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Escaping The Rat-Race
Submitted by Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity, authored by Charles Hugh Smith
Escaping the Rat-Race
The changing nature of work doesn’t just matter to new graduates seeking their first career-track job—it’s equally important to experienced workers seeking to escape the corporate rat-race or build a new career after a layoff.
Those who understand these changes will be able to successfully adapt. Those who don’t, won’t.
The Disruptive Forces Transforming the Economy
There are three fundamental forces disrupting the conventional order, and everyone with their eyes open sees them at work every day:
1. Essential resources are becoming more expensive.
2. The system of expanding credit/debt to fund more consumption (i.e. “growth”) has reached marginal returns and is failing.
3. Networked software, automation and robotics are reducing the need for human labor on a global scale.
As a result of these three structural forces, economic instability is not going to go away any time soon. Technology leapfrogs the obsolete and inefficient; no wonder conventional sectors and the market for traditional 9-to-5 jobs are both stagnating.
The realization that ever-expanding debt and consumption are unsustainable has given rise to a new understanding of the economy called Degrowth (French: décroissance, Spanish: decrecimiento, Italian: decrescita).
From the perspective of sustainable prosperity, growth based on ever-expanding debt-based consumption is the road to ruin.
This shift from debt-based consumption to a more productive sustainability is bringing profound changes to the nature of work itself and social arrangements in the workplace.
Though we can’t foresee all the ramifications of networked software, automation and robotics, we can predict one aspect of this systemic disruption: technology will disrupt the most expensive, least efficient sectors of the economy because that’s where the greatest reductions in cost can be reaped.
In our economy, these are healthcare, education, government and national defense, all traditionally viewed as stable sectors with guaranteed job security. That is changing, as the soaring costs of these sectors now exceed the economy’s ability to fund them. If an economy expands by 2% each year and healthcare costs rise by 5% each year, eventually healthcare runs out of oxygen—there isn’t enough income generated by the economy to fund its continued expansion.
Few “experts”—academics, pundits and advisors—have accepted the reality of these forces or thought through the interacting consequences. As a result, we’re on our own in setting a course and navigating the inevitable storms ahead as the old system lurches from crisis to crisis, weakening further as every politically expedient reform fails to address these structural realities.
Outmoded Career Advice Is the Norm
Though the transformative power of these three forces is self-evident, remarkably, conventional career counseling is still stuck in the past, offering three basic bits of advice:
1. Choose a career that aligns with your core talents and interests.
2. Get as many credentials as you can -- degrees, certifications, etc. -- because the gatekeepers who do the hiring require them.
3. Since the goal is secure employment, try to get a job in the government or a big corporation.
In my view, the conventional advice has it all backward. What worked in the past is no longer working because the economy and the nature of work are both being disrupted by forces that cannot be controlled by those threatened by these fundamental changes.
In the conventional view, a college degree prepares one to enter the workforce. This is no longer true, as higher education has largely failed to keep pace with technology and a fast-changing economy.
As for adding more credentials to keep ahead of the pack—degree inflation dooms this strategy for all but the few who manage to secure multiple degrees from elite universities. And even this is no guarantee of lifetime security for everyone, as the number of open slots in gatekeeper-dominated institutions is much smaller than the rapidly expanding pool of over-credentialed applicants.
What matters more than credentials is the ability to keep learning new skills over one’s entire productive life.
And while it’s certainly solid advice to align one’s work with one’s talents and interests, even this advice misses the key dynamics of the emerging economy—which I define as the parts of the economy that are thriving on innovation rather than depending on cheap credit and asset bubbles for their survival.
The thriving parts of the economy rely less on gatekeepers and credentials and more on skills, flexibility, professionalism, mastery and networks of collaboration.
In the emerging economy, security arises not from institutional promises but from a diversity of skills and income streams and a flourishing network of other trustworthy, productive people.
As a result, the goal for jobseekers isn’t just to identify one’s talents and interests but to acquire a diverse suite of flexible skills and a network that enables you to put these skills to good use.
In this view, work isn’t what you do between 9 and 5: it’s a lifestyle informed by a flexible, open perspective and guided by entrepreneurial values.
In terms of values, conventional career advice is based on the idea that happiness and fulfillment require institutional security and ever more consumption. But the more we learn about happiness and fulfillment, the more apparent it becomes that family, community, meaningful work and networks of trustworthy collaborators and friends are the sources of happiness and fulfillment, not the accumulation of institutional promises and more stuff, which turns out to have little impact on happiness or fulfillment.
The Dynamics of Economic Transformation
Capitalism and technology are both disruptive by their very nature. That mature industries shrink or disappear is not the fault of one policy or another; that process of creative destruction (a term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter) is the heart of capitalism and technology.
Many have attempted to keep technology safely locked up so it can’t creatively destroy their regime or industry. But technology is a genie that cannot be kept in the bottle. To quote Bob Dylan: those not busy being born are busy dying. Every nation or industry that tries to protect itself from technological transformation either stagnates or fails.
One aspect of capitalism that disturbs many people is the mobile nature of capital—that capital will flow to the highest return, regardless of national borders or religious, national and ideological loyalties.
