13 ms·

Or semiconductor salaries need to rise...

doctorwho42 3y ago
You guys keep focusing on the wrong thing, salaries are a first order solution. What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc.). Jacking up salaries without bringing the standard of living for the rest of your society will only lead to a continued breakdown of the social fabric that we have been seeing steadily happening over the past 30-40 years.
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  Yeah and that can happen by paying everybody more. Salaries have largely stayed the same while prices have risen and that excess has gone to profits. If workers demand more pay and they force the issue, the economy eventually will reach equilibrium. The issue currently is that those workers can't really do that because the US government has shown time and again that they don't really care that much if a company violates organised labor laws or labor laws in general (you get a fine and a slap on the wrist) but they will bring down god's wrath if workers/a union has an "illegal strike" after the employer ignores their demands. There is a reason why ever since Reagan took a hardline anti-union stance and disbanded the PATCO union for having the audacity to strike in the 1980s that the number of major strikes per year has steadily declined. https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    if you pay everyone 10% more, the difference between a $30k worker barely scaping by and a $100k worker that is cofortable simply increases by $7k. I'm not saying everyone can't get a pay raise, but we can't think linearly here. Semiconductor workers aren't exactly applying for food stamps.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > if you pay everyone 10% more, the difference between a $30k worker barely scaping by and a $100k worker that is cofortable simply increases by $7k. As long as more of the gross profit goes to workers, that's a step in the right direction. Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better!
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >As long as more of the gross profit goes to workers, that's a step in the right direction. That's now how the lesser paid workers will see it, unfortunately. >Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better! That would be flat (Y = 6000 vs Y = 1.X%). Perhaps better, but I'm not sure if that's been done outside of stimulus checks. I think what the person up chain was alluding to was to increase minimum wage or similar initiatives. Doesn't help the higher end of the working class but helps out the lower end immensely, and indirectly helps out the middle as well.
        ms4720 3y ago
        Minimum wage raises encourage two things in business: - automation, ie order at a kiosk at McDonald's - not hiring for the job because it is not profitable to do. This is what happens to low skill workers when we make low skill jobs too expensive.
        wildrhythms 3y ago
        Not sure if you've noticed but all those things have happened (self checkout, ordering kiosks) while wages haven't grown to meet inflation.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Sure, and that's not a bad thing by itself. It moves the needle up. I don't think corporate has ever said "we have too many people who want to work". There will be more jobs out there that can't be automated, at least until we hit Terminator levels of sentience. But by then our robot overlords will solve capitalism for us.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > Salaries have largely stayed the same Salaries for the top 10% or so have increased significantly over the years. Of course it still pales in comparison to how much the incomes of the top 1% increased over the same period (meaning there is enough money/productivity to pay everyone more)
  - infogulch 3y ago
    A big part of the problem is the fed that literally pursues a monetary policy that intends to suppress real wage growth. This is why wages are flat for 30 years.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      And now they also want people to be laid off.
      - probelm 3y ago
        [flagged]
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >SWEs could halt the fiat economy tomorrow through collective action From my experience, modern SWEs are the workers' category least likely to get involved in any kind of collective action. They're too self centered and individualistic for that. Everyone's too busy trying to get "theirs", while kicking down the ladder beneath them, thinking they'll be the next Larry Page. It wasn't always like this though. I think the insane demand and crazy compensation levels in the last decade changed the mentality and inflated the egos, reducing compassion and empathy, turning SWEs in the new finance bros, except more introverted and doing less cocaine.
        probelm 3y ago
        [flagged]
        sofixa 3y ago
        > From my experience, modern SWEs are the workers' category least likely to get involved in any kind of collective action. They're too self centered and individualistic for that. Not to mention way too well paid, comfortable and with lots to lose. Why risk a very comfortable lifestyle for some noble goal that barely concerns you unless you have tons of empathy?
    - 3y ago
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > Yeah and that can happen by paying everybody more. How can that be done without either stoking massive inflation or somehow paying someone else less?
    - Broken_Hippo 3y ago
      I really don't care if shareholders get less money or if a CEO gets less of a bonus. It's OK to pay some people less.
      - cpursley 3y ago
        So it’s okay screwing retired teachers living of funds they’ve paid into their entire working career? Because that’s the typical type of person who owns stock (not directly).
        Broken_Hippo 3y ago
