Best Methods For Fixing Unemployment

Y'know, since USERRA prosecution wouldn't gain me anything meaningful, I just had a great idea...

I live in a military town, with a high population of retired and former military.. As well as reserve and guard from every branch and two active duty bases..

Tomorrow morning I think I'm going to call my friend. She's a journalist. For the county newspaper.

Sounds like a great idea for a local story. She can highlight the 30 percent unemployment rate issue I talked about.

edited 15th May '12 7:05:45 PM by Barkey

Oh hell yes Barkey, links if it goes online.

Good idea.

Laser guided karma on my former employer aside, I honest to god feel it's a story that needs to be told. Even if I was still gainfully employed, this is something people need to know about, and get pissed off about.

Besides, maybe I'll earn my covergirl name again, having already been on the cover of a magazine, all I need now is a newspaper. ;)

If you become a famous face on GQ I want invitations to the scandalous LA parties.

Hookers and blow for all with my new employment status.

@Tomu: This is a late reply..sue me..I was busy playing Diablo 3 :p but the problem with that particular part of the economic model is that it way overstates the level of competition and way understates the number of firms that would actually count as Competitive Monopolies. Barkey's theoretical restaurant would most certainly fall under the umbrella of a competitive monopoly, as I think most resturaunts do. They succeed or fail based upon criteria that are almost entirely non-economic.

This is why I'm a massive fan of behavioral economics, because I honestly think that the only way to create somewhat realistic models is to start at individual behavior and extrapolate up. It's messy, it's not easy, and it's always changing, but that's kind of the point. We'll never have the nice clean models of conventional economics, but it's better than what we have now.

That's the point I was getting at. Consider it playing Devil's Advocate or something.

You probably were doing it a bit too well :p

Man I go away for like a second and it's like 4 pages of replies already.

I wanted to say that education in America is too expensive for what it is, and that there is under-education as well. Basically, I don't know where all those dollars go to when everybody else spends sometimes literally 10x less money for superior education. That's important because education is about return on investment, and if your investment costs you a bajillion dollars, there's no way there's a return that makes it worth it. I think that because of that lack of return you also entrench a sense of anti-intellectualism (or anti-educationism, more this than the former) that seriously damages democracy itself because people start to view education with a suspicious eye and begin to lack the basic skills necessary to even see through the mountainous volume of political BS in America.

However, no, it won't entirely stop outsourcing. But there are jobs you cannot outsource. You can't outsource construction and skilled labour. One cannot, at least with current technology, teleport a construction site into India, hire a bunch of Indians at 10 rupees a day and then build a structure and then teleport it back into America. So education is a tool to block the outsourcing of high-tech jobs and professional jobs.

Training programs and other mechanisms is for people to easily go into skilled labour, labour and technical vocations. But it's not so much that your education system needs "more education", but when the government controls the means of education then it can do what Canada does; judge how much jobs exist for each talent pool. Most Canadians don't know and most Canadian politicians will pretend it doesn't happen, but the labour ministry bureaucracy plans our education systems in 10-20 year trend lines to ensure that we have the necessary amount of people in each job category to fulfil what they expect and over the last 40-50 years, it has worked well. We've consistently beaten America (our primary comparison target) in proper skill to job ratio.

Next, I've been toying with the idea of eliminating a large number of corporate tax breaks in favour of grants. Thing is, corporations in failing industries don't benefit with tax breaks (no profit means no tax anyway), and reduction of taxes only benefits existing corporations, not new ones. But you want new corporations. Old corporations cost cut. Old corporations outsource. Old corporations don't invent new technologies. On average, new entries introduce far more technologies and pay far higher wages in ratio to profit. I personally did a calculation across just the tech sector and established companies usually pull anywhere between 85-99% of the value output of a worker whereas successful startups roughly within their IPO time period (like around 2-3 years before or after) take around 30-40% of the value output of a worker. (ie. Imagine you were paid the money you made the corporation and then saw the "tax rate" the corporation puts on your income. It may surprise you when you earn the company ten million dollars and then get paid 50 000) Plus a successful startup is by definition a new innovative technology.

On the lower-end scale, pouring grants into smaller neighbourhoods means someone like Barkey who wants to start up a restaurant of "El food made by veteran" gets a $50 000 starting boost. He can fail or succeed, but that $50 000 just created half a dozen jobs which has a subsequent multiplier effect and there's no reason that Barkey can't just try again. If he's successful, government gets tax dollars. If he fails, oh well, the government did some stimuulus.

edited 15th May '12 9:50:49 PM by breadloaf

inorite?

While I can understand a colleges desire to have all of their students understand the basics, a simple entrance exam should cover such (in fact, that's what they did for my engineering program so I could pass out of the basic maths and start on Calc). Cutting the generalist BS is a good idea for declared majors. Also, adding a "general education" degree for people who just want a/ny degree because they feel the need to get one. If somebody doesn't have a profession they want to go into, there's no point in trying to force them into one. But don't help them out, they just want the status so they can pay for everyone else.

