I think the top commenter ("cobo") nailed it. The main problem is that a lot of people see their job as their identity. When someone suggests they adapt themselves to another, more modern industry, they see that as an attack on their identity and way of life and dig in. The result is almost always a political mess, as those running for office come up with protectionist, regressive policies to appease those people to be able to get or retain their votes.
People tend to be much too glib about this. Megan Mcardle nailed this:
"Moreover, people invest a lot in building up a professional identity, which helps make the work more bearable (and, by giving people pride in what they do, probably ensures that the work is better done). Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional."
> Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional.
Well, color me surprised, I always figured the usual definition of 'professional' means he or she who is schooled in their art and using that knowledge professionally, not 'those who don't get their hands dirty'.
I find it hard to see a machinist not as a professional but fine, I'll change my internal dictionary.
Edit: thinking about this a bit longer, it seems clear that the distinction was made by those who don't get their hands dirty at the expense of those who do, and it seems extremely demeaning to me. As if the 'white/blue collar worker' distinction wasn't bad enough now people who spend a lifetime acquiring the knowledge to do their jobs are not even allowed to be called - or call themselves - professionals.
And then there's the sense of professional versus amateur. I suspect your internal dictionary is just fine, and we're running into different senses of the use of professional.
Doctors are professionals, miners are tradesmen, artists are craftsmen. They're just legacy words. If there is any cultural respect or stigma, it's mostly tied to income not the work itself.
It's more than professional identity: it's social identity too. Conservative society has an answer for everything: how to be a man or woman, who is appropriate to marry, why you shouldn't worry about death or global warming and what is a socially appropriate job, so retraining to do something that comes from outside society is an even bigger identity threat.
>>Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional.
It's not sudden. At all. The coal industry has been on the decline for quite a while now, and green jobs have been on the rise.
It's always a good laugh to see the mental acrobatics that Bloomberg columnists will undergo in order to maintain the Party Line. She literally links to a dubious study of 34 rhesus monkeys[1] to justify her insanity. I can imagine the cognitive dissonance going on, though: imagine spending decades of you're life defending capitalism and "creative destruction" in all its glory only to have the whole country (left and right) turn against you.
The reality is that these sorts of economic migrations are not new. The whole point is that the market produces winners and losers. But now the wrong people are losing so people like Mcardle are forced to wring their hands and make pseudo-evolutionary nonsense arguments and appeal to identity politics (which are now suddenly okay because it's the right people whose identity is at risk.) It just goes a long way to show how empty these people are. Now, when their entire model is most at risk, they point to rhesus monkeys and claim they don't know what "Plan B" is.
[1] I don't use the word "dubious" lightly. The study draws fantastically broad conclusions from a very limited data set. This is not okay because it opens the door for people like Mcardle to come along and really abuse the science to fit their crackpot agenda.
I remember my first exposure to this as a child in the early 80s, a friend of my parents was long term unemployed and I couldn't understand it. My mother's (somewhat unsympathetic tbh) explanation was that he wanted his old job back and that it no longer existed. He did eventually find gainful employment, but in another field.
A little off topic, but a functioning welfare system has the potential to allow people to take the time to find the right job, rather than be pressured into taking the first thing that comes along. It's a question of balance
>A little off topic, but a functioning welfare system has the potential to allow people to take the time to find the right job, rather than be pressured into taking the first thing that comes along. It's a question of balance
So does having 6 months of income saved up, but we don't teach any type of finance in high schools.
I understand that some people with jobs don't have that ability, but the vast majority do.
Interesting. In the tech sector we are always being bombarded with needing to be hooked in socially, have a github presence, etc. So, I guess we are not immune to that either. In order to get a good job, our career cannot be separate from our identity. We have to eat, drink and pee technology.
That's a pretty poor example. The laborers were paid $9.70/hr. No American would want to do that when you can make more working at a gas station.
That seems to be the biggest problem with lower class work in the US at the moment. Cost of living is always going up, but the companies want to pay the same paltry wages they were a few decades ago.
I don't understand. $9.70 is better than being unemployed. Your comment perfectly illustrates the point I'm trying to make (people care too much about what they're doing and/or where they're doing it -- this naturally leads to your identity being tired to your job). If it's not I'd love to hear the reasoning.
Not every job that pays $9.70 is necessarily dangerous, so I fail to see your point. That article is more of a representation of a greater potential issue.
> Not every job that pays $9.70 is necessarily dangerous
Right, hence the comment implying that a gas station job around that amount would get workers. But in a time where there is a significant push to make the minimum wage $15, it's not surprising that people won't do hard labor for $10.
Because the opportunity cost equation is different for them. $10/hr working hard labor vs. easy labor is the choice for American workers; $10/hr in the U.S. versus $4/hr elsewhere is the equation for the foreign workers. On top of that, they have the option of taking the $10/hr work for 4-6 months, and then travelling back to their home country where their cost of living is much lower and it works out the be the equivalent of $25-30/hr in purchasing power.