Though many attribute this mobility to base greed, capital that doesn’t seek to expand will fall victim to creative destruction: the only way innovation and productive investment can occur is if less productive investments and quasi-monopolies are dismantled.
This is true not just of financial capital (cash), but of human and social capital—what author Peter Drucker called the new means of production in the knowledge-based economy.
This will have implications for every worker seeking to escape the corporate rat-race or build a career.
One feature of capitalism that is rarely noted is the premium placed on cooperation. The Darwinian aspects of competition are widely accepted (and rued) as capitalism’s dominant force, but cooperation is just as intrinsic to capitalism as competition. Subcontractors must cooperate to assemble a product, suppliers must cooperate to deliver the various components, distributors must cooperate to get the products to retail outlets, employees and managers must cooperate to reach the goals of the organization, and local governments and communities must cooperate with enterprises to sustain the local economy.
Darwin’s understanding of natural selection is often misapplied. In its basic form, natural selection simply means that the world is constantly changing, and organisms must adapt or they will expire. This dynamic is scale-invariant, meaning that it’s true for individuals, enterprises, governments, cultures and economies. Darwin wrote: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change."
These new ideas, techniques and processes trigger changes in society and the economy that are difficult to predict. The key survival trait is not so much the ability to guess the future correctly but to remain flexible and adaptive.
Ideas, techniques and processes which are better and more productive than previous versions will spread quickly; those who refuse to adapt them will be overtaken by those who do.
This creates a dilemma: we want more prosperity and wider opportunities for self-cultivation (personal fulfillment), yet we don’t want our security to be disrupted. But we cannot have it both ways. Those who attempt to preserve the current order while reaping the gains of free markets find their security dissolving before their eyes as unintended consequences of technological and social innovations disrupt their sources of wealth and mechanisms of control.
The great irony of free-market capitalism is that the only way to establish an enduring security is to embrace innovation and adaptation, the very processes that generate short-term insecurity. Attempting to guarantee security leads to risk being distributed within the system. When the accumulated risk manifests, the system collapses.
Why This Matters
Why do these characteristics of free-market capitalism matter to jobseekers? Opportunity is not randomly distributed; it results from what I call the infrastructure of opportunity. If there is no mobility of labor and capital, no transparent markets for labor and capital, no creative destruction of corrupt, obsolete, inefficient systems, weak rule of law, weak property rights, no self-organizing (i.e. transparent, decentralized) access to credit, limited means of cooperation, little room for innovation and no understanding of the essential role of risk in adaptation, opportunities for successful adaptation (what we might call prosperity) are intrinsically scarce. Virtually all bets made in this environment will be lost because there is no fertile ground—it’s a desert for opportunity.
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And the decent jobs out there, which are being eliminated pretty quickly, are being given to foreigners on those work visas (the ones where the big businesses try to say enough Americans are not qualified) while having the American train their immigrant replacement who will get half his pay or less.
Find what you are passionate about and hopefully there is a way to make a living from it.
After going through a paradigm shift when researching for what was to be my first book in 08 (your prototypical right wing hit piece on Obummer), I came to a pretty startling realization. It's all a Zionist/Bankster shit show.
I taught myself video editing, monetized a few youtube accounts, and more recently started a blog. It's not great money, but if your focus is on kitty and prank videos you can pull down serious money on YT.
Go phuck yourself asshole. You wanna sing happy songs on your way to the death camps you go right ahead bitch.
You sound reasonable!
No death camp for me thanks.
Debt may be the symptom, but energy scarcity is the disease. Rising energy prices tend to throw those who are most financially fragile into the abyss...e.g. suburban homeowners in 2008.
Gail Tverberg: Debt - Eight Reasons This Time is Differenthttp://www.planbeconomics.com/2014/07/gail-tverberg-debt-eight-reasons-t...
Whats' YT?
youtube
http://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/celebrity/the-25-highest-earni...
Opening Kinder Surprise eggs. Big money in that on YouTube.
It is a bankster's shit storm but saying Zionist is the cop out word anti-semites use.
I hire foreigners! You jackass, what is a foreigner? My mommie and daddie were totally fluent in polish, I'm not, only the swear words when mom was mad at me. Your a stupid fuck! Should I put on the application, "only hire second generation foreigners". Your a uneducated idiot! Your brains are made up of dog shit!
HB1 visa foreigners and similar programs. Read up on the program and you will understand that this "visa" is just a tool to undermine the last remaining high paying middle class jobs that can't be easily off-shored. This is especially prevalent in the tech industry, where companies continuously lobby to expand the visa program despite qualified applicants. The definition for "qualified" in this case is anyone willing to do work that requires years of education and training for poorhouse wages.
If you are one of those shops then you can go fuck yourself.
With a pineapple.
*You're*
Missused it twice.
You're making the rest of us Poles look stupid.
* Misused *
there is no escape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXN3eT-U4S4
Sure there is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZR64EF3OpA
read about the man behind the Wizard of Oz.
