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A Humanoid Robot Named "Baxter" Could Revive US Manufacturing
fangmcgee writes "Rethink Robotics invented a $22,000 humanoid robot named "Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil. Artificial intelligence expert Rodney Brooks is the brain behind Baxter. From the article: 'Brooks’s company, Rethink Robotics, says the robot will spark a “renaissance” in American manufacturing by helping small companies compete against low-wage offshore labor. Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency that’s eliminated more jobs in the U.S. than overseas competition has. Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.'"
" a $22,000 humanoid robot named "Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil.
Uh... seems like someone is unclear on the definition of "job."
Three Squirrels
Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.'"
So they're going to bring jobs back by increasing productivity? The cause of 2/3rd's of the job losses?
Electrical service is much more reliable in the US compared to China/India. There is also an advantage of having your product manufacturing close to your marketplace... namely lower shipping costs.
Also shitloads of engineering still happens in the US -- offshoring of that has been far less successful than manual labor.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
they miss the point.
overseas labor is cheap because the operations needed -require- human hands, eyesight and abilities that robots still don't have.
sheesh, if we COULD use robots for things (like iphone assemblies) we would (they would). but its still human based and because of that, those jobs will never come back to the US.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This is the long term future for a lot of manual labor across the board. What that will mean for the future of human society is anyone's guess. Perhaps we'll all work 10 hour weeks. Or maybe most will be surfs, crushed under the boots of the aristocracy (robot owners).
How a consumer-driven economy can survive these changes is another huge question mark.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The cost of electricity pales in comparison with transport fidelity. Every day that your goods are being shipped means another day that they aren't available for purchase/use. Also, think of how much it costs to actually ship. The real price is pollution, and it seems as though China's getting on the brink of full up. (See smog cloud over Beijing recently)
It won't bring jobs for blue collar workers back on shore, but it will bring manufacturing back, the few engineering and operations jobs that it will require to keep the production line going, and of course, the pollution the factory brings.
Of course, America will want to keep it's stinking rich getting richer, as the spoils from the new robotic slave class go to them, and let the rest of the plebs just stink more as they are left to wallow in their own filth. Cue - get a job, ample opportunity meme's.
I think the technology of simple robotic automation is fantastic, but the robots should be the servants of humanity, not a significant subset of humanity. Since the government will be losing out on a significant level of tax revenue, (note, robots are currently a complete tax deduction, where a human wage earner pays income tax), it would be the perfect segway to universally tax robotic production, and redistribute that into education.
Failure to solve this issue could result in the unravelling of capitalism as we know it, to either a super class that will need to kill off any pleborian dissidents, or lead to a revolution similar to what the French had.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Are you suggesting the robots are not US citizens!?
No, that US citizens are robots.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The total cost of hiring a 30 cent a day worker is 30 cents day. The maintenance on one of these robots would be more than that. Plus if robots could compete with 30 cent a day workers, then China would be using more robots.
The companies that compete against the Chinese and win, do it like the Germans do, they use dedicated production automated lines designed to make the article, NOT general purpose robots, DEDICATED kit. Making perfect identical quality components again and again and again. People will pay a premium for a thing they know will work. Buyers pay less if they know the box will contain 10 articles that have defects and will break, resulting in 10 customers complaining later one! Quality has value.
When China's currency free floats in the coming years, it's people will get richer, as the yuan currency increases in value. This has happened across the rest of Asia. It re-balances the price of labor.
Do you think that people will work like slaves 14 hours a day with no prospect of a better life? They work because they believe it will improve their lives, if that doesn't happen they revolt.
Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
Higher.
China pays about the same per KW as the US but the electricity supply in China and especially India is nowhere near as reliable or clean as western nations. Factories in China have to maintain large transformers to clean the power and large backup generators which increases the cost.
Although, replacing Chinese factory workers wont exactly bring the "jerbs they turk" back to the US.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If nobody has jobs anymore we better transition to an economy where everything the robots produce is free.
China and US electricity prices are not that different
Exactly.
You also have to consider, (trying not to sound too Luddite in the process), that replacing a human in a paying job with a robot is scarcely better than off-shoring the job.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I see real potential in giving every high school senior their own Baxter that they need to learn how to maintain... then they send them off to work and people's only remaining job is to fix them when they break down.