My point is that if you expect people to always work more for less, at some point people won't do it anymore. If you want Americans to do the work, you've got to make it worth it for them. There are many factors that go into whether or not it's worth it, like the stability of work hours, autonomy, ability to work your way up, and hourly pay. With no stability, autonomy, or room for growth, and always living under the threat that their work may be outsourced, it simply isn't worth it for Americans to do the work for $9.70/hr.
Again, I fail to see how being unemployed is superior to making money. Your point is correct, if you assume the person could get a job with the qualities you describe. If they could, they wouldn't be unemployed to begin with (unless it's by choice, of course)
Why is that foreigners are taking these jobs and not Americans?
At some point it becomes easier to beg for charity from family, friends and society so that it is not worth working. Hard labor that damages your body for minimum wage may not be worth it in the long term versus a cashier's position for the same wage.
I view things differently. Back in the 60s when unions were strong and jobs weren't outsourced, employees got their fair share of corporate earnings, and a laborer could afford a middle class life with a car, house, and nuclear family.
Look at things today. The return on labor has dropped significantly due to outsourcing and immigration dropping wages at a time when corporate earnings are higher than ever and socioeconomic mobility is at an all-time low[1]. Productivity is higher & GDP per capita is over $50k/yr, yet the majority of people, especially in the lower class, have not been benefiting from this. I guarantee the corporate managers make obscenely more money than the farm laborers do. I personally don't feel it's bad to feel entitled to my fair share of the work I put in.
Interestingly, here in Canada union membership has only waned slightly over the years and the current unionization rate is almost equal to the USA's peak. Yet, we have all the same problems with wage stagnation for the majority of the population and a small group at the top reaping all the rewards of higher productivity.
Protectionism. When the law grants a monopoly, small groups gain a huge advantage over everyone else.
Ironically, unions play their own part in that. Here in Canada we like to pick on teachers because, thanks to a strong union, they can make almost $100,000 for 8 months of work. Which is fine, and good for them, but the problem is that they are able to achieve that high income only because they actively prevent other people from doing the job. Someone who is stuck in a low-paying job has no avenue to compete against them, leaving that person stuck in a low-paying job while the teacher can start amassing wealth with the high income their job provides. This is how inequality happens.
Of course, not the same degree that you find with what is quite possibly the most insidious form of protectionism: Intellectual property. It's no coincidence that people like Bill Gates, who built a business on copyright law, are among the richest in the world. As soon as someone tries to offer the "Doors" operating system to fulfill the huge demand for such a product, they will get the pants sued off them. You can try to offer something sort of the same, but not really, but that doesn't put much pressure on the market for obvious reasons.
It would be kind of like if diary and poultry (Diary and poultry products have their own protectionist system in Canada, so I use that example as more than just a hypothetical) products were controlled by a certain group. You can grow celery to try and compete against them, but that's not really going to stop people from buying dairy and poultry if that's what the market wants. Celery is not cheese. As such, those who control the market profit greatly. A family friend is in the chicken business and he's been willing to share his wealth, and let's just say that I think a lot of startups would be pivoting to that business if there was a viable way in. The problem is, of course, that the protectionism doesn't allow a viable way in for everyone else.
If you're part of a household with multiple incomes, or you live with your parents, or you are able to take out a loan or live off savings such that you can take your time to educate yourself in a field or so on, then yes, it's definitely better to be unemployed.
In the case where a partner works, so basic bills are covered, you working as well for $10/hr might be a directly economic negative -- childcare, chores, etc you're doing now are simply worth more to the family than the dollar value you bring in. Particularly so if your job would require a second vehicle.
Even in the case where people have no income, there's likely still a floor at which the person values their time. If $10/hr doesn't benefit their life in equal measure to the value of a) not having a shitty boss and b) whatever they're doing now (TV, masturbating, bumming at the library), then it makes economic sense not to take those jobs.
Once you factor in social safety net benefits, it likely makes economic sense for people not to take certain jobs.
tl;dr: You analysis fails to account for the opportunity cost of not using the time on things besides a job.
It was pretty frustrating job hunting as a 15-year-old. Nobody liked the idea of hiring someone with no work experience, even for minimum wage, and there were a lot of jobs that I seemed qualified for that were legally mandated to require people 18+.
The problems with children are really just problems with adults.
I suspect we're violently agreeing. Minimum wage is too high for the value provided by the jobs I used to do, although they were not value-less. And restrictions around child-labor are well-intentioned but occasionally produces sub-optimal results. Ten-year olds threading bobbins in a 1870s textile mill twelve hours a day is a different beast than a high-school kid picking potatos or strawberries for a few hours as a summer job.
That article is several years old now, and maybe there are some regional factors at play, but as a farmer myself, these days I regularly see offers of $20/hour if you're willing to show up, and closer to $30+/hour if you bring any skills to the table. Despite that, there is still is a lot of struggle to fill those jobs.
