10 ms·

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown as

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

maxharris 10y ago
There is no robot that can knock me out (safely so that I wake up when everything is done), snake a thing down my windpipe, poke through the exact right spot in my bronchial tube and into my mediastinum (a name for the bag that my heart), and retrieve a chunk of whatever surrounds my aorta. But here I wait, while people capable of doing this (or at least capable of learning how to do it - and that's a lot of people) also wait. That's regulation.
- david927 10y ago
  My view is that the times when Capitalism has been a long leash it ends up being wildly destructive. I love fire for cooking, forest fires not so much. I certainly don't think that the reason we don't have more jobs in America is that businesses are so hard pressed with labor laws. I just don't see that. What I have seen, over and over again, are that employers are realizing that they're now in the cat seat and become nothing less than abusive, deeply abusive, to their employees as a result. Once they see how many people apply for new openings and realize how unlikely it is that current employees will quit in this environment, they become mini-dictators. It's an interesting phenomenon. All that aside, I do wish you good health and hope that you can get the treatment you need soon.
  - kamaal 10y ago
    Capitalism creates a winner-take-all market as time progresses. As it becomes harder to enter the market for new comers(See Tesla, also try starting a company to build airplanes) you will see powerful monopolies emerging. That doesn't end well on the longer run. Also Free Market economy seems to play along with popular choice, so pokemon go and cure for baldness is likely to get prioritized above space budget.
  - maxharris 10y ago
    All that aside, I do wish you good health and hope that you can get the treatment you need soon. Thank you (and I mean that quite sincerely). Practically speaking, though, how will I get treatment? Intervention from the government is the only reason I'm waiting for care right now. (See my comments in other posts on this thread - I establish this in great detail if you consider my posts together.)
  - gregpilling 10y ago
    "..become nothing less than abusive, deeply abusive, to their employees as a result .." As an employer I find this surprising. I spend a lot of time and effort trying to be good to my staff. I find that a well taken care of staff delivers better results than a poorly taken care of staff. I admit I am doing it in my own self interest, but even acknowledging that it still is about as opposite to "deeply abusive" as I could imagine. I spend a third of my life with the people at work, how could that be pleasant if it was abusive? I hope you can find a workplace one day that makes you feel appreciated. Life is better when that happens. For everyone.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- st3v3r 10y ago
  How much does doing that pay? How much does being a finance guy on Wall Street pay (or at least have the allure of paying)? How much does being part of a trendy startup in SV pay (or at least have the allure of paying)? Doing the job you want done takes a lot of hard work and study. Being in Finance or startup world can reward better, with less effort.
- internaut 10y ago
  One can visualize a future in which disposable robots are very small and remotely controlled, capable of liquefying specific organic substances or dispensing drug doses.
  - syngrog66 10y ago
    I had two reactions to your comment. One, in which I assume you meant it in a way that was optimistic and benign. Two, in which it described a Matrix-like dystopia.
    - internaut 10y ago
      I meant the first but the second interpretation is somehow more compelling.
- vacri 10y ago
  There's no robot that can write cronjobs for the place I work at, but with my oversight, those cronjobs are force multipliers, allowing little old me to do the job of dozens of people if we had to run those things manually. Automation doesn't mean a 100% reduction of staff, but merely a significant reduction in staff. There's plenty of automation snaking its way into surgeries.
  - infinite8s 10y ago
    Those cron jobs are just manual management of automation. If you take a few steps back, it doesn't seem too unlikely that that can be automated as well (as a recent example, Kubernetes has automated away a whole swath of what recently required manual management of individual server automation).
- joshcrews 10y ago
  There now is a robot that can knock you out safely https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-could-one-day-replace-anesthesiologists/2015/05/11/92e8a42c-f424-11e4-b2f3-af5479e6bbdd_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-...
