Libertarian solutions to poverty: do they make sense?

[Chimera]

The problem with comparing Norway to the USA is one of scale.

Finland: 5.503 million
Minnesota: 5.576 million
(Minnesota has a lot of Scandahoovians, including a lot of Finns up north.)

The USA is 62x larger, population wise.

Besides the simple fact that, heavily taxing oil production and building a sovereign fund is completely at odds with Libertarian philosophy.

[Ruken]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Think about it. If you have to sell securities every year, then as some point your trust fund runs empty. One way to think of stocks is that they are the present value of their future dividend stream.

Is this for real? I sold securities last year yet my funds increased. Think about it. You do own securities, don’t you?

[k9bfriender]

@Damuri_Ajashi

We should not encourage everyone to go to college when their time would be better spent learning a trade.

While I mostly agree with this statement, it is important to make sure that they are not learning trades that will be obsolete in a few years, and that anyone working trades that have become obsolete can get training in a new one.

And there are quite a few things that someone can learn in a 2 year vocational program. Computer programming and chip design are two trades that should stick around for a little bit, and the fundamentals of those can be learned well enough in a 2 year program that one could be productive right after graduation.

I’m not sure that automotive trades are a good long term career, as that whole industry is changing rather dramatically.

Building and repairing of buildings though, that is a hard task to automate, so plumbers and electricians may be needed for a bit yet.

@Damuri_Ajashi

Think about it. If you have to sell securities every year, then as some point your trust fund runs empty. One way to think of stocks is that they are the present value of their future dividend stream.

That’s not how such things generally work. You should be selling some securities and buying others to maintain a balance in your portfolio all the time. As some gain in value, you sell those, take some of the money for your own purposes, and use the rest to buy others.

You generally don’t want to invest in high dividend stocks until you are retiring, and even then, they should only make up a small part of your portfolio.

[Voyager]

@k9bfriender

While I mostly agree with this statement, it is important to make sure that they are not learning trades that will be obsolete in a few years, and that anyone working trades that have become obsolete can get training in a new one.

And there are quite a few things that someone can learn in a 2 year vocational program. Computer programming and chip design are two trades that should stick around for a little bit, and the fundamentals of those can be learned well enough in a 2 year program that one could be productive right after graduation.

I know many chip designers, but none with two year degrees. In the old days the people who did detailed placement and layout (drew the transistors) I think were like this, but better EDA tools has eliminated that job pretty much. Synthesis has eliminated the need to write gate level netlists.
Also, chip design has become a process where you have to worry about back end effects like timing to get it right. Not nearly as much throwing the design over the wall as there used to be.
In two years you can learn the basics of logic design, but not much more than that.
Coding is a better choice.

[John_Mace]

@Voyager

I know many chip designers, but none with two year degrees. In the old days the people who did detailed placement and layout (drew the transistors) I think were like this, but better EDA tools has eliminated that job pretty much. Synthesis has eliminated the need to write gate level netlists.
Also, chip design has become a process where you have to worry about back end effects like timing to get it right. Not nearly as much throwing the design over the wall as there used to be.
In two years you can learn the basics of logic design, but not much more than that.
Coding is a better choice.

I agree. I think you and I are old enough to have been in the business back we had actual draftsmen hand-drawing the chip layouts, and then the digitizers would trace them out. But the folks who were the actual “designers” of the chips were engineers, mostly with EE degrees.

[k9bfriender]

@Voyager

I know many chip designers, but none with two year degrees. In the old days the people who did detailed placement and layout (drew the transistors) I think were like this, but better EDA tools has eliminated that job pretty much. Synthesis has eliminated the need to write gate level netlists.
Also, chip design has become a process where you have to worry about back end effects like timing to get it right. Not nearly as much throwing the design over the wall as there used to be.
In two years you can learn the basics of logic design, but not much more than that.
Coding is a better choice.

My only “cite” on that is what a community college academic advisor told me that I partly remember from about 15 years ago. He was encouraging me to do that, as he explained, that there were more and more transistors going on every chip, growing exponentially, but the number of people designing the chips were not growing exponentially, so there would always be a need for chip designers. Much of it is cut and paste, and not as optimized as it would be if someone actually came in and manually optimized each section.

I wasn’t saying that someone with a 2 year degree would be designing chips, just that they would have the skills to be useful in that process. As an analogy, mechanical engineers with a 2 year degree spend all their time marking up changes that are made by those with more education and experience. I know even less about chip design than about mechanical engineering, but I would assume that there are similar hierarchies of duty.

If that is no longer true, then that is one less “vocational” job that is available to those without the resources or skills to complete a 4 year or greater degree.

[Voyager]

@k9bfriender

My only “cite” on that is what a community college academic advisor told me that I partly remember from about 15 years ago. He was encouraging me to do that, as he explained, that there were more and more transistors going on every chip, growing exponentially, but the number of people designing the chips were not growing exponentially, so there would always be a need for chip designers. Much of it is cut and paste, and not as optimized as it would be if someone actually came in and manually optimized each section.

Ah, not an unbiased source. What he says is correct, but the solution is something called a system on a chip, where you plug in cores which you can buy from a number of vendors onto a bus to build your design. Cores might be USB interfaces, ARM processors, memory interfaces, etc. Custom logic is done using higher level design languages - Verilog and VHDL - which is a bit more like programming.

I wasn’t saying that someone with a 2 year degree would be designing chips, just that they would have the skills to be useful in that process. As an analogy, mechanical engineers with a 2 year degree spend all their time marking up changes that are made by those with more education and experience. I know even less about chip design than about mechanical engineering, but I would assume that there are similar hierarchies of duty.

If that is no longer true, then that is one less “vocational” job that is available to those without the resources or skills to complete a 4 year or greater degree.

I worked on large design teams for the past 20 years, and don’t recall anyone with 2 year degrees on them. Now we had big testers used to prove in first silicon, and I think the people who ran them had 2 year degrees, so there are jobs available.

And when I worked at Bell Labs we hired lots of people with 2 year degrees as programmers, and they were great.

[John_Mace]

A 2-year degree is definitely not enough to end poverty by Libertarian means. For that, the 4-year degree is a must!

[Voyager]

@John_Mace

A 2-year degree is definitely not enough to end poverty by Libertarian means. For that, the 4-year degree is a must!

A second grader could do a better job than a Libertarian.