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The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com)
Alana Semuels writes via The Atlantic about the parts of America most susceptible to automation: Much of the focus regarding automation has been on the Rust Belt. There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored. While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation. A new analysis suggests that the places that are going to be hardest-hit by automation in the coming decades are in fact outside of the Rust Belt. It predicts that areas with high concentrations of jobs in food preparation, office or administrative support, and/or sales will be most affected -- "places such as Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area may be the most vulnerable to automation in upcoming years, with 65 percent of jobs in Las Vegas and 63 percent of jobs in Riverside predicted to be automatable by 2025. Other areas especially vulnerable to automation are El Paso, Orlando, and Louisville. Still, the authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades.
and prison pop will go way up as healthcare will be much better there with no to very low cost. Then that shit high risk pools that you may not have the funds to pay for.
Or they could all be IT/Robot jobs if we stop nafta, WTO, and H1B visa harpooning of our economy, which only benefits the bankers and the free Federal Reserve Paper mill owners.
Either way, unless the reoccurring costs of robots drops 90% the best your going to be seeing is kiosks and drink mixers. Long term like Redbox, they will find out its still cheaper to hire help. Which most of the older owners already know, or there we be billions of robots now.
the Corpse Belt. What is it about us as a species that makes us produce so much and let everyone starve? We are applying genetically prehistoric brains to 21st century realities.
If you do anything on your job which you can be automated, which is repetitive, those tasks will eventually be automated.
This does not automatically mean your job will be automated completely, but your job will change.
Or as Edsger W. Dijkstra said: higher level programming languages: People thought that those languages would solve the programming problem [make it easier]. But when you looked closely the trivial aspects of programming had been automated while the hard ones remained.
New things are always on the horizon
and prison pop will go way up as healthcare will be much better there with no to very low cost.
Any time you want to be edumacated just visit google and search for something like "prison health care" and then cry and cry as you see prisoners not even receiving treatment for real afflictions, let alone the cosmetic surgery and shit people imagine that prisoners are receiving.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Automation is a meme the media have promoted to undermine efforts against outsourcing.
You think industrial companies have just been sitting around for the last 50 years and only just discovered the concept or something?
A lot of industry has ALREADY been automated. Low hanging fruit is well plucked since the time of the power loom.
Go to any mid-sized SME or hell, any large enterprise and tell me how many of those jobs can be automated? Go to a small business. Which are automatable there?
Oh. A $500,000 machine with repayments and $40,000 a year maintainance retainers that flips burgers 99% of the time except when it breaks down or junks up or needs cleaning or the burgers start tasting like shit. Yeah. Automation is a meme. We're all supposed to roll over while the 1% continue grinding us into prole paste.
I'm sick of the media.
Yeah. If we criminalizing things.
Yeah. If the do-gooders impose higher and higher sin taxes (say on cigarettes) and then wonder why a peaceful transfer of products turns violent as people inevitably try to avoid the onerous tax.
You want a smaller prison population? Do not criminalize everything. Limit as much as possible police enforcement to violence and theft.
The corner stone of a free society is the agreement that:
"I will not try to kill you and take your stuff If you don't try to kill me and take my stuff."
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Any "Objective Repeatable Task" is automatable.
Objective: The goal can be clearly defined in simple words. There are few input parameters to the problem that affect the output. The output is easily measured. The decision process for the input parameters has just a few steps.
Repeatable: The input parameters are similar and the outcome is similar.
Examples: Roofing. Laundry. Cooking. Manufacturing.
When the cotton gin came out. We lost so many jobs. Now I hate automation and technology.
I hear the future is going to be bad. Better setup a scheme to steal money from the people who earn it, just in case.
No, 55% of jobs won't be replaced by automation in 20 years. Stop making up stories to scare the gullible and grift the credulous.
I just wonder how long it will take these people to realize that Trump is NOT getting their jobs back.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Once upon a time it took 100% of humans 100% of their time to stay a live and gather enough food. Then we started to specialize.
