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Workers: Fear Not the Robot Apocalypse (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: For retailers, the robot apocalypse isn't a science-fiction movie. As digital giants swallow a growing share of shoppers' spending, thousands of stores have closed and tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs. The brick-and-mortar retail swoon has been accompanied by a less headline-grabbing e-commerce boom that has created more jobs in the U.S. than traditional stores have cut. Those jobs, in turn, pay better, because its workers are so much more productive. This demonstrates something routinely overlooked in the anxiety about the job-destroying potential of robots, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Throughout history, automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys. The reason: Companies don't use automation simply to produce the same thing more cheaply. Instead, they find ways to offer entirely new, improved products. As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people.
productivity gains result in job losses. They have in every industrial revolution. Then in 50-80 years tech caught up elsewhere and there were new jobs. In the meantime there were two or three lost generations living in abject poverty because in America if you don't work you don't eat. And it wasn't the New Deal that fixed that (it helped, but wasn't nearly enough) it was a global war, 80 million dying and basically the whole world getting blowed up and needed to be rebuilt.
History is basically the working class trying and failing to pry money out of the hands of the ruling class. Why the hell people don't see this is beyond me.
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Here's an unencumbered link to the article:
http://www.cetusnews.com/busin...
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
>> Throughout history, automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys
The aggregate job count is rarely the complaint of existing workers and their families. It's that the new jobs get created somewhere else and often require skills that the original workers don't have, and that the workers don't feel like moving, don't want to retrain and/or are considered too old to retrain or hire. See "West Virginia" or most of America's near-inner cities for examples...
When we have burger flipping and order taking, shelf stocking, part picking robots, where do the people who do not, can not, or will not get an education work?
The fact that it all seems to be going in the right way - for now - does not mean it will continue. Many e-commerce jobs for humans will be destroyed in the next few years as e-commerce gets more and more automated. Yes there will be jobs, but for far fewer and better qualified/skilled people. If you are a relatively unskilled worker - in my view - your prospects are not going to be good. And, what is worse, it will be people like us that are facilitating this.
Don't even start me on what robotics are going to do to the trucking industry...
Has led to less overall jobs in the auto industry. I'm pretty sure that the jobs created with supplying and maintaining these automation tools did not completely offset the jobs lost...
Jobs don't matter. Jobs have never mattered. There are, and will always be, a means to an end. That end being not starving to death. In the past, jobs were a means of divvying up the limited resources for that goal, but as the resources become less limited, something like a UBI will become necessary.
This should be a good thing, but we've got such pig-headed ideas about economics that we're taking the blessing of not needing labor and turning it into a curse.
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Only if the new offerings are not produced by robots. That's where the breakdown happens, why the advent and adoption of general-use robotics and algorithms isn't another example of historical automation.
Buggy whips went out of demand, so the people went to build cars. Cars started to get automated, so people went to build the increasingly-intricate car parts. But now car parts can crafted wholly by robots (or, for a continuously-expanding class of parts in general, "printed"). Automation in the past was about very specific processes for very specific outputs; you couldn't take a line used to make cars and easily change it to one that makes bicycles (or soup.) But soon we'll have a robot chef that works mostly by mimicking human actions, so if it can cook it can assemble.
The "creative" jobs will hold out longer, but algorithms will replace many of these, too: IBM's Watson has made a movie trailer. A lot of marketing these days are applying set rules to things (certain colors evoke certain responses in certain demographics, etc.) A lot of music is based around similar setups. Hell, Japan has a popular singer who's not even a real person.
The only question I see is: how fast will this happen? If it's extremely slow then make-busy work might fill in the gap as robots and "AI" take over most regular production. If it's very fast then we'll have a lot of robots producing things that most people can't afford to purchase, and "things" will eventually include food.
You may lose your truck driving job today, but many more jobs will be created in Elbonia, for future, far more educated generations of robotruck engineers.
I.e. NET jobs are NOT necessarily your jobs.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Let's just take a look at Amazon for a moment. I watched some news articles about them. Their warehouses already feature a lot of automation.