        Obviously society thinks it is OK. If we didn't, we wouldn't let retirement funds be dependent on how well stocks do - and we only did that after plundering other people's pensions and screwing them over. They might indirectly own it, but it is other folks getting rich off of their money. Realistically, no one should have risk when paying into pensions/retirement for later and it should be somewhat promised. The entire system is reprehensible as it stands.
        CuriousCosmic 3y ago
        No of course not. But keep in mind it's a relatively new phenomenon for most people to rely on stocks/401k/IRA for their retirement. Prior to that retirement funds were primarily handled by pensions where the company or organisation you worked for put away money for you in a fund and for the employee there was little to no risk that this money would disappear or diminish in value. Behind the scenes the company may invest it in various ways but it was generally a "low risk" retirement fund. The reason why every company and organisation (other than a handful of government orgs) got rid of pensions and switched to investment based retirement funds was because the risk got moved away from the company to the employee and as a result it was cheaper to operate. And as an added bonus, now any time we want to consider raising wages or improving things for workers at the cost of shareholders profits, companies can turn around and argue "this is hurting retired people". So no of course not I don't think retired people should be getting fucked out of the funds they've been paying into for their entire careers but they shouldn't be paying into those funds in the first place. Unless they explicitly opt into that risk, they should be getting access to a pension with guaranteed payout by default.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    More money in the system drives inequality if fundamental necessities like shelter supply remain artificially choked by people with even more money as they simply buy up and out-bid as much as possible. If that weren't the case, I'd agree. Even as I a software person gradually make more money when I'm not in a perpetual cycle of working and being laid off, a tiny condo already being out of reach is only going to get dramatically more out of reach if salaries rise while most of an arbitrary city's development rate is beleaguered by boomers, arduous bureaucracy, investors, and people with their boomer parent's money willing to spend it, knowing it'll always increase. Not that people shouldn't fight to be paid more, just that it has limited effect unless you happen to get paid significantly more than everyone else compared to what things cost now, and hope that continues forever.
- deburo 3y ago
  I guess you can keep cheerleading UBI then.
- Clent 3y ago
  No one is trying to solve the world's economic problems here. That would do nothing to solve the knowledge worker shorter with this chip factories.
- thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  > Jacking up salaries without bringing the standard of living for the rest of your society will only lead to a continued breakdown of the social fabric that we have been seeing steadily happening over the past 30-40 years. Eh, I don't know, if you follow the example of the bay area, jacking up salaries in tech means everyone else paid more money (earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France and poor in the bay area). Now if we could fix our housing problem...
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France Maybe in a poor rural area.
- wnc3141 3y ago
  You are correct, however a more practical read is: In the short run, precluding net growth and change in supply, a rise in salary implies a redistribution from capital (shareholders) to labor.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    Money might move from capital to labor, but you aren't getting any extra production of goods. The stuff labor wants to buy still has the same amount of scarcity. Ie you will get inflation. You need to encourage more (efficient) production to make labor better off.
    - oblio 3y ago
      Productivity has risen a ton since the 1970s. Wages are practically flat. Software and the internet haven't helped, quite the opposite. The profits are captured at the top.
      - gottorf 3y ago
        https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ 1970s, of course, is when the dollar started being backed by nothing more than "full faith and credit".
        oblio 3y ago
        That graphic is misleading: https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971 https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971
- Aerroon 3y ago
  >What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc.). This is a moving target that can never be met. We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff. When I was growing up the main part of the meal was potatoes/rice/pasta. Meat was a few times a week (too rarely) and there were no fancy sauces/condiments on it. Why? Because it was cheap.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    > We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff. The three main things which have skyrocketed in price since the 70s are higher education, healthcare, and housing. On top of that, over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas. This fact alone has meant that young people today start their careers significantly poorer than their parents did. Point is, it’s not just about the prices of sneakers and pasta. For all of the most important costs in life, things have gotten much more expensive.
    - TexanFeller 3y ago
      > over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas High schools do not maintain any sort of reasonable standards for granting a degree anymore, so it's no wonder businesses require a college degree. We decided everyone needed a HS degree, so we started lowering the standards for it, "teaching to the test", and only focusing on improving the worst quartile students to minimum tested standards. Now the same thing is happening with colleges.
      - janalsncm 3y ago