In 1987 2% of Americans farmed, and that's was the lowest number (total) since the 1800s. In 1820, when they were reported at less than 2.1 million, or about 72 percent of the American work force of 2.9 million. By 1850, farm people made up 4.9 million, or about 64 percent, of the nation's 7.7 million workers. The farm population in 1920, when the official Census data began, was nearly 32 million, or 30.2 percent of the population of 105.7 million, the report said. So we've gone from 100 to 72 to 64 to 30 to 2% of the population need to just make food to keep our species going.
How many people did horses 'automate'? If you look at the cumulative improvements at a single task how many people with sticks can a single tractor replace? Think of how many 'jobs' we could bring back if we outlawed tractors? It doesn't mean that a 'farmer' has gone away, it just means they do something different. An engineer in 2017 has had most of what an engineer did in 1917 'automated'.
Computers have been automating computer jobs since they were invented. Compilers are just "robots" that turn high level C into Assembly. I don't even write my own C any more, Simulink does a much better and consistent job at it. The autogenerated code may be a bit verbose but it's very explicit and bester right
People have been making this argument for over a thousand years: automation will put everyone out of work.
Problem is, it hasn't happened. On a temporary basis people get displaced, and it's not always great for those people, but in the bigger picture it enables people to be more productive. Middle class people now live better than kings did in centuries past. A single farmer today can out-produce a hundred farmers in the middle ages. It just means that we don't need 70% of the population to be farmers. They can do other things that didn't even exist back then, making everyone better off. A large fraction of the jobs that exist today could not even been conceived of in the middle ages.
The idea that automation hurts is a tired old meme and has been shown wrong time and time again throughout history.
example, if you driven out by the the deal with you '*BSD Sux0rs'. This I see the same in ratio of 5 to By BSDI who sell invited back again. lubrication. You For election, I I thought it was my Sanctions, and Also dead, its These early rotting corpse numbers contin0e And shower. For I don't want to of the above To the politically that he documents You're told. It's it a break, if today. It's about reasons why anyone charnel house.
When you have no hope in the system, because it fails you every time for decades, then you vote for the person most likely to retribute against the system.
Las Vegas and Riverside, I would like to pre-emptively welcome you to your 2024 alt/anti candidate voting block.
-a midwesterner
You want a smaller prison population? Quit being a thug. Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
cut full time down to 32 hours short term with an road map to making it 20 longer term
Considering all the bad consequences of continued human population growth, the loss of all these jobs may be a blessing in disguise. We could issue the unemployed the bare minimum to keep them alive, block them from retraining or other means of becoming economic contributors again, accompany that with multiple, easily-accessible and inexpensive means to accelerate their deaths, and let nature take its course. Under those circumstances, many of these less-employable masses will be more willing to kill themselves and those that aren't willing to do so consciously will end up dying prematurely anyway. Come to think of it, we've already been doing this. We just need to globalize the trend and accelerate the rate of self-elimination. We get rid of some 4-6 billion unnecessary people in the next century -- no genocidal wars, thermo-nuclear winters, or global pandemics needed. What could go wrong?
so in the usa run up an 100K loan to get an masters. While an overseas guy's has and masters with only an 5k-10k loan that can be discharged.
It's time for a I-hate-technology politician to run for president. "I'll build a Turing Test center, and Google will pay for it!"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yeah, just ignore any and all contributing factors. You're clearly a very smart cookie.
I think he had an invisible /sarc at the end of his statement. :)
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Automation isn't the enemy it's a very helpful tool. Unfortunately, this tools is displacing people significantly faster than new job opportunities being created. The industrial revolution had this problem and many farmers faced near starvation while the rest were forced to survive working in factories. People seem to think it was a time of great progress but the truth is that it was a time of mass exploitation. We are going to have a similar outcome if we do nothing to prevent it. There are people who balk at the very idea of Universal Basic Income in a heartless manner because they do not grasp the breadth and level of widespread suffering that is coming. I hope that humanity has the wisdom to understand what is happening but I fear that our selfish tribalism is going to leave tens of millions to die.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation.
