[ennui2]

Free trade (aka outsourcing) isn't required for corporations to stop hiring full-time workers and lean on temps and outside contractors. They are two related but different things. For instance, Uber can't be outsourced. It's inherently a local service. But it creates an underclass of day-laborers who work hand-to-mouth with no benefits. People should resist the temptation to oversimplify the issue.

[Plantagenet]

Uber and all cab driving jobs are already doomed.

Self-driving cars will quickly be converted to fleets of self-driving cabs and they'll drive existing cab businesss and Uber out of business. You can already see that technological change coming down the road.


No sir. Uber is out of business now. Too many accidents. It is much safer now that every cab is a robot cab.

[Pops]

Did I say working 3 part time jobs was a choice?

LoL, first you said mine was a "rich getting richer and the everyman is screwed" story, now you act like I'm OF2. If you just want to argue I'll let you talk to pete


I think labor is losing value to automation, labor arbitrage and shipping and its negotiating position is eroding just as Tim outlines. Companies at the moment have huge capitalization and huge cash reserves, I've read they were borrowing money for operating expenses because rates were effectively negative for so long.

There is a big thing going on and it ain't going to be solved by learning to code. IT guys just aren't going to replace line workers in the ranks of the old middle, how much sense would that make from a profit standpoint?

Becoming a techie is a great idea if one has the aptitude. 20 years ago getting into desktop publishing was a great idea, too. I could just about make as much as I wanted because digital was the disruptive tech of the day competing with semi and skilled hand work. Today it is pretty well passé as elance can get you a pretty good designer for the equivalent of $2/hr US.

So again, there is only a couple of ways to go as "productivity" continues to increase: either stuff gets cheaper and cheaper or, it doesn't and profits get redistributed.

[onlooker]

Ennui it is true what you are saying but on a global scale "free trade" does assist this process by allowing corporation to freely transfer capital and headquarters elsewhere. This obviously creates artificial labor surplus pitting workers against each other all around the world to attain any job and reduces obviously the quality of "job", part-time, temporary, no benefits etc. as excess workers trying for a particular job will bid down the features of the job in an attempt to land the job. Your reference is just another local facet of this same process applied to local areas whereby workers are either not well-trained or their is a surplus of workers so that they will accept a job however limited that definition of "job" is.

[SeaGypsy]

Really, all jobs are B/S. We weren't born with union cards, just hunter/gatherer tools. We aren't gonna do that again anytime soon I'm thinking.

But the next economy will be a lot more than just phoning it in.

--

With the same line of reasoning, I am keeping a foot in the door of the JIT food network. Funny, the biggest fruit veg & flower market in the country, where I collect my truck in the morning, is being forced to move from a dockside city centre location to an extreme security purpose built facility 30 km from town which looks like & is run like a prison. What that says about the split between what decision makers say & do & what they really think the future might be like.

I made 3 times more in disability services, by taking on extreme clients & extreme hours, than I ever made in transport; but extremely stressful work. The most money I ever made was blowing glass back in the 90's, but not consistent & now a dead market thanks to Chinese mass production.

JIT transport seems to be with agriculture the least bullshit jobs, in that without them 90% of people are dead in a month or two.

Disability work is a luxury only rich societies can afford. I am keeping up to date at university & possibly starting a respite service when my diploma is done at the end of this year. My logic is that while not a life requirement as JIT, paid social support work is what frees up family members to participate in the economy at all. I can't see a sudden shift away from this model any time soon despite it's apparent fragility.

Arts, crafts, travel, are still very important to me, but to reliably put bread on the table I have to compromise.

Like you say on a bit about the elancers for 2 bucks an hour, is exactly why it's too late to be recommending IT as a career choice. The requisite skills are in the open domain in the most fluid global market, thus inevitably IT leads the pack for wage destruction. Of course there are always pinnacle people who can stand way out from the pack, but they are the exception proving the rule.

[SeaGypsy]

"I get at least 2-3 recruiters nagging me a week"

And what skills do the recruiters have?

A. None.

About 99% of the people at peakoil.com hate the oil&gas industry, petrochemical plants, etc. The 99%ers want to sit behind a computer and pretend to do something (eg. analysts, pretense of knowledge) because its easy. No wonder there is a demand for that. This is hard:

A real newbie statement there. Among our most valued members are several gas & oil people. Show us an example of a ganging up on a G&O worker here? 99%? Bollocks.

[Ibon]

I just spent time with the daughters out west and met many of their peers and listened in on their conversations. Age range 22-27. Some interesting observations are that some of these young adults are pursuing this tech field and will indeed find good paying jobs. Most of these young adults aren't in this category, after all , we are talking about American youth here. At one uni in California I saw crowds of students outside an admission building and they were 90% asian. My daughter said this was a tech school focused on IT related fields.