The only thing they need humans for is to take stuff off shelves (that robots bring to them) and put in boxes to fulfill orders. And you can bet your wallet as soon as Amazon figures out how to automate that, those jobs are gone. Poof. And yes, they definitely do intend to automate that, they're working on prototypes and ideas as I write this.
Automation is going to be a very huge disruptive force, and as it starts to happen, it will accelerate ever faster, just like computers did from 1980's to now.
Right now, we haven't reached that critical point where automation is going to displace workers. There's enough 'other' jobs to offset what automation replaces. But you're kidding yourself if you think that's going to hold. It's going to flip to the other side very soon.
Jobs and technology are mostly independent issues in the big picture. An economy is basically systematic bartering: you want stuff I have/produce, and I want stuff you have/produce. We trade to get what we want. Money, banks, etc. are simply tools to make such trades easier and scale-able.
The problem is that politics, geopolitical complexities, and herd mentality create boom and bust cycles, and inequality where the winner takes all and the losers get tossed. These boom and bust cycles are probably as natural as the spiral arms in the Milky Way galaxy. Capitalism bubbles have been occurring for at least 400 years, long before the USA and the Federal Reserve existed (since many blame the FR).
And capitalism does NOT guarantee reasonable equality. For the past the 40 years or so, the rich have got much richer while the rest mostly stagnated. E-commerce hasn't reversed this trend. The economy produces much more, but it's not trickling down. There seems to be a feedback cycle where the owner of machines and real-estate get yet more machines and real-estate, creating a winner-take-all economy. (It's similar to Marx's prediction.) Automation may be part of that, but it's also because the rich can buy up land and companies during slumps. The middle class is usually trying to make ends meet during slumps and so don't have enough spare cash to play that game nearly as much.
The article is paywalled so I cannot see it, but I am skeptical of claims made by the WSJ. They are often biased.
Table-ized A.I.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
love is just extroverted narcissism
All those workers have to live close to the shipping warehouse, meaning the workers have to move in order to work for the big corporations and/or the death of stores in small towns.
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The last mechanical revolution automated manual labor. The coming will automate intelligence. I tickles me to see ignorant pie-in-the-sky morons crowing about what they don't understand.
Not exactly surprising that the WSJ is not thinking terribly far ahead on this.
The issue is not what has happened up until now. It is what happens in the decades to come. Because we do not have general-purpose AI yet, nor do we have sufficiently advanced robotics yet.
The agricultural revolution displaced massive numbers of workers, but they could be employed by the industrial revolution.
Now, let's try to apply that to a post-general purpose AI and advanced robotics world. You're a farmworker, and your family has been farmworkers for generations. Someone builds a new device, and you are now redundant. So you move to the cities....and there's no industrial revolution work to be done because its being done by general purpose AI and robotics.
"You could get a job building the robots!!" No, why would you use a human to build the robots? You'd use another robot.
Getting through this is going to require a lot of rethinking how society works. Since the dawn of civilization, we have defined and supported ourselves via work. Work will no longer be possible for a very, very, very large portion of the population. We need to start talking about this massive transition now if we want to make that transition without massive bloodshed.
People to not peacefully starve to death.
We had a lot of technologies established supporting the human work and employment, agreed. But if those next-gen machines (AI+robots) are suddenly more intelligent, faster and stronger, on the the other side don't need sleep, don't get sick and don't earn a salary - what is left there for us to do except for writing poems?
Fireman rescues kitten, film at 11
You can't sensationalize a headline like that. It fades into the background noise.
Fireman indicted in string of arson fires causing $100,000,000 in damages, film at 11
That gets peoples attention. This is why people need to learn to IGNORE MEDIA HYPE.
Maybe Trump does believe in climate change (or whatever the fuck we're calling it now), he just doesn't want the situation to improve for all the reasons you mentioned.
