A Tale of Two Countries 518
theodp writes "Over at TechCrunch, Jon Bischke is troubled by the growing divide between Silicon Valley and unemployed America. While people who spend most of their days within a few blocks of tech start-up epicenters are enjoying a boom/bubble, the number of unemployed now eclipses 14 million nationwide, labor under-utilization is 16.2%, and the mean duration of unemployment has spiked to 40 weeks. 'Which bring us to an important question,' writes Bischke. 'Should Silicon Valley (and other tech clusters throughout the country) care? After all, as long as people in Nebraska or the Central Valley of California have enough money to buy virtual tractors to tend their crops in Farmville, should the tech community be worried about whether those same people are getting paid to do work in the real world? Is what's best for Silicon Valley also good for America?'"
Leave Tech/IT alone! (Score:4, Insightful)
The software development, technology, and IT industries have been under attack for quite some time now. Automation, outsourcing, H1B visas, and now the cloud.
It is a testament to the technology-related fields that the workforce keeps adapting and evolving to keep pushing forward amidst adversity.
While I feel for all those unemployed, I have worked very hard to not only stay up-to-date and relevant, but to also keep pushing myself forward. I am not saying I am better than anybody else, but I have more than paid my dues and continue to do so. Perhaps the technology-related fields fare better because it has always been a moving target. Before you had worries about job security you had worries about your tools becoming obsolete or deprecated. The entire mindset is to keep learning new languages, concepts, and technology. Never rest on your laurels.
The old argument (Score:0, Insightful)
It's been discussed ad nauseam. The same things were said in the early 80s. Know what happened? People stopped worrying about it and got back to work and the country enjoyed a significant boom in production. What's unfortunate now is we have a president who's completely clueless. So enjoy a Republican in the White House in 2013.
Re:US (Score:3, Insightful)
A nasty situation like riots and a bailout from Germany?
Computers - Taking Away Jobs (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember back when granddad had a computer. He'd add up all the coins and do the math required for the accounting for the business. Then silly technology came along and now we have "calculators" and "computers". What happened to the real faces behind these jobs?! How many people are out of work that have the skills to do long division -JUST LIKE A COMPUTER-! It's a terrible thing and we should at once do away with progress. It's far too damaging to the economy.
Shitty article (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
rich were flooding the market with cheap grain, causing the small farmers not to be able to make a living because the crop they produced ended up more expensive in cost than rich, big farm holders. in turn, they had to sell their farms to rich farmers and migrate into cities to make a living. increasingly roman agriculture had come under the control of very few, rich landowning aristocrats. these farms were called latifundia.
since the backbone of the country, the small free citizen landholders were gone, public services and military continually deteriorated. the 'barbarians' (non-romans) who were increasingly conscripted to the army had less incentive than a citizen soldier to defend anything. moreover, the disillusioned citizenry, who could get nothing out of the society at that point, cared much for any intruders - whomever invaded, they were just replacing existing elite with their own, little was changing in the case of ordinary citizens. (except for exceedingly vandal barbarians and similar - vandals were also a barbarian tribe, as a sidenote).
the rich, who held all the resources had little use for anything of the sort like republic or democracy. and when augustus and later emperors started to dismantle last vestiges of republic, noone cared. now, the citizenry had no say or share from society as a whole. and from that point on it all disintegrated.
the irony is, this process started around the peak of roman momentum - late republic era. the very era in which triumvirate (caesar pompei and crassus) were waging their civil war against each other. the empire didnt instantly disintegrate - it had momentum to take itself comfortably forward at least 100 years more. everything then started to directly crumble.
today is no different. back in roman times, the poor had at least the chance to engage in trade and arts/crafts. today, even those fields of life are 'latifundiated' by the rich just like how roman agriculture (then the backbone of economy) was consolidated in the hands of very few elite.
i would like to alert you to the fact that, this situation that destroyed roman empire, had later also become the causes that led to the birth of aristocracy in middle ages and on. in fact, the entire system of feudalism, is a system of property ownership - the difference with our current capitalist system is, now everyone is able to own property (land in this case), while back then, only aristocrats could. however this doesnt change one fundamental fact - this system eventually leads to a minority having and controlling everything (yes, including politics because resource is power - just like how senate had to accept subjugation in front of those who had the funds to muster legions), and ends up in an aristocratic hierarchical society.
in short - yes, they should care. for the sake of their own freedom too.
Re:US (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're talking about Greece, then yes - one of the EU countries who had a culture of "low or no taxes" for the wealthy and businesses at all costs. Sort of like another, slight larger, economy that is similarly struggling.
You know, it's funny but when you don't have income (in the form of taxes), you can't spend it on things that you're paying for anyway, like air conditioning Afghanistan.
Re:Leave Tech/IT alone! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wish we could move (Score:4, Insightful)
...those of us that got suckered in with a mortgage...
How exactly were you 'suckered'?
Re:A Tale of Two Countries (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wish we could move (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should SV care? (Score:2, Insightful)
SV's dream is to find and develop an idea for a product that's hugely useful to a community. Then they patent it, monetize it, and monopolize it/defend it in direct proportion to its usefulness. Their assembly line takes truly good ideas out of the public sphere and changes them into privately held things that are much less useful but much more profitable. The forces that benefit are mostly the forces that are wealthy to begin with.
If SV cared they would be trying to build systems that took ideas and kept them open and free to be used, shared, and built upon, that enriched the masses and not primarily the wealthy.
Re:A Tale of Two Countries (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a "public sector" employee. After finishing grad school I chose civil service to serve my country. I've got asthma so I couldn't join the military, but I wanted to use the skills I have to go into public [u]service[/u]
So I'm making somewhere around 50-75% less than my classmates who went to work for Google or Microsoft. I didn't even get a cost-of-living adjustment this year (a political decision which I supported fyi). The housing market in & around DC has continued to fall, although not as much as some other places in the country.