Lots of holes in this articles' thought experiment but holy shit Tylers for posting this sort of thing around here... Scares this shit out of the 2 party monetarists.
Posted this in the past.
Taste it again...
People have trouble grasping how we can use technology, not only to destroy a human wage model, but to produce abundance from a now outdated scarcity based economic model.
In any "for profit" system, scarcity is the game. And the more scarce, the better. And if its not scarce, it will be manufactured as so. That's why abundant energy can never exist, there's no money in a cure, and waste is a constant. Because its profitable. Big pharma will tell you why we still fight plaque.
Scarcity is a constant in a profit system, its an ALWAYS... No matter the abundance of the product or resource.
Whether Farm subsidies / mandatory crop reduction/destruction, Planned obsolescence of products. Privatization of water. Rare mineral destruction (diamonds). "Peak oil".. a phrase we'd hear regardless of its abundance. Patents alone produce and affect scarcity. The list goes on and on...
Much of the "scarcity" (to include perceived scarcity) we're in competition for within our economic model is manufactured... for profit.
There will be no AFFORD. It will be can we or can't we. It will be "do we have the resources", not do we have the money. Profit systems use technology to GMO seeds to NOT reproduce... Rather than produce hundreds if not thousands of seeds. It's not that we can't do this, it's that it isn't profitable.
Profit systems are inherently INEFFICIENT, not efficient. Even waste is profitable.
In short tech needs to be directed to achieve abundance, not further entrench profit and scarcity.
We don't use technology to achieve sustainability or balance or abundance. And why would we????
Product sustainability runs INVERSE to economic growth.
Say that again class.
I would like some evidence to support your claim that scarcity is artificial.
I think the real reason for Planned Obsolescence and disposable products is the same reason people form cartels and try to protect their industry from innovation. At some point, people just want to keep doing the same job.
Once a person has a family and a mortgage and bills to pay, they really don't want to have to go learn a new skill set and start over at the bottom every five or ten years and work their way up to being good at something only to have to start all over again. It also makes long term commitments like a mortgage very difficult, if your wages keep resetting to the bottom.
Umm... Evidence. The fact that your iphone is already obsolete and the parts will be tossed even though the next 7 generations have already been pre-planned to separate you from your money 6 months from now.
The fact that my tomato is a one time sterilized wonder requiring me to go back to Home Depot for my next "batch" ... Rather than reproducing what nature intended, let alone what technology could further enhance.
The fact that as soon as you're granted a patent, your life altering genius just got less abundant.
The fact that free ideas on the internet are increasingly regulated.
The fact that I need to "pay to go" to brick and mortar institutions to achieve "something" that is readily abundant with minor internet savvy.
I could go on... But you can play this game yourself. That fact you haven't already is testimony to how religious most are into solving problems WITHIN the only economic model they've known. But this outdated model was based on one major premise.... That YOU, and not technology, was needed to produce labor. Value was assigned. Now, I don't need but a few scientists and technicians and some smart machines to feed thousands, millions. This trend will continue.
AND
The fact that "product sustainability runs INVERSE to economic growth" wasn't enough for you highlights the scarcity that has become of your common sense.
Well done, Tick.
How about the lack of any meaningful conversion to nat gas, even though it is dirt cheap and in essentially infinite supply.
The destruction of coal/trash fired power. The cable company demanding that I buy 700 channels, when I want, at most 5.
He who regulates, fucks up my life.
You provided examples of planned obsolescence and wasteful consumption, which I agree with. Prove scarcity does not exist.
If the world wanted 500 million barrels per day of oil per day, could it have it?
If everyone in the world wanted to live in a 5000 square foot mansion, could they?
If everyone wanted a thousand tons of gold to themselves, could they have it?
If there were 50 Billion people, could we still feed them, if there was none of this artifical scarcity you claim?
We live in a finite world that has finite raw resources.
It should be obvious the scarcity of resources exists on this finite planet. And it's 2 minutes to midnight and the bottle is a quarter full.
What I am showcasing is that artificial scarcity exists, and will continue to exist as long as it remains profitable. It is so in our face that humanity can no longer see it. It has become an accepted course of action. It has become an actual measure in efficiency. Lack of awareness only limits potential solutions.
http://www.reportsfromearth.com/53/the-bizarre-business-of-intentional-product-failure-planned-obsolescence/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzLX_C9Z74
Profit systems are inherently INEFFICIENT
BS.
Claiming abuses to be an inseparateable part of a profit-based system (and implying we need to abandon such, even though it is clear everything else will be worse.)
It's a litttle bit like bemoaning (true) democracy makes the dumbest 50% decide, but completely ignoring the fact that any other system will -at least after a few generations of "leaders"- inevitably end up having the dumbest 1% (but most ruthless) making the decisions...
Lol ya ya like all Pavlovian mainstream lab rats to you profit is a measure of efficiency. Efficiency to you isn't building things that last, it's begging storms to wipe out small towns cuz Towns & Noble can show a profit from the economic boost. Efficiency isn't curing anything... Efficiency to you is keeping you sick so Kaiser can have you for life. Cuz kaiser is model of efficiency in a world designed to measure it through profit.