Of course, that's not how capitalism works, instead, we'll have robot maintenance specialists who maintain thousands of these things, specialists in highly specialized types of robots will be the most highly paid, flying all over the country on no notice to fix them when they break. For every working robot maintainer, there will be 99 people unemployed, or working in some sort of "service" industry like wiping the foam off of barrista's frothers, until they figure out how to get a robot to do that too...
On an emotional level, I can't help feeling that Kurzweil is a cracked loon about the singularity and all, but listening to him talk, it all sounds so rational how we're moving out of an economy of scarcity into one of abundance, just 15-20 more years and solar power will replace fossil fuel, 10 years after that, electricity will be virtually free to generate.... there will be a small problem with overpopulation and obliteration of the natural world, but with unlimited energy, computing power and machines that do everything for us, what can't we overcome?
At $22k for a 3 year life, assuming 24x7, it labors for $0.84/hour with no outages. The other video had $3/hour. Add that you can save on transportation costs, customs, etc and its a no brainier that manufacturing will become "local".
As far as job creation, i can only see it create technician jobs to repair the machines. What this will not do is create the manufacturing jobs themselves. The age of low skill labor is over, those jobs are lost. That segment of the US population (poor, undereducated, entry level) will continue to be unemployed. It will also create Chinese unemployment.
I don't see a single equation or number...
Why have jobs?
This is my sig.
ding - 10 points. If all the manufacturing jobs left China and came back to the USA and were done by Robots - there would still be NO MANUFACTURING JOBS IN THE USA. If they are sophisticated enough to do manufacturing, then they are sophisticated enough to do basic grunt service jobs - a big chunk of MAcDonalds would disappear. Then what? We can't all be "entrepreneurs". We can't all be "Successful businessmen". So, you end up with an ever larger pool of poorly or mis-skilled labour who can't buy anything the robots make. Result? Economy evapourates like so much water on a hot sidewalk.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
30 cents is 1.8 RMB, it won't even buy you breakfast in China. China can certainly use more robots, then it will be just in the same place as the US, no more cheap labor advantage.
What you're missing here is that there is more than one way to have an economy, and that the idea that "everyone needs to work" isn't a fixed datum in an unchanging world.
At some point, (non-ai) robotics will assume the load of manufacturing and menial work, and from there they will percolate upwards. This may be the beginning of that trend (ignoring heavy manufacturing robotics, which are already in place and entrenched.)
You need food, shelter, and healthcare. You do not have to provide that for yourself in order to have a healthy economy.
Change is inevitable in this domain.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And yet everyone (i hope?) agrees that it would be ridiculous to complain that automation kills jobs or that we should eliminate automation....
(for those who dont, perhaps we should use spoons instead of shovels for ditch digging)
I have to ask how much sense it makes to complain about where the job gets done, unless the angle is "are the conditions humane". Spending more money to do the same job seems to make more sense, and honestly the guy in China hoping for $100 a month seems to deserve the labor more than the guy in the US coasting off of his (relatively) large unemployment check.
Not trolling, would be interested if someone could make a case for where Im going wrong here.
They used to predict in the 50s that in the future a man would be able to easily support himself while only working two days a week.
Funny thing is, they were actually correct. It's easy to live on two days of work a week... if you restrict yourself to living at a medium level of prosperity by 1950s standards.
Actually you are missing the even bigger change, one that I have been pointing out for years. Capitalism, just like every other ism before it, is simply doomed. I have argued for years that we are all John Henry against the steam engine and you can kill yourself just like John Henry but in the end the machine will win, it is inevitable.
Before anybody screams "Luddite!" or points out the industrial revolution I will point out that NO time in human history have we EVER been able to replace the worker entirely...until now. Before all those machines needed human hands and human brains but we have already reached the point you can take a factory that once employed 10,000 workers and replace them with a few guys to push the buttons, and now this. The machine doesn't get sick, or tired, doesn't need expensive medical insurance or workman's comp, at the end of it all we are playing IQ musical chairs and more and more simply won't have a seat when the music stops.
What do you do with all the people that don't get a seat? Do we do as we do now, and subsidize megacorps like Mickey D's and Walmart with government assistance so the workers come out "cheaper" than the machine? Look at the auto industry, workers got a union and demanded a living wage and suddenly the machines were cheaper. What do you do with all the people whose labor simply is no longer required? You'll never take someone with an IQ of 103 (the average last I checked) and make them into a rocket scientist and even if you could wave a wand and do that there simply isn't a need for that many rocket scientists.
To me the whole thing that proves capitalism in its current form is doomed is one simple fact: With our current level of tech we could wipe out half the people on this planet, poof! And not only would our quality of life not go down it would in fact go up as those that would be left would find their labor actually worth something! We are just gonna have to face the fact that there is a reason why Sci-Fi writers like Roddenberry didn't have money and capitalism being used in their futures and that is because once you reach a certain technological threshold it simply won't work. you'll have a handful that can afford to buy the factories full of robots and the rest rioting and looting to survive.
Hell I would argue that for a large part of the population we are already there, if you got rid of government assistance and made the corps pay a true living wage you'd quickly see a ton of them switching to the robots as they would be cheaper. Even in China where the pay is pathetic are they seeing more and more automation because even with the pittance they make the machines end up cheaper. We just need to face the facts folks, the robots will end up replacing all but a handful of "super brains" like Hawking and DeGrasse while the rest of us? Simply won't have a chair when the music stops.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Who cares what country things are produced in if nobody is hired to do the production?
That's exactly where I was heading.
There is value in raising the living standard in other parts of the world, and one way to do this is to find employment
for these populations, or a sizable portion of the population, enough to stimulate the rest of their economy.
The problem with shipping all these jobs overseas is you end up shipping a great deal of your money supply and wealth overseas with it.
These robots are aimed at stemming that transfer (the money) without much thought as to employment EITHER at home OR abroad.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Jobs should not be the ultimate goal. We must challenge the idea that jobs are the only way to contribute. Let us free people from the necessity of making a living by doing what a boss tells them, and let them instead pursue their own creative interests. Give everyone the option of a basic income, and have lots of challenges by business and government to stimulate the natural curiosity and scientific spirit that most of us are born with. Knowledge and technology will advance, which is what confers survival fitness by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Thanks to their lack of regulations they have more than 20 million people who can't safely go outside this week. I suspect they may be getting regulations soon.
Perhaps we could purchase one of these robots and have it make money for us?
Well, not really. It would shift production back to north america, and that would require technicians to install and maintain the robots.
Installation can be done by a consultant, and is a one-time cost. For maintenance, at $22,000, it would be cheaper to replace three of them per year than keeping a technician employed. All you need is someone who after his other tasks can spend ten minutes on loading in the program as per the instructions left by the consultant.
Until the robots are self-servicing, self-selling and self-assembling, there will be work. Once they've mastered two of those three, I think we will have larger issues.
... well, I don't speak binary or mandarin.
In anticipation of that time, it should clearly be stated that I, for one, will welcome our cold, unfeeling, american-made robot masters. Unless these get copied by the chinese as well, and then?
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
The writing is on the wall. Machines will replace everybody, period. And I don't just mean the factory worker, the fry cook, the maid or the gardener. I mean, every effing body. Your PhD won't mean diddly squat. So all this silly talk about preserving jobs is pointless. Both capitalism and communism were wrong from the start because they base the economy on slave labor. Why do I say slave labor? Because unless you own land and the ability to make a living on your land, you are at the mercy of someone else. We, humans, are territorial animals and we should all be living on our own domains. Capitalism gives control of the land to a few and enslaves the rest. Communism takes the land away completely and enslaves everybody. The arrival of intelligent machines will destroy both.
We need a land based, jobless economy where the land is divided for an inheritance (not for a price) and where only individuals have the right to own intelligent robots, not the corporations. And since robots will make robots, robots will be dirt cheap or, at least, as cheap as the energy supply will allow. Politicians better stop promising us jobs (as if they were doing us a favor) because we don't want no stinking jobs. We, humans, are gods. We want synthetic intelligent servants to do our work for us, all of it. We just want to sit by the pool and enjoy our margaritas and delicacies and rule our own land. We're tired of being slaves to invisible masters.
Hmmm....
Work two days a week and ... raise 2.5 children, own a home in the suburbs and a sensible late-model auto, enjoy an annual family vacation to a popular American tourist destination, and have not one single case of throat irritation (from smoking Camel cigarettes).
I'm not seeing it.
