[Audio-Omega]

They were looking for drafters to create maps for land or natural resources management.  I would work for a remote mine if I was by myself in this world.  

 

[Suntory_Times]

Quote:

To acknowledge the Labor Day holiday in the US today, I wanted to ask fellow HFers how the economy these last few years (since 2008 onwards) has affected your life.  I think it'd be interesting to get views from around the world, so please participate even if you're an ocean away.
 
Please keep politics out of the thread, in order to keep things civil, as I think the thread will be more meaningful when focused on personal stories and thoughts.
 
I discovered that my state, California, has the second highest unemployment rate in the country.  I work in the tech industry in the Bay Area and I feel we're somewhat insulated from what's going on around us, though we definitely feel consumer demand lessening, and companies getting more judicious about their spending in b2b.  My friends in engineering and sales are doing fine, but my friends in creative industries (art, design, game development, etc.) are hurting if they don't work in mobile or social games, and it's getting tough even finding work in retail and service industries.  The most affected people I run across are new college graduates, who I try to help find work, but it's this catch-22 where you need several years work experience to get a job, but there are few entry-level positions.
 
A lot of people I know have gone back to graduate school (mostly business or law), hoping to ride out the next few years.
 
I've also been hearing that people think others have been getting a lot less polite and civil in normal day-to-day interactions, possibly due to the stress a lot of families are under.  There are lots of stories and terrible pictures of the situation a lot of people are facing, particularly in the midwest and south, but it doesn't seem to have spread to California yet, especially given how it's common to see little kids with their own iPhones and iPads out here.

Silly question, how could one not be affected by the economy they live in?  The real question is how much has it affected you I would think.
 

 

[KneelJung]

Quote:

Silly question, how could one not be affected by the economy they live in?  The real question is how much has it affected you I would think.

That was essentially the question asked, but since things on the micro are effected by things on the macro, the discussion was expanded to include those things. The Atlantic magazine had an an article recently on how this whole economic thing is effecting the middle class.
 
Can The Middle Class Be Saved?
 
The Great Recession has accelerated the hollowing-out of the American middle class. And it has illuminated the widening divide between most of America and the super-rich. Both developments herald grave consequences. Here is how we can bridge the gap between us. 
 
 
In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.
   
In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.
In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around, they wouldn’t keep on climbing. “The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats,” the report said. The “great complexity” of a global economy in rapid transformation would be “exploited best by the rich and educated” of our time ..
 
The whole article is definitely worth reading and directly relates to what Elysian was trying to get at I think.
 

 

[OneSec]

My wife is working for one of the national non profit organization. Due to weakened US dollars (they operate in USD as standard although this is a multi national organization), they are having real difficulty with funds and as a result they are cutting down work force all around the world.
 
It's interesting how this effects the world in chain reaction. My wife will know if she keeps her job this Friday.
 
Oh well maybe we can plan a long vacation if this happens.

 

[Elysian]

Quote:

Originally Posted by KneelJung /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
The Great Recession has accelerated the hollowing-out of the American middle class. And it has illuminated the widening divide between most of America and the super-rich. Both developments herald grave consequences. Here is how we can bridge the gap between us. 
... In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around, they wouldn’t keep on climbing. “The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats,” the report said. The “great complexity” of a global economy in rapid transformation would be “exploited best by the rich and educated” of our time ..

I think ripples of this realization are starting to become more evident, and it's already here in this thread, as a few posters have said they're looking at picking up a good trade (that can't be outsourced) for their future.  The higher education vs trade school debate (originally published in the WSJ but now behind paywall) is another manifestation of this.  The main point of this is that supply and demand are now unbalanced.  There's some degree of this imbalance in a healthy economy, just like having a healthy level of unemployment, but I think plenty of people will guess that we have too many people going for jobs that, while they bring some value, you don't need battalions of these folks (investment bankers and fund managers, management consultants) and not enough of the other kind (designers, engineers, K-12 teachers).  Even in the higher education system, the number of people working in administration have increased by 90-100% in the last decade, but faculty and lecturers have grown at an anemic 5-10%, or thereabouts.
 
