The NEET Invasion Is Here! Warn the people about the NHK!

Being a luddite has nothing to do with the fact that better work can be acquired by actually paying people for their work. That's true no matter what.

*shrugs* It's kind of irrelevant to my point, really. You can earn a living only if other people are willing to pay you for what you do. If people aren't willing to pay for technical writing (or at least not enough to make a living wage), then technical writing is an industry with poor job prospects. My point about a mismatch between what people graduate in and where the jobs are remains.

Why people are or aren't willing to pay you for what you do doesn't really matter, from this perspective. Sure, your work might be "better" than the cheap stuff most companies "settle for", but it's not like we have some kind of committee allocating jobs based on who is "better". If nobody will pay you, you won't make a living. It's as simple as that.

Just because they're scrapping so much of NASA doesn't make it right.]

Just because they don't pay teachers nearly enough doesn't make it right.

Just because they're closing schools doesn't make it right.

Etc.

The fact is that while people are self-interested and this is supposed to be good in the free market, they can be remarkably bad at figuring out what will actually benefit them long-term and will instead look for money-saving measures in the short term. The magical hand of the free market doesn't always work.

edited 7th Jun '13 2:35:31 AM by ohsointocats

True, but that's not what I was arguing. You're making a point that's completely separate from mine and then presenting it as an argument against what I'm saying.

Actually it has everything to do with what I've said. You say you have to follow the free market and I say the free market is broken.

Like, say, having decent math textbooks instead of the schlock we feed our children might actually make them interested in math and science, or at least not completely turned off by math the moment they lay eyes on it, and we might end up with more scientists and engineers, but it's not like that's ever going to happen, because "everything is fine the way it is." There are no visionaries anymore except on the internet and that's very, very sad.

I'm not arguing for or against the free market. I'm arguing that, the free market being what it is (and like it or not, it's not going away anytime soon), there is a mismatch between supply and demand of labour, and this is a big cause of youth unemployment.

But I like internet visionaries...

Fun Fact, when I was in high school because I read Watchmen and the back cover said Alan Moore was a visionary, I asked my career counsellor whether I could be one as my career. They didn't know how to explain to me that the visionary industry is a very broad field with many tenets and practices.

edited 7th Jun '13 2:43:10 AM by NewGeekPhilosopher

What part of they want your work but are unwilling to pay for it do you not understand? See people who are tossed off to internship after internship and never have job offers. An internship is supposed to be training you for work. However, these people think they can have your work for free and then shove you off. Yet, the free market says this is okay. This should not be legal.

edited 7th Jun '13 3:16:04 AM by ohsointocats

The quality of math textbook has little to no bearing on the outcome of the kid doing or being interested in math. I know this from experience and on the job work lately.

The main reasons the kids are turned off by the subject is their own apathy, apathetic parents, and rather poorly vetted (or simply incompetent) teachers that are protected by idiotic administrations and unions. Most of the time it's the first two being the biggest factors since even the best teachers can't get a kid to learn if said kid doesn't care. The last part just creates a substandard quality of education because it then becomes how many cronies can a superintendent hire to surround herself with, how much money can they parasitically bleed off the state, and how many other departments they can fuck over so as to hire more administrators. (If it ain't obvious by now, the school district I work for is very poorly run and most of its problems are attributable to that.)

True, these unpaid internships are a nasty scheme. They're a way of exploiting people's desperation to get free labour out of them. But they're a symptom, not a cause. You can ban the practice (well, actually, I doubt you could; this would be very tricky legally) but that won't magically create jobs.

Both of you, stop using the word "visionary" for a moment and think about what it means.

A visionary is someone who has a vision. A vision of where society is headed (predictive) or where it should be headed (normative). But calling someone a "visionary" implies that you agree with their vision: that you think their prediction is right or their ideal is worth striving after. Generally, it's a very big compliment, and should not be thrown about lightly.

Hence the label "visionary" can only be properly applied long after the fact. There are probably tons of visionaries out there today (no more and no fewer than in previous generations, I'd assume), but they don't get called that because we haven't yet seen whether their visions are anywhere near the mark. Calling anyone who is currently active in whatever they do a visionary makes me extremely skeptical - the more someone is touted as a "visionary", the more likely they are to be a hack, in my experience. Calling yourself a visionary, or explicitly striving to be one, is just... sad.

A term like "visionary industry" takes the last bits of meaning out of the word, reducing it to just another of those lofty corporate buzzwords Americans seem to be so fond of.

Also, Cats, what the hell do you mean by "except on the internet"? I was under the impression that the Internet was a means of communication, not a physical realm you can be "on" or "off".

edited 7th Jun '13 1:19:57 PM by MidnightRambler

What are you talking about? I'm physically inside the internet right now. These sentences here? I used an ePencil to write them all.

"If you're having visions, go see your doctor." - Helmut Schmidt

While based on a true story I think the point at my jab with the "visionary industry" IS that farming out visionaries as an employable status is silly.

What happened in real life was my career adviser told me that Alan Moore was a comics writer, and that other people called him a visionary.

edited 7th Jun '13 9:15:26 PM by NewGeekPhilosopher

My take on it is that it's a combination of young people being mis-matched in their education and training, and old people who refuse to leave the job market (part of that problem is that the old people need more money, but a good bit of it is old people who just enjoy working more than retirement, but are being greedy in that endeavor). The two factors, combined with the slow economy, create a world where businesses hold all the cards in regards to hiring.

I'm technically a NEET for the moment, myself, due to a pushy older person making trouble for me at work, so i may be becoming more than a bit of an Age-ist.

I would think a NEET would be someone not actively searching for employment. Basically, a slacker in its purest form, except with a dash of some sort of social anxiety disorder.

Major: Eehhhnn. Maybe it's just different in Canada, but from what I've seen the math curriculum is really sort of built against the students. Not in just textbooks, but the whole darn thing. And it's not just a recent thing because there's actual mathematicians who have complained about it.

For the last 300 years.

Also that apathy has to come from somewhere, you know? It's not like kids are born apathetic (far from it actually).

The apathy often comes from their parents and friends.

They're parents, maybe? I dunno, I find it a little suspect. And with their friends it's not like they were apathetic when they were young either.

No definitely. Where I'm at has a lot of apathetic parents. Most of them and this is no exaggeration aren't what you call model or even trying parents. They're often lazy, stupid and don't care.

Which is a stark difference from parents and kids out in the county schools. They are like night and day. They care, they try and their kids do much better in school. It isn't rocket surgery to put two and two together to conclude the attitude and abilities of the parents directly relates to their kids' performance in school.

I'm on summer vacation between high school and college. Am I NEET?

I like to believe the kids who hate math just realized that any math beyond basic Algebra is terrible in every respect.

Amen to that. Fuck Calculus.

Blasphemy!

^^ But I liked Calculus in college. (The second time anyways. Must have been because the professor had an authentic Ukrainian accent.)