        Sure, but that means that students today aren’t getting bachelor’s degrees (the “expensive stuff”) by choice, but by necessity. That’s tens of thousands poorer (and ~4 years older) because of a shifting job market.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  The world runs on chips, a huge proportion of which comes from a single country which also happens to be under threat of invasion from a country hostile to the West. Sorting out the supply chain here is a pretty critical issue that makes sense to tackle in isolation.
- vasco 3y ago
  To solve the need for super specialized workers you actually need to jack up salaries. Nobody is going through the training and intensity of a semiconductor fab job for the same they could make walking dogs if that's how it worked.
- roenxi 3y ago
  In context, relative salaries are exactly the right thing to focus on. If software salaries are higher than EE salaries, EEs will move into software. Although occasionally I talk to people who seem to believe changing careers is impossible for some reason so Imagine there probably is some confusion on that point among some readers. While we do want general welfare to improve that wasn't the topic in the thread.
  - Viliam1234 3y ago
    For some reason, the free-market arguments only apply to the people at the bottom of the pyramid. If you want to buy bread in a supermarket, but the bread is more expensive than you would like it to be -- hey, that's the market price, deal with it. If a company wants to hire a specialist, but the specialist is more expensive than the company would like them to be be -- attention people, our society has a serious problem that we need to solve immediately by reforming education and immigration and whatever else might be necessary.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >If software salaries are higher than EE salaries, EEs will move into software. Although occasionally I talk to people who seem to believe changing careers is impossible for some reason Maybe because it is impossible in practice? I'm an EE trying to move from embedded SW to higher level (backend/dev-ops since I had some experience with that and with python), and all I get are rejections ("sorry, thanks for your application but we can't move forward with it since we have so many quality applicants with more experience to choose from"). To me it seems, the current market doesn't seem to favor career switchers at all. Companies seem to be looking for seniors or at least mid level experienced in their area of work, so switching careers does indeed seem to be impossible right now. Or maybe I live in a bad market.
    - careerswitcher 3y ago
      Now is a bad time. Two years ago I was hired with no experience as a career switcher onto a full-stack web (mostly backend) team. Now the same team is hiring and wants a mid-level with 3 years of experience.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Correct. Lowering prices increases the purchasing power of every worker. That could be achieved by pursuing production for use, not profit. Municipal collective ownership works quite well for utilities (like ISPs) and housing. Regional collective/co-op food production can work well too. Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places. And so on. It only takes the workers to be sufficiently well organised to obtain the means to produce in this way.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    The entire selling point of free markets is that it keeps prices in check due to competition. Every experiment in human history of nationalization of production has failed miserably. Instead, let’s cut the red tape and remove the barriers in the parts of the economy that are not following the rules of the market. Do that and prices will decrease.
    - dontlaugh 3y ago
      Every experiment in human history of deregulation, privatisation and austerity (neoliberalism) has failed miserably to serve the needs of the working class. Experiments with collectivisation have failed to serve the needs of the capitalist class, for sure. It's why they use union busting, sanctions, coups and invasions to cause such experiments to fail.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > pursuing production for use, not profit Profit is a much-misunderstood concept. Private profit is the best way discovered so far to align incentives for those who produce. As Adam Smith said, "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." A system that disregards profit and instead relies on some other incentive structure can work in small groups of people for short periods of time; but eventually those other incentives (usually some kind of familial love, a sense of group belonging and solidarity, or similar) run out of steam, and it fails to scale both in size and time. To paraphrase Churchill, free-market capitalism is the worst system of economics, except for all the others that have been tried. > Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places Only for a certain definition of "works". The Seoul Metro, owned by the city of Seoul, for example, is a huge network of clean, efficient subway lines that millions ride daily to get places. It's really quite nice to use. Under the hood, however, is the fact that they lose a quarter of a billion dollars every year, and is subsidized by taxpayers from around the whole country, most of whom don't even live in Seoul.
- probelm 3y ago
  Nah, you’re wrong too. Tax the rich. Their actions the last 30 decades and even 40 are easily Googled They’ve collided with government to expropriate worker wealth, or more accurately, propagated the myth a mathematical minority are the keystone to physical reality itself They’re only a few mere mortals and their riches are only possible so long as the majority graciously do not kill them
  - cpursley 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - probelm 3y ago
      The cause is collusion between political and private entities to insulate a mathematical minority from taxation. Trying to change the narrative altogether while claiming solidarity is disingenuous bullshit. “Hey that guy lit the house on fire! I have 4K video and a confession!” “Yeah I saw him too! But did he really or was it the gas and the lighter? Who knows. We should look into it.”