And maybe the price just needs to go higher still. I'm not going to tell someone how much they have to work for. But it's interesting that – once you account for the significantly lower cost of living generally found in these rural areas – you're practically making programmer in a big city wages now and that's still not appealing to someone who is unemployed.
In a lot of ways, I think enraged_camel (and cobo) hit the nail on the head[1]. Nobody wants the identity of working on a farm. There are a lot of negative connotations related to that type of work that have been built up over the years.
It's not "negative connotations" -- there are in fact enormous opportunity costs for such low-skilled, seasonal work. Nobody in their right mind would spend 10 hours a day kneeling in the fields picking tomatoes given (1) you are employed on literally a daily basis meaning on any given day you might show up and be told there's "no more work" which means (2) you literally have to go from farm to farm, moving around constantly, to find work, since no job generally lasts more than 3 months and which really means (3) there are literally zero benefits available at each job. To put a pretty penny on it farms tend to be in rural areas that offer very little in the way of infrastructure and amenities. Price simply isn't the issue here, when you look at what's actually involved agriculture does not offer anything like a "job" it just offers dumb work, in the purest sense of the word. That means it will always get done by poor, transitory, essentially enslaved populations that have zero other avenues for work. (This has been the essential logic of human history since literally the dawn of time so I'm a bit at a loss when I see people discussing farm labor salaries...)
There's a remarkable consistency at work here. Between Trump advocating to bring back coal jobs and others calling for better paid farmhands to the silly article suggesting that wind turbines can support anything like the number of jobs supported by coal plants... it seems like just a remarkable failure of imagination across the board.
Great example. Huge pay by every metric, and plenty by your own assertion, and they still struggled to fill all the jobs at that price, at least before the crash. I think this really emphasizes how image plays the most important role.
The folks I know who worked the rigs during the "boom years" came only to earn as much as they could before burn-out finally did them in. Some of them miss the pay, but none of them seem to miss the job.
Farm labor tends to be seasonal; making programmer wages for a few weeks and then being unemployed might not be as attractive as a steady but lower paying job.
Part of the problem is, you can go on Craigslist and find non-contract labor in that general area - starting at a wage of at least $10/hour. So $9.70 is simply not competitive at all.
No, simply because it doesn't offer enough jobs to make a macro impact, and many of the issues tied to the destruction of the middle class are much larger than just job availability.
You know what could do it though? A new new deal focused not just on national roads and bridges, but public owned internet.
In Canada anyways, a combination of 10+ years of zero interest rates, culture, and who knows what else has resulted in a housing bubble such that even if you have a fantastic job, in many cities you're not going to be able to buy a house, ever.
And now, because any policy change (normalizing interest rates for example) that might affect these precious lottery winners is a non-starter. Meanwhile, this bubble is well underway bleeding into the rental market. So it is literally government policy to create a society of have and have nots.
I think the insanely high housing prices are also largely due to the centralization of most new jobs centering around urban areas. People go where the jobs are, which drives up demand for urban housing.
That's how it is in much of the US, at least. I'm not sure if Canada is different.
Primarily it is one thing, a lack of economic mobility. Things that factor into that are stagnation of wages, increasing wealth inequality, and the fact that policy has been shown to favor the wealthy. The other commenter also touches on key points, rising rent cost as a % of wage, lack of ownership compared to past generations, lack of interest bearing accounts, etc.
> You what could do it though? A new new deal focused not just on national roads and bridges, but public owned internet.
I think this is the profound part, and it contributes toward enraged_camel and massysett's comments as well.
If you want people to take pride in their work, give them ownership: bridges, roads, wind/solar, municipal broadband last mile, contributing towards the maintaining and expansion of national parks and reserves. "I helped build that". It provides purpose. People need purpose in what they do (on top of autonomy and mastery). [1]
This is how you create community from public works projects. "Building Tomorrow Together" would make a great New Deal umbrella project, funded by the US government.
I agree, which is why I have been trying to read up on the constitutional issues surrounding the new deal programs. There is plenty of opportunity to tighten up the MIICC budget and use lots of it benefit real people in the short term and all people in the long term.
I grew up with a national forest as my back yard, so I understand the value of such projects first-hand.
A coal plant requires a lot of workers to keep running. It requires even more workers to keep it supplied with coal. Per megawatt hour, electricity from coal is more labor-intense than from natural gas, wind, or a utility scale solar PV installation.
A wind farm does not require many full time workers for operation and maintenance. Most present wind industry jobs are in installation and manufacturing. When wind power stops growing and reaches steady-state, employing people for O&M plus manufacturing/installing replacements for aged-out components, the job count is going to plunge.
I don't actually think that wind's low labor intensity is bad. I think it's great that renewables can produce electricity with far less pollution and significantly less human labor than coal plants. But it does mean that switching energy jobs away from coal, even if it were frictionless, still leaves you with fewer jobs than the status quo ante. It's somewhat like trying to switch everyone unemployed by robots into new robot-maintenance-technician careers. The numbers don't work.