  - maxharris 10y ago
    Do you know what I would give to help make this a reality? I would literally drop $10k, in cash, right now, to get faster treatment. I have the money - I worked my ass off to earn it (while sick, no less!) What I (and the experts that would use this machine on me) don't have is the political freedom to use it as we see fit. This thing could literally save my life. A team invented it, tested it, and it's just sitting there. I'm just sitting here. Waiting.
    - gregpilling 10y ago
      can you apply to professors/researchers in those technologies to be a test subject? sometimes the academics have a hard time recruiting willing subjects.
johnwheeler 10y ago
To see why that is true, imagine we lived in a sports-based economy. In such a marketplace, I would be a flop. You could supply me with the world’s best instruction, and I could endlessly strive to improve my skills. But, alas, on the gridiron or basketball court I would never command even a minimum wage. The brutal truth is that an advanced economic system, whether it be geared to physical or mental skills, will leave a great many people behind. --Warren Buffett
- maxharris 10y ago
  Our alternative is to live in a primitive economic/political system, such as Europe in the middle ages or Venezuela today. Even the scraps of giants make me better off than I'd be in either of those places.
  - summerdown2 10y ago
    There must be more than two alternatives, though? Surely we can have a 21st century economy to match 21st century challenges? I don't know what that might look like yet - but I think we will know in a decade or so. Currently there's a storm of protest from those being left behind (Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK), and it won't be long before different solutions will be tried for these - eg UBI, direct democracy, charter cities, etc. Eventually, one of these solutions will stick and look obvious in hindsight. Also there is an argument that even if everyone objectively does better under a particular system, increasing inequality is still a bad thing. To take just one example, access to money may be correlated to access to better outcomes from the criminal justice system (eg rather than the facts of the case).
    - maxharris 10y ago
      There must be more than two alternatives, though? If we're examining it from the perspective of advancement, and we know that political restrictions on economic development (i.e., regulation) slow development (compare the development delta of periods in 19th century with today), what we end up with is an infinite number of mixtures between freedom and controls. What I'm telling you is that there are some controls we have in place today that are helping to kill me, and it is almost perceptually obvious that an alternative (freedom) is possible, and that is what we should move toward. Freedom from political and economic controls is good for those that want to work and think. It doesn't do much for those who can't or won't, but so what? Those people that work and think are the source of everything, and they have the right to priority. (Consider the effects on societies where the complete opposite principle is in action: the Soviet Union, Dark Ages Europe, Nazi Germany, Chavismo in Venezuela, Maoist China, ... possibly America in 20-40 years?)
themihai 10y ago
Lawyers working on minimum wage...that's something new! Last time I've checked the free market rules didn't apply on law practioners due the "prestige" issue. How does automation affect lawyers anyway?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Research. There are systems that can surface relevant cases vs the old way of a bunch of junior lawyers reading.
  - gregpilling 10y ago
    bots that help people fight tickets too
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  A large amount of low-level scutwork at major law firms involved manual discovery -- going through boxes and boxes of documents looking for something incriminating. Electronic discovery -- both scanning docs to electronic versions, and then processing them through search, and more recently, AI, to find evidence for plaintiff/prosecution or defense -- has replace a tremendous amount of that. Lack of funds to support legal work is another element in reducing lawyers' wages and hiring.
mac01021 10y ago