You're going to have to actually say something. "Everything would be worse" was old halfway through my first rodeo, rookie.
I love argumentations right besides the point like yours!
I didn't even bring up efficiency or laid out how I exactly I understand that term, but you put words in my mouth so you have something to mob.
In case you missed it, the decision what value a certain product has is still to be made by the customer.
And one of the abuses would be to curtail competition until no decision is available anymore.
Now explain to us how much would be built or improved without profit incentive in your glorious model, you know beyond the few things from 100% altruists.
You will need a bigger whip, boy
It's not my glorious model, or any other alternative to the mess you worship, that needs explanation. These, and other ideas outside your 6 o'clock news channel of choice, are out there.
It's YOUR religious devotion to our current obsolescence that needs justification.
And why such a hard on for wage slavery? So you like make-work programs? We can hit a flys' ass from 2 miles with a drone flown from Denver but YOU INSIST on being the drunk $200k pilot flying my plane? And this is "efficient" to your dumbass?
Still falling short, dumbfuck.
So I somehow support/demand
1. efficiency above everything
2. [designed?] obsolescence
Keep pulling some more accusations out of your ass, I'm having a field day here
Field day? From where??? Your Maginot Line? I'm in Paris with the rest of us experiencing the reality of the 21st century... you Luddite proponent of wage slave efficiency.
Enjoy your socialist utopia - and pray it never runs out of OPM within your lifetime.
AAaaaaand there it is. I was waiting for the ad hom. Cuz that's all you got.
Ohh, the clwn plays hurt.
After you already fired two shots at me with nothing connecting to anything I wrote...
.
Shouldn't you be chasing your tail or licking your balls tickhound?
Round (2) ? I'm up for it... Ding...Ding
How's that "charts are useless" meme working out for you? http://www.almanac.com/
The idiot above you is a bigger challenge and he didn't even say anything.
I'll fuck with you in my down time when I'm multitasking. You're entry level sorry to say.
Ohh... Ok. I'll give you a breather between rounds. ;-)
What of the efficiencies that made this very forum possible?
Oh it was nearly a free and abundant resource at one time, no doubt. More efficient in "those" terms, less efficient from a profit perspective.
Nowaday it is entirely LESS efficient. It is corporate now. More profitable, less efficient. More blackouts. Less credibility... Articles funneled through a chain of command, a particular message necessary. 3 day old articles sometimes. Less Tyler originality. More WASTE of space with bullshit ads clouding my phone. More WASTE of time spent hitting my back button after accidently, yet very profitably, fat thumbing an ad.
If this can't satisfy you then I don't understand your question and would prefer to not have you explain it to me.
Free and Abundant! I'm starting to like you Tick Dog! I upvoted you!
? De her da her da WHAT? What are these 'nomenclatures' you speak of?
Are we here yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhFvZRT7Ds0
most excellent article..
it states a reality that 1) politicians hope to direct towards their interests and away from a natural process of evolution via a process of positive (but temporary and transitory) discrimination doomed to fail, 2) bankers and investors hope to delay or more accurately, predict the term of that evolution for lending or investment terms, 3) that religion MIGHT address by estabishing some sort of moral code (god knows politics is immoral) and 4) there is no paradigm or conditioning/education process in existence that "trains" people in this aspect of "common sense".
it suggests to me that corporations, polticially/exclusively based religions and governments, are outdated devices that, as they always have done, place barriers and restrictions around the free flow of ideas, products, interactions between people. We don't yet have a model going forward. The closest we have so far are social networks and transmission devices like Bitcoin. (Note, I still consider Bitcoin a pyramid scheme that adjusts price to reflect the pyramid scheme of everyone always finding ten more people who pay them).
People can simply meet and talk about ideas without (or despite of) government involvement or the perission of their employers, and it is generally only laws, rules and regulations that choke off ideas or make them prohibitively expensive to carry out or are deemed against the national interest for security reasons.
Anyway, I think this is a great perspective on common sense.
There is only one essential element and that is of course "bankruptcy" or what the US Constituion understood from Day One as "the proper discharge of debts."
The "Revolution" had been paid for by Worthless Continentals...just as this one his you phucking assholes from Texas!...and "The Framers" we're very explicit about not only a: "what constitutes real money" (gold) but what would constitute real money "in our imaginary legal world" (a NATIONAL BANK.).
That could still be created by the way...and indeed in fact does in North Dakota. Nay...veerily "we shall default on everything an blow Jewish confetti out our ass."
To say Americans are feeling liberated from Obama Care is an understatement! The only health care available to ALL AMERICANS (North and South) will be "in a few islands I the Caribbean"...and that will be it!
That's what one TRILLION "printed into existence AND SPENT" gets ya folks!
Now how about those psychiatric wards/prisons!
Wait until the lid blows off on those things!
With hundreds of thousands immigrants flooding across our borders and through our airports, we can sure use that there "One Child Policy" .....
It's a beautiful thing what we do here in our system to benefit credit expansion and bankers...
Contrary to the rest of the animal kingdom...
