How money Works "The Gig Economy is Full" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqmJN5z6Rjc (10 Dec 25)
There are not enough jobs for the employable people.
I haven't talked to a cashier at a grocery store in years. It's all self-checkout. I stayed in a hotel recently and I didn't even talk to someone at the front desk. I just checked in at a kiosk and got my room card. There was no one else around.
I guess the people that used to do those jobs are all just driving Ubers and Doordash now?
I wish we'd pump the brakes on efficiency and profit.
This is not legal, executives of publicly traded companies are required to put maximizing shareholder value above all other considerations.
However, some PE firms have been successfully doing similar practices.
1. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-137/will-the-real-sha...
For reference:
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits.
(Emphasis added.)
And of course, there's this idea everything needs to be done like the house is on fire, but I'm usually fairly happy if I see someone getting a break to look at their phone and doesn't notice immediately that I'm standing waiting or whatever. Or ambles over at a leisurely pace, that's fine, take your time, it's hard running around all day
This. I've asked grocery checkers why they sprint through scanning my things, then relax as I bag them, and learned that they're subject to some dumb system that grades them on how fast they scan. Ask them if they're on the boss's clock, and if not, take a minute to chat and give them a break.
Around where I live (Boston area), there are almost universally baggers. This was something that went away for a bit but, while I will if needed, I almost never bag my own groceries.
No, those people aren’t driving for Uber now. Let that sink in for a moment.
Less hospitality jobs, less customer-service jobs, less retail jobs, no mall jobs, no manufacturing jobs, gig economy is full, corporate jobs being replaced by AI, trains going autonomous, trucks going autonomous, this is end game capitalism. Those who own, own it all. Those who don’t, own nothing, will never own anything, will only rent/lease/borrow their lives.
Too true.
That’s at least one trend I’ve seen reversed. All the self checkouts around where I am have been removed because the stores realized that the self checkouts and honesty system only works when the times are good.
You should see what target does to all their stores…
I personally like self-checkout a lot. At the grocery store I used to go to, I swear I could get my stuff scanned and bagged in half the time as the cashier, and that's not counting the time waiting in limited lines (since there are usually way more self checkouts so the time-to-first-scan is also lower). Very slow and they seemed to hate small talk (also a let down, because the only redeeming part of a manned line to me is casual conversation with the cashier and those in line).
Also, unless job automation is tied to some kind of UBI or Freedom Dividend or whatever, we're facing a dystopian future with a starving underclass. Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are people supposed to move to?
The most successful model in history is the "capital class" creating new middle class jobs by venturing their capital.
Read up on the history of textiles for example and cottage industry created and then was supplanted by a capital class. Economies of scale require all sorts of things to get going like efficient transportation, but after a tipping point wealth centralizes not the reverse. Slowly clothing goes from something like 1/3 of all labor to a small fraction of our current economy.
Heard of but never actually looked into? Sorry, you set yourself up for that one.
Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?
It seems to do a bit of both. People do slightly more work with lots more automation to help them, and automation generates work as well (e.g. once upon a time you'd occasionally send a memo out; now anyone can email anyone else and it all needs archiving).
Many women did this as their full time job. Spinsters became a viable option for women without a family or land to be self sufficient. Most women used to multi task a drop spindle as they went about their day. A spinning wheel was a massive improvement per hour but the lack of portability made it an independent job. As specialists could now make way more thread which enabled the transport of large quantities of relatively high value goods to one location for economies of scale. Which could then benefit from a positive feedback loop.
> manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing
Anyway, my point was factories came late in the process. Automation of thread making occurred at several stages before there was enough supply excess supply for any kind of scale. Without that factories could only really automate less than 5% of the total labor for making clothing.
So sure, eventually automation came for those home spinners, but that happened after the natural benefits from economies of scale alongside huge shifts in the land devoted to cotton etc. This ties into all kinds of economic activity, southern plantations depended on a relative increase in the value and demand of cotton far above its historic level etc.
In general, I essentially always interact with a front desk at a hotel and it varies at a grocery store depending on lines and the merchandise I have.
Middle-class Baby Boomers hoarding their wealth is exactly what we've been teaching them to do for decades. Save save save. I've been hearing it since the 1980s. Social Security is not going to be there for you.