This could only possibly be true if one utterly fails to recognize the difference between labor intensive manufacturing and capital intensive manufacturing. Labor intensive means that labor costs are a relatively high proportion of the total cost of the product. Capital intensive is the converse. The vast majority of job losses for labor intensive products (textiles, basic assembly, etc) are entirely due to production moving to low labor costs locations. For capital intensive manufacturing, automation is the big driver. US manufacturing has been capital intensive for several decades now so further job losses will often be due to automation.
Any time you hear a politician talking about "bringing back manufacturing jobs" they are almost always talking about bringing back labor intensive production. Problem is that unless US wages fall by a LOT, production of those products is never going to come back to the US. They will be made wherever labor costs are lowest and no amount of politician's promises will change that fact. The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage are long gone.
... and let nature take its course.
[...]
What could go wrong?
If you want to all survival of the fittest, you need to remember that people will fight to survive. That means you will see an uprising most everywhere and they will slaughter their oppressors. Heartlessly discarding people will bring the dogs of war to rip out your throat.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I speculate there is a natural cap on automation since we are proven incapable of making them secure. All the recent IoT bots show what will happen: if you put in too much automation criminals will wreck it.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Population growth. That's what grows an economy at its core. You can talk about productivity growth until you're blue in the face, but unless there are consumers, it makes no difference.
That's what happened during the industrial revolution. Europe's population was rebounding after the Black Death and the mills needed to keep up. That's what spurred the machines.
And what boosted the need for people a hundred years later or so? VERy very labor intensive industries (like automobile) to fill demands of an every growing population. ONE shift at ONE Ford plant needed about 10,000 workers - to put things into perspective.
There were also UNIONs to buffer the displaced workers. Brakemen anyone? The unions would also argue that the new more productive machine needs another materials handler to feed it - whether it was needed or not.
Today's industries are not labor intensive. It has been estimated the Amazon's automated book selling operation does as much business with 30,000 workers as it would have taken with a MILLION workers back in the bricks and mortar days. SpaceX is starting at the gate with automated rockets! Tesla started off with robots!
But today's automation is much more sophisticated than the past and with our slowing population growth, that to use the past as a template for the future will lead one to draw the wrong conclusions about the future.
Our economy is undergoing fundamental changes at the core and to bury our heads in the sand and look to the past and just say, "No worries! it'll all turn out fine!" is horribly misguided.
Contrary to the propaganda we hear in this country, the Luddites were rioting because there was no place for them to go. They weren't hired as machine operators - factories hired people who were trained for that and children. They weren't hire as supervisors either. The displaced weavers went to the poor houses or were hired as unskilled labor - at unskilled labor wages. They were left behind.
If we do that to the folks who are displaced by automation, we will see some horrible social unrest. Trump's election by the white working class who have been displaced by globalization and automation is only the beginning of what we'll see if we do not adjust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOX0_FUGM6k
so in the usa run up an 100K loan to get an masters. While an overseas guy's has and masters with only an 5k-10k loan that can be discharged.
Although if it's from India that Masters is barely equivalent to a Bachelors from the USA or Europe.
Exactly. Why haven't more "Masters of the Universe" realized this and taken more steps to prepare people for civilized transitions? They're over-optimistic about people's ability to make transitions on their own? They've read Bostrom's Superintelligence and decided against him that the singularity has only upsides? They're busy arranging their means of surviving the resource wars and other types of mass dislocation and violence that climate-change, automation, and accelerated income inequality are just starting to trigger now? Beats me.
In the past, automation boosted a worker's productivity.
Today, it replaces that worker.
We're going to have to adjust our economy; otherwise, we're headed for some serious social discord.
How about...
...we try to do both?
Why the hell do so many people believe every political issue has precisely two sides, and only one side has merit? In the real world we tackle difficult problems by relying on a number of solutions, and we care more about what works than about ideals.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
You want a smaller prison population? Quit being a thug. Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
In other words, stop pushing United States culture? Maybe not laziness, I guess, but violence and lack of education are the two primary values in about half the country.