And who the hell said we don't pay income tax? If not, then something screwy is going on in payroll; at least a third of my check is gone before I ever see it, so where is the rest of it going? No, we pay income tax to both the state and the federal government, just like every other American worker out there.
I'm not trying to sit here and bitch about my job. I like it. I enjoy it. I'm glad I do what I do, and I do it for my mom & dad, my wife, my family, & my country. I don't mind sacrificing, and think there's probably further sacrifices we could make. But unless you're talking about the smooth-talking politicians and their staffers, or the stuffed shirts & suits filling up the roles of executive positions, this myth of "the luxury of government work" really pisses me off.
Yes, I've got a great job, and good job security. But I also ride crappy public transit, sleep in a crappy one-bedroom apartment, eat lunch in a room of coworkers eating PB&J or last night's leftovers, watch TV on a CRT with the beginning stages of burn-in, and sleep on a crappy freecycle mattress because I had to choose between buying a couch or a bed.
I'm not asking for pity. Hell, I'm not even asking for a raise. I'm just asking people to quit the public-sector bashing.
Re:Leave Tech/IT alone! (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps the technology-related fields fare better because it has always been a moving target. Before you had worries about job security you had worries about your tools becoming obsolete or deprecated. The entire mindset is to keep learning new languages, concepts, and technology. Never rest on your laurels.
Who is resting? Most of those whose skills are obsolete got that way by serving their employers interest rather than their own. There is often a dilemma: what is most needed at your current job isn't necessarily useful for the next and for many fields there is no equivalent to working on an open source project on your spare time. If you can't get your training on the job you can't get it at all. Hedging means steering your experience to something less useful to your current employer but more marketable outside. That's a tricky and somewhat dangerous stand to make and it should come as no surprise that many fail.
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, questions -
A) Where and how is 347/wk covering all of his bills? Because it wouldn't work in Sarasota Florida, I can say from experience.
B) Does the fact that it's temporary somehow not matter because it's extensible in (monitored) emergency circumstances?
C) Is this friend, in fact, not searching for employment? Because I can guarantee you that most people don't just say "Mmmm, delicious - I'm making $16k a year, until benefits end, I have no reason to try and find a job."
You're not supposed to make unemployment hard to get or maintain - because it's meant to alleviate a hardship, and allow people to keep effectively looking for a job, which gets a lot harder when you've lost your housing and communication services.
Re:are they capable of caring? (Score:4, Insightful)
Except the Bay Area is also the most socially liberal and philanthropic regions of the country.
If you want rich conservatives look to Wall Street (which is in an even larger bubble than Silicon Valley right now). Even more impressively, they have been able to convince middle America (the ones hurting the most from the recession) that the government social programs that can and are helping them out right now are evil and should not be funded by those experiencing said economic bubbles.
Re:A Tale of Two Countries (Score:5, Insightful)
It cannot be said that a private worker does not pay taxes to government, because government did not have that money already.
It is irrelevant who has the money to start with. A government employee gets a salary, part of which is paid to the government in taxes, just as a private sector employee does. How much is withheld depends on the dependents and other status filed on the same W4 for both employees. It is an identical situation: if the money being withheld for taxes was not withheld, it could be paid to the employee.
Now, if you seriously want to argue that government employees do not pay taxes, then you must also deduct the amount that is called "income tax" from their salary when complaining about how large the government employee salaries are. You cannot honestly argue both ways -- "look at how large their salaries are" and "they don't pay taxes!".
The government workers do not pay income taxes, because it is clear that it's just one government department shuffling money to another...
Except for the fact that the money goes through a private citizen first, you would be correct. You do understand, I hope, that the money withheld from a government employee's salary is just like every other worker's withholding. I.e., an estimate of the amount of taxes that will be owed at the end of the year. And that by proper estate planning and other actions the amount withheld can be returned to the employee as a "tax refund" when he files his taxes. That's another example of why your lie that government employees don't pay taxes is a lie.
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Income disparity was what made roman population lose interest, hope and eventually, participation in the roman republic
Well, that and the little detail that "the Roman population", the poor included, was itself a tiny minority at the top of a machine built on massacring, enslaving, and torturing the rest of the world for their own enrichment and amusement.
But I'm sure the foreign conquered provinces felt much more happy and free when they were invaded and enslaved and crucified by an equitable Roman Republic rather than by a Roman Empire ruled by a few rich guys.
Re:Welcome to the Obama economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Rose colored Republican glasses not needed.
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yeah... How about that privilege you got there? Because some people might not be financially illiterate, so much as not making more than their needs. Or they got cancer, or their parent or spouse got cancer, and their means weren't sufficient to keep their loved one alive AND build up a huge savings pool. Or one of the other members of the infinite array of things that can go wrong without someone being stupid or bad for it.
Sorry, but your "if you're poor it's cause you're stupid" narrative has never had any value, and is deeply, deeply disgusting to anyone who's ever actually interacted with someone affected by poverty.
Oh, and you know what - even if you were right (which, let's never forget, you aren't) - your "lets make it harder to keep unemployment" crap is STILL deeply stupid. Because regardless of whether we provide unemployment or other job assistance or not, the unemployed people are still going to exist. And you know what sucks more than paying a small amount of tax dollars into unemployment benefits and job assistance programs? Adding to the homeless problem, the crime rate, and the other problems that poverty serves as a primary driver for. And hey - if they turn to crime, you get to pay, not partial income, but full room and board in one of our fine correctional institutes, which costs a whole lot more than unemployment.
Re:hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or doesn't earn enough to actually be able to save.