Many jobs have been automated away. Jobs for medical doctors, as far as I can tell, are not among those. Nor must you be a genius to be an MD. It is a huge investment, though, at least in the USA.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  Jobs for medical doctors, as far as I can tell, are not among those. It's happening, and it will only get worse. E.g. radiologists can easily be offshored: http://www.itnonline.com/article/remote-viewers-are-changing-practice-radiology http://www.itnonline.com/article/remote-viewers-are-changing... I remember hearing about this a number of years ago, when the offshore radiologists were in Australia. But there's nothing to keep those jobs from moving to cheaper radioligists in India. And when they get too expensive ... to the cheaper country of your choice. But, don't worry, it will still cost thousands of dollars for that procedure. The overall price doesn't go down, only who gets what share. It is a huge investment, though, at least in the USA. Edit: to your point, those jobs haven't been "automated away". As of now, they still exist somewhere, just (soon enough) not in the USA.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this. Neither regulation nor automation is causing this. Political-economic suppression of labor and productive enterprise in favor of rent-seeking is causing this. Let's imagine an alternate universe in which different political choices were made. For instance, in the alternate universe, Elon Musk started a techno-progressive political party and swept into power in 2008, with a program calling for: * Massive housing construction in urban areas * Full repair of our famously-crumbling infrastructure * Intercity Hyperloops for America's coastal corridors * Light-rail and subway construction in the major cities * Rural broadband everywhere * Single-payer healthcare * Reducing the underlying costs of health-care through better disease prevention * Reducing the underlying costs of health-care through regenerative medicine designed to fight (and someday stop) aging-driven disease and death Now, the major economic impact here is going to be massive, truly humongous amounts of growth in the state sector, most of it spent directly on employing people to reduce the carrying costs of the economy, increase productivity, and serve immediate human needs. Most of the specific projects to do so are things that we, in this universe, recognize and understand; the more radical projects that we don't already understand how to accomplish promise radical returns. Putting aside how Elon Musk pays for it all, it would absorb a lot of what is, in our universe, excess labor in the construction and STEM R&D sectors. It would raise wages in the most direct way possible: by buying up labor and paying it to do stuff. It would also increase demand for manufactured goods, leading to either more manufacturing employment or more automation R&D. That alternate universe is the economically normal universe -- this is what we've been fooled into forgetting. In that universe, unemployment, low growth rates, and low returns on investments in physical production indicate that useful inputs to production are lying fallow, useful stuff that could get done is not getting done. Our universe is the weird one, in which relatively high unemployment and low growth are considered the normal state of affairs, with corrective intervention to use the idle resources sounding weird or impossible. The simplest reason someone would actually prefer our universe to Elon Musk's high-tech, job-filled, high-wage alternate universe is because they want labor to be cheap because they make their money from rents on monopolies, land, natural resources, and access to capital, and expensive labor is a threat to rents in general.
- noir_lord 10y ago
WalterBright 10y ago
> barely more than minimum wage. I hear this all the time, but when I want to employ a lawyer they want $400/hr.
- gohrt 10y ago
  People say that laptop factory workers make barely more than the minimum wage, but when I want to buy a new laptop, Apple wants $1000.
- vacri 10y ago
  A friend's mother worked in a high-level consulting agency. Her time was billed out at $1000/hour, and she got less than 10% of that. Still a good wage, but she wasn't getting the lion's share of the fee.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    If she was being temped out for $1000, she could hang out her own shingle and charge $500.
    - techdragon 10y ago
      Sometimes the only way to do such "expensive" work requires significant support. Things like their legal protection against liability, mandatory requirements to have X to do Y in a jurisdiction, and other sorts of things can really eat into the revenue of a small business or sole trader.
      - karmajunkie 10y ago
        Exactly. The trick to billing $1000/hr is finding someone who'll pay it, and having the connections to get in front of them, and their trust that its $1000/hr well spent, which entails no small amount of theatrics on the part of a corporate shield.
        infinite8s 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