#DeleteFacebook
I think we hit the peak usefulness of the "retrain for a better job" advice back in the early 90s when large corporations got around to destroying their "legacy" white-collar workforces. This was driven by computerization of clerical office work finally reaching a point where permanently fewer humans were needed. Back when I first graduated from college (around 1998), one of my first IT jobs was with a huge life insurance company. According to some of the old-timers I was working under, the then-sparsely populated headquarters was jammed wall-to-wall with various clerical workers up until the 80s or so. The HQ took up two Manhattan city blocks, plus a huge tower uptown, plus they had tons of large regional offices around the country. It was apparently so full that the company staggered start times so that crowds didn't overwhelm the elevators and escalators in the building. Maybe some of those clerical workers got better jobs, but I don't think that's going to happen this time around.
The fundamental problem that needs to be solved is this: If you want to continue with a consumer-based society, you must find some way to allow everyone to sell their labor for a price that allows them to continue consuming and keeping businesses alive. This includes everyone -- not just STEM graduates, CS people, programmers, data scientists, etc. The economy only works when the majority of people can afford to participate at a level appropriate to their skills. Large fully automated cloud data centers employ 20 security guards, HVAC techs, disk-pullers and rack-and-stackers...not 5000 system administrators. Automated warehouses employ a couple of robot-minders. Automated trucks employ zero truck drivers.
If we still have to cling to the idea that everyone has to have a job and earn money to be worth anything in society, how do we avoid nasty problems that crop up when the majority of people are unemployed and desperate? Technology people tend not to understand this, but look outside the tech bubble and see what kind of work the vast majority of people do all day. It's repetitive, automatable and may go away very soon.
USA has high retraining costs with loans that can't be easy gotten rid in bankruptcy and most college credits don't transfer
https://www.usnews.com/news/na...
The "robot apocalypse" has been threatened for a long time, but deploying robots increase complexity, which usually means they need trained people to keep them going. This is not necessarily what TFA is talking about, but to me the reason not to fear the robot apocalypse is, robots don't fix themselves.
At least, not yet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Workers are hired until the marginal value of their labor equals the marginal cost of that labor. You hire Alice at $50,000 salary because she'll bring in $100,000. Bob, because of diminishing returns, will only bring in $75,000, but at $50K hiring him is still a no-brainer. But if Carol will only bring in $50,000, you won't hire her unless you can get her for less than that.
What this means is there is no general economic law that connects changes in worker productivity to a particular kind of change in employment levels. It depends on what you do with that productivity.
Imagine a world in which computers were laboriously assembled by workers on breadboards using prototyping techniques. Let's say it costs you $10,000 to assemble a computer this way. In that case you'd only sell a small number of computers because they'd be highly specialized machines. Now suppose you introduce modern assembly techniques, with printed circuit boards and wave soldering. Now the computer which cost you ten thousand dollars to assemble can be made for well under $100.
If you continue to sell a very small number of computers at high prices, you'll lay off most of your workforce. On the other hand if you start selling your computers for $180, you'll end up adding to your workforce. Both scenarios turn increased worker productivity into increased profit, but in different ways.
Now let's imagine an entirely different scenario: a fast food restaurant. It's hard to imagine selling a lot more Big Macs because you drop the price. Nonetheless the same principle applies. If you can find a way to make money off the newly surplus labor, employment wont' go down. If you can't, you'll let people go.
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There are always larger factors at work than Automation. Its just one of many ingredients in the mix.
What drives making 'profit' is someone else somewhere has to spend more than their income. Spending creates savings. Ultimately this question makes its way back to who is issuing the currency, their spending decisions that drives aggregate profit.
The private sector always looks to maximise profit. A market entirely left to its own devices Iteratively Revises Down the amount of profit it makes because of changes in wage bargaining power, automation. Reduce workforce with automation and you're reducing someone's paying customers somewhere. So its self-sabotaging. However this dynamic is continuously changing(never static) as innovation creates new products, regulation and protections demand higher levels of quality and currency issuers get to work in Congress/Parliament and conduct discretionary spending which raises aggregate wealth for the private sector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Robots (broadly automation over last 250 years) always changes the mix of how many people are needed to manufacture X in industry Y. But that's just a subset of what's going on. If we look at 'work' that is both profitable and not profitable its immediately obvious that there is more work than at any point in human history that needs to be done. eg: Today's displaced retails workers could become tomorrows electronic repair technicians if regulations are introduced to reduce e-waste. Manufacturers are required to make stuff that can be un-made, fixed, recycled.
