from 2008. There where promotions that got delayed and at least one that just plain went poof. I couldn't get far enough ahead career wise to get ahead of the cost of my kid's college, so any gains I made in the 8 years immediately got eaten up by that. By the time she graduates and the debt I'm taking on (not much for scholarships & 2008 wiped out my savings, and there's limits to how much she can borrow) It'll be time to desperately save for 'retirement' (e.g. when I'm laid off in my 60s and nobody'll hire me thanks to age discrimination).
So yeah, I'm not going much of anywhere, and I probably never will. The money's just not there.
but also a push over. There's stories of him pushing Single Payer Healthcare in his Admin until he was (almost effortlessly) talked out of it. Trump just want two things: first to be rich and second to be liked. He doesn't really care how he gets it.
This also means that a national 5G network will get shut down for the same reason Single Payer did. Pity we couldn't have got Trump to run as a left wing Democrat.
but they had to tell the working stiffs something while they outsourced their jobs. You can't just run stories like "All your jobs are going to China and you're going to be impoverished". People would see it coming if you did and stop you. So you run stories about how people need to retrain (for skills that were beyond them when they were half their age and for jobs that don't exist anyway).
There was just a story about a bunch of American kids training to be coal miners. Folks were aghast, because the coal industry's dead here and their job prospects after all that training would be slim. People complained the kids were Luddites and fools.
One of the left wing rags (I forget which one) interviewed one of the kids. He didn't want to leave his family or the town he was born in; and even if he did there probably wasn't enough money to move. Sure he could train for another career, but there were no jobs for those careers. So he did the only thing he could do: train for a life in the mines and hope he's one of the lucky ones that gets a job. The moral? The world works the way it works, not the way you think it works.
of constant productivity increases being told 'raises will come' rings hollow. GDP or not we'd recovered from the 2008 crash in less than 2 years. Wages dropped like a rock then as everybody (except CEOs) took paycuts. Every day I turn on the news and the stock market's hitting records but boo-hoo-hoo the GDP means we can't raise wages, meanwhile I read stuff like this
We're in full trickle down mode (minus the trickle down, which never happens, just ask Kansas). This is what happens when you give all the money to 1% of the country. GDP _can't_ grow because all the capital is tied up in offshore bank accounts. If you let them the Aristocracy will roll us back to another Dark Age, not out of spite, but because they'll claim all the money for themselves and our entire economy will grind to a halt.
I'll remind you that the best times in American Economic history were when we had a 90% top marginal rate.
Volkswagen has admitted to funding (and subsequently cheating on) animal testing to prove the relative safety of diesel exhaust fumes...
emphasis added by me. We're all talking about the poor monkeys and I haven't seen one headline with "Volkswagen cheated on diesel safety tests". Seriously, Monkeys are cute and all, but shouldn't the bigger story be that they falsified research showing diesel fumes were safe?
good to see it making the issue into the public consciousness. This has been pointed out a few times in these automation threads but it wasn't all sunshine and kittens when the first two industrial revolutions came. It took decades for other tech to catch up and employ people. During those decades there was mass unemployment, poverty and wars. We're about to do the same thing. Sure, in 80 years it might be all good, but you and me are going to live through some (maybe all) of those 80 years. It would be nice if we learned something from the last 2 revolutions and did something about it.
And no, retraining doesn't help. It's no good retraining for scarce jobs you know.
they fire redundant staff. Sometimes even if the staff isn't redundant they lay people off to recover the costs associated with the merger and make the survivors work harder. If you've never experienced this first hand you are either very young or very lucky.
Unemployment might not be as low as the stats make it look. If it really was 4% we should be seeing much, much stronger upward momentum on wages. So far it's barely keeping pace with inflation. Walmart's seems higher because they've been putting off pay raises for 7 or 8 years.
odds are those were planned well in advance (I suppose it's possible you're a C level employee, in which case bully for you). I haven't heard a peep about wage increases except from Walmart, and aside from Fox News all the analysts agree those wage increases were because the economy's recovered enough they have to pay more to keep workers, nothing to do with the tax cuts.
Meanwhile the mergers and acquisitions are putting everybody's jobs at risk. After all, what's the first thing a company does after a M&A?
are on track to retire. So you're not making a good case. My dad contributed to his 401k for years and year. His 'retirement' was 2008. You can imagine how well that went.
