

I've not worked on Haskell but while reading about it I've always been suspicious that its type system is actually effective at preventing integration bugs. It's nice to hear this echoed.

I'd love to read more about this experience (good and the bad).

The labor market is a tool of society. It's like any other tool: it can be fixed or supplemented or even swapped out with something else if it doesn't perform its function effectively.

Exactly. Rent controls simply redistribute the spoils of an inefficient market from rentier to renter. New York's strictest rent controls occurred during the period of fastest house building (post war). Note that they're not presenting data like this because the data is inconvenient to their theory.

If the Economist were serious about encouraging property development (they're not) they'd encourage making land a tax liability rather than an asset, so that inefficiently used land (e.g bungalows in sf) would be voluntarily yielded for more productive use.

The Economist has always taken the side of rentiers though, and probably always will.

Inflation doesn't kick in when money is minted it kicks in after it is spent.

This is why QE didn't trigger inflation in a normal way - minted money was exchanged for bonds (financial assets) not spent on goods and services.

Digging up memes shared by nobodies and reinterpreting them as racist (seen this a few times now) is used as a means of deflecting criticism of obvious Islamophobia by prominent leaders like Herzog. That's the worst part of this pseudo scandal: it's trumped up for and on behalf of islamophobes.

like I said: it's not like anti semitism doesn't exist in the labour party. it's just that the boy cried wolf countless times, and they cried wolf to protect racists.

this is quite apart from the time members of this community decided that they spoke for all Jews when they attacked a Holocaust survivor.

Most of the ones whose complaints get into the media have links. E.g. members of Labour Friends of Israel like Margaret Hodge who went on a junket to Israel specifically to apologize to Isaac Herzog (he who said "race mixing between Jews and non Jews is a 'tragedy'") about the UK Labour party's "anti semitism issues".

It's frankly quite disgusting the level of Islamophobia some of these people are endorsing simply because they consider it politically expedient to throw their support behind a foreign government.

It's not that anti semitism doesn't exist at all in the Labour party. It's just vanishingly rare and literally nobody - NEVER MIND a leader - has said anything close to as disgusting as what Isaac Herzog or Boris Johnson has said.

43% of tory party members wouldn't vote for a Muslim leader. That's endemic institutional racism. Labour party members have no such issue with Jews. The anti semitism accusations are purely about the Israel lobby throwing a fit.

My company switched around the same time. Hype was primarily why we switched.

It won't be a monopoly unless every restaurant signs up to their movement.

It seems somewhat distasteful to argue that the pricing power of the rich, powerful party should not be countered by the weaker, poorer party improving their pricing power - especially on a moral basis.