We actually incentivize the weakest of our species to reproduce and have many many kids. It takes not one of them to run a household, and we achieve credit expansion through loans, grants, outright gifts, benefits and subsidy. We actually subsidize their consumption. We call this "growth."
We dis-incentivize our best and brightest from giving birth. We tell them to postpone marriage, postpone pregnancy cuz we have artificial shit for that. You can get a LOAN for it. At 40 yrs old, she may have one kid. It takes TWO of them to run a household anyway... Cuz we need a CAREER. From this yet to be automated "career" ... We grant loans, benefits, subsidies, and tax breaks. Why have a kid when you need to "buy more shit" .. is the theme here.
China had a "one child left behind limit growth policy." We have a "no child left behind import them from freaking everywhere policy" cuz each human is a potential VISA card credit expander.
We call this phenomenon "economic growth." And it's gooood they say.
In a one word summary: Idiocracy... the movie that is.
How is replacing white children with hundreds of thousands of low-IQ, disease carriers from south of the border going going to improve anything?
The tickhound was being facetious, as to incite a reaction. The fact is that he probably hedges all his bets with some broke dik commodites dealer on the Chy-town Merc.
He wasn't replying to me you square peg round holer. I'm convinced every time you open your parrot beak you lower the collective cache of this place.
Apparently we have (an) common "vested interest" based on our votes?
Cloward and Pivonesk?
If you are a corporate master trying to squeeze a slightly smaller wage out of your slaves it does wonders. For the rest of us, it's a loss. How many people, brainwashed sheep they may be, do you know who support letting illegals in. I find even most of the idiots I interact with know this makes no sense for them. And, a lot of them watch reality TV and are still able to figure this one out.
My Cousin in NovoRussia is making over $1,000 a day selling credit cards pried from the hands of corpses that fell to the ground from the Air Malaria 777 that was blown out of the sky by a ukrainian fighter jet. When he is not doing that, he is busy answering still ringing cell phones from the same corpses and offering to return them to the victims families in exchange for many Kopecs.
Fucking idiots, youd think the main industry in the US and Western Europe is writing articles painting Russians as ghouls.
People need food. Even the wall street assholes have to eat and that steak is not going to come from a rooftop garden.
I had a friend, now passed away, that was a SF Army guy in Laos during the Vietnam War. He helped build an airfield on top of a mountain there, the workers used shovels and baskets. "How did you get them to work" i asked, "under threat"? "No, a bowl of rice" was the answer. PEOPLE NEED FOOD is right.
NOZZ... -- the way I heard the story, your cousin was on board MH 17 and he was wearing a stealth parachute. He touched down safely and then harvested credit cards and the undamaged internal organs of the survivours, using a nail clippers that he found at the crash site.
ahh, the Rat Race, even if you win you're still..........................a rat.
No Thanks.
another way of looking at things:
The Indisputable Connection Between Outsourcing Projects And Stock Markets (Part 1)
http://enronnext101.wordpress.com/
r
booboo, -- first good chuckles on this thread. Thanks.
The real dichotomy is balancing the percieved individual sanctity of human life and the right to procreate with the technological gains which will eventually ( soon?) extend human lifespans to well past 100 yrs. The sub problem is the paradigm of capitalism, which claims that one must earn capital for their livelyhood. It won't be long before all physical labor will be roboticized. There are 7 billion on the planet now and 10 billion on the horizon. So what is everyone supposed to do?
At some point, capitalism will be obsolete and left behind for an entirely different paradigm. What will have to happen is a new concept of "capital" being introduced to and accepted by the collective. This self serving need to aquire the greatest quality /number of toys in an attempt to distract ourselves into believing we have a fulfilling life, is both childish and ( for our species and others) destructive to the point of annhilation. We need to wake up and KNOW that fulfillment comes from helping others. Fulfillment comes from helping those who need it w/o strings attached, w/o judgement. Being able to live one's life with this level of compassion actually rubs off on everyone with which one comes in contact. This creates a "pay it forward" mentality. To connect with a large percentage of current Zerohedge readers, I believe this can be referred to as " Christ Consciousness" among other terms. The majority of our species need to REALIZE that we are not endowed with the individual right to capitalistic, immature behavior at the expense of all else. But wars will be fought for this right until human consciousness really gets that, on a fundamental level, we are in this together. The new concept of capital must incorporate heartfelt altruism as a basic tenant.
What I've just attempted to communicate is my paraphrasing and contextualizing of wisdom that's existed for ages. This wisdom is the basis of every message delivered by every widely recognized messiah, guru, prophet. There message boiled down to: in order to realize Nirvana, Heaven, Enlightenment one must pursue the path to an open heart!
Full disclosure. I am not a realized person of which I speak. But I try, Ringo, I try!
Peace
yep, i just hope its not manifested via some sort of religious experience, as we know religion today anyway.
To me, the term religious experience is an oxymoron.
:)
Are you from south of the Rio Grande, juangrande? It sounds as if you're pro-open-borders, pro-legalization of the recent (and future) influx of the Central American child-migrants.