The problem isn't how much the rich consumes, it's how little. They can't drive an economy by themselves. But they want the power to get anything they want whenever they want it and for nothing in return (unless you count being born rich something). The way to do this is to exploit scarcity. You do as they say because they control food, water, shelter, medicine. They dole out the best to their thugs and you do as they say because either your one of those thugs or you're afraid of those thugs.
Above all they don't want people by and large to have enough to live comfortably because if that ever happens then they lose most of their power. You don't listen to Bill Gates or the Koch Bros. because they're smart. You do it because they're rich, you're hoping to get some of that wealth, and besides if you were ever a threat to them they'd crush you like a gnat.
killing TV entirely deprives your kid of a shared experience with their peers. Kids do 'water cooler' talk same as adults do, they just do it on the playground instead. Shared experiences are a big part of how people socialize. I'm not saying they should share 8 hours of TV a day but don't throw it out entirely.
of the owner class. Being able to live comfortably without risk off the things you own does. You can't just buy a robot, you have to know how to use it or hire people who do. That means either a) you're a skilled engineer, bully for you or b) you own enough robots that skilled engineers will work for you despite the fact that you yourself have no skills (and no, owning things doesn't count).
Said it before, say it again, when it comes to class warfare the best kind of war is one where the other side doesn't know they're fighting.
Not needing humans to toil is only a good thing if we have some mechanism to distribute the productivity increases besides "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Otherwise what we're gonna see if the rich turn their wealth into power and do terrible things to keep it. This isn't idle speculation. I've got 3000+ years of human history backing me up. You've got about 70 years post WWII of a few countries not being complete dicks to their working class and even then first chance they owner class got they shipped the jobs overseas where they could go back to being awful. History is on my side here; though that's cold comfort.
it's a fact that as people age they lose mental facilities. It's called "Age related cognitive decline' and there's a lot of effort going into studying it. Thing is, most folks think about people getting older and jump straight to Grandpa forgetting where his keys are style Alzheimers. But there's a huge range in the amount of decline. Grandpa might know where his keys and he might know the different between reality and fantasy on a moment to moment basis, but his critical thinking skills might have atrophied to the point where he has trouble questioning his biases.
If the devil engages in a multi-billion dollar campaign designed to call into question the dangers of cigarette smoking while targeting mentally vulnerable people for said campaign then, yes. Yes you can.
and nobody wants to pay for it. We're much more likely to keep using the (already bought & paid for) roads from the 60s and 70s. Nice idea though. Wish there was political will for it.
These companies already have complex logistics software. Removing the drive will neither increase or decrease the demand for it. It already exists and is in use. You're not going to need more computing power for it either. It's basically a solved problem. The limits are the drivers, not the software that pushes them around.
Speaking of the hospitality industry, I swear everytime I think about the upcoming driverless vehicle revolution I'm reminded of a new group of folks who are going to lose their jobs: Truck stop employees. After all, no drivers, no truck stops. It'll hit rural communities hard. A lot of them get by on that traffic....
you're preoccupied with where the money comes _from_. The ruling class, OTOH, is preoccupied with where it goes _to_.
You've figured out that if we automate all the jobs away the entire economy will grind to a halt. Good job. I mean it. That's the first step. But you still think the ruling class is just like the working class, e.g. that they depend on the economy for their livelihood. This is incorrect. The ruling class makes their living by _owning_ things. They don't need a functional economy to do well.
The ruling class can own everything and rent it out to what remains of the working class. This is how things were done for centuries. They used a smattering of well fed knights to keep the peasants in line. One well fed knight was a match for a dozen or more peasants because the peasants were weak from being underfed. If that balance was tipped from time to time than a caste system would divide the working class and prevent them from over throwing the ruling class.
It took two world wars for the working class to claw a decent living in about 1/3 of the world. We only got it because our numbers were decimated and there weren't enough workers, and because the wars made brothers of us all and weakened the caste systems. Thanks to nukes and globalization that's probably not going to happen again. We're heading for a new dark age (or gilded age, if you prefer). Of complete, total monopolization of wealth by.1% of the population. We can stop it, but not while we're busy calling each other leeches while the aristocracy claims everything for themselves.
