Post: #76

I'm going to a good school, majoring in Finance along with German, which will give me an actual skill plus a 2nd language. Right now my concern is where I want to work not if I will be working. I find that alot of these stories are just fear mongering trash. The people who are coming out jobless tend to be people who had no business going to college in the first place. Unfortunately in the US alot of trade professions are looked down on and everyone wants to be a CEO/Lawyer/Doctor. But we are in desperate need of things down the ladder, Nurses, Paralegals,Electricians. Not everybody is cut out to be on the top, we need people willing to be essential mid tier cogs in society. I have a friend who is going to be an EMT. A few thousand for a few months of training, and he will come out making 50-70K a year as a 21 year old. After a few years of that he can choose to go to Med school if he wants to go the Doctor route or he could start his own business in the health services industry. Instead of looking at options like that people who have no money are taking on 200k worth of debt to go to a low tier school and will graduate making 35k a year if they are lucky enough to get a job. It doesn't take advanced math skills to figure out who came out on top.

Post: #77

Eh, I'm not seeing where this jobless generation mantra is coming from but personally I have my FT job & I have 2 other jobs that I run as a side business. I'm not complaining since it gives me the time & freedom to do what I want.

Post: #78

Copywriting, proofing/editing and screenwriting. Got a lot of advice from Beyond Boarders and I'm going to go all out freelancing. There's some SERIOUS money to be made if you approach it in the right way apparently, and that's what I'm going to do.

Post: #79

(08-11-2013 03:43 PM)Teedub Wrote:  Copywriting, proofing/editing and screenwriting. Got a lot of advice from Beyond Boarders and I'm going to go all out freelancing. There's some SERIOUS money to be made if you approach it in the right way apparently, and that's what I'm going to do.

Great to hear, Teedub.

That said, if I were you I'd skip the low-end markets though and go right for the gold, especially if you have some money or an income to hold you over for a little while while you build this new business. My advice is to ignore everything I said about Elance and instead sign up for the forum I mentioned over in my online writing thread (no affiliation to that forum, just in case).

It's $20 or $25 a month and usually a waiting list to sign, but those writers there are making the real money.

You can start at Elance using the info I gave when I posted in your thread, but as I mentioned before, it's not really ideal - I was just going with the subject matter we were dealing with. Writing for corporates is where it's really at.

Buy a couple of the books I mentioned, sign up for the forum, and get busy learning how they land gigs. It'll take longer to climb but once you dig your heels in you'll be making much more money faster than you will using the other gameplan I threw down.

Beyond All Seas

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes
frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Kipling

Post: #80

Wondering how you guys value money comparatively with your time and the skillset you're picking up.

Going into senior year of college, looking at a few job offers in investment banking and management consulting. The pluses are six figures (in investment banking), relatively intelligent and pedigreed peers, and opportunities to move into the private equity and hedge fund worlds. Downside is the monotony of a lot of the work and lack of control over your time as you work 80 hours each week for one to two years before moving onto something else. And as intelligent as my peers are, they are world class rule followers, very institutionalized. And I'm not sure how useful the skills I'll pick up on the job such as mastery of excel, powerpoint, and corporations' capital structure and acquisition strategy will be in the long term?

I've had awesome experiences abroad at this point in my life, very easily pick up languages: both foreign langauges and programming languages, and have had some success in writing. I notice these are some of the "international" skills you guys are promoting on this thread. I think long term my goal is to be location and financially independent, meaning I've built a product or biz that works for me so that I can take on bigger risks, projects, and pursuits of knowledge.

Time is no doubt our most valuable asset, so I wonder if trading two years of my life for some quick money is the right way to go about this or if the time would better be spent taking a risk to produce revenue streams via the internet while experiencing more of what the world has to offer.

Post: #81

From page 1 "Does anyone else laugh out loud at the notion of a college graduate with an average degree, average school, and average grades have multiple offers before graduation at any point in the future?"

As of now, it is happening here in Germany IF you have the right degree. We don't have the hierarchy of Ivy-league universities, states universities etc. With very few exceptions, the higher ed institutions are all state run here. The technical sector is strong here, people with C-grades get hired straight out of university and can pull in 50 k US$ from the get go.

If you feel the top-tier consulting firms or investment banks (Goldman Sachs etc., they have operations here, too) are your choice, than it's the same as anywhere else ... A students only, B or less and you won't even be invited for an interview.

A general rule is, the press and especially "Russia Today" tends to paint very bleak / pessimistic pictures of what they want to sell us as reality. Drama makes the world go round .... if any of you guys have the time, read this article written in respected weekly "Business Week" in 2003, and look at where Germany stands today : http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2003...of-germany

Post: #82

(07-17-2013 06:33 PM)[email protected] Wrote:  

(07-14-2013 12:38 AM)Therapsid Wrote:  

(07-13-2013 11:07 PM)tairos Wrote:  

Quote:The end game is there will be a Post-Work world where notion of working builds character will be laughed at it. It may take 30-50 years but it will come. Increasingly sophisticated automation, robotics and technology won't leave much room for people working.

This is long overdue as it is. They've been predicting this for decades, and there's no valid reason why they shouldn't have been correct.

I agree. What's been missed is that, in fact, many of the problems the middle class have faced since the 70's have been the result of insufficient technological progress.

See: Tyler Cowen's "The Great Stagnation" and especially Peter Thiel's speeches and writings on technological stagnation.

Start here: link

actually it is already happening and it has been happening since about the late 1960s -- automation is eliminating labor. the difference between say the steel mills becoming automated and today is that it is now white collar work and intellectual work that is more and more automated and outsourced.

It is interesting to me that the OP posed this question, and others have answered accordingly, as what will YOU do about the jobless economy.
This is a collective situation, responding individually is akin to maintaining the status quo in which the working class is all but dead and the middle class is now not far behind:

http://sourcefednews.com/america-has-the...dle-class/

unemployment is no longer cyclical, meaning it varies according to the business cycle, it is now secular, meaning there is structural unemployment / underemployment

Just read through this thread, and there is a lot of truth to the argument that there have been technological changes that will remove the need for labor; however, the political question has been who will reap the benefits from technological changes, and so far those benefits have not been spread to the people. That is why in the US of A we do not have a reduced work week but rather we have a lot of unemployed and largely those who are working having to work too much and too many hours.

In that regard, it is pie in the sky to think that the benefits of technological change will be spread across working people, unless some kind of political movement makes that happen, such as unionization.

A lot of guys on this forum seem to be against unionization, against redistribution of wealth b/c it messes up game and the status of men and so be it, people are entitled to their opinions.

I certainly like to have a lot of women around who are available to bang and without attitudes, and i do recognize that if wealth is redistributed too much that will likely mess up gaming possibilities. Anyhow, there are contradictions out there.

(07-13-2013 12:37 PM)ms224 Wrote:  If each one of us ate an old person, this problem would be greatly alleviated.

Probably the above comment is a joke;however, it is a bit ridiculous b/c many people really believe this crap.

People really believe that the babyboomers are going to drain social security so they should not believe they are "entitled" to receive it. These are political ploys for the rich to steal from and privatize social security, and old people should not be considered the problem of a society in that we are all going to get old someday, if we are so lucky.. so we should not strive to have systems to get rid of or to disrespect old people. or to make their lives unnecessarily burdensome.... or eat them.. so to speak. That's my humble bumble opinion.