I learned a lot about DRM from this website when I was much younger. It has only gotten worse since then, with DRM infesting not just DVDs etc but now John Deere tractors, which are hostile architecture black boxes preventing farmers from optimizing their super expensive machines. So there is no free software or open secondary market for GPS data gathered (i.e. something that would sense micro conditions and efficiently apply another tech). This is hugely dangerous to the human race at large since we are dependent on the tractors for survival. I would argue it ought to be one of the biggest deals to face. If something goes wrong with John Deere we skid right back to sticks rather easily.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/...
https://www.extremetech.com/co...
http://boingboing.net/2017/03/...
"Now, farmers find themselves in desperate straits. Not only does Deere gouge them on repairs ("$230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize [a user-swapped] part"), but the repair shops can be far away or busy, and thus a half-million dollar tractor can sit immobilized while a farmer frets about getting his crops in."
https://www.ifixit.com/Answers...
http://www.npr.org/sections/al...
http://freeknowledge.eu/campai...
Totally unacceptable situation here.
--hongpong.com
cut full time down to 32 hours short term with an road map to making it 20 longer term
Not everyone can do every job.
A subset of jobs is getting automated, and barely anyone with those skills is going to be needed.
Your solution, isn't.
I imagine that things are going to be very rough once automation _really_ starts cutting into employment in ways that haven't been seen previously. The ironic thing is that the "knowledge worker" is the target for this round, as most large-scale US factory work is offshored or automated by now. All that money people are paying to get themselves the education they need for a job is never going to be recovered if employees aren't receiving salaries to make it worth going in the first place.
I graduated high school in 1993, and even by then, everyone was being told that there was no longer a viable career path that didn't go through college. And this was in the Rust Belt city I grew up in, where just 20 years prior it was possible to guarantee a lifetime of work by joining a union's apprenticeship program and working in a factory for your whole career. I distinctly remember events at the end of high school that were basically send-offs into the "grown-up" world like the prom and a formal senior dinner -- as if to say that for at least a chunk of the graduating class, this was the last time they'd ever see the education system again. Wind the clock forward, and we're requiring college degrees for receptionists and the few factory workers that are left. So now we have a more educated workforce, who may no longer have anything to do that will allow them to make money, start families, buy things, etc.
I've done most of my career working directly for or contracting with large companies -- think companies big enough to have a huge corporate campus, parking garages, etc. Even in 2017, there really are a ton of corporate jobs that could go away in this next round of automation. Lots of jobs we IT people support involve taking input stacks of work, performing some sort of process on them, and putting them on the output stack. Look at how mega-corps lay people off in huge numbers -- HP/HPE just got rid of more than 30,000 people last year. I'm sure a lot of that was just idiotic MBA spreadsheet jockeying, but how many of those 30,000 people were doing one of these easily automated jobs? Each one of those 30,000 people probably owned a house, paid property/school taxes, some of them had kids, they bought cars, and basically contributed to society. Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
With no way for educated people to make money, what happens to the work-money-consumption cycle we've been used to for ages? Some people propose paying people regardless of their employment status, and I think that's one way to bridge the gap. But what happens on the other side? Will we have a Star Trek utopia where everyone does what they're best at instead of driving to MegaCorp every morning to file papers? Or will we have a Hunger Games style existence or go back to feudal serfdom?
The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs hovered in the 17-18 million range for about 30 years, 1970-2000. NAFTA was signed in 1994, GATT/WTO treaty was signed in 1995. Five years later, the number of people employed in manufacturing in the U.S. started a precipitous decline, going from ~17 million to under 12 million in the course of the next ten years.
It's hard to believe that only 650k of those jobs were lost because of the trade agreements and the other 4.35 million were lost due to some huge wave of automation.
What do you have against Trump voters?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not sure you meant this is as sarcasm, but you sound like a Progressive yearning for the days of eugenics.
You still don't get it. Your anointed empress lost because she was blatantly campaigning to outsource them via the TPP. It wasn't a vote for trump. It was a vote against your corrupt bitch.
