patrick.net

Heraclitusstudent says

That worked when most people could play a useful role in a society

Something wrong with picking fruit?

Perhaps you are blind to it.

I see businesses everywhere producing and engaging in commerce. My only complaint is CA fee for business. That’s truly anti economy.

Aphroman says

FortWayne says

Under Trump capitalism is roaring back!!!

Really? Where do you see Free Market Capitalism roaring back?

I look around the System of the USA, and I struggle to find any remnants of Free Market Capitalism. The last part of the economy that resembles a Free Market for Capitalists is the Cannabis marketplace, but even that is being invaded by the Regulators

The army's IQ=85 requirement is mainly due to impulse control / safety of officer consideration and the fact in a pinch even the cooks and car pool have to take weapons and fight under tactical command.

In civilian life, IQ as low as the 60's can find simple jobs such as line cooks. In fact, because people with an IQ that low are certifiably retarded/disabled, the employers are exempt from minimum wage laws when hiring them . . . so it ends up being easier for a person like that to find jobs in the private sector. This phenomenon really proves that "unemployable" in most cases is actually the result of minimum wage laws / welfare rules. Of course, the life-time productivity vs. consumption by a person with IQ in the 60's is likely negative. That's why it is not legal for a normal person to have sex with a person with IQ that low and risk reproducing another generation of retarded.

Reality says

In fact, because people with an IQ that low are certifiably retarded/disabled, the employers are exempt from minimum wage laws when hiring them

Wait. How much does it cost to hire a retard army?

Reality says

This phenomenon really proves that "unemployable" in most cases is actually the result of minimum wage laws / welfare rules.

Do you genuinely feel that post AI there will be enough employment for zero skill laborers? Pretty sure drivers of every kind, dishwashers, veggie choppers, busboys, lawn mowers, pizza delivery drivers, and especially fast food workers... are all being looked at for robot replacement.

Aphroman says

even that is being invaded by the Regulators

Regulations have two functions:

1. to prevent competition by making it harder for small/upcoming companies to comply
2. to protect the public

#2 is used and as excuse for #1 in normal everyday politics. I learned this from a book by John Kenneth Galbraith, but can't remember which one. Some other good insights:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith

jazz_music says

farming is highly automated now and run by big corporations. They don't want or need you to come and work their farms, they got high tech equipment for that

They do need people who understand the equipment, but that knowledge is difficult to get and does require a few more IQ points than average.

In general, there are plenty of good jobs all the time, it's just that those jobs require those IQ points and some years of dedicated study. As tech gets better, the prospects for those who cannot or will not dedicate themselves to learning keep getting worse. But the prospects for those who can learn tech deeply keep getting better.

But farming is actually just a small part of the economy these days.

Tech requires a lot more people than are well-trained and available so far, and the demand is likely to keep growing.

Is it dead yet?

Patrick says

But the prospects for those who can learn tech deeply keep getting better.

To be a good programmer you need a minimum 115 IQ (just my observation). The best programmers are perhaps the most brilliant people you'd ever meet.

Where in that world does the 30% of population below 90 IQ find an opportunity?

MisterLefty says

Something wrong with picking fruit?

Are you suggesting the 95 millions people not in labor force pick fruits?
Fruits are being picked right now with the labor force we have, correct?

I don't think people here are really trying to understand the problem.

Patrick says

In general, there are plenty of good jobs all the time, it's just that those jobs require those IQ points and some years of dedicated study. As tech gets better, the prospects for those who cannot or will not dedicate themselves to learning keep getting worse. But the prospects for those who can learn tech deeply keep getting better.

If everyone had an IQ of 120, jobs in tech would require an IQ of 150.
As it stands, there are already tons of useless or overly speculative things done in tech.

Reality says

This phenomenon really proves that "unemployable" in most cases is actually the result of minimum wage laws / welfare rules.

If it wasn't for minimum wages laws, wages would fall to $2/h. As a result the end demand would collapse further, and even more debt would be required. Why do you never consider the effect of low wages on spending when half the population already can't come up with 400 fucking dollars?

Unbridled immigration will solve this problem.

CBOEtrader says

Where in that world does the 30% of population below 90 IQ find an opportunity?

One hope is that the genetic and environmental determinants of intelligence will become well understood, and people will choose to have genes and upbringing that cause high intelligence.