      - cpursley 3y ago
        You’re half way there - the other half is crony capitalism (regulatory capture). The solution is dealing with those issues at the source, not the tail end.
        probelm 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - probelm 3y ago
    [flagged]
- markus_zhang 3y ago
  We need a fundamental rehaul of the system which sadly won't happen without major effort and maybe bloodshed because in the least (assuming we still want to keep Capitalism) somehow we will have to 1) Remove the political power groups that benefit from past 40 years' global development, and 2) Remove similar groups in any other sphere that support the people in 1). Maybe WW3 can bring it and keep it for a couple of decades, if we don't all die in the mushrooms.
- giantg2 3y ago
  It's also possible that we've already peaked as a society and we can't continue to have infinite higher standard of living. Real wages have declined over the past 50 years. Due to both resource consumption/demand and environmental impact it may not be feasible for the next generation to have the same things as the previous generation. Even shifts like a secondary economy transitioning to a tertiary economy can cut out more people due to the demand for high skill/education. Despite all this, standard of living has gone up, even for the less fortunate if you compare to the past, mostly due to the quality of goods and the advantage of trade with poorer nations. When that might end or reverse is anyone's guess. But yes, inequality has also gone up as you point out. Raising other people's salaries is probably the best way to deal with this while staying in the current paradigm. Although raising chip worker wages isn't going to change inequality - you'd have to apply this to other jobs like retail, food service, custodial, etc.
  - mech765 3y ago
    Real wages have risen over the last 50 years.
    - wildrhythms 3y ago
      It's about purchasing power; not just real wages. >despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
      - gottorf 3y ago
        > It's about purchasing power; not just real wages. Real wage means purchasing power parity, or it should. These two statements cannot be true, if they are using the same definition of inflation: - Real wages have risen over the past 50 years - Today's real average wage has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago The methodology must be different.
- black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  I mean, sure, but we gotta start somewhere. If you want my opinion on big, society-wide changes, "What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc)" isn't enough. The capitalist system needs to be destroyed, and we need a new arrangement of society where workers own the means of production and the value is shared with everyone, not a few arbitrary billionaires. Restructure society to benefit everyone (or at least work towards that goal), rather than a society that unequally benefits the capitalist class. But until that movement is ready to happen, I think it's fine to acknowledge that the "real" cost of living has risen over the past few decades, while most people's "real" wages have remained stagnant. If it's not salaries, then I think the next thing to look at is the exorbitant housing and rent prices.
- randysalami 3y ago
  Or we go back to the old ways where servants make up one chunk of society, indebted and poor, and the rest is made up of petty elites and elites. You can tell from this post how many people want this and are scared they might eventually fall to the former. “No it’s perfect reasonable for me to make 150k. No that doesn’t make me an oppressor. Sorry you make 30k a year, now go fill up my beverage peasant or die”.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
How could we afford to run the software if the transistors were two micro pennies more?
- zbrozek 3y ago
  If each transistor got 2 micropennies more expensive, that would more than double the price of a midrange CPU.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
dontupvoteme 3y ago
The problem is there are only a few players in the game, so they basically collaborate to keep wages down.
4gotunameagain 3y ago
I know this will be unpopular here, but no, SW wages need to fall. They are incredibly inflated compared to the rest of professions, and not only it is impossible to raise all wages like that, but other, harder and more important professions need to be incentivised more. A doctor working at a public hospital should be paid much more than us, that are sitting at their computer all day. Yes, doctor wages need to rise, but also SW wages need to fall. And this is comping from an aerospace engineer with an inflated wage, which, being in Europe, is not nearly as unfairly inflated as in the US.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Doctors are paid better than SEs, arent they?
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    I think depends upon the SWE and depends upon the doctor's specialization. Doctors do have a credential system that sets them up for a longer more stable career path with few ageism concerns. But all things considered more money now for less time investment is more valuable.
- markus_zhang 3y ago
  I think average doctors should get paid more but doctors who work in private places probably need to get the same treatment as high end SWE. But all in all I think worker's share of wealth shoud raise but that's a bloody question.
- dnissley 3y ago
  Do you have any ideas about how to make software cheaper?
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    Yeah, don't pay people that write back end javascript more than firemen. Let's start with that.
gregoriol 3y ago
Or things need to be automated
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jmoak3 3y ago
It’ll rise when there are more employers competing for the workers. Until then they don’t have to try so hard to find people, students can see the bad salaries ahead of time yet they study for a decade for these roles regardless.