One last thing, I'm sure I haven't changed your mind. I'm mostly just venting. But to anyone reading this who sees through the systems used to contain and oppress the working class, any ideas how to convince this AC before it's too late?
of miners in most countries? Scary stuff even today. Same thing for indentured servants. It'll mean slavery, and slaves haven't been treated well at the best of times. Even the Romans only treated them OK when the population of slaves got too big to oppress, and the Romans didn't have automatic weapons and aerial drones. You don't need very many cooks or whores either. There's a limit to how much a billionaire can eat and screw.
That old 'Idle hands are the Devil's plaything' is bullshit. Give most folks beer and football and they're set. Give the rest video games and you're good. Bread & Circuses and whatnot. The problem's going to be when the ruling class have enough firepower that they don't need to bother with the Bread & Circuses. The question is are we gonna let them. As far as I can tell all signs point to yes.
The rich aren't going to share the proceeds from all this increased productivity. They'll pocket it for themselves. And they won't need consumers if robots make all the stuff they want. They'll need a few servants for appearances sake, a few engineers to keep things running and a few doctors to treat their illnesses. That's maybe 10% of the population. Then they'll pit the other 90% of the population against each other to see who gets to join that 10% servant class.
People like to focus on the improved standard of living the industrial revolution brought us and forget about the 40-80 or so years of unemployment, chaos and social strife (the 'Gilded Age') that followed the last two industrial revolutions before other technologies caught up and employed the people who were put out of work.
they've got no overhead so they're really cutting into the cost of hiring an assassin. Sure I can call a hit out on somebody for a fiver, but your getting an untrained amateur instead of a licensed & trained murderer. The other day a 'ninja' showed up to kill me wearing black pajamas and what looked like a plastic sword. I gave him one star.
on the itty bitty bars at the top of my window on my 1080p monitor. I don't want clicking 'new tab' to feel like sniping somebody from across a map. I do, however, want hierarchical menus (File, Edit, View) that follow a consistent pattern making it easy to find things. Whoever came up with the Ribbon should be launched into space and fired out of an airlock.
Slashdot Mirror
from 2008. There where promotions that got delayed and at least one that just plain went poof. I couldn't get far enough ahead career wise to get ahead of the cost of my kid's college, so any gains I made in the 8 years immediately got eaten up by that. By the time she graduates and the debt I'm taking on (not much for scholarships & 2008 wiped out my savings, and there's limits to how much she can borrow) It'll be time to desperately save for 'retirement' (e.g. when I'm laid off in my 60s and nobody'll hire me thanks to age discrimination).
So yeah, I'm not going much of anywhere, and I probably never will. The money's just not there.
but also a push over. There's stories of him pushing Single Payer Healthcare in his Admin until he was (almost effortlessly) talked out of it. Trump just want two things: first to be rich and second to be liked. He doesn't really care how he gets it.
This also means that a national 5G network will get shut down for the same reason Single Payer did. Pity we couldn't have got Trump to run as a left wing Democrat.
but they had to tell the working stiffs something while they outsourced their jobs. You can't just run stories like "All your jobs are going to China and you're going to be impoverished". People would see it coming if you did and stop you. So you run stories about how people need to retrain (for skills that were beyond them when they were half their age and for jobs that don't exist anyway).
There was just a story about a bunch of American kids training to be coal miners. Folks were aghast, because the coal industry's dead here and their job prospects after all that training would be slim. People complained the kids were Luddites and fools.
One of the left wing rags (I forget which one) interviewed one of the kids. He didn't want to leave his family or the town he was born in; and even if he did there probably wasn't enough money to move. Sure he could train for another career, but there were no jobs for those careers. So he did the only thing he could do: train for a life in the mines and hope he's one of the lucky ones that gets a job. The moral? The world works the way it works, not the way you think it works.
of constant productivity increases being told 'raises will come' rings hollow. GDP or not we'd recovered from the 2008 crash in less than 2 years. Wages dropped like a rock then as everybody (except CEOs) took paycuts. Every day I turn on the news and the stock market's hitting records but boo-hoo-hoo the GDP means we can't raise wages, meanwhile I read stuff like this
We're in full trickle down mode (minus the trickle down, which never happens, just ask Kansas). This is what happens when you give all the money to 1% of the country. GDP _can't_ grow because all the capital is tied up in offshore bank accounts. If you let them the Aristocracy will roll us back to another Dark Age, not out of spite, but because they'll claim all the money for themselves and our entire economy will grind to a halt.
