Also wtf were we supposed to do? I graduated during the great recession. No one was hiring. Everyone from the president on down told us to learn to code. So we did.
Those are some really interesting questions. To me giving a mustard gas receipt to someone with no intent to use it is unlikely to be dangerous. On the other hand some particularly inflammatory racial propaganda in an area with simmering ethnic tensions is very likely to be dangerous.
But give that same recipe to a wannabe terrorist and suddenly it is dangerous. Context matters, not just the information.
I’ve been on both sides of the table for decades. I try to find ways to bind incentives from either side so that they are better aligned, but it’s always exploitative in one way or another. It’s just suboptimal. Perhaps employee owned businesses are the solution.
Perhaps. But that also erodes the stability islands that motivate people to be hyper productive, and encourages investment in external economies, starving the local economy. So I don’t think those work, or at least I’ve never seen a working example. Costco, on the other hand, and many other employee owned cooperatives do seem to align incentives better than most situations without discouraging investment.
demurrage currency otoh is probably worth looking closer at IF a way to build an equitable two-tiered system could be developed. Perhaps corporate money would be demurrage , with personal money that has passed through a tax window stable.
Immigration isn't "shipping the job to India". It's bringing the labor here and contributing to our economy. This might have a suppressive force on wages, but it lifts the overall economy and creates more opportunity and demand.
Offshoring is permanent loss. It causes whatever jobs and industry are still here to atrophy and die. The overall economy weakens. Your outlook in retirement will be bleaker.
If you have to pick between the two, it's obvious which one to pick.
And that's the general problem. People don't care about the overall economy when wages are going down and cost of living is going up. Even myself, I couldn't care less about the overall health of the economy. I care about being able to subsist mine and my family's life style, put food on the table, someday own a home, not live paycheck to paycheck because all the jobs are paying below a living wage, etc.
I'm extremely fortunate to make the salary that I do, but I know plenty of others not so fortunate, in other fields that don't pay nearly as well as tech does, and probably never will. The answer can't be "go into tech" nor should it be "let's suppress wages so labor isn't so expensive for our domestic companies." And obviously offshoring isn't great either.
We can still import talent without suppressing wages, by not abusing the program and actually only importing for roles that truly, beyond all reasonable doubt, could not be filled by a domestic worker.
Usually the next step of this failed discourse is to explain that locals are so entitled that they don't want to do hard jobs for the minimum wage, due to decades of wage suppression done thanks to immigration.
In France, being a cook used to pay very well, now that most cooks in Paris are from India or Sri Lanka, often without a proper visa or at the minimum wage, no local wants to do this anymore (working conditions are awful).
The industry then whines loudly about "the lack of qualified (cheap) workers"
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