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Jesse Jackson, Jr. Pins US Job Losses On iPad
theodp writes "Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. went on an anti-technology rant on Friday on the floor of Congress, blaming the iPad for eliminating thousands of American jobs. 'Why do you need to go to Borders anymore?' asked Jackson. 'Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad, download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine.' Jackson continued: 'What becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs? And what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not too distant future, such jobs simply will not exist. Steve Jobs is doing pretty well. He's created the iPad. Certainly, it has made life more efficient for Americans, but the iPad is produced in China. It is not produced here in the United States."
But are you for real?
Talk about a load of xenophobe/technophobe nonsense! The trouble is not the technology, but rather that the good old US of A loves importing deflation and writing bad checks. Much easier to have a dumb populace of consumers who spend money they don't have, and then import deflation to counter it and blame a random fad technology than get to the actual issue.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Where are you going to buy the e-books for your iPad? They don't come from thin air, and the iPad doesn't write articles itself. Just because we've moved from brick-and-mortar distribution to digital distribution doesn't mean ANY jobs were lost, they were just MOVED.
Seriously, this made me sick to read. Rep. Jackson needs to keep his mouth shut on subjects he knows nothing about.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
"Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I've worked in the publishing industry. I have no sympathy for people who are holding on to the past with both hands, fiercely fighting for things to not change. Things change over time. Adapt. Evolve. Move forward. If you fail to do so, you'll be left behind and forgotten. Blaming the iPad or the internet or anything of the sort is foolish. Times change - find the new marketable product (hint: it's probably digital), make that, and profit.
Evolve or get out of the way for those who are willing to move into the future.
His rant can also be interpreted as against globalization instead of against technology. All the people who will become lose their jobs now that more and more brick-and-mortar stores are being obsoleted by websites, they're not getting jobs in electronics factories, since the electronic devices are almost all made in low-wage countries these days.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Even more strange. Just last month he wanted to amend the constitution and give an iPad or similar device to every kid in school in the country. Wonder what made him change his mind.
Does he know that Barnes and Noble has its own e-reader? Or that Amazon had one before the iPad?
If the odd case that anyone thinks Jesse Jackson Jr. has anything close to a valid point:
1) Though jobs for some brick and mortar retailers are lost, the loss is due to a structural change in the market induced by increasing digitization rather than through any one product. Horse buggy makers went out of business when automobiles came out, and much the same rhetoric was spewed to attack the manufacturers of cars.
2) China makes the iPads. True, but manufacturing is no longer a $40+benefits job with enough seniority. Gone for the foreseeable future are high paying manufacturing jobs that we as a nation want to focus on. The success of the IPad has spurred other technology companies to push their own tablets onto market. What does that mean? The tech companies hire more mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineers, computer/materials scientists, programmers, designers, and production line developers. Those workers produce far more "value" to an economy than a factory worker in a mass production line. Ask a Foxxcomm worker (the guys who make iPads and iPods) if they'd rather be working in a Chinese factory or at the Apple headquarters, and guess what? They'd rather be an engineer.
3) Librarians aren't useful because the buildings they're in have information. They're highly useful because they can advise us where to find the relevant information. The librarians at my university aren't there to restock books or charge late fees. They're hired because they can help students track down critical papers, research vital bits of information, and educate them about how to find the right kind of sources. Brick and mortar stores are useful because they offer a tactile shopping experience that online systems can't seem to replicate yet. Same idea: physical locations and people offer have value added characteristics.
4) There are many things to blame for the job market pains in the United States. I don't think anyone is educated enough to really understand the "true" driving factors, but you know what? I sincerely doubt that stiffing innovation, creativity, and technological development is the way to go.
Actually sorry, I'm wrong. On behalf of the *IAA cabal and the Chinese Council for American Advisement, I suggest that we focus all of our governmental energy on stopping piracy of songs and movies instead of nurturing markets and funding basic science. If we can stop all illegal firesharing, we can save up to $13 trillion a year in damages!! That's several times more than the technology market makes in a year!
Signatures are the new names.
If there is no need for wasting paper, why do we need to work? Is it a religion, does everyone have to work, consume, and waste? What's broken are the economists, who cannot adjust the economy to change with the technology. Humanity has evolved before, but it was never by resiting change, but thirsting for it. There is no need to work just to consume, consume, there is a need to study, research and invent. That is real work.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
It's not anti technology! The guy loves the iPad! He's just upset that the US is losing jobs to creative destruction and outsourcing and the GOP is worried about debt!!
He's bang freaking on.