Anyway, going to back to have and have-nots debate, there are two main thoughts in the US on how to tackle this:
1) Wealth redistribution
2) Accept that there will be a fantastically rich and priviliged minority, and try to shape the environment so that enough of it trickles down so that the masses also enjoy an improved quality of life
 
That's what essentially drives all these divisions of the $200k+ and non-$200k+ households, huge corporations vs small business, private sector vs public sector, etc.
 
In the end, I generally feel our elected officials are trying to keep a reasonable amount of disposible income in the hands of the masses, so that approval ratings remain reasonably high.  That's a large part as to why you see uprisings in Egypt and not in Saudi Arabia.
 
If you want to get cynical, you can make an argument that elected officials are trying to keep people fat and happy enough so more of these London rioting incidents and black-on-white mob violence in the American midwest and east coast don't keep on occurring.
 
I'm trying to be optimistic, but it's difficult to be when you see the poverty and imprisonment rate in specific racial and religious groups, much less the impact these things have on immigration, available work, public benefits, some officials argue crime (and I know the author of the cited study has argued against the findings being used to fuel profiling policies in CA and AZ), etc.

 

[Happy Camper]

The world has grown too fast to support the quality of life that created the growth. Now we have the fruits of that growth trying to be maintained. Hard realities will create social warfare and thin the herd. Why it's happening can be speculated but anything driven by greed turns out bad. Only a few are rich enough to control the world's economies.

 

[Suntory_Times]

Quote:

The world has grown too fast to support the quality of life that created the growth. Now we have the fruits of that growth trying to be maintained. Hard realities will create social warfare and thin the herd. Why it's happening can be speculated but anything driven by greed turns out bad. Only a few are rich enough to control the world's economies.

Care to back that up with any real evidence.
 

 

[Hennyo]

Quote:

The world has grown too fast to support the quality of life that created the growth. Now we have the fruits of that growth trying to be maintained. Hard realities will create social warfare and thin the herd. Why it's happening can be speculated but anything driven by greed turns out bad. Only a few are rich enough to control the world's economies.

Agree ^^. You're silly to believe otherwise.
 

 

[Happy Camper]

Care to back that up with any real evidence.
 

Yeah, all the empty strip malls and manufacturing plants I saw while driving to South Bend yesterday. Every other house with for sale signs in neighborhoods that were working in those abandoned factories and strip malls not that long ago. The number of older autos on the roads because no one can afford a new one. All the people being taken to the ER with preventable conditions because they can't afford healthcare. The same people who will be bankrupt for those bills because they don't have health insurance. The US economy was overcooked when credit cards were being sent daily to homes who couldn't qualify for them, people buying way beyond their station living in half million dollar homes with a BMW and Benz in the driveway, startup businesses being fully funded with no collateral. Today, take a drive through those neighborhoods and you'll see plenty of real evidence, not some flim flam numbers being broadcasted by the media.

 

[Elysian]

Quote:

Care to back that up with any real evidence.
 

I don't have links on hand but there are plenty of studies on how we're tearing through our natural resources (oil, natural gas, rare earths, etc.), and what happens to nations once their supplies run low (Syria), as well as what it does to international relations (China and US dustups over rare earths, oil, etc.).
 
Other areas which have a lot of research include freshwater (again, see China), diminishing amounts of arable land, the presumed long-term effects on the environment when you uproot too many trees and other objects which help mitigate erosion and dust clouds, ocean fishing stocks (pretty strict quotas across the world now, and you can just look at data from the 80s and 90s to see how much catches have been decreasing), the increase in algal blooms, etc.  Even the news on bee pollination is very worrying.
 