You guys keep focusing on the wrong thing, salaries are a first order solution. What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc.). Jacking up salaries without bringing the standard of living for the rest of your society will only lead to a continued breakdown of the social fabric that we have been seeing steadily happening over the past 30-40 years.

CuriousCosmic 3y ago
Yeah and that can happen by paying everybody more. Salaries have largely stayed the same while prices have risen and that excess has gone to profits. If workers demand more pay and they force the issue, the economy eventually will reach equilibrium. The issue currently is that those workers can't really do that because the US government has shown time and again that they don't really care that much if a company violates organised labor laws or labor laws in general (you get a fine and a slap on the wrist) but they will bring down god's wrath if workers/a union has an "illegal strike" after the employer ignores their demands. There is a reason why ever since Reagan took a hardline anti-union stance and disbanded the PATCO union for having the audacity to strike in the 1980s that the number of major strikes per year has steadily declined. https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  if you pay everyone 10% more, the difference between a $30k worker barely scaping by and a $100k worker that is cofortable simply increases by $7k. I'm not saying everyone can't get a pay raise, but we can't think linearly here. Semiconductor workers aren't exactly applying for food stamps.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > if you pay everyone 10% more, the difference between a $30k worker barely scaping by and a $100k worker that is cofortable simply increases by $7k. As long as more of the gross profit goes to workers, that's a step in the right direction. Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better!
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >As long as more of the gross profit goes to workers, that's a step in the right direction. That's now how the lesser paid workers will see it, unfortunately. >Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better! That would be flat (Y = 6000 vs Y = 1.X%). Perhaps better, but I'm not sure if that's been done outside of stimulus checks. I think what the person up chain was alluding to was to increase minimum wage or similar initiatives. Doesn't help the higher end of the working class but helps out the lower end immensely, and indirectly helps out the middle as well.
      - ms4720 3y ago
        Minimum wage raises encourage two things in business: - automation, ie order at a kiosk at McDonald's - not hiring for the job because it is not profitable to do. This is what happens to low skill workers when we make low skill jobs too expensive.
        wildrhythms 3y ago
        Not sure if you've noticed but all those things have happened (self checkout, ordering kiosks) while wages haven't grown to meet inflation.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Sure, and that's not a bad thing by itself. It moves the needle up. I don't think corporate has ever said "we have too many people who want to work". There will be more jobs out there that can't be automated, at least until we hit Terminator levels of sentience. But by then our robot overlords will solve capitalism for us.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > Salaries have largely stayed the same Salaries for the top 10% or so have increased significantly over the years. Of course it still pales in comparison to how much the incomes of the top 1% increased over the same period (meaning there is enough money/productivity to pay everyone more)
- infogulch 3y ago
  A big part of the problem is the fed that literally pursues a monetary policy that intends to suppress real wage growth. This is why wages are flat for 30 years.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    And now they also want people to be laid off.
    - probelm 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >SWEs could halt the fiat economy tomorrow through collective action From my experience, modern SWEs are the workers' category least likely to get involved in any kind of collective action. They're too self centered and individualistic for that. Everyone's too busy trying to get "theirs", while kicking down the ladder beneath them, thinking they'll be the next Larry Page. It wasn't always like this though. I think the insane demand and crazy compensation levels in the last decade changed the mentality and inflated the egos, reducing compassion and empathy, turning SWEs in the new finance bros, except more introverted and doing less cocaine.
        probelm 3y ago
        [flagged]
        sofixa 3y ago
        > From my experience, modern SWEs are the workers' category least likely to get involved in any kind of collective action. They're too self centered and individualistic for that. Not to mention way too well paid, comfortable and with lots to lose. Why risk a very comfortable lifestyle for some noble goal that barely concerns you unless you have tons of empathy?
  - 3y ago
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > Yeah and that can happen by paying everybody more. How can that be done without either stoking massive inflation or somehow paying someone else less?
  - Broken_Hippo 3y ago
    I really don't care if shareholders get less money or if a CEO gets less of a bonus. It's OK to pay some people less.
    - cpursley 3y ago
      So it’s okay screwing retired teachers living of funds they’ve paid into their entire working career? Because that’s the typical type of person who owns stock (not directly).
      - Broken_Hippo 3y ago
        Obviously society thinks it is OK. If we didn't, we wouldn't let retirement funds be dependent on how well stocks do - and we only did that after plundering other people's pensions and screwing them over. They might indirectly own it, but it is other folks getting rich off of their money. Realistically, no one should have risk when paying into pensions/retirement for later and it should be somewhat promised. The entire system is reprehensible as it stands.
      - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