Ah, a classic case of attacking the irrelevant symptoms and ignoring the relevant causes.
Has the supply of US jobs that aren't either burger flipping or financial services scamming been gutted like a landed fish? Oh fuck yeah. Is that the iPad's fault? How can you even seriously consider such a foolish idea?
With more respect than I can usually muster for Mr. Jackson, the numbers don't lie: American workers have been treading water or worse since the 70's. The economy as a whole has been doing OK, and productivity per worker has actually never been better; but fuck all of that has gone to the bottom 90-odd percent. The comparatively low-skill, low-capital populations that Jackson is probably most interested in appealing to have done particularly badly. The idea, though, that the destruction of a fairly modest number of low-skill, low-pay service sector jobs by technology is the root(or even a reasonably sized branch) of the problem would be hilarious were it not taken seriously. Low-skill, low-pay service sector jobs are the paltry rewards of the post-industrial economy, where people flip burgers for one another. If you are reduced to quibbling over those, you have already lost.
I think it's more likely that the bookstores will downsize or close. Retail shelf space has a cost, and they need a certain amount of turnover to pay that cost, going down the tail isn't going to help when you have a very limited amount of space. You need a lot of niche market spending to make up for the loss mass market volume, it's not impossible, but it is hard.
All this right after I read Wired Science's article on 7 science-education battlegrounds of 2011 If the US wants to be effective in technology they have to stop being stupid in education - otherwise we Canadians, along with the rest of the world, will beat the crap out of you.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
The US turned into a service economy, now even the service jobs are being taken away.
Another poster above complains about the saving of GM for the low skill jobs... but that is what the majority of people do. The majority is NOT working on the next generation chip technology or moon rocket (oh wait, that is China isn't it, my bad).
There are several key industries in which people work:
Food production, read farmers. This was once the mass employer but also a poor employer. Crops especially needed massive amounts of labour but only in certain times of the year. Seasonal labour is not all that great to have. But it still employed a great many AND also added some extra cash for people with tiny farms suitable only for feeding themselves. But now, food production is left to a handful and employment in the sector itself is very low.
Food preperation. Quick, when did you last buy bread (US people, read on, I ate what you think of as bread, go stand in the corner and be ashamed and remember this, bread does NOT bounce!) from a baker who had his hands involved in the process? Wanna bet most bread comes from a factory paying very low wages? Luckily enough people still out so some people still make their money from food preperation but the time every few thousand people had their own bakery, butcher and grocer is long gone.
Resource gathering. Often not really represented as a seperate group, I am talking about the miners and loggers here. Well, you can watch swamp loggers. A dozen men hauling of a dozen truck loads of wood in a day. Very impressive but not exactly going to put the masses to work is it? And very dependent on everyone else, if nobody is using wood to build houses, then no trees need to be cut down.
Production. Factory work, either heavily automated or shipped abroad. Try to find anything in your house that is not made in China. Can you? Was on a US bus recently, most used ropes to call for a stop (looped through a metal thingy labelled marked in China) but one used buttons, grey bulges of smooth plastic with a red button. Exactly the same as in use in many Dutch busses... wanna bet their origin? Yes, this is low skilled work most of the time and it doesn't pay much. But millions upon millions once employed funded the moon landings with their taxes. A termite mound stands tall on the back of countless tiny worker backs. With the industrial revolution, this was the backbone of the economy.
Service. This was the great new hope. What people who favored outsourcing thought would keep people employed when production went away. Sure, the iPad is not produced here but it must be sold here (how people are going pay for it if they don't have a job was never answered, or maybe it was seeing the recent crisis with debt). And now those jobs are indeed going away as well. Amazon does not employ the same number of people and certainly not at the same wage as the bookstores it is so busily replacing. Sure, it means cheaper books but also more people unable to find a decent job or indeed a job at all.
?????. What else is there? When farming went away as a mass employer, industry took over. When industry left, service took over. If service goes away... what is left? Government jobs? The army? Sex? No, these "industries" can only exist on the back of an employed society making enough money to afford them.
But slashdot is a very bad place to discuss this. Most here have higher level jobs which are not YET affected all that much. Except, who is going to pay you in the future? Game developer? Who can afford a new console and 60 bucks per game if they got to combine 2 jobs or more at below minimum wage to just make ends meet? Regular developer? Your jobs are already being outsourced. IT support? Cost cutting already outsourced those jobs as well.
But we still think we are safe. Somehow, magic new tech development is to employ around a billion people (the entire "west" is affected, not just the US) with no new line of work in sight.
