There are several different definitions of that word, some of which would reasonably apply to hn. I am glad it doesn't have infinite scroll but it also (front page) changes fairly slowly so I do not develop an urge to check it every few minutes.
Yes, and this is something that is routinely overlooked. Work identities run deep, and they are not easily changed.
Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.
Truck driver to nurse is special kind of issue, because nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity. But they will take jobs that are not that much feminine.
And nursing also require a lot more study then people assume, 40 years old trucker will have hard time spending that much time in school even if it was his lifelong dream.
Without throwing the gender stuff into it... There are plenty of occupations I have no interest in and can't picture myself ever doing. People spend their childhood and young adulthood figuring out what they are good at and what they enjoy, and you can't expect them to suddenly move to something completely different.
I'm not going to hold back my description of reality out of fear that it's somehow magically shaping it. Stating most nurses are female is the mildest observation possible, and doesn't sneak in any opinion whether that's good or bad, unlike your comment.
The profession is in reality overwhelmingly female, and it is associated with women in basically the entire world. Even from a linguistic perspective, the origins of the English word is gendered (the association with wet nurses is unmistakably feminine), and similar phenomenon happen in other languages. It's no longer considered the polite word to use, but if you read moderately old Japanese texts you'll find nurses referred to as "kangohu," no longer preferred because the "hu" part specifically means "woman." I'm sure if we did a survey of more world languages we'd find other hints. Even high-minded economic writing will describe it as "pink-collar" work. You could quite sensibly argue that it should be otherwise but the world is not as we might wish it were.
OP did not say anything about skilled workers who make things with their hands. You are describing an artisan or craftsman, or at the very least a tradesman.
The quote is talking about manufacturing labor. This is the guy on the assembly line who lowers the press, makes his thousandth widget for a day, and then lifts it up. Rinse and repeat.
That person would have been a skilled laborer like a blacksmith a few generations ago. I'm sure many of those people felt the same way when factories started to produce what they had spent a lifetime learning to make.
Now that is happening to many kinds of knowledge workers. Assembly lines mechanized the work of artisans. LLMs are in the process of mechanizing knowledge and creative work, of certain kinds.
I’m not sure people working on an assembly line in a factory is defining themselves as their work task. Someone working in a factory mounting IPhone screens probably don’t make their job their identity the same way a designer, developer, author does.
(Of course there are manual jobs that people have as their identity.)
One tiny nanoscopic nitpick, because i agree with you mostly, programming is often creating wider things (abstractions, frameworks). I think it hits a different part compared to most jobs. Maybe... i'm not sure, but that's how i feel compared to other manual occupations that i loved too.
The article says nothing about “skilled people who work with their hands” specifically, so it’s unclear what is being refuted here.
However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.
It's also reflective of the author living in a very small bubble. It's quite a shame that chose to include that as I think the article is otherwise relevant and pertinent, but it colors the whole thing.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
I chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted.
It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate.
edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it.
I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
> Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
It is currently there. The economy doesn't seem to be getting friendlier to the youth though. That median also seems pretty heavily skewed by a seven-year jump in youth unemployment after 2008, which seems like a bad omen.
Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
Changing the tax system to tax capital rather than labour would probably get you 90% of the way there without great societal upheaval (capital would fight back though).
If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
They used Royal Mail for shipping, on the way out Royal Mail are the ones handing it to the next country. In that case it seems to be a Royal Mail fuckup. It didn't touch the Finland carrier until it reached Finland.
I do remember my lung biopsy where they went in down my neck. Maybe they give less drugs for that than for your upper endoscopy. My memories have a slightly horror movie vibe but I would not be put off having the procedure again.
You might have been dreaming. I had a memory of the doctor saying "clamp down" and I bit down on the endoscope and he said "not you." I asked him if that happened and he said nothing like that happened at all and it was just a false memory/pseudo dream. Or he was lying to me.
I remember there was a lawsuit when a guy left his phone recording when they wheeled him in for a conscious sedation procedure and the doctors and nurses were making fun of him audibly how fat he was. Seems like they're confident enough in people not remembering for them to do that - or being able to dismiss it.
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