Only rarely. Golden Eagles don't tend to breed all that close to human populations centers, where domesticated and feral cats are usually found. Where they do, they tend not to do well--a steady succession of failed nesting attempts is the norm.
TL;DR. AWEA is a pro-wind lobbying group for wind companies by wind companies, and the “facts” in this link have many problems. Some of my responses below:
> Turbines almost never kill bald eagles.
Better to attribute the ramping of Bald Eagle populations across North America to the ban of DDT and other organochlorines, as well as successful restorative nest hacking in areas where they were extirpated. Windfarms are simply not common enough to be a mitigating factor (yet).
> Golden eagle fatalities are relatively uncommon at wind projects.
This is a clever turn of phrase. One could also say wind projects are also relatively uncommon, which is probably the biggest reason there haven’t been more eagle fatalities. One need to look no further than Altamont Pass, California, to see what happens when you install a windfarm adjacent to the largest known population of nesting Golden Eagle in the world. That's a worst case scenario, of course. But the point is that good siting is pretty much the key to making bird killing a non-problem. As more windfarms are installed, the problem will likely become more common.
With that said, state and federal regulators in the USA have either by omission or intent set very low bars for “voluntary reporting” and mortality monitoring. The lion’s share of the mortality data that exists is strictly “proprietary”, and has never been shared. And most windfarms do practically no monitoring at all apart from the laughingly inadequate pre-construction and post-construction surveys mandated by the USFWS. And why should they? The hostile legal environment surrounding permitting, for example, would make it foolhardy for any company to go out of their way to collect data that could only become a giant liability down the line. Simply put, the absence of data for eagle mortality should not be taken as a sign that there is no eagle mortality occurring.
> The majority of golden eagle deaths occur at older wind farms build in the 1980s, when the relationship between turbines and eagles was not understood. Better-sited, modern turbines are replacing outdated ones and lowering deaths by 80 percent.
They are referring to Altamont Pass, again. Modern turbines are definitely better. Rather than the picket-line or gauntlet of high-speed blenders installed atop hills where birds slope-soar and hunt, modern turbines tend to be spaced much farther apart, greatly reducing the likelihood of a collision. However, reducing incidence of collision does not mean “lowering deaths”--it just means that that each “pass” an eagle makes through a windfarm becomes less dangerous. This distinction is important. In windfarms where choice prey is abundant, hunting eagles will typically make several extended passes through a windfarm each day, making their likelihood of an “encounter” with a turbine quite high over a period of several days or weeks.
They say “lowering deaths by 80 percent”, then backpedal a bit farther down:
> It is estimated that eagle fatalities will be reduced by as much as 80% as those long-standing wind sites replace their shorter, more numerous, faster-rotating old turbines with taller, less numerous, slower-rotating modern turbines that are sited based on more experience.
I was about to say: the only windfarm in the country that’s employed any serious “repowering” effort is Altamont Pass. And the speculated improvement that new turbines are better than the old turbines for “lowering deaths” there has, so far, been inconclusive. It’s not that modern turbines aren’t an improvement, it’s just that this webpage doesn’t yet have any justification to be making this claim!
> Modern turbines have slower-rotating blades, and fewer are needed to generate the same amount of electricity.
Modern turbines’ rate of rotation is indeed slower, but the speeds of the actual blades (especially on the distal half) is actually appreciably faster than smaller bird blenders. In practice, it just means the risk is...
I'm sorry it was not convincing, but I'm not sure why you're saying my rebuttal is FUD when the PR page is crafted exactly to muddy the very waters of this topic. You driving by "five or six hundred wind generators" tells me you went by one larger park, or perhaps a handful of small or medium sized parks. If you're in the USA, you've also pinpointed a few locations on the map where you probably live, because there are only a few places presently in the country with that much installed capacity. Yes, I'm saying that even "five or six hundred" is miniscule.
But, seriously, I see too many bad faith owners/operators who really don't give a shit about their effects on wildlife. And I see regulators setting a low bar and showing no teeth when it actually matters. Altamont Pass is a prime example--despite knowing about the "bird problem" there for many years, there has never been a requirement by state or federal regulators for any sort of mitigation at all. I find that honestly a bit disgusting.
Even the Eagle Take Permit's primary tool of "compensatory mitigation" (usually in the form of utility pole retrofitting) does not address where the problem actually occurs. You don't balance wildlife populations like you would an algebra equation--instead, the side subtracted from is simply subtracted, even if you conceivably enable gains elsewhere.
This is actually an apples and oranges argument. All birds are not the same. What's also problematic with this argument is that even if "house cats" were the #1 problem, you still need to address both problems when we're talking at this scale--you shouldn't use one to excuse the other.