Maybe you mean something like ... wages garnished for child support, a home in government subsidized low-income housing and a mini-van (technically, your moms mini-van), selling your food stamps (to take a different sort of trip), and a prescription that you need, but can't afford to fill.
That makes more sense. Well, more sense than Kurzweil has ever managed...
Required reading for internet skeptics
I work at a largish US manufacturing plant. We normally generate about half our power on site. The rest is generated by the local municipal power company (which is pretty much in the factory's pocket since it's a HUGE employer). Our suppliers are required to have back up generators so they don't shut us down during a thunderstorm.
I'm guessing that large backup generators are standard equipment.
I've worked at factory place in Australia, a backup generator that can produce enough power for production to run isn't that uncommon although at the last place I worked, the backup power requirement was for 8 hours, where as in a similar factory in china had a requirement for 21 days of backup power as they couldn't even rely on regular diesel deliveries if things got bad.
Also the power delivered to us from the state power company (state gov owned) was in a very good condition, compared to china where it needed to be filtered. At a local aluminium refinery, they generated all of their own power but they get natural gas delivered to them by pipeline from a feild in the north of the state. About 1/3 of the piped gas goes straight to that refinery so at their size, it's more economical to run your own powerplant. I think the size of the operation we were discussing wouldn't be that large.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
"Baxter" looks like a clone of the Yaskawa Motoman SDA two-armed robot. Brooks quotes a cheaper price, though; the SDA dual-arm is about $63K. Mechanically there's nothing new here.
Brooks claims better safety systems and easier programming, so that the thing doesn't have to be run behind safety fences. That's the claimed innovation. It's about time for that. Industrial robots have been expensive semi-custom products for decades, and there's no good reason for that. Today, it's cheaper to include a vision system and good force feedback than to support both smart and dumb versions. iRobot's experience with the Roomba has taught them how to deploy and service standard robots in quantity. So they have a good chance of bringing this off.
One place I would like to see Baxter is at McDonalds or Starbucks. Now really how cool would that be!
If they made a Baxter that looked like a Cylon Centurion and had it working at Starbuck's. that would be totally cool.
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"And yet everyone (i hope?) agrees that it would be ridiculous to complain that automation kills jobs or that we should eliminate automation...."
Well, my take on it is that omni-automation will produce an inhuman dystopia unless it's coupled with a proportional rise in socialism (so that we can communally benefit from the advances). My #1 choice would be to leverage automation in that way; but at the same time, the US seems committed to heading in the exact opposite direction in how we use it, so...
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I have no idea what certivity is, but I'm sure the basic income the parent post mentioned would be in dollars, which certainly would pay your bills (unless your bills are too high), as well as enable you to buy food for you and your cats.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I love the way the article talks about these robots in the hands of the "factory workers" when it means the "factory owners".
Sounds like a stiff property tax on robots is in order to me, if for nothing else except to prevent civil unrest.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Dollars are fictional paper. What you produce only has value because people want it, and have that paper. The entire economy is a game of the-man-behind-the-curtain.
If it's all a fiction anyhow, there's no shame in reinventing it to be something a tad more humane.
They used to predict in the 50s that in the future a man would be able to easily support himself while only working two days a week.
Funny thing is, they were actually correct. It's easy to live on two days of work a week... if you restrict yourself to living at a medium level of prosperity by 1950s standards.
I remember the daydreams about how robots would do all the work and people would lead lives of leisure. Instead we work harder to try and keep up with the machines we built. Those daydreams were still going into the 80's.
Where I live plenty of people live on zero days of work a week though. The state seems to have accepted that some people don't need, or just won't, work.
Jobs should not be the ultimate goal. We must challenge the idea that jobs are the only way to contribute. Let us free people from the necessity of making a living by doing what a boss tells them, and let them instead pursue their own creative interests. Give everyone the option of a basic income, and have lots of challenges by business and government to stimulate the natural curiosity and scientific spirit that most of us are born with. Knowledge and technology will advance, which is what confers survival fitness by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
Baxter has a basic knowledge of how to perform a wide range of basic manufacturing operations such as loading and unloading, counting, reorienting, and light assembly.
Ah. Those things that robots are already doing quite efficiently. What else?
Quite efficiently but not cheaply. I've no idea about Baxter but Rooney Brooks has come up with funky stuff. Roombas, bomb disposal robots, and a whole load of academic papers.