"We need to wake up and KNOW that fulfillment comes from helping others. Fulfillment comes from helping those who need it w/o strings attached, w/o judgement."
Nope. Born in La. of Irish, English, German, et al,blood...... whitey! Family has been here since the 1840's. I do think borders and any other imaginary means to divide humans are archaic and no longer useful. Already, we are electronically interconnected world wide. Next step is soulfully interconnected!
The old ways just don't work in the future.
Besides, during the 80's and 90's we fucked with Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in a big way. I am a believer in accepting responsibility for my actions. Our country should also. Plus, we ( US gov.) spend money on way more idiotic shit than helping out kids, even if they are brown and speak spanish.
The problem is psychopaths and sociopaths are at the top of most organizations be public or private.....pass. Let them have it..The Females still believe in the system now since they have benefitied from the socialist policies. Huge problem.
ah hah...all women are democrats because they are on welfare....hmmm...ponders that
Women seek security. If they can't get it through a man then they have the state.
Fred, -- I had one of them. She wanted mine plus the state. Run Johnny run.
I'm good at peak cheap fossiles.
Along with Economic structural issues Tylers mention, there are political, social ones also. The chances of fixing this are 0. We have an illegal form of Government...no? Do not pass go..
"As a result, the goal for jobseekers isn’t just to identify one’s talents and interests but to acquire a diverse suite of flexible skills and a network that enables you to put these skills to good use."
In other words give up on traditional careers that were secure and profitable. (Have to admit some are not as secure and profitable today.) Such as engineering, accounting, chemist, medical, dentist, computer science and such.
If you follow this advice be prepared to find a way to start your own company (and to have/get financing) otherwise sounds like you will be working in the customer service industry, handyman work, assistant manager at a store, real estate and such.
And if you are just out of college and get a general job with this strategy you better develop some specific skills while at that job because otherwise when you get laid off it will be like starting from the bottom again.
Seen it with friends who took this approach. And friends who did not get a college degree have found their advancement is limited by company policy, and when looking for their next job those without their experience but with degrees are prefered and opportunities lessen as they get older.
Networking/network? Yeah, young college kids have a great network with those who hire. One friend is a plus personality, networking, lets all have fun and entertain person. It does get him some leads on jobs of limited potential. But if he had gotten a degree, for him even a general busines degree, he then would have gotten his foot in the door and he would have soared.
Yes, I've seen much the same thing. You may be flexible, but your monthly bills won't. Even a few months of unemployment or underemployment can put someone in a deep hole, and more employers are hiring based on credit rating, for god's sake. Idiots.
Networking is great..., for fat housewives gossiping over coffee. It does NOT increase the supply of jobs.
Linked In = unemployed misery loves company
"What matters more than credentials is the ability to keep learning new skills over one’s entire productive life."
This is the main thing I hate about tech, and now it sounds like they're pushing for it across all industries. I started out as a poor black child... err started out in mainframe MVS and ended in UNIX telecom. I continuously learned VMS, three or four flavors of UNIX, CISCO & Jupiter routing, dozens of programing languages, endless process quality improvement, team building, and other various management bullshit.
Continuous learning just plain sucks. I burnt out after 15 years, really after ten, then I just faked it for five more.
Looking back, I envy my friends who work for Ford. Happy-go-lucky, drink a bunch of beer with their line-mates after work, nice acerages in the country.
I can still hear the machines humming even though I've been out for three years now.
And the more you learn, the less you earn, because your competition is an unlimited number of cheap little brown curry crunchers from India.
I like Jupiter routing lol
Well you didn't get/recognize the memo: you cannot learn everything or try to ride every new fad (cloud cough), you need to make a choice on two or three things and try to learn / keep up to date on the big picture on those. For the details it's all JIT learning.
That's speaking tech, I wouldn't even know what to recommend on mgmt - all the Rapid Waterfall Scrum development to me are all descriptions how it should be, but not templates how to make it happen that way. If a few people in a project have the "not my problem" mentality, the whole thing will either fail or effectively be carried only on the shoulders of the few not sticking to such a mindset...
"If a few people in a project have the "not my problem" mentality, the whole thing will either fail or effectively be carried only on the shoulders of the few not sticking to such a mindset."
That's the reason I had to take all the classes. DBAs, network techs, programmers... "not my job"
And that Jupiter stuff did suck. Two years of customers insisting that Cisco couldn't handle their "huge" volume, then the volume wasn't huge. Spent the next three years re-doing with Cisco.
I'm not a network guy, but I still assume you mean Juniper... feel free to make fun of me if I'm wrong.
and after all that work, all your labor did was create intangibles that evaporate.
Information Technology is a fraud. A great way to waste the best and the brightest on empty pursuits so they don't notice they are being fucked over.
Its almost like the authorities knew they needed different opiates for the various strata of the masses. TV,religion, Geek work,welfare.
This is horse shit. The main reason that the US economy is in the shitter is because of 1) Importation of cheap labor, 2) Exportation of our factory production.
Free Trade with third world shit holes where people earn next to nothing is suicide for the natives of any advanced country.