IF the high street really gets replac
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Thanks for simplistic high school level economics lecture. You are conveniently omitting the factor of scale. One or two orders of magnitude of manufacturing jobs are lost for every "mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineer" job created. Also, manufacturing jobs can be made attractive again if you slap punishing tariffs on chinese dumping and corporations that facilitate it.
I don't think anyone argues about complete halt of technological progress, but making it orderly and less harmful to society is certainly needed. Instead of blindly throwing people on the street by the million and giving them the moronic advice to "adapt", we should provide those people with a few years of social support and "useful" job training, paid for largely by the companies doing the firing. We are supposedly living in a human society and not in the jungle.
Which means the low skill jobs will be coming back.
hth.
Deleted
Not only that, but anyone with the leisure to sit around posting leftist drivel on their very own 3000 MHz computer is very "rich," from the perspective of several billion people.
Someone who incites a class struggle in the US would have to be delusional to think that they'd actually come out ahead if such a thing came to pass. The GP may picture himself among the oppressed masses at the bottom of the pyramid of capitalism, but he's standing on the shoulders of a lot of little people, himself.
CA needs more businesses to leave. There are way too many people who want to live in CA. They spend plenty, but the real issue is that they didn't raise taxes to match. Get rid of the artificial caps on real estate taxes and the real estate market will adjust. And make sure to get taxes inline with expenses, and if people have an issue with that, they can leave. That wont hurt CA, they would be better off if more people left. Sure, the rich people who don't want to leave will be paying a little more, but my response to that is "waah."
Learn to love Alaska
How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late: Andy Grove
How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late: Andy Grove
By Andy Grove - Jul 1, 2010
Bloomberg Opinion
Andrew "Andy" Grove, co-founder and senior adviser to Intel Corp., listens during an interview in his office in Los Altos, California. Photographer: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg News
Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto, California, restaurant introduced me to his companions: three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I’ve lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.
Not this time. I left the restaurant unsettled. Something didn’t add up. Bay Area unemployment is even higher than the 9.7 percent national average. Clearly, the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn’t been creating many jobs of late -- unless you are counting Asia, where American technology companies have been adding jobs like mad for years.
The underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.
Mythical Moment
Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.
Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.
Intel Startup
I am fortunate to have lived through one such example. In 1968, two well-known technologists and their investor friends anted up $3 million to start Intel Corp., making memory chips for the computer industry. From the beginning, we had to figure out how to make our chips in volume. We had to build factories; hire, train and retain employees; establish relationships with suppliers; and sort out a million other things before Intel could become a billion-dollar company. Three years later, it went public and grew to be one of the biggest technology companies in the world. By 1980, which was 10 years after our IPO, about 13,000 people worked for Intel in the U.S.
Not far from Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, other companies developed. Tandem Computers Inc. went through a similar process, then Sun Microsystems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Netscape Co
> I don't think people, overall, are that smart. the world seems to be run by 'the people of walmart'.
Some people are good at what they're trained for. A lot of people are "smart," or at least effective, in at least a few specific tasks. And don't make the mistake of assuming people working or shopping at walmart aren't intelligent, sometimes in their own way at their own tasks, sometimes like Dilbert's great garbage man.
The world is definitely *run* by smart people. They may not be as smart as engineers--it depends on the particular "runner" and the engineer--but they are much smarter than your average bear. The people on the Hill and in the White House were in the top 10% of their high schools. A lot of them are assholes. A lot of them are nice people. They all have learned certain skill sets. The elected ones have to develop skill sets that make them seem stupid to smart people. They also, mostly, have do mean things because empirically, mean things WORK. Lying to the public--spin--works. Going negative in campaigning works. If you don't do it, you're at a huge disadvantage. Without consensus not to do it, pretty much everyone does it.
Businesspeople vary in intelligence. The best are usually quite intelligence. Again, they can be good people or not. They tend to think differently than you or I.
"People, overall," don't run the world--they accept the world, or they rise up. Their needs have been catered to for millenia by those running things. The Romans for control of the senate--panem et circenses--the nations following the infantry revolution at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and the gunpowder revolution.
There are also thugs. A lot of thugs in power. Warlords, torturers, thieves and brigangs and thugs who somehow have nations behind them. Not so much in the West. But in Africa, in Chechneya, many places. And of course local crime lords.