What's actually true is that "house cats" and wind turbines can be fairly effective killers in their respective niche. Cats predate primarily songbird species. Wind turbines whack relatively low-abundance birds of prey and--in offshore installations--seabirds. With the right circumstances, both can do very substantial harm to bird populations.
>you still need to address both problems when we're talking at this scale--you shouldn't use one to excuse the other.
I'm not. I'm pointing out that if one problem is 15,000x bigger than another problem and you never mention the bigger problem then perhaps your problem isn't with the actual problem but with the fact that you're in the pay of coal/oil/gas/nuclear companies or you choked on their propaganda.
Except it isn't "15,000X" larger. It's just different. You didn't even acknowledge my second paragraph, and instead decided I'm some shill. If nothing else I say matters to you, let me correct you on this point: I'm actually employed by a wind energy company. Feel free to dismiss what I say, but don't paint my name with baseless suspicion.
Back on topic, ...
Golden Eagles are generally sparse breeders with some of the largest home territories of any bird. A successful pair typically produces one or two chicks. As many as 55-70% of successfully reared offspring don't live through their third year. It takes birds typically six or seven years to reach full maturity, although breeding is possible by their fourth or even third year of life--however, young parents are rarely successful ones.
The point I'm making is that this is not a species with overwhelming numbers, nor the ability to recover readily from steady declines. This is especially true when you speak of Golden Eagle populations typically in terms of hundreds or thousands of pairs (not tens or hundreds of thousands as you might with some more common songbird species). The steady "take" of even just a few percent of the GE population each year should not be conflated as having the same impact to the population as plinking house sparrows with a pellet gun.
"federal tax credit—which gives producers 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity for 10 years—is set to expire at the end of 2019" Roughly a 50% tax credit? Once this goes the pretty graph in this article will drop like a rock.
Wind power is not suitable for base load power, not just because of its intermittency but also because the tech running it is designed to exploit government subsidies rather than provide reliable power. A great example of this immaturity here (software defaulted to protecting the wind farm at the expense of an entire state's power supply).
You make a good comment (which I generally agree with), and prompted a thought: How much would it take to change this situation?
For instance, the tax credit is a huge subsidy, and obviously reduces the effective capital cost. But once the capital cost is depreciated after a short period of years, then what does the ongoing marginal cost look like?
If it's low, which I expect it is, then can it be retrofitted with batteries or other technology to store energy?
I don't know the answer, but the lower effective capital cost has to have longer term effects - especially when a coal plant is depreciated over a couple decades.
"The first point is the very basic fact that new wind power and/or solar power plants are typically cheaper than new coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants — even without any governmental support for solar or wind.
Not only are they typically cheaper — they’re much cheaper in many cases.
Yes, these are levelized cost of energy (LCOE) estimates from Lazard based on various assumptions, and they are averages for the US as a whole rather than prices for specific locations within the US, but the lower estimated costs for these renewables are reflected in the real world as well, where solar & wind accounted for 69% of new capacity additions in 2015, 99% of new capacity additions in Q1 2016, a large portion of new capacity additions in Q2 2016, and probably ~⅔ of new capacity additions for 2016 as a whole."
Even with a reduced capacity factor, if you can shift non-essential loads to when renewables are producing (my pool pump needs to run X hours a day, but I'm happy to wait until the cost of power is low to run it), that's essentially "storage" without needing to pay for storage.
I don't believe that analysis is accurate. The demand for coal has been going down for years. The power plants themselves are about as good as it is possible for them to be and they still aren't as efficient on a unit-for-unit basis. The only difference is the installation costs which have been going down for wind and solar over the past 10 years and are still not at peak efficiency.
WRT to your comment on base power, that's the main reason why they haven't stopped using those plants completely, but the problem itself is not insurmountable or dependent on coal. In the U.S. and in SA, they are likely going to switch to Natural Gas peaker plants to manage any periods of instability. And that's one of the big reasons why the Feds in Australia are pushing for that new hydro power in VIC.
TL;DR: coal is on the way out, and the base load is a tough, but fixable problem.
The "intermittency" is an early adoption problem. When you have enough windfarms more uniformly supplying The Grid across the country, this issue will become less of a concern.
What I do see as a big problem is cost. Government subsidies aside, the cost of buying and installing turbines presently is no laughing matter. At scale, solar is rapidly becoming much cheaper to install than wind, which is increasingly becoming reliant on giant 3-5 MW capacity monoliths costing roughly 4-5 million USD a pop--not accounting for installation and maintenance over the long term, and supporting infrastructure and transmission lines to tie the windfarm into The Grid.
77 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] thread"Moreover, people invest a lot in building up a professional identity, which helps make the work more bearable (and, by giving people pride in what they do, probably ensures that the work is better done). Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-06/some-blue...
As if blue collar workers are not professionals.
I find it hard to see a machinist not as a professional but fine, I'll change my internal dictionary.
Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional it looks as if this is a cultural difference.