Ageing population suddenly stops being a problem if you introduce the right level of technology and job creation for instance.
Also Jobs that stick around are the ones that have a contingent element of responsibility attached to them. Its easy to automate a Lawyer but hard to change a system that demands a human accountability in the process. That is a big part of why so many jobs are not being automated but others are: A coordinator who is legally responsible but not human? How do you sue that?
I dont buy into 'robots are here so work has ended' it never will and the people selling this idea well meaning or not don't see the whole picture.
You're saying that things were just rosy during the Dark Ages when there were no productivity gains for hundreds of years? I don't think so.
The Great Depression wasn't caused by productivity gains, and the Soviet Union collapsed because productivity was too low, not too high.
As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people.
s/hire more people/buy more robots/g
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Hint: If you can't get into a college with credits that transfer, you don't belong in college, at all.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The ATM graph doesn't appear to show what the author claims it shows. It looks like ATM's greatly delayed the growth of bank teller employment. Without ATM's, it looks like the total tellers would be roughly more than double the current quantity (although the chart doesn't cover enough years to get a good feel for the pre-ATM rate). The rate of teller growth may be finally going up again, but that's probably despite ATM's if we look at the pre-ATM rate. Using that chart, it appears ATM's indeed did take a big bite out of overall teller jobs.
Table-ized A.I.
Imagine you are a Roman in the Second Century BC; over the past 500 years Rome has grown from a village to the dominant force on the peninsula, to a pan-Mediterranean power. It would seem to you to be a kind of iron law of history: expansion is always good for Rome.
What you don't know is that you are approaching a kind of inflection point -- several inflection points actually. Despite the enormous wealth expansion is bringing into the city, you are reaching the point where Rome can't pay for expansion by taxes and do it with volunteers. The adaptations Rome will make to deal with that will fundamentally alter the character of Rome's cherished institutions, and Romans themselves.
My point is that there are limits to the power of experience to predict the future. Sometimes circumstances which have remained unchanged for centuries evaporate overnight. So while our experience since the Industrial Revolution tells us not to assume that technological innovation will result in net job losses, we shouldn't be to quick to jump to the opposite conclusion either. We should always keep an eye peeled for things we have always taken for granted that might not be so certain.
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It's fair to say that efficiency CAN make the economy better, but the benefits of that betterment often don't get distributed well in practice. That uneven distribution is largely why Mr. Trump won. The slightly-Democrat-leaning rust-belt leaned toward Trump this time, bucking the trend, because they've been hit hardest by automation and outsourcing. The distribution problems can be both geographical and by class (since the rich are still getting richer).
This map shows the delta of the voting pattern per last election. The red-shifted areas fall predominantly in the rust-belt. The distribution problem has been an economic stumper of late.
I don't fully believe in Trump's claimed solutions to the rust belt, but he did focus on and popularized the issue better. If you have a back-ache, you'll probably pick the doctor who talks more about backs, even if their solutions seem nebulous.
Table-ized A.I.
Throughout history technology and innovations have solved specific labor problems and opened the way for more relatively unskilled labor to be done. The wheel meant it was possible to carry heavier things and people were free to work on other things. The cotton gin required less work to process cotton, opening more jobs for relatively unskilled work. Same with the printing press, etc.
What we have here is different. Cheap automation, over the next 100 years, will be able to do any work a human can do, but far more cheaply and 24-7-365 (366 on leap years). AI will be able to replace every white collar job, from help desks to engineers to lawyers - and do it far cheaper and 24-7-365.25. They will be able to be trained quickly and efficiently should a new task be desired and the way it's going only a few people will reap thier rewards. Please explain to me how even skilled workers are going to be able to compete with this because soon we will have AI and generic robotic automation, deployed rapidly to novel situations and its like nothing this world has seen before.
" Despite the enormous wealth expansion is bringing into the city, you are reaching the point where Rome can't pay for expansion by taxes and do it with volunteers."
