Hopefully video rental store employees will soon make the 60k a year they deserve

Yeah, you can't possibly have a grasp on how much demand has shifted from medium skill to low skill workers if you think the problem is American workers aren't skilled enough.

You crazy.

Best way to stop low wage jobs is allowing technology and automation to blossom + a basic income allowing the labor pool of low skilled workers to have much better bargaining power.

"Do this and you can increase your income by 50%" is wayyy better for the labor pool and society than "Do this or your kids will starve"

It would also better allow people to follow their true talents and passions(and better realize a closer to optimal society) without that threat of uncertainty.

Typical non sequitur

Let's start a Tree Fiddy plan.

Everyone gets $350 a week, Federal sales tax of 3.5% and no income tax below $350,000

but hopefully we can phase out the low skill jobs in favor of technology over time leaving us with only high skill jobs. Ideally those will also disappear in short order and we can then ride the successes of technology to a life of leisure.

But then you're left with a heartbreaking tale of robotic love between a lonely waste-cleaning robot that follows the object of his desire into SPACE.

I wouldn't be surprised if the prime impetus for this move is to butt**** charter schools.

Can you expand on the first part (of course the second part is correct from a relative global sense)

Real talk though, this is the future

Used to be, factories made the same **** for years or decades. Train their employees to know the ins and outs of their product, for many reasons beneficial to the company. They'd have employee career plans and ****.

Now, the business model is, understandably, to be sleek and agile. Small number of high value employees. Rely on temp staffing, turnkey and other solutions companies for whatever isn't just the process of maintaining and creating core competencies.

Repair isn't even repair anymore. It's just replace the module and run a debug script. Slows you down to understand what the module does or how it works.

So it's not just that there's less medium skill jobs, it's that every day they look more like low skilled jobs, including in how they're hired and what the model of (temp) employment is.

And of course, service industry still going stronk

When China has been shedding manufacturing jobs for 20 years, it's hard to see the path back to enough medium skilled jobs to support 1950-present American lifestyle. So either that's gone or we could look for other ways to support that lifestyle

A life of leisure would lead to profound unhappiness for a lot of people. Humans generally like to have a purpose in life, and sitting at home collecting NEETbux doesn't quite fill the hole. Hence the recent rise of, e.g., opiate addictions and overdoses.

Seems more likely that in this scenario you end up with an incredibly minuscule spectacularly rich and an overwhelming majority with crippling poverty

Hahaha, hence. Good one.

B, not just my factories example, either. Like all the people with college degrees, even math degrees, that used to be necessary to push paper. Now an executive with little to no understanding of the concepts behind it just plugs and plays in the computer

It's everywhere. Google the shift from medium to low skilled labor demand or something like that

Numbers are better than words, as long as you have some context

All my googling is showing lower demand for low skilled labor which makes sense to me as those are the first jobs substituted away by technological automation.

Or put another way, what used to be medium skill jobs are now low skill jobs and those are lost.

edit - if low skilled labor demand really increased, shouldn't that lead to higher wages for low skilled jobs?

S-U-P-P-L-Y

but he didn't say that. his argument was wages are low because labor demand has shifted from medium skill to low skill.

and if that is the argument, well then we are in agreement - low skilled labor supply is too high.

The last video rental store in my area closed just a few weeks ago

The end of an era that ended years ago

Yeah, redbox is great and all, but it only has the latest movies usually.

Which means now I have to buy blurays if I wanna watch a movie rather than just pay a few bucks to rent a movie

Amazon Prime

From what I heard, teachers count as state employees, and this rule doesn't change state employees pay.

so this only applies to corporations then? that would make sense

teachers always complain about all the extra hours they put in, but don't seem to realize everyone else has more regular hours plus all those extra hours

plus no summers off!

Source.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/7-things...overtime-rule/