Edit: thinking about this a bit longer, it seems clear that the distinction was made by those who don't get their hands dirty at the expense of those who do, and it seems extremely demeaning to me. As if the 'white/blue collar worker' distinction wasn't bad enough now people who spend a lifetime acquiring the knowledge to do their jobs are not even allowed to be called - or call themselves - professionals.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/professional
That doesn't seem clear to me at all.
It's not sudden. At all. The coal industry has been on the decline for quite a while now, and green jobs have been on the rise.
The reality is that these sorts of economic migrations are not new. The whole point is that the market produces winners and losers. But now the wrong people are losing so people like Mcardle are forced to wring their hands and make pseudo-evolutionary nonsense arguments and appeal to identity politics (which are now suddenly okay because it's the right people whose identity is at risk.) It just goes a long way to show how empty these people are. Now, when their entire model is most at risk, they point to rhesus monkeys and claim they don't know what "Plan B" is.
[1] I don't use the word "dubious" lightly. The study draws fantastically broad conclusions from a very limited data set. This is not okay because it opens the door for people like Mcardle to come along and really abuse the science to fit their crackpot agenda.
A little off topic, but a functioning welfare system has the potential to allow people to take the time to find the right job, rather than be pressured into taking the first thing that comes along. It's a question of balance
So does having 6 months of income saved up, but we don't teach any type of finance in high schools.
I understand that some people with jobs don't have that ability, but the vast majority do.
Case and point -- North Carolina and their need for farmers [1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/15/north...
That seems to be the biggest problem with lower class work in the US at the moment. Cost of living is always going up, but the companies want to pay the same paltry wages they were a few decades ago.
There are plenty of truly poor people out there who I really do think would rather be homeless than toil dangerously.
9.70 doesn't pay for a broken arm or back pain years down the line
Right, hence the comment implying that a gas station job around that amount would get workers. But in a time where there is a significant push to make the minimum wage $15, it's not surprising that people won't do hard labor for $10.
Why is that foreigners are taking these jobs and not Americans?
Look at things today. The return on labor has dropped significantly due to outsourcing and immigration dropping wages at a time when corporate earnings are higher than ever and socioeconomic mobility is at an all-time low[1]. Productivity is higher & GDP per capita is over $50k/yr, yet the majority of people, especially in the lower class, have not been benefiting from this. I guarantee the corporate managers make obscenely more money than the farm laborers do. I personally don't feel it's bad to feel entitled to my fair share of the work I put in.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...
Ironically, unions play their own part in that. Here in Canada we like to pick on teachers because, thanks to a strong union, they can make almost $100,000 for 8 months of work. Which is fine, and good for them, but the problem is that they are able to achieve that high income only because they actively prevent other people from doing the job. Someone who is stuck in a low-paying job has no avenue to compete against them, leaving that person stuck in a low-paying job while the teacher can start amassing wealth with the high income their job provides. This is how inequality happens.
Of course, not the same degree that you find with what is quite possibly the most insidious form of protectionism: Intellectual property. It's no coincidence that people like Bill Gates, who built a business on copyright law, are among the richest in the world. As soon as someone tries to offer the "Doors" operating system to fulfill the huge demand for such a product, they will get the pants sued off them. You can try to offer something sort of the same, but not really, but that doesn't put much pressure on the market for obvious reasons.
It would be kind of like if diary and poultry (Diary and poultry products have their own protectionist system in Canada, so I use that example as more than just a hypothetical) products were controlled by a certain group. You can grow celery to try and compete against them, but that's not really going to stop people from buying dairy and poultry if that's what the market wants. Celery is not cheese. As such, those who control the market profit greatly. A family friend is in the chicken business and he's been willing to share his wealth, and let's just say that I think a lot of startups would be pivoting to that business if there was a viable way in. The problem is, of course, that the protectionism doesn't allow a viable way in for everyone else.
In the case where a partner works, so basic bills are covered, you working as well for $10/hr might be a directly economic negative -- childcare, chores, etc you're doing now are simply worth more to the family than the dollar value you bring in. Particularly so if your job would require a second vehicle.
Even in the case where people have no income, there's likely still a floor at which the person values their time. If $10/hr doesn't benefit their life in equal measure to the value of a) not having a shitty boss and b) whatever they're doing now (TV, masturbating, bumming at the library), then it makes economic sense not to take those jobs.
Once you factor in social safety net benefits, it likely makes economic sense for people not to take certain jobs.
tl;dr: You analysis fails to account for the opportunity cost of not using the time on things besides a job.
The problems with children are really just problems with adults.
And maybe the price just needs to go higher still. I'm not going to tell someone how much they have to work for. But it's interesting that – once you account for the significantly lower cost of living generally found in these rural areas – you're practically making programmer in a big city wages now and that's still not appealing to someone who is unemployed.
