The truth is that wages a worker can earn are bounded at the top by how much value they add. If they are paid more than the value they create they'll be fired (unless they're executives).
A manufacturing line can produce millions of dollars of value with a few dozen workers. This means if the workers organize properly and if they're not undermined by foreign competition then they can potentially capture a lot of value and have high incomes.
The "service" jobs that are replacing them add much less value. A caregiver can only work with one person at a time, and maybe six or eight in a workday. That guarantees the job will be low wage or not done at all.
Our economy used to produce jobs by the tens of millions where an average guy with average ability and a willingness to endure hard work and monotony could buy a house, raise a family, go on the annual vacation to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, have his wife work as much or as little as she wants and eventually retire comfortably. The economy doesn't produce these jobs anymore.
Now we have jobs that are still well compensated but comparatively small in number and highly specialized or jobs that are not and can not provide wages to live the lives people used to have.
Once 3D printing evolves to the point of being suitable to print everyday items it would kill a lot of jobs all across the supply chain the manufacturing industry.
That won't happen any time soon. Sure, you can print household items like a cup, plate, and possibly silverware but so many household things are made out of materials that aren't really 'printable' (a pillow or couch for example) or complicated devices with components (headphones, a can of air freshener, a laptop), manufacturing plays a role in all of those items.
We can actually 3D print a pillow now since we already have printers that can 3D print with memory foam. https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/now-can-3d-print-memory-...
The current high end generation of printers use a combination of lithographic/ultrasound and chemical based process control can produce rigid and flexible materials from the same substrate. e.g. http://carbon3d.com/
And we can print already circuit boards as well as embed wires and conductors in the 3D printing process, we can also 3D print basic components like resistors and capacitors. http://www.kurzweilai.net/3d-printing-basic-electronic-compo...
If you think this ain't happening any time soon, we either have a very different definition of soon or you don't really understand just how far 3D printing and additive manufacturing in general has progressed over the past 5 years alone.
We are considerably closer today to the day where when you need a new pair of headphones you simply walk to a kiosk than to the days when low-skilled labor manufacturing was a major part of western industry.
While this isn't going to be done within 2 years, within a decade it is going to be possible, especially considering that additive manufacturing is already being used by local shops and major companies are pushing for this in order to simplify their supply chain.
The car companies are a very good example of this, Audi and a few others have been investing heavily in additive manufacturing of replacement parts in order to be able to grant their authorized dealers and repair shops the ability to 3D print many parts in house. This means that car companies do not need to continue to manufacture replacement parts for decades and keep old tooling a live or to outsource manufacturing to 3rd parties in order to keep their cars running, this also cuts down the cost of shipping and inventory management considerably.
Many other businesses/industries also are expanding into similar techniques with plumbing, electrical work and HVAC systems being prime candidates and being actively piloted in the field, need a 4" Y connector? simply go to your truck and print one....
Just look at SpaceX. It's cool, it's tech and it is most certainly hard material science.
We won't be able to make it with just soft skills and software. Improving our material lives (including not wasting resources) matters.
In the case of SpaceX or similar companies that fall under ITAR or do classified work, meeting those security requirements is an additional hurdle to outsourcing, although automation will still have an impact.
Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?
I have plenty of friends and some non-intermediate family members that have reported that their friends and family actively discouraged continuing their education after highschool for one reason or another. In some cases, reasons like "you'll earn more working an honest trade", and "college debt is a scam" are given (in some cases, these may actually be true). In others, things like "do you think you're better than the rest of us?", "that's for white people", and "only f-gs and liberals go to college" are hurled at those that want to continue their education.
And in many cases, it doesn't even take active discouragement to prevent people from wanting to obtain any higher education. I have relatives that live in very small, rural farming towns that have actively resisted attending anything other than the local 2-year junior college, in part because the people that get 4-year degrees never come back to town. They're convinced that they would be betraying their family and friends by getting educated and finding a better living situation.
My roommate hired him to refinish his deck (He owns the house), and every time my father showed up for work and I was working from home, he was thrilled.
My mother is barely literate, never really attended high school. She always read to me, encouraged me to read, and always made money available to buy books. The only things she cared about was me taking education seriously and not saddling myself down with kids too young (which might have backfired because neither I, or my brothers, have any interest in having children, which makes her sad).
I guess I'm just saying: Have another anecdote to add to your collection. But I'd also say, don't think the GP is wrong. Both attitudes exist obviously.
1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/166490/americans-college-educatio...
This is true, but the fact that there are definitely stigmas around higher education in underprivileged and working class communities in the USA is very much a reality.
I disagree, you find a diverse set of viewpoints on HN, this isn't representative. The fact that a distillation of r/theredpill dogma is the top comment is upsetting to me, but then again, I have come to expect that when the number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes on a story, such stories are more of a lightning rod of politicizing than it is substantial conversation.
Eventually the up/down votes equalizes it out. There are a couple of interesting comments below this that shock discuss the content of the article and probably will take this comment's place.
People from cities exhibit this kind of behavior too, but for some reason no one talks about it as negatively as they talk about staying in your shitty rural town after high school.
We've really fallen as Americans, too eager to stick in one place. 2-3 generations ago many of our ancestors left everything they had in their home country to come here with nothing more than the money in their pockets and shirt on their back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia#As_a_medical_conditi...
Homesickness: An American History by Susan J Matt is a great book about how it existed in America. The song "Home Sweet Home" is banal to us, but was forbidden to be played during the Civil War because it caused homesickness and desertions.They used to hospitalize people suffering from nostalgia. It could be that bad. the past was nothing like the modern rootlessness we have now.
But as far as the "reality" goes, there are certainly personal anecdotes to support it, some about people I personally know.
I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. If you really want to Make America Great Again, you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Easier said than done of course.
Within software, Haskell is the wrong direction. I haven't used it, but it seems like Go aims to make coding simpler. But it's not just programming languages; it includes large scale system design, which currently needs to be reinvented with intense effort at every firm, even repeatedly within the same firm, even within the same product.
Maybe but it doesn't matter that much. If some breakthrough in education made it easy for 60% of the population to become good quality coders, it would lower the wages of existing programmers, somewhat increase the pool of working programmers but not give that 60% good jobs.
The type of coding done at Uber, for example, is specifically valuable because it replaces the lower paid labor of other people. We can't all have jobs automating each other out of jobs, now can we?
2) Sure, you need all the hands you can get in the current market. Still, you wouldn't hire a ten thousand new developers tomorrow even if ten thousand people as competent as your most competent lead developers showed up on your doorstep tomorrow.
The tech companies in SV told the Obama administration that if they gave a million more H1Bs to engineers, they'd hire them all. And plenty of them put resources on improving developer tools.
I've been out of web dev for a while now, but React's one way state to UI concept actually seems like an amazing simplification.
Wouldn't a greater number of coders with lower abilities not work very well? Today's 10x programmers would become 20x or 50x
The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians are addressing are working from a memory of a time when "men were men", that worked hard in a physical way to produce a physical product; in the memory, these working men didn't think and didn't emote, they produced.
Now, the voter says, men have been "feminized" by being forced out of a productive, provider role where a single income could support the family. Instead, they are placed into a role where they need to express concern, care, and use soft skills instead of physical strength.
And when they want the same pay and security they had before, they are instead told to "learn to code" (or learn whatever, get an education). Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow.