
In Aging Singapore, 65-Year-Olds Are Learning How to Code - danso
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-13/in-aging-singapore-65-year-olds-learn-how-to-program-software
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nubela
As a Singaporean, this is another "feel good" article about Singapore that
cherry picks anecdotal examples to paint a false image.

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analognoise
Could you elaborate? What's the true image?

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mfcl
The true image is that 65-year-olds are not learning how to code.

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Aloha
> The true image is that 65-year-olds are not learning how to code.

The true image is that _most_ 65-year-olds are not learning how to code.

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epx
If just one leant to code at 65 this is so great to hear about.

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WalterBright
My uncle in his 60's returned to the university to get an advanced degree in
vulcanology.

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coldtea
Several people do it, like several people do matchstick Eiffel Towers or have
a crocodile as a pet.

It's still rare, and in no way anything statistically significant to write
home about, nor the "way out" for the serious problem of old people forced to
work.

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redact207
When I worked in Singapore, it was heartbreaking to see how the elderly were
forced to take low paying positions clearing tables and being servers at
McDonald's. Not because it's "bad" work or anything, but because in their
aging years they were forced to due to a social service system that failed
them.

This is obviously a fluff piece that tries to promote the resilience and
motivation of the aging population, yet just highlights how bad things are
since people have to work til they die.

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rayiner
How has the system “failed them?”

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coldtea
In the European sense, that if you're 70+ and you're forced to working still
after a lifetime of work (even if you had blown every penny of your old
salaries on hookers and blow), then the pension system is bad and anybody who
approves of it should feel bad -- you wouldn't understand!

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rayiner
I clearly don’t. It’s inexplicable to me why able-bodied people in a country
with a birth rate below replacement rate since 1977 should expect to be able
to stop working. It doesn’t matter how you structure the retirement system,
the math doesn’t work.

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jnbiche
> It’s inexplicable to me why able-bodied people

That's the problem. Very few people can still work at that age. To be more
specific, there are more or less two types of labor: physical and mental
(cognitive).

Very few people can do 40 hours of physical labor when they get to be 65 years
old. If they've been working physical labor, their body is beaten and used for
the years of abuse. They literally are no longer physically capable, not to
mention the significant pain they're in from working a life of physical labor.
If they've not worked a life of physical labor, then very few have the
physical ability to start doing so when they're 65. Yes, if they've been
fortunate enough to have top-notch medical care, good exercise habits, good
genetics, and good luck, they may be able to do physical labor for 5-10 years,
and then what? Also, a failure of any of those 4 can destroy you suitability
for labor. Also, if they've had good medical care and the privilege to
maintain a rigorous exercise regime, they likely have enough money for
retirement.

In terms of mental labor, first of all, what percentage of the population is
capable of skilled cognitive labor, like programming? Also, even among the
minority of the population that is suited for such work, some people start
losing a significant amount of mental acuity by they time they're 65-70.

In short, any society that fails to care for its elderly has failed, period.
Yes, these folks have no choice but to try to get by as best they can, but
it's a societal failure.

Surprised that any reasonable person would disagree.

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rayiner
My parents are past 65, and my mom is still easily able to spend a full day
taking care of our 1 year old, and my dad spent the last few weeks cutting
down trees on his property. (They spent the first 40 years of their life in
Bangladesh, so your point about healthcare probably isn’t correct either.)
Only a small fraction of people work hard physical labor that someone 65-75
could not do. And of course some people won’t be able to do even a normal
service job, but you don’t need everyone to keep working, just most people.

As to the societal failure—its a self-engineered one. Maybe some day we’ll
have robots doing all the work, but we’re not there yet. Singapore’s GDP per
capita is $90,000 per working person. Enough where you can have a functional
retirement system, but not so much that doubling the number of retirees per
worker won’t seriously be painful.

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frequentnapper
here we go... anecdotal evidence starting with "my such and such can do such
and such" so it must be true for most people. I am 38 and last year I tried
doing dish duty in a kitchen just for the heck of it and my back couldn't take
more than 4 hours at a time.

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crispinb
Isn't this thread fragment all anecdotes & unsupported generalisations, on
both 'sides'?

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coldtea
If you mean we only provide actual experience from society, and not statistics
and what some expert said, in a topic that's not about stats, then yes.

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crispinb
You are reacting, not responding.

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mfcl
The title says that 65-year-olds are learning how to code, yet the article
itself only mentions one example. It does not provide more data, except about
the decline of productivity and the aging population.

A 65-year-old learning how to code is still probably very unusual.

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Clubber
Translation: Singapore's government is failing its elderly generation. A very
small percentage are able to keep working and supporting themselves for a few
more months / years by learning how to program, in probably the most basic
sense. Everyone else is unable to find work but unable to receive retirement
benefits that they've paid for during their working years in taxes. This
circumstance is due to either corruption or ineptitude, or both.

This will probably be a more prominent story in the US soon as well. Save your
money as best you can and don't count on governments to fulfill their
promises.

When I was growing up, the retirement age in the US was 65. Now it's 66 and
will soon be 67. By the time I retire, it will probably be higher. It's blamed
on the population living longer, yet the average lifespan has been decreasing
recently. The government failed (or ignored) the fairly obvious result of
modern medicine making people live longer and did not plan for it, and
continues to not plan for it other than cutting benefits. How many 66 year old
programmers do you know?