Problem with that logic on just this specific point is that in Rome as with modern economies today taxes don't pay for spending. Its the other way around you have to issue a currency BEFORE you tax it back. Do this over X iterations and as long as issued/spent/created unit of account is greater than what is taxed back your civilisation remains solvent.
In Rome they understood this as in the archaeological sites in Pompeii some of the accounting is preserved. Roman one such example in a book the brief history of money: A governor asking for an expansion of credit tallies or minted coin to employ for more labour resources to expand the city. What it brings into focus is the point: If money is a soft constrain then what are the hard constraints? Eg: how many people, resources that can be brought to bear to make something. Taxation is for subservience and to keep people operating under the empire/country that they live in: sovereignty that's how the British colonised so many places they make people work for some form of legal IOU else they put law enforcement/the army onto you.
Of course they understood they had money problems. What they didn't know was the consequence of their solution to those problems, which was essentially to privatize the army.
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Forget everything we taught you in 101. In the real world, business owners barely know what they are doing and will instead do whatever they think will meet their personal goals. There is no economic law that connects business behavior and rationality or forethought. You can generally bet though that productivity gains will be more likely funneled into owner profit while employment grows as slowly as possible.
Exactly. The Roman empire collapsed a few hundred years later under very similar mechanics to what's happening around the world now. Call it artificial scarcity of money/keystrokes. Rome had many factors that caused its downfall but as soon as you start privatising armies and running the empire under basically austerity forgetting how money works it becomes brittle and unable to respond to challenges.
Even the 'dont panic' automation articles are not comprehensive. They ignore the larger context if you're sitting in an artificial non-optimal domain because there is not full employment + looking at automation and then narrowing it based on what the private sector sees as 'profitable' work (Marx was empirically right about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time). We can be led to believe robots will utterly take all the jobs and miss the causation/loopbacks in the system.
It is unwise to apply historical precedent when the difference may be qualitatively profoundly different.
Robots with AI are not mere machinery, they are much more like slaves. And there were serious problems economically for non-slaves because of competition from slave labor. This was a big deal in the Roman empire.
As usual, the elites owned almost all the slaves---and one reason Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated by the oligarchy was because he favored restrictions on slavery in order to benefit the wages of free Romans.
Now robot AI slaves are unlikely to spontaneously revolt, and a major category of these will of course be armed guards, Unsullied Machines, who will prevent democracy from imposing restrictions on the elite's slavery.
No I don't 'know this', because you just made it up. It's bullshit. Nationally Accredited colleges still accept transfer credits from other accredited colleges (some limits, fairly recent or testing required).
You are thinking of places like 'University of Phoenix'. Which is what I was talking about, if you can't get into a college with academic admission standards, you don't belong in college. Start at a Jr college, their first 2 years of credits transfer too, (but generally not the remedials).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, a lovely chestnut, this history thing.
For example, throughout history, the American housing market never went down. (2007 just called: they want their barm back.)
Like Moore's "law" (not so much in evidence lately), these are not laws but inductive extrapolations.
In particular, the assumption is that you won't run into a motivated reversal.
This would be where an entity—let's say Goldman Sachs—doesn't find a way to cash in on mass populations lulled into treating inductive extrapolations as blue chip gold bullion.
This would be wary you should be.
In The Big Short the two young guys explicitly state that their business model is based on the observation that people prefer sunny thoughts, so they bet on big payoffs when sunny thoughts mushroom cloud (while loosing small when daisies reign).
The movie doesn't have a collar wad at Goldman swivel-face toward the camera to make the same statement, so let me do it here:
Time after time, a capricious, long-dormant tail slams down ruin and wreckage, and afterwards Goldman emerges from their sagacious tail-proof tail-packed den of stout timber iniquity tens of billions of dollars wealthier still.
For my money, you can bet large that Goldman is presently eyeing up the looming robot apocalypse as a convenient compass-spinning cover story for some devious underlying snookery even as we speak.
Now if I could figure out what this angle would be, they'd be making a movie about me, and not those chumps from The Big Short.
But unfortunately, induction interruptus resembles a Romulan bird of prey.
Generally speaking, once seen, twice fried.
Oh oh, look out, another new innovation from California... San Francisco City Supervisor Pushes State Tax On Robots To Slow Automation http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...
If this were true, then a large cataclysm would create more jobs, both from new construction, and by replacing inefficient buildings and energy systems with resilient ones.
Provided people learned from the mistake of building on a flood plain, or siting a nuclear reactor next to a city instead of on an island.
(object lesson: this is happening in Japan, where reactor impacted regions now have solar and wind farms, and in China, where industrial impacted sites now have solar farms, but to date has not happened in the US, other than due to fires in SF and Seattle and other major cities, which caused rebuilding which adressed the primary risk factors (wood in SF in a quake zone, buildings on a flood area in Seattle))
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No ! Companies do not have to hire more employees due to more products being sold. They simply need more automation and also need to get rid of employees as human workers are cost negative. Further, when the company makes more money that have no reason at all to spend or invest it in the US.. In other words the notion of trickle down economics is a sick joke.
If I already own everything I really don't give two shits whether there's anyone to buy it from me. That's how ruling classes work.
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unless you can convince Americans and people in general that taxation without a direct benefit to yourself isn't theft. Note I said 'direct'. Not getting threatened with violence from poor people doesn't count. Most folks would prefer to counter those threats with greater violence if history is any indication.
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The slightly-Democrat-leaning rust-belt leaned toward Trump this time, bucking the trend, because they've been hit hardest by automation and outsourcing.
And, apparently, by compromises in the education system; you had to be a pretty spectacular buffoon to believe that Trump (a lifetime con man) was going to do anything to help The People, the same people that he's been party to helping to fuck over throughout his life.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I see it as more of a gamble: there was a (slim) chance he really did have fantastic negotiating skills to balance trade and bring back factory jobs. Experimentation is part of science. (Although, this particular lab-rat has an Abby Normal brain.)
Table-ized A.I.
I see it as more of a gamble: there was a (slim) chance he really did have fantastic negotiating skills to balance trade and bring back factory jobs.
The problem is that you have to believe in both motive and opportunity. Even if you assume opportunity, what's the motive?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
He has two consistent motivations: 1) ego and 2) xenophobia. Been that way for 4 decades.
Table-ized A.I.
He has two consistent motivations: 1) ego and 2) xenophobia. Been that way for 4 decades.
OK, so which of those things were supposed to motivate him to help people? And also, you forgot greed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
See, that's a not a problem to that logic. The posters point has nothing to do with what you seem to want it to be about which seems to be conservative monetary policy issues and everything to do with just pointing out that one cant predict the future based on the past. Poking holes in the metaphor doesnt mean the point is false.
Basically, you're ignoring the point and running on an unrelated tangent.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Removing minimum wage until that person can barely pay enough to eat in spite of working their number of hours, while not having UBI or a safety net more or less means you are creating a class of indentured or downright enslaved people, and in the end run you STILL have to have a replacement for job as otherwise such people will sooner or later find out that violence is a better solution to quasi slavery. On the contrary I think to avoid that scenario it would be MUCH better to have a high minimum wage, have a QUICK robotization, and then have politics and rich folk confronted with the problem quickly rather than slowly, thus forcing the same end solution (UBI+ safety nets) with far more minimal pains.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
greed could be conceivably considered part of ego. How many times have we heard "the money is just a way to keep score" in one form or another?
When your choice is "continue down the path that is bad for you" and "change direction", people are going to pick change. Even if a bad change is the most likely result.
A glimmer of hope gets more votes than guaranteed darkness.
The new McDonalds ordering terminals seem to make sure the restaurant is FULL all the time of people waiting now. It's more convenient and you confirm your own order, so you know it's not going to be screwed up. (At least the order, who knows about what they make to fill it.)
All this is to say the actual purchase experience is better. So more people go, and the staff seem to have increased in number in the kitchen. (You can see right into the kitchen.)
