VCs Are Financing an Economy of Servants (sifted.eu) 127
An anonymous reader shares a post: But what's at stake is not just employing people properly and/or paying them well -- what is often called the 'casualisation of work.' At the core of enabling, financing and founding this servant economy is something much less tangible but substantial: what kind of an economy do you want to produce with your decisions? How far do you want to push the division of labour between (elite) educated high earners and people providing menial services for this class?
The economy we are currently seeding is one where convenience for some is worth more than community and solidarity for all. It pits one class of unstably employed (gig) work 'entrepreneurs' against an often older, surely more established class blessed with safety and security, benefitting from a new choice of servant services.
The economy we are currently seeding is one where convenience for some is worth more than community and solidarity for all. It pits one class of unstably employed (gig) work 'entrepreneurs' against an often older, surely more established class blessed with safety and security, benefitting from a new choice of servant services.
9 min and still first post! (Score:2)
Uh, I think everybody's taking the day off for Labor Day... does that have anything to do with this story?
Servant is the wrong word (Score:2)
Servants have employers who pay emploment taxes on their pay.
So gig workers are no more servants than (wo)man-in-a-van who sorts out your plumbing. No, not that plumbing.
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Upstairs Downstairs ... (Score:1)
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"Maybe it's just from watching Upstairs Downstairs, but it seems to me like servants had considerably more security and stability than "gig workers"
That's a big part of why I find the show disturbing: it portrays a very skewed and unrepresentative view of what it was like to be a Victorian servant. In reality they where mistreated, often severely, fired on a whim, beaten, employed as young as 9 or 10 years old, replaced when sick, raped, worked at least 14 to 16 hour days and even more during the holidays,
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Victorian servants were often mistreated, but they had job security not only for themselves, but for their grandkids. All they had to do was show proper deference and not complain.
You may or may not like that depth of job security, but it is foolish to just say, "no, no, no" to what the details were. I'm assuming you think of "job security" as a positive, and you think of "Victorian servant" as a negative, so you say "no" without thinking about it.
They could be fired, but then they'd have to be replaced, an
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"Victorian servants were often mistreated, but they had job security not only for themselves, but for their grandkids. All they had to do was show proper deference and not complain."
Of course, some were better off than others, and a few did have the level of 'security' you speak of, but the majority ended up being employed in cities by much smaller households and not as a family.
"You may or may not like that depth of job security, but it is foolish to just say, "no, no, no" to what the details were. I'm ass
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The vast majority of the upper class in Victorian times were rural. And cities were much smaller than they are now. They were not simply metropolises with fancy dress. Cities had recently grown from the Industrial Revolution and were dominated by factory workers. Upper class would travel into the city to attend social events, but most of the important people who actually lived there were involved in government.
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"The vast majority of the upper class in Victorian times were rural. And cities were much smaller than they are now. They were not simply metropolises with fancy dress. Cities had recently grown from the Industrial Revolution and were dominated by factory workers...."
Yes, the upper most classes, the top aristocracy, were more rural and often had dozens of servants, including families. At the same time more and more people in the cities, from the middle classes up, were relying on the continuing expansion of
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The show in effect maintains a myth of nobility and class ...
That is why I will probably never watch "Downton Abbey". Just watching some trailers is enough to raise a steam of indignation against the injustices of class divisions in English society. I can watch some period dramas without that effect, like classic crime stuff, but the story and characters have to be really good. Why exactly is this toff in charge? Is he better at detecting crimes because of his superior accent that he acquired at an expensive school? This idea that toffs should be in charge is unfortu
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Yes and no. A servant could be fired for any reason from being suspected of theft to complaining about getting sexually molested. With a large unemployed number of people willing to work as servants there was only pressure to keep the best ones around and you had better be servile or unreplaceable to keep your job. There was also quite the
hierarchy downstairs so the new maid had better keep the cook happy kind of thing.
So personal choice counts for nothing? (Score:1, Insightful)
Personal choice counts for nothing? All is the fault of an older, more established ...?
Weak. This reasoning is so weak as to be childish.
Every gig worker had a choice. They chose gig work.