What about these young adults that do not have the inclination to sit in front of computers for hours on end like zombies (my subjective adjective ) Who are not willing or able to do this? I can already see resourcefulness becoming deeply embedded. Sharing living space and cars, greatly reduced consumption, lots of bicycles instead of cars, interests that are related to handyman skills, gardening etc.

I am witnessing a young generation practicing frugality, forced on them but rapidly becoming an accepted norm. I am not sure that the percentage of youth who will pursue these high wage IT jobs are going to follow their parents in their consumption habits. I think the playing field has changed. I am not seeing a division of haves and have nots yet in my daughters peer group. They are still young. I wonder how much this will change as they age and how much we will see a class culture form around wealth division in their generation? How will those who financially rise position themselves as a growing minority in a vast majority of far less wealthy peers? Will fences go up as they age and will those now sharing resources grow weary of chronic low wage employment.

There is generational adaptation happening right now before our eyes. We here who are writing about this are pretty irrelevant. I would like to hear from more younger voices here.

[Apneaman]

Not no middle-class left, I have not heard that claim, but shrinking yes. Ennui and what industry do you work in?

[phaster]

Kinda interesting watching how fast technology is being developed in europe and japan (both regions with low birth rates)

for example Mercedes and Scania have self driving trucks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-avjrYP0e3Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZxZC0lgOlc

and in Japan they are developing robots for use in the heath care field

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzw71j4b78

even here in the USA there are companies developing low cost manufacturing robots

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/are-robot ... -50138922/

IMHO sadly what we are seeing with the shrinking of the so called "middle class" is actually a return to the historical normal. I say this because the myth of the US middle class was sold to the world as a type of anti USSR propaganda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jy2qdTCs0g

consider post WWII the USA was the only manufacturing power left un-bombed: the Germans at the start of the WWII bombed GB, and after the USA entered the war US and GB bombers laid waste to Germany and Japan (which now along with China are manufacturing goods for consumers all over the world)

Uber and all cab driving jobs are already doomed.

Self-driving cars will quickly be converted to fleets of self-driving cabs and they'll drive existing cab businesss and Uber out of business. You can already see that technological change coming down the road.


No sir. Uber is out of business now. Too many accidents. It is much safer now that every cab is a robot cab.

[Outcast_Searcher]

"I get at least 2-3 recruiters nagging me a week"

And what skills do the recruiters have?

A. None.

About 99% of the people at peakoil.com hate the oil&gas industry, petrochemical plants, etc. The 99%ers want to sit behind a computer and pretend to do something (eg. analysts, pretense of knowledge) because its easy. No wonder there is a demand for that.

Do you ever do anything but empty, citation free whining? If not, I suppose it's good work if you can get it.

I spent 26.5+ years "building stuff" made of software, for a career. A career I spent 5 years working my ass off perparing for, BTW.

That stuff billed many $billions for various services, and when I switched from application programming to database systems programming, managed many many $billions of assets in things like banking, steel, insurance, and more virtual things like maintenance agreements.

One thing I'm personally proud of is that in 17+ years of database handling, my team never lost ONE BIT of data where I had any control over how the data was managed. This includes multiple 24 and one 48 hour stint of data recovery work dealing with defective hardware or software (where I was the customer).

(This was in the era before RAID drives were "a thing", so if a hard disk controller (literally) physically exploded -- all hell broke loose).

So if you want to call careers like that which MANY real serious IT people handle "easy", go ahead. IMO, it speaks to the general mindlessness which marks your consistent complete lack of credibility, as you attack anything you don't like and fail to understand much.

I know doomers are, well, doomers -- but how about actually adding something meaningful or positive, i.e. a contribution, for a change?

[StarvingLion]

The middle class was enabled thru royalties from oil&gas exploration and development.

And, no, I don't understand the common "Get a job" mentality. Who the hell are the "job providers" and if they don't have an obligation to employ a tax payer than why should I pay taxes?

Either you have a claim on hard resources or you don't.

[americandream]

The middle class was enabled thru royalties from oil&gas exploration and development.

And, no, I don't understand the common "Get a job" mentality. Who the hell are the "job providers" and if they don't have an obligation to employ a tax payer than why should I pay taxes?

Either you have a claim on hard resources or you don't.

You better watch it SL, youre sounding like a commie!

[ennui2]

Ennui and what industry do you work in?

I've been a web developer since the late 90s. I feel well qualified to comment on hiring trends and corporate psychology within IT. What I see here is a lot of ideological chest-thumping about how evil corporations are and not a whiff of pragmatism about how people could actually survive or even thrive if they actually stopped being so fatalistic and managed their careers. Unplugging from BAU is a romantic notion but it has some serious drawbacks vs. maximizing your earning potential from within.

[Pops]

And just how many people here do you think are not "maximizing their earning potential"?

[Henriksson]

I once had piles of hypothetical money lying around, but I realized I had to sell drugs to get them, so I left them lying.