        No of course not. But keep in mind it's a relatively new phenomenon for most people to rely on stocks/401k/IRA for their retirement. Prior to that retirement funds were primarily handled by pensions where the company or organisation you worked for put away money for you in a fund and for the employee there was little to no risk that this money would disappear or diminish in value. Behind the scenes the company may invest it in various ways but it was generally a "low risk" retirement fund. The reason why every company and organisation (other than a handful of government orgs) got rid of pensions and switched to investment based retirement funds was because the risk got moved away from the company to the employee and as a result it was cheaper to operate. And as an added bonus, now any time we want to consider raising wages or improving things for workers at the cost of shareholders profits, companies can turn around and argue "this is hurting retired people". So no of course not I don't think retired people should be getting fucked out of the funds they've been paying into for their entire careers but they shouldn't be paying into those funds in the first place. Unless they explicitly opt into that risk, they should be getting access to a pension with guaranteed payout by default.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  More money in the system drives inequality if fundamental necessities like shelter supply remain artificially choked by people with even more money as they simply buy up and out-bid as much as possible. If that weren't the case, I'd agree. Even as I a software person gradually make more money when I'm not in a perpetual cycle of working and being laid off, a tiny condo already being out of reach is only going to get dramatically more out of reach if salaries rise while most of an arbitrary city's development rate is beleaguered by boomers, arduous bureaucracy, investors, and people with their boomer parent's money willing to spend it, knowing it'll always increase. Not that people shouldn't fight to be paid more, just that it has limited effect unless you happen to get paid significantly more than everyone else compared to what things cost now, and hope that continues forever.
deburo 3y ago
I guess you can keep cheerleading UBI then.
Clent 3y ago
No one is trying to solve the world's economic problems here. That would do nothing to solve the knowledge worker shorter with this chip factories.
thatfrenchguy 3y ago
> Jacking up salaries without bringing the standard of living for the rest of your society will only lead to a continued breakdown of the social fabric that we have been seeing steadily happening over the past 30-40 years. Eh, I don't know, if you follow the example of the bay area, jacking up salaries in tech means everyone else paid more money (earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France and poor in the bay area). Now if we could fix our housing problem...
- qwytw 3y ago
  > earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France Maybe in a poor rural area.
wnc3141 3y ago
You are correct, however a more practical read is: In the short run, precluding net growth and change in supply, a rise in salary implies a redistribution from capital (shareholders) to labor.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  Money might move from capital to labor, but you aren't getting any extra production of goods. The stuff labor wants to buy still has the same amount of scarcity. Ie you will get inflation. You need to encourage more (efficient) production to make labor better off.
  - oblio 3y ago
    Productivity has risen a ton since the 1970s. Wages are practically flat. Software and the internet haven't helped, quite the opposite. The profits are captured at the top.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ 1970s, of course, is when the dollar started being backed by nothing more than "full faith and credit".
      - oblio 3y ago
        That graphic is misleading: https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971 https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971
Aerroon 3y ago
>What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc.). This is a moving target that can never be met. We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff. When I was growing up the main part of the meal was potatoes/rice/pasta. Meat was a few times a week (too rarely) and there were no fancy sauces/condiments on it. Why? Because it was cheap.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  > We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff. The three main things which have skyrocketed in price since the 70s are higher education, healthcare, and housing. On top of that, over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas. This fact alone has meant that young people today start their careers significantly poorer than their parents did. Point is, it’s not just about the prices of sneakers and pasta. For all of the most important costs in life, things have gotten much more expensive.
  - TexanFeller 3y ago
    > over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas High schools do not maintain any sort of reasonable standards for granting a degree anymore, so it's no wonder businesses require a college degree. We decided everyone needed a HS degree, so we started lowering the standards for it, "teaching to the test", and only focusing on improving the worst quartile students to minimum tested standards. Now the same thing is happening with colleges.
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      Sure, but that means that students today aren’t getting bachelor’s degrees (the “expensive stuff”) by choice, but by necessity. That’s tens of thousands poorer (and ~4 years older) because of a shifting job market.
jabradoodle 3y ago
The world runs on chips, a huge proportion of which comes from a single country which also happens to be under threat of invasion from a country hostile to the West. Sorting out the supply chain here is a pretty critical issue that makes sense to tackle in isolation.
vasco 3y ago
To solve the need for super specialized workers you actually need to jack up salaries. Nobody is going through the training and intensity of a semiconductor fab job for the same they could make walking dogs if that's how it worked.
roenxi 3y ago
In context, relative salaries are exactly the right thing to focus on. If software salaries are higher than EE salaries, EEs will move into software. Although occasionally I talk to people who seem to believe changing careers is impossible for some reason so Imagine there probably is some confusion on that point among some readers. While we do want general welfare to improve that wasn't the topic in the thread.
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  For some reason, the free-market arguments only apply to the people at the bottom of the pyramid. If you want to buy bread in a supermarket, but the bread is more expensive than you would like it to be -- hey, that's the market price, deal with it. If a company wants to hire a specialist, but the specialist is more expensive than the company would like them to be be -- attention people, our society has a serious problem that we need to solve immediately by reforming education and immigration and whatever else might be necessary.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >If software salaries are higher than EE salaries, EEs will move into software. Although occasionally I talk to people who seem to believe changing careers is impossible for some reason Maybe because it is impossible in practice? I'm an EE trying to move from embedded SW to higher level (backend/dev-ops since I had some experience with that and with python), and all I get are rejections ("sorry, thanks for your application but we can't move forward with it since we have so many quality applicants with more experience to choose from"). To me it seems, the current market doesn't seem to favor career switchers at all. Companies seem to be looking for seniors or at least mid level experienced in their area of work, so switching careers does indeed seem to be impossible right now. Or maybe I live in a bad market.
  - careerswitcher 3y ago
