
The American Dream 2.0: Why America Should Reject Silicon Valley’s New Wealth - djsumdog
https://scobleizer.blog/2018/11/12/the-american-dream-2-0-why-america-should-reject-silicon-valleys-new-wealth-redistribution-and-bring-a-new-g-i-bill/
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dasil003
I agree with everything in this article right up until the proposed solution.
Yes, people need to feel useful, and UBI does nothing to address the
fundamental social problem. However giving everyone tech jobs is not really
going to work—I agree anyone can learn to write code to some level of
competence, but the problem is that there is not really a big market for the
basic level of competence. If you don't have the fundamental curiosity,
systematic thinking and famous programmer "laziness", you will never attain
the level necessary to go beyond the "bullshit job" level of coder. For
example, anyone can learn to code HTML and CSS, but not anyone can build
Squarespace, and yet even at minimum wage, it's not cost effective to pay a
mass of individuals to create sites manually because it'll be more expensive
and lower quality than just using Squarespace. More abstractly: top
programmers are capable of automating away the work of lesser programmers, and
this balance will worsen significantly if we start trying to push everyone
into programming as a basic job.

I know this comes off as elitist and dismissive, but I've been mentoring and
training junior programmers for 20 years, and it's just a fact that not
everyone is cut out for programming. It's not even about intelligence–there's
just something intrinsic that people need to be able to create significant
value from programming. And if we assume some kind of general AI or
singularity is coming, eventually we will reach a point where no human
programmer can create any value over machine-written code. We're not
sociologically equipped to deal with these changes, and I think it's going to
get a lot uglier before it gets better.

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zaptheimpaler
LOL. There is so much "demand" for technically skilled people, yet try finding
a job as an entry level dev in this market.. employers reject people left
right and center for the tiniest of reasons. They want to take 0 risk of
hiring someone who doesn't already have every skill they need, 0 risk of
hiring someone who has made mistakes in their career, 5 leetcode rounds, 5
references, 3 past internships, 5 github projects and the list goes on. Anyone
recently graduating from CS will tell you they apply to 100s of jobs to get 10
callbacks and a shot at landing 1.

The problem with hiring is employers, and they just don't need to change. As
much as they would like more employees, they either don't really need them as
urgently as they claim, or they would rather go out of business than take a
risk.

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dexwiz
Schools produce Computer Scientists, but companies want Software Developers.
When interviewing new grads, the CS questions are just weed out questions like
a hard sophomore level class.

But if you don't how to build a passable REST API, when to use an event queue
instead of a database, or experience with a build system you are far from my
ideal candidate.

In all reality, my advice for anyone in college today is to get an internship
during school, and try to convert it into a full time position. Good luck
getting a position with no internship experience.

~~~
umanwizard
> Schools produce Computer Scientists

This is not actually true, at least at average universities in the United
States. Schools have a degree called "Computer Science" but the standards are
shockingly low.

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lutorm
_Jobs. Work. Church service. Community service. Or simply helping some other
alcoholic out of the hole that he or she is in. All fit. Sitting at home
collecting a check doesn’t._

This doesn't make sense. Church service may give someone a higher purpose, but
it won't _put food on their table_. Guaranteed basic income would make it
possible for people who want to devote their lives to community service or
helping other alcoholics to do so without becoming homeless.

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leroy_masochist
> Many Native Americans are given something like a guaranteed minimum income
> on the reservations America gave them and what has that brought them? Higher
> rates of alcoholism, for one.

I'm not an expert on Native American history or alcoholism, but I have a hard
time believing that guaranteed income from Tribal revenue is the primary
driver of substance abuse issues within that community.

~~~
ska
It's an unfortunate and inept parallel to draw.

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cbanek
> Time will solve a lot of problems. Within three years we are getting new
> computing devices that will help us learn a lot faster than the computers
> you see above in the photo I shot in the current school.

I'm honestly not convinced of this. Learning is not about technology, it's
about people. I worked on some educational activities and have been knee deep
in this personally.

If this were true, then I feel like since the 90s, we should be at least twice
as smart given all the technological improvements. But if anything, American
students are falling behind compared to the rest of the world, and we are a
technology leader!

People are people, have been, and will continue to be. The issues about
learning aren't about technology to show us the way, it's about getting
understanding as a person. This means things like knowing how to teach
concepts well to people who think a certain way, such as understanding
learning styles (which we're not good at).

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raspo
> unfriending more than 4,000 on Facebook alone and unfollowing 45,000 on
> Twitter

I tried to read this article but I couldn't take this person seriously after
that.

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kkotak
I know, right? I met him a few times back in the 2000s and didn't see why he
got so much attention back then. I think he is regurgitating some of the
common talking points amongst the valley anarchists about how we live in a
bubble. I don't disagree with the overall message but nothing new to see here.

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airstrike
Thanks for posting this. It's a very compelling read.

I've been saying this for ages and I can't understand why folks don't see it
as clear cut as I do: if you want economic prosperity for the average person,
invest in education. It's the best use of our tax dollars because the long-
term return on investment is higher than you can measure. Those tax dollars
can be put to use through free education provided directly by the government
or via tax credits for private enterprises that provide standard education
services _subject to a high degree of scrutiny and measured through
standardized exams and KPIs_

I don't necessarily agree that we don't need teachers. That may work for
certain skills and jobs. But in fact, I think we can provide real wage growth
to lower income workers simply by paying teachers twice as much as we do today
today so we actually attract top talent.

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nightfly
> and unfollowing 45,000 on Twitter

So they what saw, maybe one tweet per-person ever? There is no point to
following so many people.

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arebop
Isn't retirement a counter-example? Yes, a lot of new retirees have trouble
redefining their identity and finding purpose in life. But, on the other hand,
many retirees are very happy despite not having a supervisor or any customers.

Anyway, BI directly addresses poverty. Providing job training opportunities
will not completely cure poverty. So why ignore the poverty problem in your
haste to advocate for more educational opportunities for everyone? Surely
there is room to improve learning opportunities and also alleviate material
suffering (without troublesome discontinuities/perverse incentives).

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riskneutral
> Now we are facing a new age where many people will find themselves jobless
> due to automation ... More than a million truck drivers, for instance, will
> lose their jobs in the next decade or two, maybe less.

Just to be clear, the premise of this article is that a new wave of
unemployment will come sometime “in the next decade or two,” the example given
is truck drivers, and the debate is what to do with all these future
unemployed truck drivers (specifically, whether to just give them welfare
directly or whether to help them find jobs by retraining them).

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kopo
Everybody is currently conditioned to think they have to stand up on a stage
and give a TED talk/I Have a Dream speech -> drum up enough support and you
are on your way right?

Wrong. Because everyone else is playing the same game. It's an arms race for
peoples attention. And mass attention is highly scattered and diffused over
all kinds of things in the spectrum of useful to bullshit.

That needs to change first.

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dexterdog
I had no idea Scoble had popped his head back up.