I'll remind you that the best times in American Economic history were when we had a 90% top marginal rate.
emphasis added by me. We're all talking about the poor monkeys and I haven't seen one headline with "Volkswagen cheated on diesel safety tests". Seriously, Monkeys are cute and all, but shouldn't the bigger story be that they falsified research showing diesel fumes were safe?
The theory is the game glitched.
he can't do it anymore. There are feats of videogame prowess that my younger self could do that our out of reach today, and I'm only 40.
good to see it making the issue into the public consciousness. This has been pointed out a few times in these automation threads but it wasn't all sunshine and kittens when the first two industrial revolutions came. It took decades for other tech to catch up and employ people. During those decades there was mass unemployment, poverty and wars. We're about to do the same thing. Sure, in 80 years it might be all good, but you and me are going to live through some (maybe all) of those 80 years. It would be nice if we learned something from the last 2 revolutions and did something about it.
And no, retraining doesn't help. It's no good retraining for scarce jobs you know.
they fire redundant staff. Sometimes even if the staff isn't redundant they lay people off to recover the costs associated with the merger and make the survivors work harder. If you've never experienced this first hand you are either very young or very lucky.
Unemployment might not be as low as the stats make it look. If it really was 4% we should be seeing much, much stronger upward momentum on wages. So far it's barely keeping pace with inflation. Walmart's seems higher because they've been putting off pay raises for 7 or 8 years.
before the inevitable crash. Hope you got somebody on the inside who lets you know when. Like these guys do.
odds are those were planned well in advance (I suppose it's possible you're a C level employee, in which case bully for you). I haven't heard a peep about wage increases except from Walmart, and aside from Fox News all the analysts agree those wage increases were because the economy's recovered enough they have to pay more to keep workers, nothing to do with the tax cuts.
Meanwhile the mergers and acquisitions are putting everybody's jobs at risk. After all, what's the first thing a company does after a M&A?
are on track to retire. So you're not making a good case. My dad contributed to his 401k for years and year. His 'retirement' was 2008. You can imagine how well that went.
The problem isn't how much the rich consumes, it's how little. They can't drive an economy by themselves. But they want the power to get anything they want whenever they want it and for nothing in return (unless you count being born rich something). The way to do this is to exploit scarcity. You do as they say because they control food, water, shelter, medicine. They dole out the best to their thugs and you do as they say because either your one of those thugs or you're afraid of those thugs.
Above all they don't want people by and large to have enough to live comfortably because if that ever happens then they lose most of their power. You don't listen to Bill Gates or the Koch Bros. because they're smart. You do it because they're rich, you're hoping to get some of that wealth, and besides if you were ever a threat to them they'd crush you like a gnat.
Following the big tax cut most CEOs when asked said they'd spend the money on mergers and acquisitions. Expect to see more of these..
protecting your privacy? At least with the Government I can have public oversight committees & freedom of information requests.
killing TV entirely deprives your kid of a shared experience with their peers. Kids do 'water cooler' talk same as adults do, they just do it on the playground instead. Shared experiences are a big part of how people socialize. I'm not saying they should share 8 hours of TV a day but don't throw it out entirely.
of the owner class. Being able to live comfortably without risk off the things you own does. You can't just buy a robot, you have to know how to use it or hire people who do. That means either a) you're a skilled engineer, bully for you or b) you own enough robots that skilled engineers will work for you despite the fact that you yourself have no skills (and no, owning things doesn't count).
Said it before, say it again, when it comes to class warfare the best kind of war is one where the other side doesn't know they're fighting.
Not needing humans to toil is only a good thing if we have some mechanism to distribute the productivity increases besides "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Otherwise what we're gonna see if the rich turn their wealth into power and do terrible things to keep it. This isn't idle speculation. I've got 3000+ years of human history backing me up. You've got about 70 years post WWII of a few countries not being complete dicks to their working class and even then first chance they owner class got they shipped the jobs overseas where they could go back to being awful. History is on my side here; though that's cold comfort.
it's a fact that as people age they lose mental facilities. It's called "Age related cognitive decline' and there's a lot of effort going into studying it. Thing is, most folks think about people getting older and jump straight to Grandpa forgetting where his keys are style Alzheimers. But there's a huge range in the amount of decline. Grandpa might know where his keys and he might know the different between reality and fantasy on a moment to moment basis, but his critical thinking skills might have atrophied to the point where he has trouble questioning his biases.