All the top universities usually require "breadth" education and there usually isn't complaint about it. If your particular college isn't handling it right (ie. teaching you things you didn't want to learn) then I would take issue with your particular college not with the idea itself. You generally get breadth education to expand your general understanding of the world so that you don't make narrow-minded choices. If your education isn't helping you do that, then your college has designed it poorly.

One problem with testing is they screw you out of stuff whenever possible. I tested out of Calc III with like a 95% (they required 80%) but UO made me take it anyway. And then after transferring to OSU they made me take it again because their version of it was minutely different and there's no way I could have covered that material in the UO class (not only did I, but I covered it in high school as well. Better even).

edited 16th May '12 1:08:45 AM by Pykrete

From who? I went to learn about science, not the boring subjects in the humanities. I can honestly say I have never met a college student who was declared and had more than a passing interest in the required subjects beyond one or two subjects they were mildly interested in and could learn about just as well on The Other Wiki. I've met far more who knew they were nothing but shameless attempts to weedle more money out of students. Wide angle learning is what primary education is for. Doing it again with little to no knew information is just delaying the inevitable.

That and constantly having to unlearn the garbage they try to get you to do as a habit. It took so long to break the Purple Prose bullshit I had to practice to meet minimum length standards. Honestly, most of the communication based subjects should be handled in house since the communication based colleges focus on their own use of it rather than the ways you'll use it elsewhere.

I'd also posit that trying to do a generalized course more than once is partly to blame. Generalized courses tend to be fairly similar, so taking them multiple times would be similar to being forced to do the tutorial level every time you turned on a game, regardless of save state.

edited 16th May '12 4:41:31 AM by Deboss

My interests in literature and history are mostly due to about three general ed classes that by some miracle were actually taught well, and Wikipedia would never have covered these topics in the kind of depth that made them interesting to me.

Still, not arguing that there's way, way too much fat in the curriculum on the whole. Or that writing classes teach you to write needlessly minced words that are an eyesore to trudge through.

edited 16th May '12 10:20:30 AM by Pykrete

Real education makes you realise how trash The Other Wiki is, and what universities? Places such as Oxford, Stockholm, Waterloo, MIT, etc. What I'm trying to say is that it sounds more like you're complaining about a crappy university versus a crappy concept. Plus, one of the major problems that non-American employers have with American candidates is their narrow-minded focus on education being only to get you a job, it ironically makes them highly unfit for any of the higher-paying jobs. Their "passing interest" and lack of initiative to learn anything beyond what they feel is "necessary" is one of the biggest problems I have found with American college graduates and makes millions of them virtually unemployable except in the mid to low end American jobs.

If you treat the education system as an assembly line to produce people for jobs, then you'll forever have people in crappy low-paying jobs because that's all you built the system to do.

But even then, fixing universities only helps 30% of Americans. The other spectrum are labour related jobs. To that I think that the promotion of small business should be the solution, alongside grant money. It seems to me that small businesses in America pay substantially less wages to Canadian counter parts for two reasons:

• Higher risk of failure in USA
• Healthcare costs rival salary costs themselves

I'm not sure how much of those problems are fixable on the college level. Much of it stems from the lower end schools leaving students that have just graduated with the mindset that doing better won't actually get you anything better. And that after school programs are things you do so that you have something to put on your resume and you shouldn't look for things you enjoy. Then again, the amount of crap on curriculum is one of the best ways of teaching kids that school is a place you go to put up with the same lessons repeated over and over again so there's no point in learning it the first time.

Are we talking a "learning is something you should always be doing" attitude or a "every subject is interesting" attitude?

I also really really wish HR departments would quite putting "entry level" and "expert" on the same job requisition form.

It'd be nice if Entry Level was actually Entry Level -_-

Yeah no shit. Seems like for every one entry level job there's like 5 managers, that's the real problem with this country.

I've yet to meet anybody with the title of "Manager" or "Analyst" who makes more than 80k a year who actually does something useful.

No, I mean, every Entry Level position I've seen is "Must have 2 years prior work experience."

"Eliminate the middleman" is a time-honored tactic for cutting costs. One wonders why, in this age of financial uncertainty, the low man on the totem pole is the one finding his job at risk.

edited 17th May '12 9:49:03 PM by drunkscriblerian

Because they're the most replaceable, because people in desperate circumstances are willing to put up with a whole lot of shit.

I suppose it would also help if one of the primary jobs you get for having a degree wasn't a manager or sales person who only use it as a key to those jobs. That's probably one of the reasons degrees don't get as much respect. When you're primary experience with a degree holder is a friggin' manager, you tend to form certain opinions of them.

Tomu, I'm thinking more of the jobs that say 0-1 year of experience and an expert in [some program] or something. Entry level means blank fucking slate with all the basics, not somebody who secretly has ten years of experience and just wants to hide it for some reason.

Except no, it doesn't. Every last job outside of Food Service (and a lot even in Food Service) that I've seen says "Entry level" and yet still has prior work experience listed as a requirement.

Yeah, I've got to agree with Tomu here. I haven't seen any jobs lately that haven't asked for prior experience. I even came across an ad last month for a janitorial position that required a bachelor's degree.