In a lot of ways, I think enraged_camel (and cobo) hit the nail on the head[1]. Nobody wants the identity of working on a farm. There are a lot of negative connotations related to that type of work that have been built up over the years.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074922
There's a remarkable consistency at work here. Between Trump advocating to bring back coal jobs and others calling for better paid farmhands to the silly article suggesting that wind turbines can support anything like the number of jobs supported by coal plants... it seems like just a remarkable failure of imagination across the board.
You know what could do it though? A new new deal focused not just on national roads and bridges, but public owned internet.
Isn't job availability the biggest issue when it comes to destruction of the middle class? Could you name a bigger issue?
And now, because any policy change (normalizing interest rates for example) that might affect these precious lottery winners is a non-starter. Meanwhile, this bubble is well underway bleeding into the rental market. So it is literally government policy to create a society of have and have nots.
That's how it is in much of the US, at least. I'm not sure if Canada is different.
Trick up is real, trickle down is the myth.
I think this is the profound part, and it contributes toward enraged_camel and massysett's comments as well.
If you want people to take pride in their work, give them ownership: bridges, roads, wind/solar, municipal broadband last mile, contributing towards the maintaining and expansion of national parks and reserves. "I helped build that". It provides purpose. People need purpose in what they do (on top of autonomy and mastery). [1]
This is how you create community from public works projects. "Building Tomorrow Together" would make a great New Deal umbrella project, funded by the US government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...
I grew up with a national forest as my back yard, so I understand the value of such projects first-hand.
A wind farm does not require many full time workers for operation and maintenance. Most present wind industry jobs are in installation and manufacturing. When wind power stops growing and reaches steady-state, employing people for O&M plus manufacturing/installing replacements for aged-out components, the job count is going to plunge.
I don't actually think that wind's low labor intensity is bad. I think it's great that renewables can produce electricity with far less pollution and significantly less human labor than coal plants. But it does mean that switching energy jobs away from coal, even if it were frictionless, still leaves you with fewer jobs than the status quo ante. It's somewhat like trying to switch everyone unemployed by robots into new robot-maintenance-technician careers. The numbers don't work.
Curiously, when coal/nuclear/gas industry lobbyists (also Trump) emphasize the latter fact they usually fail to point out the former.
http://www.awea.org/Issues/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=832
> Turbines almost never kill bald eagles.
Better to attribute the ramping of Bald Eagle populations across North America to the ban of DDT and other organochlorines, as well as successful restorative nest hacking in areas where they were extirpated. Windfarms are simply not common enough to be a mitigating factor (yet).
> Golden eagle fatalities are relatively uncommon at wind projects.
This is a clever turn of phrase. One could also say wind projects are also relatively uncommon, which is probably the biggest reason there haven’t been more eagle fatalities. One need to look no further than Altamont Pass, California, to see what happens when you install a windfarm adjacent to the largest known population of nesting Golden Eagle in the world. That's a worst case scenario, of course. But the point is that good siting is pretty much the key to making bird killing a non-problem. As more windfarms are installed, the problem will likely become more common.
With that said, state and federal regulators in the USA have either by omission or intent set very low bars for “voluntary reporting” and mortality monitoring. The lion’s share of the mortality data that exists is strictly “proprietary”, and has never been shared. And most windfarms do practically no monitoring at all apart from the laughingly inadequate pre-construction and post-construction surveys mandated by the USFWS. And why should they? The hostile legal environment surrounding permitting, for example, would make it foolhardy for any company to go out of their way to collect data that could only become a giant liability down the line. Simply put, the absence of data for eagle mortality should not be taken as a sign that there is no eagle mortality occurring.
> The majority of golden eagle deaths occur at older wind farms build in the 1980s, when the relationship between turbines and eagles was not understood. Better-sited, modern turbines are replacing outdated ones and lowering deaths by 80 percent.
They are referring to Altamont Pass, again. Modern turbines are definitely better. Rather than the picket-line or gauntlet of high-speed blenders installed atop hills where birds slope-soar and hunt, modern turbines tend to be spaced much farther apart, greatly reducing the likelihood of a collision. However, reducing incidence of collision does not mean “lowering deaths”--it just means that that each “pass” an eagle makes through a windfarm becomes less dangerous. This distinction is important. In windfarms where choice prey is abundant, hunting eagles will typically make several extended passes through a windfarm each day, making their likelihood of an “encounter” with a turbine quite high over a period of several days or weeks.
They say “lowering deaths by 80 percent”, then backpedal a bit farther down:
> It is estimated that eagle fatalities will be reduced by as much as 80% as those long-standing wind sites replace their shorter, more numerous, faster-rotating old turbines with taller, less numerous, slower-rotating modern turbines that are sited based on more experience.
I was about to say: the only windfarm in the country that’s employed any serious “repowering” effort is Altamont Pass. And the speculated improvement that new turbines are better than the old turbines for “lowering deaths” there has, so far, been inconclusive. It’s not that modern turbines aren’t an improvement, it’s just that this webpage doesn’t yet have any justification to be making this claim!