If the devil engages in a multi-billion dollar campaign designed to call into question the dangers of cigarette smoking while targeting mentally vulnerable people for said campaign then, yes. Yes you can.
and nobody wants to pay for it. We're much more likely to keep using the (already bought & paid for) roads from the 60s and 70s. Nice idea though. Wish there was political will for it.
These companies already have complex logistics software. Removing the drive will neither increase or decrease the demand for it. It already exists and is in use. You're not going to need more computing power for it either. It's basically a solved problem. The limits are the drivers, not the software that pushes them around.
Speaking of the hospitality industry, I swear everytime I think about the upcoming driverless vehicle revolution I'm reminded of a new group of folks who are going to lose their jobs: Truck stop employees. After all, no drivers, no truck stops. It'll hit rural communities hard. A lot of them get by on that traffic....
you're preoccupied with where the money comes _from_. The ruling class, OTOH, is preoccupied with where it goes _to_.
.1% of the population. We can stop it, but not while we're busy calling each other leeches while the aristocracy claims everything for themselves.
You've figured out that if we automate all the jobs away the entire economy will grind to a halt. Good job. I mean it. That's the first step. But you still think the ruling class is just like the working class, e.g. that they depend on the economy for their livelihood. This is incorrect. The ruling class makes their living by _owning_ things. They don't need a functional economy to do well.
The ruling class can own everything and rent it out to what remains of the working class. This is how things were done for centuries. They used a smattering of well fed knights to keep the peasants in line. One well fed knight was a match for a dozen or more peasants because the peasants were weak from being underfed. If that balance was tipped from time to time than a caste system would divide the working class and prevent them from over throwing the ruling class.
It took two world wars for the working class to claw a decent living in about 1/3 of the world. We only got it because our numbers were decimated and there weren't enough workers, and because the wars made brothers of us all and weakened the caste systems. Thanks to nukes and globalization that's probably not going to happen again. We're heading for a new dark age (or gilded age, if you prefer). Of complete, total monopolization of wealth by
One last thing, I'm sure I haven't changed your mind. I'm mostly just venting. But to anyone reading this who sees through the systems used to contain and oppress the working class, any ideas how to convince this AC before it's too late?
of miners in most countries? Scary stuff even today. Same thing for indentured servants. It'll mean slavery, and slaves haven't been treated well at the best of times. Even the Romans only treated them OK when the population of slaves got too big to oppress, and the Romans didn't have automatic weapons and aerial drones. You don't need very many cooks or whores either. There's a limit to how much a billionaire can eat and screw.
That old 'Idle hands are the Devil's plaything' is bullshit. Give most folks beer and football and they're set. Give the rest video games and you're good. Bread & Circuses and whatnot. The problem's going to be when the ruling class have enough firepower that they don't need to bother with the Bread & Circuses. The question is are we gonna let them. As far as I can tell all signs point to yes.
The rich aren't going to share the proceeds from all this increased productivity. They'll pocket it for themselves. And they won't need consumers if robots make all the stuff they want. They'll need a few servants for appearances sake, a few engineers to keep things running and a few doctors to treat their illnesses. That's maybe 10% of the population. Then they'll pit the other 90% of the population against each other to see who gets to join that 10% servant class.
People like to focus on the improved standard of living the industrial revolution brought us and forget about the 40-80 or so years of unemployment, chaos and social strife (the 'Gilded Age') that followed the last two industrial revolutions before other technologies caught up and employed the people who were put out of work.
they've got no overhead so they're really cutting into the cost of hiring an assassin. Sure I can call a hit out on somebody for a fiver, but your getting an untrained amateur instead of a licensed & trained murderer. The other day a 'ninja' showed up to kill me wearing black pajamas and what looked like a plastic sword. I gave him one star.
on the itty bitty bars at the top of my window on my 1080p monitor. I don't want clicking 'new tab' to feel like sniping somebody from across a map. I do, however, want hierarchical menus (File, Edit, View) that follow a consistent pattern making it easy to find things. Whoever came up with the Ribbon should be launched into space and fired out of an airlock.