I chose steady employment as a cog in a machine, and quite deliberately. I'm not made to be boss. I just want to do my job, do it well, and not be notorious.
Others chose different.
And before all you hi-school bolsheviks go "reeee," 4 years ago I worked at a convenience store, 'cause the goddamned phone wasn't ringing
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Beyond that, look at the headline. "VCs Are Financing an Economy of Servants". VCs get involved because they see an opportunity for a fairly quick buck: provide fluidity and capital for an early stage venture, in exchange for a cut of future profits (often with further intermediaries, like IPO investors or a buy-out, providing the actual payout to the VC).
Exactly how do they see these companies being more profitable in the future? Are they going to raise prices, deterring customers? Cut costs, driving w
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The article poster looks for those kinds of things.
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What about the ones who were taxi drivers, and their employer went out of business because VCs funded startups that operated at a loss to engage in a price war that destroyed the competition? For them calling it a "choice" is specious and small-minded.
People who are moonlighting, sure, it is a choice.
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Okay, what about them?
How many cab services have gone out of business thanks to Uber? Honest question.
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Many gig workers would prefer a better paid, more permanent job with predictable hours and income.
They don't take shitty jobs by choice.
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Every gig worker had a choice. They chose gig work.
Maybe the alternative was no work at all, or worse conditions if working as an employee. I think Uber has gained a hold, versus the private hire taxi business, because the old style of taxi driving employment was horrible. This is the conclusion that my rather right wing friend reached, after interviewing Uber drivers in an informal survey. That does not make gig employment right. It just means that some jobs are sub-standard for basic worker's rights, so going freelance is better.
Festering in my somewhat s
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Judging by your signature, you are a leftist of the far-left sort, ready to blame 'evil capitalists' for all the world's problems.
You better be careful before stretching that far: you might throw your back out.
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Who in their right mind thinks that gig work provides food or shelter? Regular employment as a janitor or food service worker is generally more lucrative (and that isn't saying much). "Gig work" is for your off time if you want to make some extra cash on the side without fully moonlighting. It's a side hustle you can pick up or put aside as dictated by the time pressures from the rest of your life.
I think these articles miss the point (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, there's 2 sides to "too big to fail", there's the big business that you and me can't allow to go under and then there's us, giving them gobs of free money to save our own skins.
Imagine if the next time the economy collapsed the C-levels could just let it collapse, screwing us all in the process, but not suffer any hit to their wealth and prestige?
That's what they're doing here. And it represents a fundamental breakdown in capitalism. It's a return to feudalism. After all, the King didn't need you and me to buy iPhones and cars...
Re: I think these articles miss the point (Score:2)
Wise words. I see the same things everywhere, almost as if the status quo is being designed for a collapse. What is supposed to come next is the question. In crypto, you see images of an economy not predicated on growth, in many other areas, you see the emergence of syndicates, that function almost as small states within states. I wonder what kinds of plans are out there for the next thing, because we are clearly moving toward something.
Crypto is completely dependent on growth (Score:2)
Point is, don't pin your hopes on it, at least not your hopes for a better society.
Re: Crypto is completely dependent on growth (Score:2)
Crypto? I dont, I actually think its pretty evil. But treating it as a currency, it rewards non spending, aka no growth, where the inflationary economy rewards spending and investment. (held dollars slowly shrink in value due to inflation) As of today I see El Salvador is using bitcoin as national currency, so it is clearly a part of someone's global plan.
Let me help you out (Score:4, Interesting)
It's clear nobody ever mentioned to you what a VC is.
It might be helpful to know what the term means, what a VC does.
> what the VCs are doing. They're disconnecting themselves from the economy of the rest of us.
> Imagine if the next time the economy collapsed the C-levels could just let it collapse, screwing us all in the process, but not suffer any hit to their wealth and prestige?
> That's what they're doing here.
A VC, a venture capitalist, is someone who puts up all the money to start a business. They buy the machinery, pay the rent, pay the people's salaries. If the business does well, the VC makes money. If the business fails, the vc LOSES ALL THEIR MONEY.
So really, just precisely the opposite of what you just said.