Those who did this to us are going to swing from lamp posts, and the sooner the better.
And we will. We hired the illegals, we bought the cheap imports. Sure, "they" made it easy for us, but WE did it.
...networks of collaboration.
In the emerging economy, security arises from [...] a flourishing network of other trustworthy, productive people.
There's a lot of wishful thinking in those statements!
Nowadays, collaboration is mostly a tit-for-tat between insiders to keep the really able people out (i.e. disable competition.)
To find trustworthy, productive people for which building a network is not just a step towards soon afterwards trying to keep other trustworthy and even more productive people away from the feeding troughs, is hard to impossible these days.
Everbody has to make his/her choice how to approach networking for themselves -
and for most social validation (do what the group does or seems to be doing!) wins easily over doing the right thing (and staying pretty lonesome.)
Yep. That's why, to me, the solution to our problems must come from an entirely different collective mental paradigm. Basically, the human species needs to grow up!
The corporatists can kiss my ass, I will not accomodate them in terms of my adaptation to part time work. Frankly, the motherfuckers can bring back good full time manufacturing jobs and all the fucking Mechanical Engineering they fucking stole from CANADA over the last fourty years. If they do not get off their collective asses and restore the
manufacturing markets we used to have we will fail to survive as a nation that will be forced to import at too high a cost. Fuck you
and the bus you rolled in on if you think I'm going to cater to the motherfucker corporations that sold us down the fucking river fourty years ago. If these motherfuckers want to have business in North America they had better start handing out full time jobs again or I, along with about five million of my closest friends will fuck you up. And remember what Fidel Castro did to the motherfuckers that crossed him and don't forget that we can pull the same tactic anytime we want, motherfucker.
Worth reading imo. Then again, it only confirms the path I've been on most of my adult life - eat what you kill.
I am old. I am tired. Where is CognacAndMencken when you really need him? (spellcheck)? I look at it more from the point of CheapVodkaAndHustler!
But nary a word on what makes a country great. Agriculture, mines and manufacturing.
The article just rattles hollow. It must have been written by a clerk.
yup. Lots of academics and government drones do this crap.
Anyone who has had a real job wants to scream, "where's the beef?"
Chris, your article feels like it (still) has one foot in the corrupt status-quo and one foot out. Maybe it's because your site, by association, has articles that, last I looked, seemed like pay-to-read. (Collapse capitalism?)
Maybe it's because I also didn't see Care of Earth or Care of People anywhere in there- what which would seem to fundamentally increase security.
"...we want more prosperity and wider opportunities for self-cultivation (personal fulfillment), yet we don’t want our security to be disrupted. But we cannot have it both ways." ~ Chris Martenson
Seems to me that real prosperity and opportunity for self-cultivation is what increases security. If so, then maybe you can have it both ways.
One of the biggest disrruptive (depending how you look at it) is 3d printing.
It is unbelievable how fast this all taking off:
http://www.3ders.org//
I plan on buying one but haven't made up my mind what I want there are too many choices so I need to research.
And no I won't be building guns I have a bunch of those already.
I'm sure the gov't would love to shelve 3d printers for everyone but themselves. Problem is cats out of the bag. It's an easy concept to understand and any tech guy could build one. They're here to stay.
And speaking of technology, outsourcing etc..........do we really need several hundred overpaid fucking idiots in DC? The new system does not require them. Surely we could design a system without them esp since all they do is continually fuck us anyway.
The skills to learn are how to gather water, work a garden for food, build and repair and find a neighborhood of like-minded folks. Yes, the economy could mutate and keep going, but more likely a lot of effort will be put into preserving things the way they are until they can't ... then it collapses. Things will quickly become chaotic and violence will be widespread - at least for a time. So if you can't feed and protect your family you won't make it no matter what work skills you may possess.
The implications of poor job creation are massive. The biggest may be that a huge number of people are dropping from the work force. Often these people have little in the way of savings, this means that the burden of caring for them will be transferred to society. If to many people shift into this category we will slowly wear down through attrition. Finding a fair way to share and balance the work load that goes on every day may be one of the most important problems facing our modern world. Not discovering a solution to this dilemma bodes poorly for our consumer driven economy and adds to the toxic problem of inequality. More on the implications of unemployment in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/09/implications-of-poor-job-creation...
By and Large we are in OverShoot. Our Net Global Energy available will decrease from this time forward.
Population Globally that hockey sticked up in the last few centries did so because available energy also hockey sticked up at the same rate.
Nothing is going to change the fact that there will be a major correction in Population.
Those who live thru it can debate how to proceed.
Before that all plans etc will matter as much as Fly Shit on a Cannonball.
You really do have a way with words.
Nicola Tesla...need I say any more?
Not bad, but meaningless paragraphs mar the work. e.g. the following:
"As a result, the goal for jobseekers isn’t just to identify one’s talents and interests but to acquire a diverse suite of flexible skills and a network that enables you to put these skills to good use.
In this view, work isn’t what you do between 9 and 5: it’s a lifestyle informed by a flexible, open perspective and guided by entrepreneurial values."