Data point of one, but it seems at least in this case automation reduced the annoyance with low-wage workers taking your order correctly, and increased staff and volume.
Someone who actually works as a manager for one of these places can probably elaborate.
Those jobs do not last long enough to make an entire economy. Also they are far too few disasters, especially if you actually do learn from them.
He's been complaining about China's (alleged) trade barriers since at least late 1980's. He claimed he tried to do business in China and encountered tons of red tape put up by the Chinese gov't.
Thus, his motivation to "fix" China may be a combination of greed and xenophobia. (Get even with "those darn foreigners".)
Table-ized A.I.
By your logic, we would never have made it out of the 19th century. After all, the light bulb put thousands of candle-makers out of work. But it also allowed us to work at night, and in climate-controlled buildings where productivity improved across the board. Making new businesses and jobs possible that weren't practical before.
Light bulb experts were needed. Who soon specialized into incandescent, fluorescent, halogen, sodium vapor, and LED specialists. As each sub-industry grew, each needed new experts in a hundred different stages of production for each type of bulb. From mining raw materials, to refining, to design and production of the components, to delivery and sale of the final products.
If our civilization is to survive and expand into space, for instance, then we need thousands of workers who don't yet exist. We need space engineers, janitors, architects, pilots, miners, construction workers, etc. Where do you think they'll come from if current population trends continue?
Answer: They'll come from the labor freed up by automating the transportation of consumer goods, food service, etc. That's not a bad thing, it's an improvement in the use of human time for more productive ends.
Unless your political philosophy promotes the idea that humans should just sit on their rear and suck the government's teat idle every time adversity strikes. Or you economic philosophy favors over-specialization of a company's economy in a way that excludes those with few tech skills, for instance.
The candidate that seems to at least understand a voter's problems will always beat one that either ignores them, or is seen as actively participating in making them worse.
THAT is why Trump won.
Look to the DNC and ask why they couldn't come up with (or allow through) a better candidate than the one their insiders chose. The problem wasn't Trump, it was the morons that Trump was running against. Find better candidates.
The Trump alternative was also a liar, much greedier, and also a much more blatant law breaker.
You can't compare Trump to a perfect opponent, because he only faced a series of incompetent opponents on both sides.
The Trump alternative was also a liar,
Sure.
much greedier,
Poppycock.
and also a much more blatant law breaker.
Bollocks.
You can't compare Trump to a perfect opponent, because he only faced a series of incompetent opponents on both sides.
Straw man.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When your choice is "continue down the path that is bad for you" and "change direction", people are going to pick change. Even if a bad change is the most likely result.
No, see, this is the very disconnect. Those are not the choices. Both choices were "continue down the path that is bad for you". People who believed that Trump was somehow different, a "non-establishment" candidate are fucking dumbfuck yokels. This is your cue to cry about how those people are alienated by being told they're being dumbfucks, but the fact is, they're being dumbfucks and we've already tried reasoning with them. It just doesn't work. Trump has consistently demonstrated throughout his life that not only doesn't he give a fuck about literally anyone else except maybe his children (as a reflection of himself, of course) but that he is willing to tell any amount of lies in order to achieve his personal aggrandizement. Further, people who ignored Trump's actions and voted for him on the basis of his words are not just morons but also shitheels, because his words were terrible. He proudly announced that he would do all manner of illegal things, and showed the world just what kind of person he was repeatedly by calling for violence against his detractors, and anyone who voted for him voted for him on that basis. They trusted that he would at least try to do the things he said he would do, things that were both illegal and immoral, and you don't get to vote for someone on that basis without being labeled as deplorable.
TL;DR: Trump supporters are crying so hard about being told that they fucked up that they won't hear that they fucked up; it's a defense mechanism powered by cognitive dissonance that guarantees that they will continue to vote against their own interests right up until they die.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Campaign message != reality.
People usually vote based on campaign message. After all, that's the entire point of having a campaign.
Also, I'm not so sure you want to open the Pandora's box of truthfulness, narcissism, and public versus private positions when it comes to the two major general election options.