If the business fails, the VC loses their wealth, while they were paying the salaries of the employees.
The opposite system would be one where the elites take your money and mine and use it to build a business. The elites under this opposite system don't put in any of their own money, they have no akin in the game. They just take your money and mine and use it for their projects. That system is called socialism, and the elites running the businesses without having any skin in the game are the politicians.
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Your description of the VC is quite fine on paper but the OP is sadly what happens in reality. The VCs got their art down to a science and they perfected the art of making a buck and dumping the risk on others.
What happens today is that they ALWAYS make money, if 9/10 ventures fails. the one that doesnt must make them enough to cover for not only the 9 losses, but the opportunity loss as well. Hence how you end up with companies like Uber, who are bleeding money and a constant loss for everyone, but for the
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> I agree with your idea. The VCs are indeed risk takers and are funding tomorrow's economy by taking risks. ... VCs will STILL have their golden parachutes and they will still be there shorting the hell out of the market.
You realize that funding and shorting are opposites, right?
If you're very optimistic you make those risky investments because you think things are going to go well.
If you're quite pessimistic, you short because you think things are going to go poorly.
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Yeah, he didn't get his terminology right, but you missed the point. The VCs are rebuilding the economy to turn the vast majority of people into a new precariat, people who own nothing and cannot escape that situation, no matter how much they seek education or how hard they work. In other words, it's the elimination of the middle class. VCs have capital. They are on the owner side of this remodelling. If they succeed, "letting the economy collapse" won't even have a meaning in the capitalist sense, because
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You have a good understanding of some of this stuff.
You could educate some people, help them understand.
May I suggest that people tend to be more open to learning when you don't call them a dumb duck?
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"The elites under this opposite system don't put in any of their own money, they have no akin in the game. They just take your money and mine and use it for their projects. That system is called socialism, and the elites running the businesses without having any skin in the game are the politicians."
Which is not too far from... going public with an IPO. The main difference is that with an IPO they are banking on the public's greed to voluntarily provide the funding. Many IPOs were based on lies or wild over
You're thinking about the smaller VCs (Score:2)
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If the business does well, the VC makes money. If the business fails, the vc LOSES ALL THEIR MONEY.
I think the business model for a VC is to expect a large number of duds, where they lose all their investment, but that is compensated for by backing a few stars, that make back the investment many times over. Of course, if one had a crystal ball, one would not back any duds, and only back stars. But as far as I know, this does not happen in practice. I presume God does not bother with all this tawdry money making business.
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Your points are valid, but VCs very rarely lose all their money when a business fails. They do indeed take a hit, but it's rarely as catastrophic as you make out.
Firstly, VCs often demand a monthly repayment on whatever money they paid out. They invest (say) $1M, and so they demand (say) $5K a month payment. It doesn't pay off the investment - it's just a service charge.
Next up, they'll provide you with some "advisors" and other "skills". These will typically come at multiple $K per day rate, say $4k/day. T
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So to clarify, you buy into new companies that suck? Ones that tried to build products that don't work, who have management that doesn't know what their doing, and their business processes are all wrong? Or do you buy into companies that are doing well?
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I get where you're coming from, but this is fucking stupid. Not sure who the moron is, however. Could be you, could be them doing what you think they're doing.
The reason this is fucking stupid is that it's not possible to have a parallel economy, because fucking everything is now entwined.
Do the 1% want to watch movies?
If the answer is yes, then they need everyone who works on movies to have enough personal security (housing, money, food, medicine, etc.) that they'd work on the movie. They need groceries, r
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You talk about it like it's a new thing that's de
Guillotines are useless (Score:2, Insightful)
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The modern military? I don't seem to recall them having much success in Vietnam or more recently Afghanistan.
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That depends on your definition of success. It seemed quite successful as a wealth transfer.
what a load of buzzwords (Score:2, Troll)
Pseudo-commie bullshit spewn by a loser who couldn't make it.
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a loser who couldn't make it.
That's an odd way to describe an academic who lives in central London. Clearly no match for your towering intellect and observational prowess.
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An "academic"? seriously, you think that qualifies someone? Plenty of "commie academics" out there, meanwhile look at what any real world communist system gets you.
