A trend that’s been rising for years and is not stopping, for sure, but about to take over? I have to say I’m skeptical.
Humans still value each other for practical reasons. Once convincing AI – the kind you have trouble telling from a human even when performing complex tasks and going off-script, and with a natural sounding voice and natural looking face (no “uncanny valley”) – becomes widely available, that’ll be the game changer, but when that happens it’ll be a lot more than just teaching jobs that will disappear. There’ll be less reason for people to learn languages anyway, since robots will make better students.
Buxiban owners only care about kachin! not results. Just like translations. Machine translations are good enough to fill a space they do not care about in the first place
[quote=“strngr, post:55, topic:156194, full:true”]
I’m not debating that those people exist, but if you go outside of the tech bubbles and places like NY, anything that is significantly more than $95k is a very good salary even in the US.[/quote]
If by “tech bubbles” you mean SF, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Austin, etc., and if by “places like NY” you mean New York, L.A., Chicago, Boston, D.C., etc., then you’re really talking about every major economically thriving city in the US; aka the American equivalents of Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung; aka exactly the types of places that American IT and business people are most likely coming from when they come to Taiwan from the US.
I realize some westerners will take a pay cut to move to Taiwan for family reasons, or affordable health care or child care, or other quality of life reasons, but I seriously doubt very many are voluntarily taking large pay cuts to move here, and certainly many (most?) have moved here because they can make more here than they can in the US.
I might agree somewhat for the BMWs (though I think they also tend to be purchased by high level business executives and entrepreneurs who do have to work, but just happen to make a lot of money). The high end clothing stores, though? No way is it just the 1% keeping all of them afloat. There are malls full of them everywhere, in nearly every neighborhood, even out in places like Banqiao. There are clearly a significant number of people here who can afford luxury goods.
Oh, I have no problem believing those numbers if we’re talking about the entire population. I was talking about the population of expats from the west, though. I have difficulty believing that many people are moving here from the US, Canada, UK, Western Europe, Australia, or New Zealand to take those kind of salaries (excluding the aforementioned young travel adventurers) when they could make more in their home countries.
Hmm…I meet young westerners all over Taipei who teach English for living. Yes, a few of them teach online, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been replaced-- it just means they don’t have to leave their homes to work. The vast majority of them still teach at schools, buxibans, or privately in people’s homes, though.
I recently had the chance to participate in a selection process and had the chance to look at several foreigners’ resumes. I felt heavy in my stomach reading the stuff. Most people’s careers made a screeching halt when they came to Taiwan. I mean, from mid level management in international companies or otherwise quite confortable positions… to teaching kindergarden or any other kind of English teaching. Huge blcks of what I guess unemployment. Awesome qualifications, what happened? They came to Taiwan. Or rather, their wives told them to come to thsi land of opportunity… where the streets are no longer paved in gold and people stop you on the street for jobs on teh spot, can you come now please. It is not that competitive, unless you mean competing against the owner’s cousin who did a summer term in Whatchamacalit, South Dakota. It is a race to the bottom, as with the rest of the economy. Stagnant salaries and antiquated, stiff, demeaning work environments do not attract the best and the brightest. Only the really resilient, the ones that want to make their marriage work or the occassional actual success in the face of adversity story. Even so, we are at the mercy of our benefactors.
I have been thinking about this lately, after the resume experience. Does anyone ever think about what they left behind to come here? Not really, as the next thought is why they came and love only stretches that much. Living environment, career options, family. Then they treat you as a dog begging for scraps. Any wonder why foreigners here drink that much?
Yes, I think about what I left behind. I left behind a job that paid half as much with longer hours and way less vacation, a higher cost of living (most notably for health care, but really for everything except clothing and maybe craft beer), a crumbling infrastructure, higher taxes, much higher crime, horrible winters, and now President Trump. Good riddance.
I get your point, regarding frustrated low-information voters misattributing the cause of those things, but I’m afraid the only connection is going to be that the final one will make the others far worse.
I’m not sure what you mean exactly by “low information”, but I think if we were to look at things such as intelligence, education level, political knowledge, etc., what we would find is a high-low coalition on the Democrat side, with the middle generally occupied by Republicans.
