DailyDirt: Take The Red Pill, Young People

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

In the wake of the Great Recession, many young adults are still having a hard time finding jobs. The recent unemployment rates for young adults (age 20 to 24) is about 13%, which is much higher than the rest of the adult population. Even worse, it seems like young workers (even college graduates) are increasingly taking low-wage jobs. Perhaps it's time for our youth to consider taking a chance and going into business for themselves. Here are a few links that might help convince them to take the plunge. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
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Filed Under: college, entrepreneurs, indentured servants, mentoring, peter thiel, startups, students, upstart


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 23 Apr 2013 @ 5:26pm

    Or perhaps it is time for the captains of industry to realize that sending jobs overseas is not in their best interest ... naaaahhh that will never happen.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    znmeb (profile), 23 Apr 2013 @ 6:03pm

    "Perhaps it's time for our youth to consider taking a chance and going into business for themselves."

    Unless you have time management, accounting and sales down cold, don't even *think* of "going into business for yourself". You'll waste time and get nowhere.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 23 Apr 2013 @ 6:14pm

      Re:

      Tell that to the kid who sold Summly to Yahoo... you just need to find a sucker to acquire whatever you've built. (ahem, Yahoo)

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    6, 23 Apr 2013 @ 6:31pm

    "Upstart helps them raise enough money to get their startups going, and in return, they pay their backers up to 7% of their future income each year for 10 years."

    That sounds illegal. The SEC has passed "rules" against this type of investing I had heard, because they are granted rulemaking authority under the law to regulate this type of investing. It is pretty much the same thing as offering to pay for someone to go to college and then have them pay you a precentage of their income. And that is definitely illegal under the SEC rules (though most people probably don't pay attention to that if they agree to do that scheme). I'm surprised that this is out in the open and the SEC hasn't shut them down.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 4:46am

      Re:

      The nerve of those companies selling stock to unsuspecting noobs. All they get in return is a percentage of profits, sounds illegal.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 9:27am

    Took me three years after graduating college to find a job that wasn't under-employment.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 11:10am

    Perhaps it's time for our youth to consider taking a chance and going into business for themselves.


    That's a pretty big gamble. They're fresh out of college and already in debt, and the suggestion is for them to take out business loans and try to start up a company?

    According to Buisness Insider, "the success rate for first-time entrepreneurs is only 12 percent" (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-odds-of-startup-success-2012-10).

    The other 88% will find themselves still jobless and even deeper in the hole after their attempts, with both student and business loans to pay off. Quite possibly in a bad enough situation that "declare bankruptcy" becomes a better choice for them than "find a job".

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Tex Arcana (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 5:42pm

    First off, the "official" numbers are ay off: overall, the real unemployment rate is well over 25%, with many having settled on low-paying part time jobs (sometimes 2 or 3 of them, if the first employer allows them to do it), or just giving up altogether and living in squalor.

    I'm older, over 50, an underemployed degreed professional, who can't find squat job-wise, because most of the demand got shipped overseas--and I'm going on 6 years of underemployment; and I was unemployed for 4 years solid.

    The real problem is the corporations, and their political lackeys: they do anything they can to impoverish the very people they rely upon to support them to start with. Soon, this vicious cycle has to stop-- and it will take a major crash to wake the idiots up.

    Maybe THEN we can stop pandering to the 1%ers, and make our elected officials work for us, instead,

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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