My "towering intellect", as you call it, has life experience showing that what that "academic" is advocating leads to ruin and genocide.
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What you call "life experience" is actually ignorant opinion based on a lifetime of relentless pro-capitalist brainwashing and propaganda.
You probably even think you're a capitalist. You're not. You're a worker. Your bosses may be capitalists, if the business is large enough not to be a small/sole trader (who are also workers, just a different class of worker).
And you probably think that any form of trading is "capitalism" - sell a loaf of bread? That's capitalism! No, it's not. It's trading, something
Nothing new here (Score:3)
Hiring employees is too hard (Score:3)
Especially for a small business. Too much paperwork and expense.
If government wants companies to hire more workers, they should make it easier
Ummmm. It's always been this way sorry. (Score:2)
People have worked for other people. The whole benefits thing is relatively new ( within the last couple of hundred years). It's their choice if they want gig work. No one is forcing them, unlike the serfs of old who had no choice, or slaves in the US. Not Everyone who works for someone else is poorer than the people they work for BTW. We live in a services oriented economy. So to a certain extend 97% work for someone.
Go have a thorazine drip, meditate on your AOC poster and curl up with your Commun
One disagreement with that article (Score:3)
I would argue that it pits those unstably employed (gig) work ‘entrepreneurs’ against each other. The lowest Uber bidder will get the the job; the Amazon warehouse worker who doesn't take a bathroom break so they don't have to leave their post keeps their job. The gig economy distills the free-market approach and empowers a sniper called "the bottom line" that targets us individually. It circumvents worker protections that came about, I suspect, largely because of unionization, and workers organizing to make their voices heard. The gig economy offers minimal employment to people who, at least in America, don't have health care or a retirement plan.
Again, I am guessing that the long term effects will be greater burdens on society. Perhaps that Amazon factory worker develops intestinal infections which they ignore because they can't afford time off for preventative medicine, nor can they afford the medical bills if they went. Until they become an emergency room visit, a long-term stay and eventually go on unemployment or disability, which is far more expensive and becomes a cost for the health "care" system and ultimately a cost for society.
Greed and self-righteousness doesn't think "long term". The Texas legislators who figured out the formula for bypassing Rowe-v-Wade have not thought about what will hatch from eggs they've laid. Given time, more will be revealed. It may be voracious.
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And if you hadn't noticed, the entire existence of life on Earth is founded on competition. You may have heard of things like evolution or meritocracy, but did you know they were
School is already designed for it. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's designed like barracks for children, to program the basic functionality for good little servant robots into them. ... are all ignored,
Things like thinking for yourself, problem solving, the scientific method, resource management (space, time, energy, food, goods, finances,...) and planning, and basic damn social skills like relationships, resolving conflicts, detecting and fixing triggers/traumata, or raising children right
in favor of blind belief, obedience, and bulemic rote memorization of those things that leeches, excuse me, "employers" want the most.
Even if you want to take mathematics as an example of what's wrong: Just read Lockhart's Lament. (It's not long.)
(And mathematics, while useful, is higher (read: later) education than all the things I mentioned above, except for the parts required for them.)
We must bring our society out of the age of industrialization, where we treated humans like factory machines. It was a brief lapse in human history. A phase of illness. A soulless inhumane mindset, that needs to die just as quickly.
That businesses go on to keep those born-to-serve children as servants because they are psychopathic control freaks, makes it worse, yes. But is not the root problem.
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Your concept of a greater, societal strategic plan is rather absurd.
These VCs are greedy plunderers, trying to "disrupt" (eg, destroy) extant industries. They do not care what the replacement is, their plan is to "get [their] kicks before the whole shit house goes up in flames," as the Voice of the Internet once said. (on the soundtrack to the book Netslaves)
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I think you've got this wrong, schools are just daycare that also happens to teach job skills, rather than just letting them watch cartoons all day. Schools exist so that neither of the existing workers has to drop out of the workforce, resulting in increased economic output, not to funnel new trained workers into the workforce
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That businesses go on to keep those born-to-serve children as servants because they are psychopathic control freaks...