maxharris 10y ago

There is no robot that can knock me out (safely so that I wake up when everything is done), snake a thing down my windpipe, poke through the exact right spot in my bronchial tube and into my mediastinum (a name for the bag that my heart), and retrieve a chunk of whatever surrounds my aorta. But here I wait, while people capable of doing this (or at least capable of learning how to do it - and that's a lot of people) also wait. That's regulation.

david927 10y ago
My view is that the times when Capitalism has been a long leash it ends up being wildly destructive. I love fire for cooking, forest fires not so much. I certainly don't think that the reason we don't have more jobs in America is that businesses are so hard pressed with labor laws. I just don't see that. What I have seen, over and over again, are that employers are realizing that they're now in the cat seat and become nothing less than abusive, deeply abusive, to their employees as a result. Once they see how many people apply for new openings and realize how unlikely it is that current employees will quit in this environment, they become mini-dictators. It's an interesting phenomenon. All that aside, I do wish you good health and hope that you can get the treatment you need soon.
- kamaal 10y ago
  Capitalism creates a winner-take-all market as time progresses. As it becomes harder to enter the market for new comers(See Tesla, also try starting a company to build airplanes) you will see powerful monopolies emerging. That doesn't end well on the longer run. Also Free Market economy seems to play along with popular choice, so pokemon go and cure for baldness is likely to get prioritized above space budget.
- maxharris 10y ago
  All that aside, I do wish you good health and hope that you can get the treatment you need soon. Thank you (and I mean that quite sincerely). Practically speaking, though, how will I get treatment? Intervention from the government is the only reason I'm waiting for care right now. (See my comments in other posts on this thread - I establish this in great detail if you consider my posts together.)
- gregpilling 10y ago
  "..become nothing less than abusive, deeply abusive, to their employees as a result .." As an employer I find this surprising. I spend a lot of time and effort trying to be good to my staff. I find that a well taken care of staff delivers better results than a poorly taken care of staff. I admit I am doing it in my own self interest, but even acknowledging that it still is about as opposite to "deeply abusive" as I could imagine. I spend a third of my life with the people at work, how could that be pleasant if it was abusive? I hope you can find a workplace one day that makes you feel appreciated. Life is better when that happens. For everyone.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
st3v3r 10y ago
How much does doing that pay? How much does being a finance guy on Wall Street pay (or at least have the allure of paying)? How much does being part of a trendy startup in SV pay (or at least have the allure of paying)? Doing the job you want done takes a lot of hard work and study. Being in Finance or startup world can reward better, with less effort.
internaut 10y ago
One can visualize a future in which disposable robots are very small and remotely controlled, capable of liquefying specific organic substances or dispensing drug doses.
- syngrog66 10y ago
  I had two reactions to your comment. One, in which I assume you meant it in a way that was optimistic and benign. Two, in which it described a Matrix-like dystopia.
  - internaut 10y ago
    I meant the first but the second interpretation is somehow more compelling.
vacri 10y ago
There's no robot that can write cronjobs for the place I work at, but with my oversight, those cronjobs are force multipliers, allowing little old me to do the job of dozens of people if we had to run those things manually. Automation doesn't mean a 100% reduction of staff, but merely a significant reduction in staff. There's plenty of automation snaking its way into surgeries.
- infinite8s 10y ago
  Those cron jobs are just manual management of automation. If you take a few steps back, it doesn't seem too unlikely that that can be automated as well (as a recent example, Kubernetes has automated away a whole swath of what recently required manual management of individual server automation).
joshcrews 10y ago
There now is a robot that can knock you out safely https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-could-one-day-replace-anesthesiologists/2015/05/11/92e8a42c-f424-11e4-b2f3-af5479e6bbdd_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-...
- maxharris 10y ago
  Do you know what I would give to help make this a reality? I would literally drop $10k, in cash, right now, to get faster treatment. I have the money - I worked my ass off to earn it (while sick, no less!) What I (and the experts that would use this machine on me) don't have is the political freedom to use it as we see fit. This thing could literally save my life. A team invented it, tested it, and it's just sitting there. I'm just sitting here. Waiting.
  - gregpilling 10y ago
    can you apply to professors/researchers in those technologies to be a test subject? sometimes the academics have a hard time recruiting willing subjects.

johnwheeler 10y ago

To see why that is true, imagine we lived in a sports-based economy. In such a marketplace, I would be a flop. You could supply me with the world’s best instruction, and I could endlessly strive to improve my skills. But, alas, on the gridiron or basketball court I would never command even a minimum wage. The brutal truth is that an advanced economic system, whether it be geared to physical or mental skills, will leave a great many people behind. --Warren Buffett

maxharris 10y ago
Our alternative is to live in a primitive economic/political system, such as Europe in the middle ages or Venezuela today. Even the scraps of giants make me better off than I'd be in either of those places.
- summerdown2 10y ago
  There must be more than two alternatives, though? Surely we can have a 21st century economy to match 21st century challenges? I don't know what that might look like yet - but I think we will know in a decade or so. Currently there's a storm of protest from those being left behind (Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK), and it won't be long before different solutions will be tried for these - eg UBI, direct democracy, charter cities, etc. Eventually, one of these solutions will stick and look obvious in hindsight. Also there is an argument that even if everyone objectively does better under a particular system, increasing inequality is still a bad thing. To take just one example, access to money may be correlated to access to better outcomes from the criminal justice system (eg rather than the facts of the case).
  - maxharris 10y ago
    There must be more than two alternatives, though? If we're examining it from the perspective of advancement, and we know that political restrictions on economic development (i.e., regulation) slow development (compare the development delta of periods in 19th century with today), what we end up with is an infinite number of mixtures between freedom and controls. What I'm telling you is that there are some controls we have in place today that are helping to kill me, and it is almost perceptually obvious that an alternative (freedom) is possible, and that is what we should move toward. Freedom from political and economic controls is good for those that want to work and think. It doesn't do much for those who can't or won't, but so what? Those people that work and think are the source of everything, and they have the right to priority. (Consider the effects on societies where the complete opposite principle is in action: the Soviet Union, Dark Ages Europe, Nazi Germany, Chavismo in Venezuela, Maoist China, ... possibly America in 20-40 years?)

themihai 10y ago

Lawyers working on minimum wage...that's something new! Last time I've checked the free market rules didn't apply on law practioners due the "prestige" issue. How does automation affect lawyers anyway?