I have no idea what certivity is, but I'm sure the basic income the parent post mentioned would be in dollars, which certainly would pay your bills (unless your bills are too high), as well as enable you to buy food for you and your cats.
Which won't work when the people who make human and cat food don't have to do their jobs to get paid.
The premise was that it will be the robots who make the human and cat food.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
in capitalism, we have tons of lazy people.
they claim to make our laws, but I'm not even sure about that.
they own land, sit back and just collect money.
there's lots of kinds of lazy. take your pick.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So, in other words, don't create anything. Don't earn your keep. Become a "useless eater". Nice.
Funny how Americans are all TV-watching morons until this topic comes up, then we are a nation driven by natural curiosity and scientific spirit. Did anyone not notice that elephant in the room?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
No more ridicoulous than a farmer running a 60' cultivator instead of hiring a whole lot of people to follow horses pulling a 6' one (at a quarter the speed).
If we still employed the vast majority of our work force to grow things to eat there would be two problems. First not enough food. But second not enough people to do all of the interesting (and not required) jobs that simply didn't exist 100 years ago.
Pretty much anyone in the entertainment industry. Most of the telecommunications people. Vast majority of the health workers. The list goes on and on and on. Jobs that simply didn't exist and simply could NOT exist if we had not eliminated the need for people to work on the farm growing enough food to feed everybody.
A job eliminated through efficiency or automation means a somebody that can hopefully go out and do something else that will in the long term be more valuable to them and society. And that's the real goal. Keep innovating new jobs and services to make everybody better off.
I'm supposedly incapable of working for reasons that -would- make it difficult to keep a regular job, so I get some form of welfare. It doesn't stop me from doing things others might see as work. The desire to prove myself and do things that look neat drives me to better my own skills. So despite being a bad fit for a regular job, I do have some sort of creative output.
The biggest problem is that I'm an outlier, not the norm. But I think more creative minds would blossom if freed from the pressure to get a job.
That sounds like defeatism.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I remember the daydreams about how robots would do all the work and people would lead lives of leisure. Instead we work harder to try and keep up with the machines we built. Those daydreams were still going into the 80's.
I remember that too. Not robots particularly, but computers to do the paperwork and automated machines to do the labour. Just a few humans would need to work a few hours per week on maintenance. Sociologists writing in periodicals such as New Society, New Scientist and the more serious Sunday newspapers used to say that the main worry for the future was to keep the millions of idle, bored people from getting into mischief.
That state of affairs could be almost practicable by now. But what has happened is that millions of non-jobs have been created instead. In the West there is now a vast marketing industry, half of it competing against and neutralising the other half. There is a vast "Health and Safety" industry, wherein billions of pounds/dollars (=economic product) is spent on possible saving a few lives. There are industries created around the enforcement of political correctness (my local council has a significant equal opportunities department).
My father lived a cycling distance from work, but now vast amounts of wealth are frittered away by millions of people commuting daily the sort of mileage that my father would have considered an annual holiday journey. He cycled to work with no thought of being "green", the idea didn't exist then, but being "green" today is another new industry that sucks up vast amounts of wealth - don't get me started on that subject please.
TWo points.
China and Cuba are doing remarkably well for communism not working.
Given the current state of the economy and the fact the USA is defaulting on it's obligations and debts right now I would say our current system is also broken.
Social security isn't an entitlement. it is a mandated 401K at minimal interest. you pay into it. EVERYONE under the age of 40 won't ever be able to collect anything they pay into it because capitalist politicians spent all the money stupidly expecting infinite growth. Capitalism requires infinite growth because if you aren't growing then your dead.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Notice how many episodes of the series that should never have been, start with an artsy fartsy act of a crew that really doesn't seem to have a day job. The Enterprise is a floating luxury hotel that runs itself and were nobody ever has to get their hands dirty, leaving its passengers to pursue the arts and not be very good at it.
The PROBLEM is... your art has no value. Very little art has. You can see this with the art shops run by bored rich house wives that are often little more then tax dodges or in some cases active money laundering operations or used for bribes. "No no, I won't slip you a brown envolope... say, that painting in your wives shop, what would you say that is worth *wink wink*".