There is a problem that those who achieve power can tend to be psychopathic control freaks, because people without that particular drive are not interested in achieving power, and so don't compete in that sphere.
Mind you, from personal experience, my current bosses are not psychopathic control freaks, thank goodness. I don't hear much from the MD these days, because the company has expanded so much that he is somewhat remote now. However, he did strike me as pretty reasonable back in the day, when the compa
Here's the crazy truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Your existence is random, and the universe is unfair. Humans added the concept of 'fairness', and if you want to be fair, you have try to equalize all human life at birth.
Billionaires who are sucking wealth out of society into their personal control, with enough spare change to buy laws to enable them to not only continue but increase the rate at which they concentrate wealth should not be permitted to exist. Money is power, and they have too much of it.
Next, you have to look at how ridiculously productive our society is, and how we're allocating those resources. We could put every single person who is below the poverty line in a modest bachelor apartment and give them food, Netflix, and Steam for life and still be fine. And most of them would find a way to contribute back even if it wasn't on purpose. If your first thought is, "but that isn't fair" then you really haven't paid attention to how they got below the poverty line in the first place. It takes a truly exceptional person to escape poverty, and those barriers are a lot less fair than carrying a few freeloaders when we have more than enough wealth to do so.
So have a 'gig economy' for casual work... IF you're also supporting something like Universal Basic Income so you're not just creating a slave class who are so busy trying to tread water they can never swim to shore.
When every person has access to food, shelter, education, and healthcare, then you can start to talk about 'fair' meaning some who work harder should be allowed to accumulate more wealth. Because we can afford it. In the meantime, it seems we're choosing to have a slave class, and we're just calling it something else because we don't want to admit it.
Efficency (Score:2)
You can take all the wealth from all the billionaires in the United States. Every penny of what they own. Every share of stock, every dollar of every mansion's value. All the money squirreled away in tax havens. You can take every single penny they own and plow it into state, federal and local governments. Fully fund every program at every level of government. Fully cover all grants, discretionary and mandatory spending for everything.
It would fully fund the whole government for about half a year, and the m
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Your existence is random, and the universe is unfair. Humans added the concept of 'fairness'...
While I agree that life is not fair in many respects, such getting cancer, or your house is destroyed in a flood, we can expect fairness when dealing with other people. There is a notion that economic forces are like forces of nature, and that it is futile to resist them. I dispute that. If people treat you unfairly, that is not the result of some indifferent natural force.
We could put every single person who is below the poverty line in a modest bachelor apartment and give them food, Netflix, and Steam for life and still be fine.
That does seem to be feasible, given a radical distribution of existing funds. But what about the resentment felt by those who work, and
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Besides, if you really want to create a slave class without all the hassle of having to put people in actual chains, making them dependent upon your unproductive largess is a great start. You call it UBI, I call i
wrong focus (Score:3)
It's like everyone is complaining that a football game sucks because the referees make poor decisions, without pointing out that there could be super-obvious problem letting the players be referees in the first place.
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The teams choose the referees, usually through some sort of league arrangement, and for each bad call there is a team who liked the call. So even complaining to the people who choose them won't help.
Before there were security cameras on all the stands, the risk of having a hot dog bun full of mustard thrown at them was at least a small restraint on their behavior, but these days they don't even have those organic checks and balances.
Baseball umpires used to fear making bad calls because they had to get from
Nonsense (Score:2, Informative)
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The only thing wrong with that "fair deal" is that in order to support oneself, let alone a family, one must work at gig economy jobs full-time and then some. This lives no time or energy for other interests.
The "deal" of gig employment is one-sided -- it only favors the customers, not the workers. And of course the corporation who created the app and controls all the variables.
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The whole point of "gig work" is that it is a way to make some extra cash on the side. It's like you're complaining that you can't eat junk food all day without dying of malnutrition. Worse, instead of
is Correlation Causation? (Score:2)
It is fair to say that the conditions and compensation offered a typical gig worker fall well below what could be expected by a regular, full-time employee [even performing a similar role]. I don't think that's disputed.