> Modern turbines have slower-rotating blades, and fewer are needed to generate the same amount of electricity.
Modern turbines’ rate of rotation is indeed slower, but the speeds of the actual blades (especially on the distal half) is actually appreciably faster than smaller bird blenders. In practice, it just means the risk is...
One could. I could also say that I drove by about five or six hundred wind generators today...
Nothing in what you said above really convinces me that you should have anything against wind farms in general. It's all FUD.
But, seriously, I see too many bad faith owners/operators who really don't give a shit about their effects on wildlife. And I see regulators setting a low bar and showing no teeth when it actually matters. Altamont Pass is a prime example--despite knowing about the "bird problem" there for many years, there has never been a requirement by state or federal regulators for any sort of mitigation at all. I find that honestly a bit disgusting.
Even the Eagle Take Permit's primary tool of "compensatory mitigation" (usually in the form of utility pole retrofitting) does not address where the problem actually occurs. You don't balance wildlife populations like you would an algebra equation--instead, the side subtracted from is simply subtracted, even if you conceivably enable gains elsewhere.
What's actually true is that "house cats" and wind turbines can be fairly effective killers in their respective niche. Cats predate primarily songbird species. Wind turbines whack relatively low-abundance birds of prey and--in offshore installations--seabirds. With the right circumstances, both can do very substantial harm to bird populations.
I'm not. I'm pointing out that if one problem is 15,000x bigger than another problem and you never mention the bigger problem then perhaps your problem isn't with the actual problem but with the fact that you're in the pay of coal/oil/gas/nuclear companies or you choked on their propaganda.
Back on topic, ...
Golden Eagles are generally sparse breeders with some of the largest home territories of any bird. A successful pair typically produces one or two chicks. As many as 55-70% of successfully reared offspring don't live through their third year. It takes birds typically six or seven years to reach full maturity, although breeding is possible by their fourth or even third year of life--however, young parents are rarely successful ones.
The point I'm making is that this is not a species with overwhelming numbers, nor the ability to recover readily from steady declines. This is especially true when you speak of Golden Eagle populations typically in terms of hundreds or thousands of pairs (not tens or hundreds of thousands as you might with some more common songbird species). The steady "take" of even just a few percent of the GE population each year should not be conflated as having the same impact to the population as plinking house sparrows with a pellet gun.
(Edit for typos and clarity.)
"The number of animals killed in the United States has been estimated at a million per day"
"About 350,000 to 27 million birds are estimated to be killed on European roads each year."
Wind power is not suitable for base load power, not just because of its intermittency but also because the tech running it is designed to exploit government subsidies rather than provide reliable power. A great example of this immaturity here (software defaulted to protecting the wind farm at the expense of an entire state's power supply).
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...
Relying on wind power is like using your home router in an ISP datacenter.
For instance, the tax credit is a huge subsidy, and obviously reduces the effective capital cost. But once the capital cost is depreciated after a short period of years, then what does the ongoing marginal cost look like?
If it's low, which I expect it is, then can it be retrofitted with batteries or other technology to store energy?
I don't know the answer, but the lower effective capital cost has to have longer term effects - especially when a coal plant is depreciated over a couple decades.
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-...
"The first point is the very basic fact that new wind power and/or solar power plants are typically cheaper than new coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants — even without any governmental support for solar or wind.
Not only are they typically cheaper — they’re much cheaper in many cases.
Yes, these are levelized cost of energy (LCOE) estimates from Lazard based on various assumptions, and they are averages for the US as a whole rather than prices for specific locations within the US, but the lower estimated costs for these renewables are reflected in the real world as well, where solar & wind accounted for 69% of new capacity additions in 2015, 99% of new capacity additions in Q1 2016, a large portion of new capacity additions in Q2 2016, and probably ~⅔ of new capacity additions for 2016 as a whole."
https://www.lazard.com/media/438038/levelized-cost-of-energy... (warning: pdf)
Even with a reduced capacity factor, if you can shift non-essential loads to when renewables are producing (my pool pump needs to run X hours a day, but I'm happy to wait until the cost of power is low to run it), that's essentially "storage" without needing to pay for storage.
WRT to your comment on base power, that's the main reason why they haven't stopped using those plants completely, but the problem itself is not insurmountable or dependent on coal. In the U.S. and in SA, they are likely going to switch to Natural Gas peaker plants to manage any periods of instability. And that's one of the big reasons why the Feds in Australia are pushing for that new hydro power in VIC.
TL;DR: coal is on the way out, and the base load is a tough, but fixable problem.
What I do see as a big problem is cost. Government subsidies aside, the cost of buying and installing turbines presently is no laughing matter. At scale, solar is rapidly becoming much cheaper to install than wind, which is increasingly becoming reliant on giant 3-5 MW capacity monoliths costing roughly 4-5 million USD a pop--not accounting for installation and maintenance over the long term, and supporting infrastructure and transmission lines to tie the windfarm into The Grid.