It sounds like, if this study turns out to be accurate, the future of metropolitan areas is going to be wealth holders and high skill jobs, surrounded by robotic "Servants" performing all the service type jobs normally held by low income earners, like food prep, cleanup, trash collection, hell even driving the trash truck or busses or hunting for litter. Cities will look highly dystopian with only elites even having a place there, while the low earners are marginalized to slums.
But transSEXuals!
a politician here in France has proposed to forbid job suppression.
But who is going to pay for the non rentables jobs ?
"Nothing is impossible", they say.
Sarcasm for sure. We really do need to reduce human population but I'm only in favor of doing it by preventing births, not by ending anyone's life or purposely depriving people of the opportunity for a better life, and not by selecting some favored subset of the human population for the privilege of reproducing. Abiding by those restrictions would make intentional population reduction extremely difficult. As environmental degradation accelerates the temptation to get rid of excess human beings by other means will increase. The people with the power to do this will certainly not volunteer to self-eliminate. We're in for a hell of a century.
Because for a great many of them, their goal isn't to help the people but rather help themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Who the fuck cares about any of this shit when President Pussy-Grabber is trying to turn the U.S. into a gods-be-damned theocracy so the right-wing fundamentalist Dominionists can impose their 'christian' version of Sharia Law on everyone? You think The Handmaids' Tale is just entertainment? NO, it's a CAUTIONARY TALE.
Just blow the whole fucking planet up and kill everyone on it. We don't deserve to live, we SUCK as a race and should END.
You don't need to actively prevent births. The easiest way to reduce the total human population is to spread prosperity. Every country that's undergone an economic revolution has seen their birth rate drop to near or below replacement levels.
World Bank Data on population growth
Overpopulation - The Human Explosion Explained
The concern is that past a certain point automation stops spreading prosperity and starts concentrating it in the hands of a small wealthy class.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Forced sterilization of Atheists, Negroes, Middle Easterners, those filthy Redskins etc. (Good God fearing people need to keep breeding after all!) And termination/deportation of people who can't meet their financial obligations on a year to year basis.
Does this sound like a dystopian hell? Yes, it is.
Given that it is taking from too many at too fast of a rate and leaving way too many people in a long-term displacement, it is beyond time to pull the brakes.
You want automation, fine. Just make it a royal PITA to not bring in the displaced.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
[allegation that trade is less than automation]
Then hit both, hard. Their allegations only paper over trade-related losses with more prosperous regions.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
The average Clinton or Sanders voter, in a nutshell.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Once you include the displaced, the involuntarily retired, and unsuccessful new entrants, you get a number more in line with reality - especially with regions that have seen consistent decline.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
production of those products is never going to come back to the US, save for regulatory pain making it easier to manufacture in the US.
FTFY.
The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage can return with sufficient regulation.
FTFY.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Technology in the form of automation is making the future of employment uncertain, while at the same time continuously increasing the amount of death and suffering an individual can unleash against others.
That's Silicon Valley. If geology decided to rip a new one such that Silicon Valley (and the Bay) disappeared, while causing something to do similar with Seattle/Vancouver, we'd probably be in a better position to keep work versus losing it.
And to top it off the left is trying to currently trying to keep rolling back healthcare for millions of people with the ACA, while making access more uncertain as providers pull out.
The GOP is actually trying to bring healthcare back, not remove it. On the other hand, their opponents would rather have a law that diminishes access and lowers the quality of what jobs are left (29ers).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
and in the past an education was a trade / apprenticeship with university being for the rich kids.
Now days trades have been put down and HR's people don't like them university are still very theory loaded with high costs.
Herbert's Dune spoke of a large uprising against AI that crushed it completely. Centuries of progress went out the window just because someone couldn't use it responsibly.
If those behind AI/ML forget about or underestimate effects of the mass displacement of individuals, they may end up losing everything - where Ned Ludd not only wins, but does so gloriously on a global scale. If they depart from that path and start including humanity, especially the short/long-term displaced, they might live and see their creations survive.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
My job is to write code that can be used 24hrs a day forever by machines. These machines and computers are already taking the place of human workers, never need to sleep and don't falter when tired like silly humans. I guarantee that I will be replaced at some point by a script in the next 10 years. We meat sacks are screwed.