A much more interesting question is whether or not VC companies are setting out to "create an underclass" in the way suggested by the headline. Much as it is very tempting to just blindly agree and vent anger at "those nasty capit
A bit late to the party (Score:2)
This will probably go unnoticed, but here ya go [imgur.com].
Perhaps people should think twice about the choices they make and this issue would go away. The first is to not use these cab companies. You know, like people complain about Amazon then have a package day sent to them from Amazon.
Only temporary (Score:2)
The situation is only temporary. Food delivery will be taken over by robots sooner or later. This will relieve us from having to wring our hands on Slashdot about servants.
Shite (Score:2)
I remember when Slashdot had technical articles of interest, not articles promoting class war.
I'm sure this all won't end badly. (Score:2)
Would Sir like the red wine or white with their millionaires corpse?
Corporations are amoral (Score:2)
Venture capitalists, and other money makers, are not motivated by moral concerns, such as better pay and conditions for workers. The primary purpose is increasing profits. Some (not all) money making enterprises will seek to increase their profits at the expense of worker conditions, if they are allowed to by legislation. There are cases where this exploitation does not happen, and by contrast, the employer treats their employees well, because that is a good way to get employees to work effectively. But unf
In other words ... (Score:2)
The way it's been for hundreds (thousands??) of years.
Personally, I'm so tired of the whining of those that are unable to make it on their own demanding that their company treat them better. Go find another job. And, if you can't, that's on you . Not them.
I learned many years ago that I will never be rich. I'm smart enough, but not motivated. So I have to settle for the pay given to me and the wor
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More importantly, if you want the species to degenerate until we are little more than
What a load of crap. (Score:2)
And just what the fuck is wrong with people being paid to do things for other people? How many of us here are ultimately in the service sector but are not "servants"? If you aren't making things to be sold, you're probably performing a service instead. Web design, computer repair, network
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"A VC" is someone who has won the British bravery medal, the Victoria Cross.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: VC's? (Score:3)
it's an initialism for a latin phrase meaning first against the wall when the revolution comes.
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Victor Charlies, also known as Viet Cong.
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Worst article summary ever. Was it really that difficult to write whatever "VC" is supposed to mean out in full and actually define it?
Re:VC's? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. In a tech-oriented audience, it is assumed that people know what is meant by references to the Vertically Challenged at Vassar College using VisiCalc to provide Voice Cues over a Virtual Channel.
Re: VC's? (Score:3)
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Agreed, that was Very Clever.
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Yes. In a tech-oriented audience, it is assumed that people know what is meant by references to the Vertically Challenged at Vassar College using VisiCalc to provide Voice Cues over a Virtual Channel.
Of course in the finance context a good tech knows their Virtual Centres from their Vulture Capitalists.
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It may be not widely known for those distanced from American business - venture capitalist (VC used for) is some entity, maybe person, which runs investments from funds available, and actually decides what kinds of businesses are worth these. As per article, with this, they may be shaping structure of economy and jobs created.
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Seriously - the people who put up all the money (Score:4, Informative)
There are some funny responses here.
For those unfamiliar, the post is referring to the people who put up the money to but the equipment, pay the people, etc for a new venture. If a new business needs programming and systems work, the VC pays the salaries of all the people while they build it, before they have a significant number of customers.
The new business is referred to as a venture and all the money needed to get it going is capital, so it's all funded by a Venture Capitalist.
The person who wrote the post seems to have missed the fact that people who go to dental school tend to work as dentists, people who go to truck driver school tend to work as trucks drivers, people who go to welding school tend to work as welders, people who then go to the underwater welding class tend to do underwater welding work, etc. That people generally do the work they have the appropriate skills for.
The author complains that they do only "menial service work".
The author is looking for someone to blame, apparently not having made the connection that the reason they are doing menial service jobs rather than database architecture work is because they haven't learned any database architecture skills.
The author hasn't yet made the connection between ditching class every day to smoke weed behind the school and the fact that they now have no marketable skills or knowledge.
Re:Seriously - the people who put up all the money (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to have missed that the economy is not static. Sure the person trained as a welder prefers work welding but if the economy is shit or there is an over supply of welders, they may have to do something else and if the only jobs are servant class, that's what they do.