And yet still a large part of them have no meaningful retirement, and no plan.
My father passed last year, penniless after a 50 year career engineer. My mother passed penniless after a 40 year career. It’s so sad. They thought they did everything right. They thought they had enough saved. They didn’t. It took everything from them.
Watch and you'll see all sorts of things happening that shouldn't be possible in an economy with healthy amounts of competition.
An example that has been on my mind recently is dynamic pricing [0], where everyone is charged a different amount based upon what an algorithm thinks the company can get away with. When healthy competition exists, you can't just arbitrarily charge people more, because they'll just go buy from a competitor.
What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?
I grew up listening to right-wing news radio, and one of the first things I learned in the realm of politics is that "our economy is great; offer quality goods and services at a competitive price and you will make a modest profit and grow and succeed". My political journey in the following decades is a tale of me seeing more and more that idea is false. The companies that truly shape our world first curry favor from those who already have wealth and power, and then focus on crushing competition and establishing a monopoly rather than making a profit; that's why these huge world-changing companies go a decade or more without ever making a profit--the news radio people never gave me an explanation for that.
Competition is meaningless when they're all owned by Blackrock and Vanguard to an extent. They can easily sacrifice a brand to test the waters, knowing consumers will move to buy from their other brands which the also own.
The idea of not turning a profit was to keep reinvesting it into the company. Growing the business. This “eat it all and figure it out later” mentality grew Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, just to name a few.
The goal was to become dominant so that the world depends upon your existence. Without being labeled a utility.
You and I agree though that the moat has been carved pretty wide. The market is no longer a free market. It’s a “I must play to stay” market. Meaning that all these companies are depending on each other for specific goods as they have crushed competition to the point where there are, at most, 2 choices.
This. Jobs that were previously contract employment jobs that came with health insurance, workers rights and social security and were mostly taken by youth as part time jobs to fund studies, are now turned into gig jobs where you get none of those things and are mostly taken by migrants who live 10 in an apartment and send the money home.
Gig work used to mean that you have several customers you bounce around for doing part time gigs, not you work full time for the same tax dodging Amsterdam based food delivery company who doesn't want to hire local workers on employment contracts to evade labor laws and liabilities.
How does this benefit society? It only benefits the capital owning class. Why isn't the government regulating this gig industry abuse? It's literally what its job is.
But pretending small-time participation in public markets is the same as billionaire participation in private markets is a great way to convince the lower classes our financial system isn't structured to move wealth away from them.
Sure, but…. really?
What's the point of being considered 'employed' if you can be wiped out with one trip to the ER?
My metric for "fully employed" would be has a job, has health insurance and has enough money in savings to fully cover their out of pocket max. Could not be a barer minimum of survival.
What "is", right now, leads us to the suggestion of int32_64, which would actually be a good metric to keep track of.
You are right about what "ought" to be, but until and unless we can get there, maybe we can at least base our information on what "is" in the moment, not on what we would like to be the case?
And then it's "negotiated" down to $15K.
And then, if you pay cash, are you going to pay a portion of what they would have "charged" the insurer? Or what they "negotiated" with the insurer?
Toss a coin!
All that said, the main issue with the health insurance metric is that it would end up being a forcing function for the continued coupling of work and healthcare, which is bad and toxic.
Gross job creation & destruction annually is roughly 10–12 percent of all jobs (new positions added and permanently lost across all employers).
This is down from the past, when it was 15-18 percent.
Source: US Census Bureau Data https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_job_destruction_rate
I find it unlikely that white collar positions will be switching drastically to blue collar unless they’re already on the fence about it or they’re not middle to high up in the white collar ladder (six figures+)
What blue collar field/industry is expected to grow?
> I'm also not sure that people who have been conditioned to work white collar jobs will be happy to work in blue collar jobs.
A quick google search shows about 60% of workers are white collar and about 30% are blue collar. I suspect blue collar workers are not going to be happy with the influx of white collar workers competing for their jobs.
None of the jobs ads are real.
Is it possible it's largely caused by shitty ATS software that everyone uses and we are mistakenly attributing it to fake job postings?
Add the fact that they stick around longer and I can comfortably say 50%+ of the jobs people are applying to are fake.
toomuchtodo•1mo ago