Gol' nab it! You ain't takin' my guns away from me!
Now fetch me my beer!
that will only hurt the middle class and cost the upper class nothing, only increasing the gap between rich and poor
unless you can magically mandate that everyone getting their hours cut gets a commensurate boost to their wages in which case you may as well do the sensible thing and just implement a basic income funded by an income tax which amounts to the same thing.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What's more, as large parts of the labor force are put out of work, even the educated worker will find his skills devalued, unless those who control resources start demanding a lot more creative work.
It's pure market forces: if there are fewer jobs out there, more people will bid on the work, driving prices down.
Already, despite huge increases in productivity per hour, the worker is paid 50% of the share of corporate productivity that the worker got in 1973. If labor had the same fraction as in 1973, labor would have 2x the purchasing power per hour worked.
The screwing of labor has started, is already severe, and it is going to get worse.
--PeterM
The problem with short-hour workers is that there is more overhead in maintaining more people and keeping them on task. Payroll/management/benefits are all easier with 4 40 hour workers than with 8 20 hour workers.
So the 1% won't go for having more workers, because of inefficiency. The 1% also won't like paying their workers 2x as much per hour. And the 1% controls the political process.
--PM
Don't forget, weaponry and soldiers will be automated too. The power of the masses to rise up and defeat the political establishment by violence is either already in the past, or soon will be.
--PM
The coming age of automation need not have tragic side effects if our political system is revamped to encourage and support both automation as well as the unemployed. If we do not prepare all hell will break lose. That means things have to change right now and yet we have an administration dedicated to going backwards in social policies. The right wing is building the road to hell for all of us.
Florida requires convicts to pay for their jail or prison time. They make parole conditional upon those payments. They extend paroles until the bill is paid. In the end it is the same issue as an inmate on bail needing to hire a very expensive lawyer. A few new crimes will raise the cash to hire that lawyer. Now the inmates may need to commit crimes to make their parole payments. It is another half baked, right wing policy. And by the way you might now want the medical care that some Florida inmates receive. One of our local jails seems to be filled with people with serious medical issues. You can simply look at the inmate and see that some awful medical issue is at work.
Is being an asshole to your fellow Americans helpful? Please stop. Be a grownup. Thanks.
With a 32 hour work week you need the same number of workers should available work reduce 20%. However, it makes more sense for a business to reduce headcount by 20% to reduce fixed costs. Now you have 20% fewer workers, quite possibly earning less (supply and demand) supporting people on UBI. Hence UBI is unlikely to get political support as those already squeezed by wage pressure are unlikely to support it unless it is neutral cost for them, which is not possible if supported by earned wage income tax, and there is such a short to medium term advantage to having low corporate tax that's unlikely to make up the shortfall.
Health care is horrible in prison- especially private prisons.
They simply define what you have as not being an issue and then they do not need to treat you.
And almost no pain medication for anything except OTC type stuff.
Enjoy your fantasy world.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I hope the 1% are stockpiling Zyklon-B.
Involuntarily retired about five years before my time, likely because they needed to pay me too much money. In the end, I was happy it happened when I heard about all the sh*t dumped on those who remained.
A sensibly implemented income tax funded UBI will provide a net gain (UBI received minus taxes paid to fund it) to everyone making less than the mean income, which is currently about 75% of the population and would only go up under the kind of automation crunch we're talking about. The bulk of the UBI will be funded by the people at the very top of the income curve (the ones who drag that mean income so far up above the mean in the first place), who are largely not wage workers to begin with, but rather making unearned incomes off rents and interest lending out their wealth. Those are the people who need to bear the burden of taking care of the people at the bottom, because they're the ones who can. The well-employed but still working-class people you're worried about being over-taxed by an UBI are the very same people I'm proposing the UBI in place of the hours reduction to protect. A straight hours reduction is going to hurt those people, the ones working full tilt to try to get over the hump, the most, to fund a benefit to people who need it even more sure, but at no cost to the people at the top who can afford it best, who thus ought to be bearing the burden instead of the people in the middle.