Or maybe that won't happen. I don't know.

CBOEtrader says

In fact, because people with an IQ that low are certifiably retarded/disabled, the employers are exempt from minimum wage laws when hiring them

Wait. How much does it cost to hire a retard army?

LOL! Apparently, the officers don't like the idea of too many sub-85 IQ semi-retards and sub-65 IQ full retards armed, and potentially easily triggered.

CBOEtrader says

Do you genuinely feel that post AI there will be enough employment for zero skill laborers? Pretty sure drivers of every kind, dishwashers, veggie choppers, busboys, lawn mowers, pizza delivery drivers, and especially fast food workers... are all being looked at for robot replacement.

When automobiles replaced horse buggies as cabs, people feared that the job of cab drivers was finished because it would take far fewer cabs to deliver the same passenger-miles in a city. What really happened was the exact opposite: far more cab drivers, so many of them that the city had to come up schemes to limit the number of cabs clogging traffic, because automobile cabs became cheaper and more passengers want cab rides; passenger-miles count exploded and the city's commerce taking off creating even more jobs as transportation cost plummeted.

Something similar is bound to happen, as AI-based automation reduces the price of goods and services. More people will buy up more goods and services as their prices come down . . . if the particular good/service doesn't warrant the capital investment of building robots for it, people will be hired to do it (if cheap enough, and because cost of living comes down due to automation, in the absence of minimum wage laws, more people will be able to have their first jobs instead of the current ever shrinking labor participation rate)

CBOEtrader says

To be a good programmer you need a minimum 115 IQ (just my observation). The best programmers are perhaps the most brilliant people you'd ever meet.

Where in that world does the 30% of population below 90 IQ find an opportunity?

People who buy into the faddish scams like AGW usually have sub-120 IQ.

The 30% sub-90 IQ population can work all sorts of jobs not yet replaced by automation. Automation is not going to replace all automatable jobs all at once. Every single job on the Tesla production line today can potentially be automated NOW! but it hasn't been. Human labor happens to have the advantage of being flexible, and laws making that inflexible would only produce unemployment.

Heraclitusstudent says

Reality says

This phenomenon really proves that "unemployable" in most cases is actually the result of minimum wage laws / welfare rules.

If it wasn't for minimum wages laws, wages would fall to $2/h. As a result the end demand would collapse further, and even more debt would be required. Why do you never consider the effect of low wages on spending when half the population already can't come up with 400 fucking dollars?

$2/hr would still be a lot higher than the $5/day that Henry Ford offered (and even his was more than doubling then prevailing wage).

Why half the population can't come up with $400? They have been sucked dry by debt service, either directly or indirectly through the rent, utilities, medical and educational bills that they pay (all of which have massive components paying towards the service providers' debt service).

More debt "is required" to keep the bankster blood suckers alive! That's why $5/day was considered very very high wage at the time of Henry Ford, but $16/day ($2/hr) is unbearably low today. The massive inflation has been used to keep bad debts alive and allow banksters keep sucking blood out of the real economy. The real people can live fine on $5/day if the dollar's purchasing power is such that a brand new car cost only $250 (like Model T at that time), 50-days labor of the worker buying a brand new car. In fact, since an average new car today cost $40k, that's equivalent to $40,000 / 50 = $800/day now! $200k a year! for a line worker. No union due to pay either. That's what your beloved blood-sucking institutions have done over a century of inflationary blood sucking: reducing the worker from $800/day to less than $100/day, while praising silly political pretend-work like the minimum wage law that keep workers out of starter jobs. Letting the bad debts die (i.e. letting the creditors eat their own credit risk) would have served the society much better.

BTW, it is not minimum wage laws that keep wage above $2/hr today. 96+% of hourly wage earners are paid more than minimum wage, and that's before counting salaried workers and self-employed. It is productivity (not minimum wage) that keep workers' pay up. In fact, if not for minimum wage laws, small businesses like fast food would be able to both hire more entry level workers and pay higher wages for their more experienced workers, instead of the current trend towards losing all experienced workers (due to wage flattening) because the owners have to pay raised minimum wage workers; the current trend is of course leading to replacing overpaid (compared to their low productivity) minimum-wage workers with automation so the money ends up going to technology companies instead of the original experienced fast food workers, exacerbating income inequality. Minimum wage law is actually reducing real end demand: by keeping workers of lower productivity out of work and reducing the purchasing power of those who do work.