Some of them are quite personable. Some are quite intelligent. Others are puppets of other people who are intelligent. They may not have formal schooling, or they may. And of course, sometimes they're just a bully. But it usually takes a bully with intelligence to get a nation behind him. Even a crappy nation.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
You highly overestimate the importance of low Chinese wages. In most products these wages form only a tiny fraction of total cost. Not to mention that China is in fact expensive when compared to other developing economies. To replace the Chinese wages with American ones would not increase prices that much.
So why still produce in China? Because the Chinese government knows what it takes to make things attractive for manufacturing. Infrastructure, tax breaks, economic zones, environmental regulations, availability of energy and raw materials, managing a gigantic pool of laborers, etc. In places like Guangdong, Chengdu, etc. where production takes place, *everything and everyone* is geared towards production.
I'm sure you understand you don't create a second silicon valley by asking IBM, Cisco and Microsoft to move next to a university in Florida. It's not that simple. Likewise you don't create an attractive climate for manufacturing by supplying cheap labor and telling Apple to move it's factory to the US. You'll need to do a lot more than that.
Actually, all those things are getting cheaper per productivity. That's the measure that matters. The total expense rising is a reflection of the return on investment of that expense rising, which justifies the higher initial expense.
The oil supply curve is starting to go down the slide. But its curve to date was pulled by very wasteful consumption. At best 25% efficient internal combustion engines. At best 50% efficient building insulation, 80% efficient heaters, 3% efficient lighting. The majority of the population using those engines for over 15% of their work/commute hours between the (work) buildings more efficient during the lower consumption (day) period and the (home) buildings less efficient during the higher consumption (night) period.
Meanwhile other energy sources are rising steeply in their supply curve. They're more efficient, and indeed many are sustainable rather than merely peakable. While consumption is finding dramatic efficiencies in use and reduced use (telecommuting, CPUs instead of ICEs, electric vehicles, mass transit).
And while the people supply is increasing, the rate at which they can do something useful for anyone else in the world is increasing. Education and telecom also makes more of them more valuable. The distribution of value is making the tide go out on some people: unhelpful people in the Euramerican world too long propped up by White Privilege. But overall people are becoming more valuable, as Asia, Africa and South America sees many of its people become valuable to more than just their immediate families for the first time in centuries, or ever.
It's tempting to see redistributions both geographically and into the near future, that underlie overall increases in total value, as a net loss. But when you see the big picture, you can take part in the growth. Or the nearsighted pessimism can lock you out of it, and self fulfill itself.
--
make install -not war
200,000. They have artificially low property taxes, so the state appraises the houses at 5x their value to make up for the lost revenue (at the expense of people like me not ever being able to move there and the expense of companies not being able to hire people so they move to places like Austin).
It's actually worse than that... They don't "assess" 5x their value, they force high valuation by limiting development. It goes back to prop 13 in the late 1970's. California real estate was exploding, and little old ladies on fixed incomes were being priced out of their homes by year over year property tax increases. People rebelled at the ballot box and forced prop 13 on an unwilling political class. This froze property tax valuations at the time of sale. My parents still pay property taxes at rates set in 1978.
This sets up a kind of enmity between local government and housing. They know they won't get to raise their tax assessment but once every 30 years. So they have to pre-load development to cover the expansion of services, everything from sanitation to schools. They do this with very very steep permit and planning fees. There are cities in the SF Bay Area that used to charge upwards of $70,000 in planing and permit fee's to build a single family home. This then implies that every existing house with a valid occupancy permit, even a "tear down", is worth a minimum of $70k in that city.
You can then extend these tricks up and down the whole economy. Higher than average fuel excise taxes are applied before exceptionally high sales tax. Special California-only fuel blends... Electricity prices are insane ($0.249/kwh vs. ~$0.104 here in Texas), and getting worse. Those high fuel & energy costs then result in high prices for goods and services... Which again pads the bottom line on sales taxes. Lather, rinse, repeat... They've been building a closed market on the left coast for 35+ years.
I can't shed so much as a tear for them. I'm a 5th generation Californian. In 2004 I packed up and moved to Texas, and I brought my job with me. Oddly enough, my property taxes are about the same. But I got a 10% raise by loosing the income tax. Virtually all goods & services are much cheaper.
Kipling believed this, not because he saw Hindus, Moslems and Buddhists as inferior, but because he saw them as equals who had lacked opportunity. (This comes out very strongly in his book for adolescents, Kim, which as intended in part to excite schoolboys with the prospects of a career in India.) You may think this was paternalistic, but from the perspective of the time, he was pretty enlightened, and extremely pro-Indian. (G K Chesterton thought that Kipling should be buried, not in Westminster Abbey, but in a Hindu temple.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."