However, let us suppose, for a moment that Trump voters were truly the Dumbest People in the World™. This begs a few questions.
When the current crop of “low information voters” in swing states voted Democrat in the last two elections, were they instead “high information voters”? If so, how did they become “low information voters”? It doesn’t seem implausible that people could go from “low” to “high”, but “high” to “low” would be quite an intriguing possibility, I must admit.
Having seen the equivalent Dumbest People in the World™ on the other side of the pond defeat “high information voters” (Brexit), why did “high information voters” in the USA get completely blind-sided in similar fashion? Weren’t they “high information voters”, after all?
Having failed to anticipate the possibility of such, why do “high information voters” keep doubling down (Brexit, Trump, Italian Referendum)? What will happen if they keep failing to recognise what might be a trend? Again, at what point would they lose their status as “high information voters”?
If/when “high information voters” see their communities destroyed, in conjunction with losing their “high information jobs” through a combination of out-sourcing, in-sourcing (perhaps through H1B visas or the like) and automation, will they suddenly become “low information voters” also for voicing concerns about such things?
How much of all of the above represents a lot of “low information voters” actually mistakenly believing that they’re “high information voters” (see the Dunning-Kruger Effect)? How much of it represents sour grapes? How much of it represents hubris? How much of it represents plain old bigotry (especially when blue “low information voters” get various passes)?
As for Trump, I don’t think he’ll make things much worse. Let me qualify that. Firstly, he’s going to be a politician, so of course he’ll make things worse. I mean in comparison to others. Secondly, I do actually think that things are going to get a whole lot worse, but that’s because there are massive structural issues, not just in the USA, that have been swept under the rug for decades now and I believe that all of that can’t be sustained for that much longer.
In this regard, I actually would have preferred Hillary (provided she hadn’t started WW3 – a distinct possibility given both her rhetoric and her track record in MENA) for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I think that Trump will bumble along and take the blame for a lot of things that have nothing to do with him. Hillary, being the very embodiment of corrupt politician for sale to the 0.001%, would have been the better one to wear a lot of what’s coming. Secondly, (again, aside from the possibility of WW3), her complete craziness would have been just the ticket. Trump is going to slow the decline but not stop it; Hillary would have gleefully driven the whole thing off the cliff at full speed. Sometimes, it’s better for the whole thing to come to a head as soon as possible, rather than limp along. Personally, I don’t think it would have mattered if The Best Candidate in the World™ had run and been elected. Sometimes, you get a Flavius Aetius, but he lives in the fifth century, by which point it’s too late anyway. Better to just have a merciful euthanasia.
TL;DR:
If idiots keep beating you, who is the real idiot?
It doesn’t matter who the driver is for a bus that’s about to go over a cliff.
[quote]Source: Credit Suisse
(Wealth distribution, in USD) Taiwan
<10000 - 19.9%
10000 - 100000 - 42.2%
100000 - 1 million - 36.0%
above 1 million - 1.9%
Average wealth per adult - 172,847
Median wealth per adult - 63,134
Comparison: USA
<10000 - 34.6%
10000 -100000 - 28.6%
100000 - 1 million - 31.3%
above 1 million - 5.5%
Average wealth per adult - 344,692
Median wealth per adult - 44,977
Germany
<10000 - 31.0%
10000 - 100000 - 33.7%
100000 - 1 million - 32.9%
above 1 million - 2.4%
Average wealth per adult - 185,175
Median wealth per adult - 42,833
France
<10000 - 26.1%
10000 - 100000 - 23.9%
100000 - 1 million - 46.7%
above 1 million - 3.3%
Average - 244,365
Median - 99,923
[/quote]
I’m not claiming that it’s 100% accurate, just that it kinda corresponds to my experience growing up. I always went to public schools, and usually there were perhaps 3-4 kids from poorer families in a class of 30 something students, the rest usually ranged from OK to really rich. I’m guessing a large chunk of those who own less than 10k are young people, and the seemingly decent wealth distribution is mostly the legacy of the past. Btw the majority of these assets aren’t properties.
Idk about the statistics of other countries though. Maybe they are total bullshit. In that case, blame Credit Suisse.
Well their wives are either stupid, or evil, or both.