    Now is a bad time. Two years ago I was hired with no experience as a career switcher onto a full-stack web (mostly backend) team. Now the same team is hiring and wants a mid-level with 3 years of experience.
dontlaugh 3y ago
Correct. Lowering prices increases the purchasing power of every worker. That could be achieved by pursuing production for use, not profit. Municipal collective ownership works quite well for utilities (like ISPs) and housing. Regional collective/co-op food production can work well too. Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places. And so on. It only takes the workers to be sufficiently well organised to obtain the means to produce in this way.
- cpursley 3y ago
  The entire selling point of free markets is that it keeps prices in check due to competition. Every experiment in human history of nationalization of production has failed miserably. Instead, let’s cut the red tape and remove the barriers in the parts of the economy that are not following the rules of the market. Do that and prices will decrease.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    Every experiment in human history of deregulation, privatisation and austerity (neoliberalism) has failed miserably to serve the needs of the working class. Experiments with collectivisation have failed to serve the needs of the capitalist class, for sure. It's why they use union busting, sanctions, coups and invasions to cause such experiments to fail.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > pursuing production for use, not profit Profit is a much-misunderstood concept. Private profit is the best way discovered so far to align incentives for those who produce. As Adam Smith said, "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." A system that disregards profit and instead relies on some other incentive structure can work in small groups of people for short periods of time; but eventually those other incentives (usually some kind of familial love, a sense of group belonging and solidarity, or similar) run out of steam, and it fails to scale both in size and time. To paraphrase Churchill, free-market capitalism is the worst system of economics, except for all the others that have been tried. > Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places Only for a certain definition of "works". The Seoul Metro, owned by the city of Seoul, for example, is a huge network of clean, efficient subway lines that millions ride daily to get places. It's really quite nice to use. Under the hood, however, is the fact that they lose a quarter of a billion dollars every year, and is subsidized by taxpayers from around the whole country, most of whom don't even live in Seoul.
probelm 3y ago
Nah, you’re wrong too. Tax the rich. Their actions the last 30 decades and even 40 are easily Googled They’ve collided with government to expropriate worker wealth, or more accurately, propagated the myth a mathematical minority are the keystone to physical reality itself They’re only a few mere mortals and their riches are only possible so long as the majority graciously do not kill them
- cpursley 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - probelm 3y ago
    The cause is collusion between political and private entities to insulate a mathematical minority from taxation. Trying to change the narrative altogether while claiming solidarity is disingenuous bullshit. “Hey that guy lit the house on fire! I have 4K video and a confession!” “Yeah I saw him too! But did he really or was it the gas and the lighter? Who knows. We should look into it.”
    - cpursley 3y ago
      You’re half way there - the other half is crony capitalism (regulatory capture). The solution is dealing with those issues at the source, not the tail end.
      - probelm 3y ago
        [flagged]
- probelm 3y ago
  [flagged]
markus_zhang 3y ago
We need a fundamental rehaul of the system which sadly won't happen without major effort and maybe bloodshed because in the least (assuming we still want to keep Capitalism) somehow we will have to 1) Remove the political power groups that benefit from past 40 years' global development, and 2) Remove similar groups in any other sphere that support the people in 1). Maybe WW3 can bring it and keep it for a couple of decades, if we don't all die in the mushrooms.
giantg2 3y ago
It's also possible that we've already peaked as a society and we can't continue to have infinite higher standard of living. Real wages have declined over the past 50 years. Due to both resource consumption/demand and environmental impact it may not be feasible for the next generation to have the same things as the previous generation. Even shifts like a secondary economy transitioning to a tertiary economy can cut out more people due to the demand for high skill/education. Despite all this, standard of living has gone up, even for the less fortunate if you compare to the past, mostly due to the quality of goods and the advantage of trade with poorer nations. When that might end or reverse is anyone's guess. But yes, inequality has also gone up as you point out. Raising other people's salaries is probably the best way to deal with this while staying in the current paradigm. Although raising chip worker wages isn't going to change inequality - you'd have to apply this to other jobs like retail, food service, custodial, etc.
- mech765 3y ago
  Real wages have risen over the last 50 years.
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    It's about purchasing power; not just real wages. >despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > It's about purchasing power; not just real wages. Real wage means purchasing power parity, or it should. These two statements cannot be true, if they are using the same definition of inflation: - Real wages have risen over the past 50 years - Today's real average wage has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago The methodology must be different.
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
UtopiaPunk 3y ago
I mean, sure, but we gotta start somewhere. If you want my opinion on big, society-wide changes, "What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc)" isn't enough. The capitalist system needs to be destroyed, and we need a new arrangement of society where workers own the means of production and the value is shared with everyone, not a few arbitrary billionaires. Restructure society to benefit everyone (or at least work towards that goal), rather than a society that unequally benefits the capitalist class. But until that movement is ready to happen, I think it's fine to acknowledge that the "real" cost of living has risen over the past few decades, while most people's "real" wages have remained stagnant. If it's not salaries, then I think the next thing to look at is the exorbitant housing and rent prices.
randysalami 3y ago
Or we go back to the old ways where servants make up one chunk of society, indebted and poor, and the rest is made up of petty elites and elites. You can tell from this post how many people want this and are scared they might eventually fall to the former. “No it’s perfect reasonable for me to make 150k. No that doesn’t make me an oppressor. Sorry you make 30k a year, now go fill up my beverage peasant or die”.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

