Tattoos Prevent Employment

A woman claims she can’t secure a job after her tattoo “addiction” took over her body.

Covered in head-to-toe ink, Melissa Sloan, 45, from Wales has “lost count” of how many pieces of body art she has, saying she even covers up old tattoos with new ones due to a lack of bodily real estate.

“I’ve got too many tattoos now, too many to count. I’ve gone over ones I’ve already had,” she told the Mirror. “I’ll never stop, I tattooed over them because I’d ran out of space.”

Her passion for tattoos has soiled her career prospects, as many jobs “won’t have” her. While she’s cleaned toilets before, it didn’t last very long, but she would gladly “go and work” if someone offered her a position.  READ MORE...

Robots Are On The Horizon

The U.S. market for robotics and artificial intelligence career openings is exploding based on early 2022 trends from job postings on Robots.Jobs, the marketplace specifically for robotics and AI companies looking for talent and for jobseekers looking for the latest industry opportunities. 

In the last 90 days, open positions on Robots.Jobs have increased by more than 500 percent. Newly featured job-posters include autonomous drone hardware and sensors company GreenSight and Intrinsic AI, making industrial robotics accessible and usable for businesses.

"Robotics, IoT and AI careers are in high demand across almost all industries, including industrial, healthcare, biotech, logistics, consumer and more," said Ann P. Walsh, CEO & cofounder, Robots.Jobs. 

"In this competitive job market, talent recruitment requires skill, targeting and focus to attract the most qualified employees. For robotics and artificial intelligence, we are just at the beginning of demand for talent."

Geographies for job growth
Boston, Massachusetts maintains its stronghold on the largest volume of robotics and AI job searches with 25 percent of open positions posted on the Robots. Jobs job board. This growth is in part due to the number of biotech companies actively using robotics and artificial intelligence technologies within their organizations. 

Austin, Texas and Denver, Colorado are also seeing fast growth, with many new innovation centers increasing recruiting efforts for engineering talent. The industry is growing in these states due to lifestyle advantages, a lower cost of doing business, and tax incentives to build a younger, more diverse workforce.  READ MORE...

Working in a Metaverse

Facebook’s metaverse was always intended to be more than another virtual reality application. It would provide users with infinite space and infinite possibilities, to move around, interact, engage, and even earn in a VR world. One of the key use cases the company has factored in is work.

“By 2030, the new generations of Oculus will allow users to teleport from one place to another without moving from their couch — not only for gaming and entertainment but also for work,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a March podcast. Then, in August, the company introduced a VR collaboration solution called Horizon Workrooms. And now, Facebook has completely rebranded as Meta, with a clear vision for a VR-enabled metaverse.

The notion of the metaverse contains within it several elements: multiple VR worlds, interactive and near-real digital assets, the ability to move around and teleport without restrictions, and problem-solving in 3D. All of these are extremely conducive to work-related use cases.

What Is the Metaverse?
The metaverse is defined as a three-dimensional internet powered by virtual reality and augmented reality. It is persistent (exists regardless of the user’s presence), real-time (users can experience live events), infinite (supports unlimited concurrent users and VR worlds), self-sustaining (users can work for and pay for things in the metaverse), and interoperable (there’s only one metaverse and everything is integrated within it).

Importantly, this definition of the metaverse exists independent of Facebook (now rebranded as Meta). The term was coined in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and there have been several attempts to build the metaverse since then. However, early attempts like Second Life, Roblox, and NeosVR were all limited gaming applications. The new metaverses put forward by Facebook and also Microsoft are geared for work-related use cases – i.e., communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.

Working in the Metaverse: Key Advantages
What are the advantages of working in the metaverse? In 2019, this question might have been slightly harder to answer. But now, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions around the world were forced to switch to digital-only modes of communication and some kind of a virtual workspace. Working in the metaverse takes this a step further to bring you all the capabilities of the real world, with very little of its challenges or limitations.
Overcome the challenges of remote work

This is the biggest advantage of working in the metaverse. When telecommuting, users often complain that they are unable to read body language and communicate effectively. Managers struggle to maintain visibility over team productivity. And, due to the prolonged absence of in-person interactions, there is risk of disengagement. The metaverse creates an immersive virtual workplace where 3D avatars of employees can work together just like in the real world.  READ MORE...

Demand Side Economics

Demand-side economics is frequently referred to as “Keynesian economics” after John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who outlined many of the theory’s most important attributes in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

According to Keynes’ theories, economic growth is driven by the demand for (rather than the supply of) goods and services. Simply put, producers won’t create more supply unless they believe there’s demand for it.

Demand-side theory directly counters classical and supply-side economics, which hold that demand is driven by available supply. This may seem like a chicken-and-egg distinction, but it has some major ramifications for how you look at the economy and the government’s role in it.

In contrast to supply-siders, Keynesians place less emphasis on overall levels of taxation, and believe much more in the importance of government spending, especially during periods of weak demand.

Here’s how demand-side economics differs from supply-side:

• Demand-side economists argue that instead of focusing on producers, as supply-side economists want to, the focus should be on the people who buy goods and services, who are far more numerous.
• Demand-side economists like Keynes argue that when demand weakens—as it does during a recession—the government has to step in to stimulate growth.
• Governments can do this by spending money to create jobs, which will give people more money to spend.
• This will create deficits in the short-term, Keynesians acknowledge, but as the economy grows and tax revenues increase, the deficits will shrink and government spending can be reduced accordingly.

There are two-prongs to demand-side economic policies: 

• an expansionary monetary policy
• a liberal fiscal policy.

In terms of monetary policy, demand-side economics holds that the interest rate largely determines the liquidity preference, i.e., how incentivized people are to spend or save money. During times of economic slowness, demand-side theory favors expanding the money supply, which drives down interest rates. This is thought to encourage borrowing and investment, the idea being that lower rates make it more appealing for consumers and businesses to buy goods or invest in their businesses—valuable activities that increase demand or create jobs.

When it comes to fiscal policy, demand-side economics favors liberal fiscal policies, especially during economic downturns. These might take the form of tax cuts for consumers, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, which was an important part of the Obama administration’s efforts to fight the Great Recession.

Another typical demand-side fiscal policy is to promote government spending on public works or infrastructure projects. The key idea here is that during a recession it’s more important for the government to stimulate economic growth than it is for the government to take in revenue. Infrastructure projects are popular options because they tend to pay for themselves in the long term.  READ MORE...