Also, I'm not so sure you want to open the Pandora's box of truthfulness, narcissism, and public versus private positions when it comes to the two major general election options.
There's nothing good in the bottom of that box for either candidate, that's my whole point. Clinton was the devil you knew, Trump was the chaos candidate. Trump voters voted for disruption, and we all got it. They failed to consider the basic question you have to ask yourself when you're asking for change: What do you want? It actually doesn't matter what people want, because Trump won't give it to them. That Clinton wouldn't either is not a valid reason to vote for disruption of the system without any notion of actually improving it.
And therein lies the major disconnect with the poor end of Trump's power base; they actually think they'd be better off without government, so they're always happy to tear the system down without regard for the consequences, or a plan for recovery (let alone improvement.) But they'd be fucked sideways in a hot second without all the trappings of modern civilization.
This is why education is so important, and why right-wing fascists are always trying to compromise it. If they can make their bullshit believable by any means, they can baffle enough of the populace to keep confusing the issues so that we don't unite against their rapine ways. If that means compromising education, well then so be it. Surely private schools can spit out enough geniuses to keep America rolling? Except they never actually have been able to, we've always had to hire in a huge percentage of our talent.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That Clinton wouldn't either is not a valid reason to vote for disruption of the system without any notion of actually improving it.
Caveat: Not a Trump voter.
The point was to disrupt the system. The parties had stopped giving good candidates a while ago, and were not responsive to complaints about this situation. Instead, the parties relied on "but the other candidate is worse!".
The people voting for Trump who were not racist/sexist/just assholes were attempting to impose some consequences on the parties for this lack of responsiveness.
And therein lies the major disconnect with the poor end of Trump's power base; they actually think they'd be better off without government, so they're always happy to tear the system down without regard for the consequences, or a plan for recovery (let alone improvement.) But they'd be fucked sideways in a hot second without all the trappings of modern civilization.
Personally, I file those under "just assholes" above. They will always vote for the Republican, so they're moot when it comes to convincing them to vote for someone else or stay home.
Which leads us to the people who stayed home or protest-voted. They are the voters who could have possibly stopped Trump. But when given the choice of stable continued decline or chaos, they chose chaos. Because there's a chance chaos will result in waking up one of the parties.
And education doesn't matter with that calculation. No matter how many degrees you have, a 1% chance is still greater than zero chance.
For these voters who stayed home or protest-voted, the 2016 election was about 2020. From their perspective, the 2016 election had been lost long before November. So most of them stayed home.
Now, as to your comment that education is important bit... do note that both educated and uneducated people can be found on both sides.
Right, trump voters had median incomes 10k higher than clinton voters. But Trump's most vocal supporters typically demonstrate their lack of education in every comment, tweet, and blog post.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
much greedier,
Poppycock.
Clinton Foundation: Acceptance of "donations" from foreign nationals while Secretary of State; despite a written agreement with Obama not to do so. Foundation itself gives less than 10% of what it takes in to charities. The rest is used for the personal expenses of the Clintons. Various laws about State Department email regulations and safe data handling bypassed in order to deliberately hide incriminating evidence.
Trump Foundation: Got caught using foundation funds to buy a piece of artwork for a donor. Fault was admitted, and fine was paid in full.
However greedy Trump is (and remember he's not taking a salary right now), Hillary is at least 10-20x worse. It's not just her greed, but how petty and unnecessary so much of it is. She'll lie to bag $500 or make off with White House property as much as she will for $350,000 "speeches" to Goldman Sachs.
and also a much more blatant law breaker.
Bollocks.
That's nothing but willful ignorance on your part.
You can't compare Trump to a perfect opponent, because he only faced a series of incompetent opponents on both sides.
Straw man.
Reality.
Trump sucks, but nobody better stood up on the Republican side, or was allowed through the primary on the Democrat side. If you think Hillary was in any way better, then you're ignoring the reality of her criminal history, her rank incompetence as SecState (Obama had to constantly work around her), and the fact that she was beholden to banksters and foreign interests instead of the needs of the USA. Trump, for all of his many faults, is only beholden to his own aims and those who voted for him.