How could we afford to run the software if the transistors were two micro pennies more?

zbrozek 3y ago
If each transistor got 2 micropennies more expensive, that would more than double the price of a midrange CPU.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

dontupvoteme 3y ago

The problem is there are only a few players in the game, so they basically collaborate to keep wages down.

4gotunameagain 3y ago

I know this will be unpopular here, but no, SW wages need to fall. They are incredibly inflated compared to the rest of professions, and not only it is impossible to raise all wages like that, but other, harder and more important professions need to be incentivised more. A doctor working at a public hospital should be paid much more than us, that are sitting at their computer all day. Yes, doctor wages need to rise, but also SW wages need to fall. And this is comping from an aerospace engineer with an inflated wage, which, being in Europe, is not nearly as unfairly inflated as in the US.

hardware2win 3y ago
Doctors are paid better than SEs, arent they?
- yomlica8 3y ago
  I think depends upon the SWE and depends upon the doctor's specialization. Doctors do have a credential system that sets them up for a longer more stable career path with few ageism concerns. But all things considered more money now for less time investment is more valuable.
markus_zhang 3y ago
I think average doctors should get paid more but doctors who work in private places probably need to get the same treatment as high end SWE. But all in all I think worker's share of wealth shoud raise but that's a bloody question.
dnissley 3y ago
Do you have any ideas about how to make software cheaper?
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  Yeah, don't pay people that write back end javascript more than firemen. Let's start with that.

gregoriol 3y ago

Or things need to be automated

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jmoak3 3y ago

It’ll rise when there are more employers competing for the workers. Until then they don’t have to try so hard to find people, students can see the bad salaries ahead of time yet they study for a decade for these roles regardless.