Someone currently working a 40h week at around $25/hr is making around the mean income right now, and under a sanely implemented UBI would see neither a loss or a gain to their income because of it. But if you reduce the work week by 20%, that person loses around $10,000/year income, some of which might be spread around here or there among the 75% of people making less than him who might see an increase in employment (if further automation to make up the slack isn't cheaper than that); and the actually rich people at the top who aren't wage workers to begin with see no change. So the middle is pulled down a lot, the bottom might get a little bump, the top gets off scot free, and the slope between bottom and top gets even steeper. An income tax funded UBI would have the exact opposite effect, making the slope from poor to rich shallower and easier to climb, by applying a center-ward pressure on everyone's income.
Having the bottom claw the middle down is exactly what the people at the top want.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The steam tractor and combine harvester slashed the agricultural work force.
But their productivity is nothing compared to the power of early computers in the 1960s. Just imagine running a bank or a tax office without *any* computers at all. Everything done by hand. And that is nothing compared to office automation today.
And yet, bureaucracies have grown dramatically, not shrunk. Because while the human capacity for food is limited but the size of the gut, there is no such limit on the desire for rules and regulations, processes and procedures...
So I foresee a brave new world where everybody becomes a bureaucrat at some level or other.
In the longer term (100 years) humans will be obsolete technology, so it probably does not matter anyway.
http://www.computersthink.com/
The corner stone of a free society is the agreement that:
"I will not try to kill you and take your stuff If you don't try to kill me and take my stuff."
"An it harm none, Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
Congratulations; that's one of the most ignorant things I've read in nearly twenty years on Slashdot. If your parents reassured you that you weren't retarded... they lied.
Mandatory 35 hour work week
Permanent ban on overtime work
With the productivity increases from automation I don't think you'd need more workers, even with reduced hours, but it would vary between sectors.
An example might be workforce in sector A changes from one million to 100,000. Sector B (not automated) now needs to expand from 100,000 to one million employed to soak up the difference, so ten times the workers working only four hours a week, which is not viable.
Hey thug culture is not part of the gun / pro-second Amendment crowd. You're willfully ignorant if you think so.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Doesn't work because projects need to be completed fast. Doesn't scale because more workers means more coordination and communication.
Make it full-time work followed by the same duration of time off.
Actual implementation will be by hire-and-fire, of course. Nobody pays for that much vacation time.
production of those products is never going to come back to the US, save for regulatory pain making it easier to manufacture in the US.
FTFY.
Evidently you are unfamiliar with the story of King Canute. Regulatory pain has NOTHING to do with why labor intensive manufacturing has largely left the US. It is almost entirely about labor costs and labor costs alone. If 50% of the cost of a product is in labor then it is going to get made where labor is cheap. $15/hour US labor cannot compete with $1/hour Chinese labor on such a product even if you assume a massive productivity advantage that doesn't exist in the real world. You could have the most favorable regulations in the world and it still would make no economic sense to make the product where labor costs are high. This is economics 101 stuff and no regulations can alter economic laws like this.
US manufacturing is alive and well. That sector of the US economy is worth over $3 trillion by itself and growing robustly. But it is not going to be a source of massive jobs without an equally massive drop in average wages. If you want to put in regulations to bring labor intensive manufacturing back to the US then you are legislating millions of people into poverty wages. Doesn't sound like a very good idea to me.
The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage can return with sufficient regulation.
FTFY.
You again didn't fix anything though you did prove you don't understand even basic economics. If you put up huge trade barriers or other regulations to keep foreign products out you will cost FAR more jobs than you will ever save. You are driving up the price of cars for tens of millions of people to gain at most a few tens of thousands of assembly jobs. Regulations that try to prevent economic reality result in a situation like what you seen in Venezuela right now. Huge unemployment, huge inflation, and a massive economic depression. Some regulation is good like those to ensure clean air or quality roads - these protect resources we all need to use. Regulation that defies basic economics is doomed to failure.
The world your parents and grandparents grew up in no longer exists. To pretend we can recreate the circumstances of that time is both false and foolish. You can learn to live with today's reality or you can get passed by those who will.