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NotSammyHagar
Let's make sure social security is around forever, and available for those
that actually need it. We can slightly increase taxes and slightly reduce
benefits for wealthy people to keep social security working basically forever.
I'm fortunate to be a highly compensated engineer. If I'm making say $250k a
year, I could pay a little bit more in taxes to help the system be
sustainable, and also more likely to be there if I do need it.

Taxes for this benefit are capped at $8,240 or 6.2% of salary up to $132,900
[1]. The reason taxes are capped is because benefits are capped. My company
could pay a bit more in payroll taxes and they wouldn't care, they'd love to
hire 5 more experienced and well compensated engineers like me. There's a
similar issue on social security wages - let's say I accumulate $5 million in
assets at retirement, I'm going to be earning a pretty good amount of income
even when not working, so you could reduce my social security (maybe via extra
taxes?). People grumble about that money, "it's mine, I paid for it my whole
career" \- and you did pay for it in taxes. But things like social security
also serve as a crucial part of our weaker societal safety net in America. I
want it to be there for people that need it.

I probably won't need it in retirement, but most people will. If I do lose all
my money, or say I wasn't as lucky in my life and was hurt or not able to
accumulate so much wealth, I want it to be there - for me and others.

[1] [https://smartasset.com/retirement/social-security-tax-
limit](https://smartasset.com/retirement/social-security-tax-limit)

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ra1n85
>If I'm making say $250k a year, I could pay a little bit more in taxes to
help the system be sustainable, and also more likely to be there if I do need
it.

I'm all for helping those in need and having a safety net, but I don't think
what you're advocating for is a realistic solution. Social security is in
trouble because it was mismanaged - increasing taxes to offset the burden of
mismanagement is a half solution, and likely only a temporary fix. Social
security (as well as a multitude of other things) is in its current state
because we Americans lack the necessary systems/skills/policies to manage it
properly.

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basementcat
How is it mismanaged?

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ra1n85
-On track to be insolvent by 2034

-Costs already exceed income for trust funds

-Costs will exceed income by 2020 for the entire program

-The OASDI tax rate has been increased 20+ times since Social Security's inception in order to keep the program viable.

Add an inability to even recognize mismanagement.

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NotSammyHagar
These things all come because our elected american representatives how not put
more money into it. For my entire life every year there has been a report that
they needed to put a bit more in and although there have been small amounts it
has never been enough added. Calling this mismanagement of the program is not
accurate because it suggests that the money was somehow lost or misinvested by
the leaders of the program somehow. The senators and representatives in
congress didn't put the right amount of money in it to match the payouts they
set.

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imtringued
Why does a 65 year old person still have to make a long term investment into
their career? Isn't that person going to retire in their 70s or earlier?

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menzoic
That's the issue at hand. Singapore's economy can't support retirement in the
way you think about it from your country.

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onlyrealcuzzo
Why can't Singapore's economy support it? Isn't Singapore richer than almost
every country that does have some form of public pensions?

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hn_throwaway_99
I know many comments were about how the article was a cherry picked example,
but I was still glad the example seemed to be a useful one.

Honestly, I think even _most programmers_ would benefit from refreshers on how
to automate large parts of their workflow (I myself wish I was much more of a
sed/awk guru than I am), and how to use the command line and the standard
command line tools to get things done.

Not to be too harsh but I think it's unrealistic to expect more than a tiny
percentage of people who are very late in their careers to learn to be true
programmers, but I think most people could learn bot-like automation tools to
improve their productivity.

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onetimemanytime
>> _Valerie Yeong-Tan, who’s worked for 47 years at Singapore
Telecommunications Ltd., is one such example._

Give this woman her pension already.

Learning to code cause you want to at 65 is very different from having to....

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PorterDuff
I'm rather hoping to forget how to code at age 65.

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golemotron
In Asia and Latin America, children support their parents as they age. The
West created this dream of individualism where each person had to become
entirely self-sufficient through their savings and investments (employer
managed or not). It's not surprising that it is more fragile.

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chillacy
Singapore is part of Asia, and has a majority ethnically Chinese population,
what does the west have to do with this?

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golemotron
West-ernization.

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cylinder
I see Americans are now exporting Hustler Porn to Asia.

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patientplatypus
This is the sort of thing that belongs on
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/)

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paulpauper
>Now she uses her new-found skills to automate work processes like doing
reports, drafting budgets and other repetitive tasks, saving her hours in her
day.

lol i have been using computers for along time and i still have not done that
yet. Rather than lots of repetitive tasks it seems i have to focus on a few
tasks that require precision and cannot be automated. Very seldom can i recall
ever being in a situation where i would spend hours doing something that could
be automated. Also trying to code a program to automate the task would take
longer than doing the task. I think i can recall one time 2 months ago needing
to check 70 accounts and doing it by hand which took a half hour was way
faster than trying to spend hours trying to code a program to do it.

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prashnts
Automation doesn’t need to be end to end. Consider a case if you need to do an
aggregation with pdfs, simple script to read and pull the data points is
pretty trivial. You will still need to type the results by hand in excel (for
example), but that « automation » just reduced the effort it’d take otherwise.

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mirimir
Huh?

    
    
        pdftotext
        massage with grep, tr, sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc
        paste into Calc or Excel (or some SQL first)