Those two paragraphs are nothing but vague garden-variety cheerleading change crap that I've been seeing in advice columns for the past 30 years.
The reality is that for those who need to sell their labour in an advanced capitalist economy, there can be no such thing as "security."
There is no security for those who need work. Period.
Your credentials don't matter. Your skills don't matter much, either. Your "network," whatever the hell you think that is, doesn't matter. Your talents don't matter very much, either.
Mr. or Ms. Worker, you have no security and nothing you can do is ever going to get you any security.
In a capitalist society, if you want security, there is only one thing to do: get capital, and lots of it.
In a capitalist society, workership is nothing and ownership is everything. What you produce does not matter--you don't get paid much to produce under capitalism. Instead, capitalism mean you get paid mostly for owning.
if this moron thinks america is a capitalist nation then he is too stupid to stock shelves at walmart which would be bankrupt without food stamps defense medicine finance real estate it is all the same the big money comes from the government want to make money in the usa be at the interface with government and the hand out 2 examples physical therapy clinic for medicaid and medicaire providing homes for the paroled look for where our government is pissing my taxes away
This reads like the Harvard-Soviet sacharrine of a reversion to the mean. The emerging markets economies owe you a living and shall wait for you to get your acts together.
Those morons out there have their "new normal" where they define it as their century and their way. They will derail all your efforts to restore.
They are as much duped as you are and the only solution is to connect with them to re-define who to really fight "the 1% of rent seekers and their cronies".
Until the pendulum swings back to the a fairer economic return on labor vs capital with no violence but giving no benefit of doubt to the 1%...the talks will go on.
Fuck Fuck Fuck. Don't know if I'll even post this RANT. Soooo Tired! I've gone from good 6 figure to unemployed. It has not changed much, yet it's changed a lot. To those that wish to grade me on grammar, check out now!
As a Merchant Mariner, I've had to jump through more hoops than most, yet it's not up to the owner of a $20mil-$1bil boat if I run it or not. It's up to the Gov that SAYS it's OK for me to do so.
I've been telling people for decades, that the day will come, that people able to work with their hands will pass up the ones w/college shoved down their throats/up their asses. I've now lived long enough to see this proven true, as companies will now pay you , easily $800-$1000 per day to do this shit.
Sometimes it's nice on the oceans to to be, only putting up with 10 or 12 assholes at a time, compared to dry land, which can include millions of assholes,all at once.
But if not enough, TPTB have decided that,despite 10, 20, 30 yrs of experience, we must all be retrained on how to do our fucking jobs.
Green MotherFucking Shoots! Schools that lobby the Gov. to expand their budget, to apply tax $, to give said $ as grants, to teach people what they fully well know. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK!
Clean your guns, can your veggies, enjoy your families, live well. DLR AKA boattrash
Creating jobs in a mature market should be required to pass a certain "taste" test. It should be pointed out that while America is creating jobs it is costing a huge amount. I'm referring to the massive government deficit which I feel is the fuel driving our still rather weak growth. Is it sustainable, and just as important are these the right kind of jobs and will they last?
When a job that falls outside the description of government worker fails to make economic sense it becomes a form of working welfare with the taxpayer picking up the tab. We as a country and as a society have paid dearly for each unsustainable job created through government incentives and partnerships, because of the nature of many of these jobs we might even call them temporary. More on this subject in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2014/04/creating-real-jobs-remains-proble...
Sustainability means planning our future in a way that we do not set ourselves up to crash and burn at some future date. Long-term planning has not been something politicians excel at or are even good at. Our system is geared at getting politicians reelected and fulfilling the most pressing needs of today. Things like profit, greed, and quenching our unrelinquishing desire for growth are placed in front of longer term issues and needs. Mapping out a logical and sustainable long-term plan requires delving into some rather hefty philosophical questions like what brings real happiness. More on this important topic in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2014/04/planning-sustainable-future-for-m...
I'll have to come back tomorrow........... I am nodding off seriously now and I can see there is something here I do need to pay attention to.... at least give it a good shot. Good night zeo hedge. Looking forward to a very productive and enlightening week!
HIT THE FLOOR RUNNING............... TOMORROW IS MONDAY!
"...work isn't what you do between 9 and 5: it's a lifestyle...". Winston Smith? I kinda like the French definition of who you are being what you love to do as a hobby. Being a mountain climber, scuba diver, bicyclist, seems so much more human thancubical dweller, postman, government drone.
What I like best is the fact that Mr. Creative Destruction himself, Joseph Schumpeter, was a TENURED professor at Harvard. You really cannot make this stuff up. Constant job loss and upheaval is only for the "little people", I guess?
Funny how the intelligent articles on ZH get the least views and comments lol.
This is a brilliant article.
The mainstream media refuse to talk about and/or faily to grasp the dynamics of the new global economy. Also, Americans just want to be told everything is OK and tucked into bed, the masses seem to unconsciously desire to be naive optimists.
The truth is, the global playing field is leveling out, there is more competition for dwindling resources, and emerging educated/middle classes everywhere. Less opportunities for developed nations, more for emerging ones.