See it a lot here in the oil patch, when the price of oil is high, lots of welding jobs, then the price crashes and lots of unemployed welders. Same with truck drivers. Dentists are generally more stable but there can still be a surplus of dentists leaving dentist school.
It happens a lot in the trades where there is high demand for a trade such as welding, then an over supply happens due to so many getting trained.
Re:Seriously - the people who put up all the money (Score:4, Informative)
I live in Texas, so I'm quite aware of the cycles you're referring to. Coincidentally, I helped a little bit in starting a welding program at the university extension where I worked, so that's the particular field I'm most familiar with regarding how it relates to the oil industry.
Here's what I've seen. People would come into our program and after six months they could go make decent money as a new weldor. After a couple of years they could make really good money working in the oil industry or certain other industries. Like you said. Some of them came back for two weeks, or on weekends or whatever, and got training beyond the basic entry-level. They learned underwater welding, or got certified to weld aircraft, or different materials. Some didn't.
When the oil and gas industry goes to shit for a while, the people who never learned more than the entry-level might take a job in an auto automotive machine shop or build trailers or whatever. They could pay the bills, but it didn't pay as well as natural gas work.. Those who realized that "learning = better job" and had learned to weld titanium started welding the F-22 and made a lot more than the natural gas folks.
Learning isn't a one-time thing. It's a lifestyle choice.
Having said that, I'm now going to go study module 3 in my "big data for security" course, learning more in the field I've been working in for 25 years.
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You're now a victim of the certification industrial complex that dominates IT.
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I work around 10:00-5:30 from my house and make well into six figures doing what I love doing, so if this is victimhood give me more. :)
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It's not just a certification thing - continuing to learn new skills is simply something useful and applicable for the job at hand, makes you more marketable, and makes you more valuable to whoever you're working for now.
And far less bored (and boring) (Score:2)
That's absolutely true. For me, perhaps even more importantly new stuff means I'm not bored. I'd be bored as heck doing exactly the same shit every day for years and years. I *like* learning and doing new stuff. That's the main reason I do it - because it's fun to explore.
A newish thing recently is I've become aware it not only makes me less bored / more interested, it also makes me less boring. People want me to come speak at their event and such. That adds a whole new dimension when you start having a
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When it comes to learning how to weld, it is not always that you intend to spend your life as a welder. It can be a useful skill among many, that could include machine tool operation, CNC programming, 3D CAD, or whatever. My former boss is trying to get on to a welding course, as part of his new engineering design and manufacturing business. I dare say he will employ a qualified welder if need be, but it is much easier to tell someone what you want if you have attempted it yourself.
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Why do you find vocational training depressing?
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Actually, dentists is a bad example because it's part of a field that is controlled at numerous levels to ensure that supply and demand are maintained just in favor of demand, keeping salaries and costs high -- e.g. rent-seeking behavior
- available slots in schools and residency programs
- difficulty of exams
- state regulations regarding who can perform procedures
It's similar to the guilds of the middle ages, where they maintained tight control over production and therefore prices.
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Everybody in tech knows what the fuck a Venture Capitalist is
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Re: Not just VC's (Score:2)
You think you earn slightly more but you donâ(TM)t. You pay for the serf lifestyle through the gig economy
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Vassals have to declare their allegiance and pay regular tribute.
If people were switching from casual day labor to being employees, that description would fit more closely.
I don't know about other people, but I prefer to own my serfs. Without ownership they're just a mob.
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Also, this is news since Nebuchadnezzar was in the habit of peeling, slowly, rebels.?
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It's truly amazing that so many Americans will see some evil shit that is obviously and undeniably being done by individuals and companies - venture capitalists - and instantly come to the conclusion "It's the government's fault, the perpetrators are just innocent victims in this government plot".
The brainwashing runs deep. Well, as deep as the shallow neuron layers allow.
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Currently about half the USA population seems to think that following sound medical advice to fight a world wide viral pandemic is a bad idea. It's hard to imagine where we're going to allow immigration from that is going to bring down our collective IQ even further.