maxerickson 10y ago
Research. There are systems that can surface relevant cases vs the old way of a bunch of junior lawyers reading.
- gregpilling 10y ago
  bots that help people fight tickets too
dredmorbius 10y ago
A large amount of low-level scutwork at major law firms involved manual discovery -- going through boxes and boxes of documents looking for something incriminating. Electronic discovery -- both scanning docs to electronic versions, and then processing them through search, and more recently, AI, to find evidence for plaintiff/prosecution or defense -- has replace a tremendous amount of that. Lack of funds to support legal work is another element in reducing lawyers' wages and hiring.

mac01021 10y ago

Many jobs have been automated away. Jobs for medical doctors, as far as I can tell, are not among those. Nor must you be a genius to be an MD. It is a huge investment, though, at least in the USA.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago
Jobs for medical doctors, as far as I can tell, are not among those. It's happening, and it will only get worse. E.g. radiologists can easily be offshored: http://www.itnonline.com/article/remote-viewers-are-changing-practice-radiology http://www.itnonline.com/article/remote-viewers-are-changing... I remember hearing about this a number of years ago, when the offshore radiologists were in Australia. But there's nothing to keep those jobs from moving to cheaper radioligists in India. And when they get too expensive ... to the cheaper country of your choice. But, don't worry, it will still cost thousands of dollars for that procedure. The overall price doesn't go down, only who gets what share. It is a huge investment, though, at least in the USA. Edit: to your point, those jobs haven't been "automated away". As of now, they still exist somewhere, just (soon enough) not in the USA.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this. Neither regulation nor automation is causing this. Political-economic suppression of labor and productive enterprise in favor of rent-seeking is causing this. Let's imagine an alternate universe in which different political choices were made. For instance, in the alternate universe, Elon Musk started a techno-progressive political party and swept into power in 2008, with a program calling for: * Massive housing construction in urban areas * Full repair of our famously-crumbling infrastructure * Intercity Hyperloops for America's coastal corridors * Light-rail and subway construction in the major cities * Rural broadband everywhere * Single-payer healthcare * Reducing the underlying costs of health-care through better disease prevention * Reducing the underlying costs of health-care through regenerative medicine designed to fight (and someday stop) aging-driven disease and death Now, the major economic impact here is going to be massive, truly humongous amounts of growth in the state sector, most of it spent directly on employing people to reduce the carrying costs of the economy, increase productivity, and serve immediate human needs. Most of the specific projects to do so are things that we, in this universe, recognize and understand; the more radical projects that we don't already understand how to accomplish promise radical returns. Putting aside how Elon Musk pays for it all, it would absorb a lot of what is, in our universe, excess labor in the construction and STEM R&D sectors. It would raise wages in the most direct way possible: by buying up labor and paying it to do stuff. It would also increase demand for manufactured goods, leading to either more manufacturing employment or more automation R&D. That alternate universe is the economically normal universe -- this is what we've been fooled into forgetting. In that universe, unemployment, low growth rates, and low returns on investments in physical production indicate that useful inputs to production are lying fallow, useful stuff that could get done is not getting done. Our universe is the weird one, in which relatively high unemployment and low growth are considered the normal state of affairs, with corrective intervention to use the idle resources sounding weird or impossible. The simplest reason someone would actually prefer our universe to Elon Musk's high-tech, job-filled, high-wage alternate universe is because they want labor to be cheap because they make their money from rents on monopolies, land, natural resources, and access to capital, and expensive labor is a threat to rents in general.

noir_lord 10y ago

WalterBright 10y ago

> barely more than minimum wage. I hear this all the time, but when I want to employ a lawyer they want $400/hr.

gohrt 10y ago
People say that laptop factory workers make barely more than the minimum wage, but when I want to buy a new laptop, Apple wants $1000.
vacri 10y ago
A friend's mother worked in a high-level consulting agency. Her time was billed out at $1000/hour, and she got less than 10% of that. Still a good wage, but she wasn't getting the lion's share of the fee.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  If she was being temped out for $1000, she could hang out her own shingle and charge $500.
  - techdragon 10y ago
    Sometimes the only way to do such "expensive" work requires significant support. Things like their legal protection against liability, mandatory requirements to have X to do Y in a jurisdiction, and other sorts of things can really eat into the revenue of a small business or sole trader.
    - karmajunkie 10y ago
      Exactly. The trick to billing $1000/hr is finding someone who'll pay it, and having the connections to get in front of them, and their trust that its $1000/hr well spent, which entails no small amount of theatrics on the part of a corporate shield.
      - infinite8s 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]