I'm hardly a conspiracy theorist or environmentalist, and even I think it's pretty frightening what will happen when the impact of all these things start aggregating, especially once when we've tipped things so far we won't even be able to pull back to a net zero impact on any of these things.

 

[digitaldissent]

Ever get to that point in SimCity when the map is full and its a real B**** to keep the city going?
 
I think we are at that point

 

[bcasey25raptor]

Quote:

I don't have links on hand but there are plenty of studies on how we're tearing through our natural resources (oil, natural gas, rare earths, etc.), and what happens to nations once their supplies run low (Syria), as well as what it does to international relations (China and US dustups over rare earths, oil, etc.).
 
Other areas which have a lot of research include freshwater (again, see China), diminishing amounts of arable land, the presumed long-term effects on the environment when you uproot too many trees and other objects which help mitigate erosion and dust clouds, ocean fishing stocks (pretty strict quotas across the world now, and you can just look at data from the 80s and 90s to see how much catches have been decreasing), the increase in algal blooms, etc.  Even the news on bee pollination is very worrying.
 
I'm hardly a conspiracy theorist or environmentalist, and even I think it's pretty frightening what will happen when the impact of all these things start aggregating, especially once when we've tipped things so far we won't even be able to pull back to a net zero impact on any of these things.

Space is our only hope. We must expand our empire beyond earth.

 

[bcasey25raptor]

Quote:

Ever get to that point in SimCity when the map is full and its a real B**** to keep the city going?
 
I think we are at that point

Lol i love that game. Ya i really think your right there.

 

[Elysian]

Quote:

Today, take a drive through those neighborhoods and you'll see plenty of real evidence, not some flim flam numbers being broadcasted by the media.

 
Quote:

Don't trust the government's figures on unemployment.  That mostly counts people receiving unemployment.  When the number gets too high, they rejigger the formula and exclude people so the rate doesn't look too bad.  But it's ugly, especially when people are trapped in lousy jobs below what they could earn or not fully using their skills.

Completely agree, and I wish we could get an unvarnished look at what's really going on.  I don't trust the BLS' numbers.  The CBO seems fairly objective but, in my opinion, they tend to either do narrow or overly sweeping analyses, neither of which is that useful.
 
Maybe instead of SimCity, we should be thinking about SimEarth...

 

[cifani090]

     Quote:

Yeah, all the empty strip malls and manufacturing plants I saw while driving to South Bend yesterday. Every other house with for sale signs in neighborhoods that were working in those abandoned factories and strip malls not that long ago. The number of older autos on the roads because no one can afford a new one. All the people being taken to the ER with preventable conditions because they can't afford healthcare. The same people who will be bankrupt for those bills because they don't have health insurance. The US economy was overcooked when credit cards were being sent daily to homes who couldn't qualify for them, people buying way beyond their station living in half million dollar homes with a BMW and Benz in the driveway, startup businesses being fully funded with no collateral. Today, take a drive through those neighborhoods and you'll see plenty of real evidence, not some flim flam numbers being broadcasted by the media.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elysian /img/forum/go_quote.gif

I don't have links on hand but there are plenty of studies on how we're tearing through our natural resources (oil, natural gas, rare earths, etc.), and what happens to nations once their supplies run low (Syria), as well as what it does to international relations (China and US dustups over rare earths, oil, etc.).
 
Other areas which have a lot of research include freshwater (again, see China), diminishing amounts of arable land, the presumed long-term effects on the environment when you uproot too many trees and other objects which help mitigate erosion and dust clouds, ocean fishing stocks (pretty strict quotas across the world now, and you can just look at data from the 80s and 90s to see how much catches have been decreasing), the increase in algal blooms, etc.  Even the news on bee pollination is very worrying.
 
I'm hardly a conspiracy theorist or environmentalist, and even I think it's pretty frightening what will happen when the impact of all these things start aggregating, especially once when we've tipped things so far we won't even be able to pull back to a net zero impact on any of these things.

The truth that needs to be told in American schools...