[onlooker]

Ennui, maybe you are discounting the fact that some here already earned enough money and have chosen to invest it in living a simpler life/a life off the grid in preparation for the future. Why would you think that is not worthwhile when a person may not wish to make tons of money and also with the very ominous clouds of consequences hovering over head.

[AgentR11]

So again, there is only a couple of ways to go as "productivity" continues to increase: either stuff gets cheaper and cheaper or, it doesn't and profits get redistributed.

Let me tap on this idea a moment if you will. My assertion is that stuff *is* getting cheaper, and will continue to get cheaper. But... the catch.. it will be cheaper in the sense of the same number of dollars (or even slightly increased number of dollars), but each of those dollars having a larger drop in individual value.

Its a trick that was beyond the computational ability of our financial system until relatively recently, and now that they've seen what they can do with it; expect them to use it relentlessly to keep bread on most everyone's table; yachts in most every oligarchs boathouse, and just about everyone capable of making a mess, employed enough to be too busy and or too tired or too content to go out and make that mess.

The trick is simple and oosing with finesse. In a naturally deflationary environment, hold core interest rates far below the level of experienced consumer inflation, and manipulate the money supply in such a way that no matter how little or how much liquidity tries to escape, its always matched in milliseconds by a source or sink that keeps the balance of nominal inflation vs core interest rate. Then drive up the total money supply faster than the true increase in economic production, and you have Bob making the same $100 today he made two years ago, but that $100 is worth less, but buys the same widget+food+energy combo. With the widget price having dropped and the food price having risen.

I fall back to the EMRATIO chart again here. That was real, and unconcealable. Those weren't retirees all heading to Florida; those were regular folks in regular jobs, jobs that just disappeared, and are gone forever. That kind of drop only goes with a depression, and we aren't showing any signs of recovering to where we were. But the finesse of finance, kept the train on the rails, kept the grain moving, the bread cooking, and the grocery store lights on. Most folks know something happened, even if they kept right along doing their jobs. The finesse made that "something" into an ephemeral thought, hiding around a corner, buried in lots and lots of numbers.

TLDR: Stuff is getting cheaper, and Bob is able to buy basically the same amount of stuff as he was able to seven years ago, and yet Bob is making the same nominal amount of money as he was seven years ago.

[Ibon]

Ennui and what industry do you work in?

I've been a web developer since the late 90s. I feel well qualified to comment on hiring trends and corporate psychology within IT. What I see here is a lot of ideological chest-thumping about how evil corporations are and not a whiff of pragmatism about how people could actually survive or even thrive if they actually stopped being so fatalistic and managed their careers. Unplugging from BAU is a romantic notion but it has some serious drawbacks vs. maximizing your earning potential from within.

I was mentioning how in my daughters peer group there are those who are pursuing this career in IT. They do have a good earnings outlook. And those who are unplugging in creative ways from BAU. This is also a pragmatic approach for those whose perspectives of long term wage slave status at low wages isn't going to deliver on the quality of life their parents were able to enjoy. So they are gravitating toward more sharing of resources and frugality and they want time over security, working various gigs, being resourceful, taking time off to travel and volunteer, maximizing their quality time this way instead of attempting to go on a career path on a treadmill that will not lead to any meaningful prosperity. I am just curious how they will further mature in a constrained economy.

The ones with romantic notions are oldsters speculating. The young are actually dealing with their own set of day to day struggles. Pragmatic all around whether you choose a high paying career path of choose an alternative to BAU.

[ennui2]

those whose perspectives of long term wage slave status at low wages isn't going to deliver

Is that kind of a euphemism for white-trash idiots? There's a pretty fuzzy line between people that have no good job prospects and people who might, if they just worked hard enough. I would never discourage people from trying their best to get ahead in a highly-skilled profession.

go on a career path on a treadmill that will not lead to any meaningful prosperity.

Speaking as someone who went through two sabbaticals, I can say that life is a lot less stressful with steady cash-flow. But it takes work to land a job that doesn't feel like a ball and chain every day you go to work. It's all too easy to just throw up your hands and think it's impossible.

[Plantagenet]

those whose perspectives of long term wage slave status at low wages isn't going to deliver

Is that kind of a euphemism for white-trash idiots?

ennui2....whoa there, you are way out of bounds on that one. There are lots of people at this site and their children who choose to live unconventional lives---there is no call for you insult them.

Not everyone who opts out of conventional career paths should be called "white-trash idiots."

Some people choose to be organic farmers, musicians, artists, athletes, rebels, writers, travelers and/or adventurers---these people have a different perspective on life then you do and they make different career choices then you would make. That doesn't make them "idiots". People who choose to work with their hands or follow an artistic calling are just as smart as you are---they've just made different choices and done different things with their lives then you have done.

I suggest you might try to be a little more tolerant and broad minded.

Cheers!