You can see it for the lower classes on youtube, only a tiny fraction has views over half a dozen, millions of video's have no views whatsoever. The simple fact is that the modern world doesn't need as many artists as it once did. Older ages, before replication of art was easily available to all, needed every painting, every book, every performance done by hand. It was a golden age for artists. These days, one artist can supply the needs for the entire planet. Consider comedy: Once every time you wanted to hear a joke, you needed to pay someone to tell it. Now you can just replay the same video over and over of the best comedians the world has ever produced.
Why should I pay you for your crappy work when I can experience the masters for peanuts?
Really, WATCH ST:TNG, it is nothing but layabouts going to each others performances. Work? That happens to other people. The series Friends is roughly the same idea, that the "elite" doesn't have to work. The Victorians thought the same BUT the Victorians did it over the backs of a massive work force who worked very hard indeed. The 90's tried to sell us the idea that EVERYONE could be the elite and that their would be a natural demand for all the creative works created by the entitled non-gifted. This hasn't turned out to be the case. A few artist have gotten really really rich and the majority of the plebs by cheap reproductions of their work, rather then original works in their price range.
There have been many novel ideas about future economies where hard work is no longer the core of the economy and basically, none of them really work out because sooner or later so far, someone has to do the work AND there is always someone willing to launch the B-ark into space. The masses are not going to support an idle middle/upper class for very long... well maybe just long enough to help them up the little steps to the block.
The US economy RAN on all those boring factory jobs that people in the movies always want to escape from but that were for decades the places fathers and mothers went to earn the money to raise their kids. See "An Officer and a Gentleman" the girl is working in a factory making cardboard boxes. Hardly inspiring work but all the girls who do NOT marry a jet pilot, it is their only source of income until they retire or die. It ain't glamorous, it ain't the stuff of dreams but all those workers payed their full taxes while the likes of Romney didn't. The economy runs on factory workers, not the elite. The elite can't and won't pay for millions of workers sitting idle reading Shakespeare and writing sonnets. Neither will the workers support an ever growing middle class doing nothing either.
You can try to move the working to China but then they will just do what the Koreans and Japanese did before them, become the elite themselves and make their own phones. And kiddies, all the idiocy you can come up with why the Chinese can never be creators the same was said about the Koreans and the Chinese. Hell, go back a bit further and the Brits said the same thing about the colonies (that is you Americans) when they outsourced farming, so the British country side could be reserved for gardening, parks and recreational hunting. And then the US copied industry too and the British economy has been sliding into obscurity ever since.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, no shit. It is difficult to succeed if a large part of the world actively tries to destroy you.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
China is communist in name only. They're more of a fascist dictatorship.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Capitalism Supersized
The following suggestion at first seems impractical because it is so simple: What if we, as a society, simply give consumers money to spend in the economy? In other words: What if the way to achieve the strongest possible economy is to give every citizen more money to spend? For example, what if we gave every citizen of the United States $25,000 to spend? $25,000 sounds impossible the first time you hear it, but consider the possibility.
Would this simple step -- giving money to every consumer -- accomplish the five economic goals set forth in the previous section? Yes. It would be a huge boost to the American economy:
* The economy would be strong because of all of the consumer spending.
* The economy would be stable because income (and therefore spending) would be guaranteed.
* With $25,000 per year to spend, innovators would no longer be forced to work -- they could focus their energy on innovation, living off of the $25K per year they receive. Inventors would have time to invent, writers to write, entrepreneurs to breed new companies, etc. They could devote all of their time to innovation. There would be billions of dollars for people to invest, especially in their own businesses. And investors would have a stable marketplace into which to introduce new products.
Most importantly, it would create a nation where the citizens are truly free. If every person had $25,000 per year in today's dollars to spend, they would be able to live their lives even if they lost their jobs. If robots took their jobs it would not be catastrophic. People would be able to weather the robotic takeover, retrain and move into new careers.
Lots of people do this today. The sad thing is they make them show up to the office 5 days a week.
you cannot fix the world. you can, at best, try to make things better where you currently are.
Ive struggled with the concept of why a guy on this side of the ocean deserves jobs on this side of the ocean more than the starving, harder working guy on the other side of the ocean-- simply by virtue of which side he is on.