CBOEtrader says

Jordan Peterson talks about the 85 IQ lower limit for US army employment. Something like 12% to 15% of the population is lower than that, and therefore not intelligent enough to wash trucks.

So do we prop up that 12-15% and let them create more retards, or do we let them die off as nature intended?

PrivilegedtobeWhite says

CBOEtrader says

Jordan Peterson talks about the 85 IQ lower limit for US army employment. Something like 12% to 15% of the population is lower than that, and therefore not intelligent enough to wash trucks.

So do we prop up that 12-15% and let them create more retards, or do we let them die off as nature intended?

A relatively free market place already provides a clean and humane solution: letting the less productive find work that can keep themselves alive, but at the same time the low earnings making them sexually unattractive so that they are not advantaged in reproduction. The combination of minimum wage laws and welfare on the other hand produces a monster of forcing them stay home and find nothing to do except for having sex and reproducing more offspring of questionable productivity in the next generation, trapping themselves into generational poverty.

Quigley says

You can think of it as working for the elites, or you can take a wider more expansive view, you can consider the progress that the amalgamation of human work and ingenuity has produced, the cities, the infrastructure, the amenities, the entertainment, the easy access to necessities and also luxuries, the medicine that gives us long lifespans, and the ever escalating technological progress that keeps moving the bar forward. You can consider the absolutely INCREDIBLE advances humanity as a WHOLE has experienced, how an average worker in middle class America has more choices for luxury and medicine than Louis XIV, and you can conclude that human work has moved HUMANITY forward! Sure, the elites maintain an edge over the average man, and they still call the shots for the most part. But the improvements our combined work has wrought upon the land are enjoyed by all of us!

You’re not working for the boss, in furtherance of his bottom line. You’re working for the human race, in ...

I don't mind working for someone else. What bothers me is that the vast majority of people do not earn enough to pay for a home of their own. The average worker should be able to earn enough from his labor to literally own his own home (home loan paid off completely) after 15 years of work. That cannot be allowed by the elites because then there is less motivation to continue working for them. It is the corrupt banking system that makes us all slaves.

It is great that the collective labor of our ancestors has afforded us such luxury and medicine not available to previous generations. It is awful that it now takes two incomes to produce the same standard of living that a family with one working person could afford 30-40 years ago.

Lol, capitalism is socialism - for the rich, corporations, the bankers, politicians, the elite, the corrupt, etc.

PeopleUnited says

What bothers me is that the vast majority of people do not earn enough to pay for a home of their own. The average worker should be able to earn enough from his labor to literally own his own home (home loan paid off completely) after 15 years of work. That cannot be allowed by the elites because then there is less motivation to continue working for them. It is the corrupt banking system that makes us all slaves.

Yes, our owners need obedient servants and so they lobby and twist the laws and the bailouts to make sure that houses remain too expensive for most.

But they are greatly helped by the self-interest of everyone who already bought. All those owners (mostly debtors) viciously oppose any effort to make houses cheap.

So it's a conspiracy of the public against itself in a way.

US median home price mid-2017 was only around $200k. That translated to $800/mo on 30yr mortgage at then prevailing interest rate, about $1200/mo on 15-yr mortgage. That's well within the affordability of two adults making median income; in fact, within reach of one-income for adult male median.

The real question is, why do so many people want to live in where housing is expensive? The progressive income tax system makes it quite obvious that it doesn't pay to chase high income jobs in high living-cost locations unless one is willing to do long commute or rent cheaply.

My answer is: women's hypergamy. Young women want to move to high cost-of-living locations in order to find high-income men who can make it there. Men follow them there in order to get laid. If we look at the population ratio, the major expensive cities are severely imbalanced in gender ratio (far more women than men in NYC, for example), and imbalanced the other way in podunks. Turns out, this perceived inequality is nothing more than the continuation of human evolution via sexual selection. It's just like peacocks have to carry the high cost of a heavy tail in order to get laid, because peahens like to see the extravagant display of fitness (and of course, women likewise have to carry those back-breaking mellons catering to men's visual interest, not functional value).

Housing cost in high-demand area during high-demand time of course is high. Otherwise, we'd have to have run-away construction/bust cycles laying off enormous numbers of construction workers instead of price cycles (busting unwary speculators) in order to hold price steady.