Wrong. The accurate statement is that what did come to pass is efficiencies beyond our wildest dreams where each individual employee creates in 2 days the GDP that took his counterpart 2 weeks to create, however the management see's no reason to allow the employee to keep the same portion of that GDP he kept in the 50s, if they did that then the employee would only work 2 days a week and the employer would be out significant profits that can be reaped by keeping the employee there 5 days. This is why the rich now are so much richer than they were in the 50s, they're producing tons more than their 50s counterpart did, while keeping a significantly larger share of the production's revenue than the 50's employers did. The efficiences have gone up causing enormous GDP-per-employee gains, yet employee pay has only kept up with inflation.
On the other hand, this may be due to the fact that in reality inflation is somewhat controlled by the majority of the population, so if the majority of the population worked 2 days a week, the guy who worked 3 would be *loaded* making 50% more than the average wage at which point the majority would say "hell, one more day a week and I can go from 40k/year to 60k/year!" but then someone works 4 days a week... Economics are nebulous and this is why they're much debated, but simple fact is there's no way a bunch of robots doing all the work ends up with a liesure life for the populace; the singularity is a lie, if we no longer have work to do that just cements 100% the income divide by making the disparity so significant. The efficiencies talks about by the singularity are so large that those who are reaping their benefits will have magnitudes more wealth than others to an extent that if you aren't on the beneficiary side of those efficiencies you won't be able to afford bread. The efficiences of the singularity would effectively make money wholesale without value. I wonder what we would value then... Robots maybe will be the new currency... There's a weird thought.
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
If you are referring to the Soviet Union and China, communism never really existed there. They started down that road, sure, but only got half way there when the dictators took over. If Trotsky had won out against Stalin, the Soviet Union may have ended up as a democratic communism, where the educated workers actually did make the decisions. You can't say that communism didn't work, because it was never really tried. Norway and Sweden are closer to the communist ideal than the Soviet Union ever was.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I'm so dead tired of hearing people mischaracterize social security. Let's get one thing straight right now: It's not a savings account, it's not a 401k, it is not any form of account where you have cordoned off money that you put in and is held for you.
It's insurance. Retirement insurance to be fair, they run the actuary tables and adjust the costs such that they're betting more people won't live to retirement than are paying in, if more people reach retirement than there are payers then just like any other insurance their bet loses and they go bust. I'm not calling it insurance to villainize it, I think it's perfectly good insurance to have, it insures that in the unlikely event that you survive with your marbles to retirement age, you won't have to continue working. Without it, only the wealthy would be able to survive past that age because work kills old people, fast. You pay health insurance for the unlikely event that you are injured, you pay retirement insurance for the unlikely event that you retire, and it pays out more than you paid in over the term that it's paying you *because* it's insurance: Pooled money. Not a savings account for you, not your personal 401k, but a company that you are paying, who maintains a pooled amount of money and tries it's best to pay out fairly without paying out too much so that it goes bust.
You all should be glad it's public, a private version would be for-profit and charge a *hell* of a lot more, especially because it would have a smaller pool since not everyone would be forced to use it. The result: Lots of people would make it over retirement and work to death in misery of old age because they couldn't afford to pay for this insurance their whole lives, and the wealthy well they retire early already so they wouldn't bother paying for this kind of insurance anyway.
Hmmm....
Work two days a week and ... raise 2.5 children, own a home in the suburbs and a sensible late-model auto, enjoy an annual family vacation to a popular American tourist destination, and have not one single case of throat irritation (from smoking Camel cigarettes).
You should check to see what "middle class" living was actually like in 1950. You might have a car and a house but the house was only 600 sq ft. The father got bacon and eggs and the rest got porridge because that was all they could afford. The family had to do laundry at the end of the week as if they didn't they wouldn't have any clothes for the next week. The wife had to stay home because most modern appliances did not exist or were not available to their price range.
The 50's were good times not because we were wealthy through the entire thing but because it was a time of increasing wealth. It was a general .com boom for everybody. Men were job hopping every year or two into a new job at a higher pay. Appliances were becoming affordable to lessen the work load at home. Clothes and food were becoming cheaper. What was considered middle class in the beginning of the 1950's in terms of size of house lived in, food purchased, and clothing owned would be considered well below poverty level these days.
If you really want to see bad times though, go back and look at the great depression. People in the US were actually in threat of starving to death. The soldiers of WW2 were an inch or two shorter than the generation before and after simply due to lack of food while growing up. People of today would consider great depression conditions worse than apocalyptic and probably were worse than some movies show life after the apocalypse.