I think a lot of people have a fairly exaggerated view of what the President of the United States can do. Everything I'm reading here suggests there's no implied threat, but rather that Apple will receive vast amounts of taxpayer-funded largess, in the form of big tax breaks. Considering that manufacturing is more and more automated all the time, even if Apple bites, I'm still not exactly clear what benefit any of this will have for the average American worker. None of them would work for the wages that someone in China would, but no American consumer is going to pay ten times what they pay now for an iPhone, so it really does amount to the US government blowing a hole in its own finances for a marginally better position as per manufacturing.
Most states have some sort of faithless elector law. Whatever the Founding Fathers' vision for the EC, Walter Bagehot called it right nearly 150 years ago:
"Washington and his fellow-politicians contrived an electoral college, to be composed (as was hoped) of the wisest people in the nation, which, after due deliberation, was to choose for President the wisest man in the nation. But that college is a sham; it has no independence and no life. No one knows, or cares to know, who its members are. They never discuss, and never deliberate."
He wants to defund NASA's climate monitoring department, so I have yet to be convinced that even if he admits a "connection" that he fully understands the only way you study that connection is by gathering data, and that NASA is in a unique position to do just that.
In other words, we are the wealthiest people that have ever lived, and yet we're miserable because we squander that wealth and then struggle to pay for it.
How many ditch diggers were put out of work by steam shovels? How many were put out of work by bulldozers and backhoes? By your logic, either mechanization should have been outlawed or people should have continued to be employed digging ditches nobody wanted.
Not every ditch digger is going to be a computer programmer, but the fact is we need a LOT less ditch diggers now than we did 100 years ago, and 100 years ago they needed a lot less ditch diggers than they did 200 years ago. At the end of the day, my suspicion is that we will have to use UBI to guarantee that those who cannot by any reasonable measure find sustainable employment are not left starving, but that's just my view. One thing is certain, there are lots of occupations that are as threatened as the proverbial ditchdiggers, and that is only going to pick up the pace over the next few decades. Raw resource extraction, manufacturing, and even distribution are increasingly automated, and as someone pointed out, even truck drivers could find themselves out of work in a couple of decades with much long haul trucking being done by driverless vehicles. So you have observed a problem, but I don't think you quite grasp that the solution isn't just to keep paying people to do jobs that people no longer need to do.
Actually that's the scary part. It's one thing when Freddie Kruger is trying to kill you and eat your soul, it's quite another when he starts giving you solid stock tips.
And how will raising tariffs, leading to other nations raising tariffs as well, aid in full time employment.
And yes, for chrissakes, lots of people may have to learn new skill sets. And it's hardly the first time it happened. During the Industrial Revolution and the steady mechanization of agriculture, huge portions of the populations of many industrializing countries quite literally picked up and left their traditional work. Is there some reason you think the youngest Baby Boomers and the Gen Xers should be immune from these forces.
Do you really seriously imagine that economic protectionism is going to make all the factories come back and start employing all the people that don't work there any more? Do you understand that even in the jurisdictions like China where that manufacturing has now gone to, that those workers are probably within a decade or two of being turned out on the street.
Manufacturing and the low skilled high paying jobs that it provided over the last seventy or eighty years is done, and trying to artificially bring that kind of manufacturing back to life would be exactly like how the Soviets used to keep factories open for no other reason than to create employment. It isn't economically sustainable, and it's not like the rest of the world is so small that a protectionist and isolationist US wouldn't just force them to find a way around the US.
You're living in a naive fantasy land where somehow the 1950s can be resurrected and made real again. Somebody here was even talking about how even if Trump deregulates coal, mining companies are pushing so heavily towards automation that it wouldn't likely make very much of a difference at all in employment levels in those coal production areas.
Or to put this bluntly and simply, those particularly parties are over, and perhaps it's time for political leaders to stop lying to their voters, and start telling them straight up "It's time to move on." In a hundred years, hell probably in thirty years, the idea that manufacturing will be a large scale employer will be laughed at as much as someone asserting that 19th century governments should have continued promoting building wooden ships.
And again, we see people who think trade is a zero sum game, which it is not. Just because there aren't as many low skilled manufacturing jobs available, doesn't mean there are no jobs.
The thing is that there are things that could be done. Putting money into retraining or relocation programs would be at the top of my list. The fact is that many of the very people who have been idled are the children, grandchildren or even great-grandchildren of people who moved to the area at the height of manufacturing in the area, so if these peoples' forebears could pick up stakes from where ever they were from and move to places like Ohio, then perhaps they should take a lesson from them.
But promising to reopen shuttered factories, or throwing large amounts of infrastructure into areas that simply do not have the long term economic viability is literally nothing more than building bridges to nowhere. Sometimes industrial areas do scale back. My favorite example is the Maritime Provinces in Canada, that, during the 17th and 18th century, grew prosperous on the shipbuilding industry, but by the 19th century, as shipbuilding technology was transitioning. Other parts of the British Empire could build better ships for cheaper, and the region went into a decline that some might argue continues to this very day.
He's even waffling on the Paris deal, so it's quite possible that many of the people that supported him may find he's not as keen to fulfill all his campaign promises as they hoped.
No, you can't really argue with someone who will just basically say "I don't want to hear what you say, let's try this insane thing because it might work." At the same time, who are they going to go to when Trump inevitably fails, and in some cases, if he actually carries out many of his promises, actually makes things worse? That's what scares me. If Trump fails, then where do they turn, a real Nazi?
That's my view completely. Western economies are in many transition, and really, have been for a while. If I blame governments for anything, it's for not better preparing workers in these areas for the decline, and for the what they will do in the post-decline. The fact is that the pace of automation has been picking up for several decades now, and the vision of many industries has been to minimize the number of workers on the floor. In some cases, like Japan, this has as much to do with a shrinking population and a lack of actual workers, but in other jurisdictions, it is really about profitability. Even Foxxcon is retooling in China, with more automation, which means all those Asians that the Trump squad believe stole their jobs will soon be on the unemployment line themselves.
I grew up and still live in a manufacturing town in British Columbia, here it's forestry. When my father got his job at a sawmill in the late 1960s, the mill itself employed something like 700-900 people. When the first major retooling came in the late 1970s, with the then state of the art computers, there were significant job losses. The recession of the early 1980s saw those numbers drop due to economic circumstances, and by the time the economy recovered, most of the lost jobs never came back. Now, forty years after the first automation systems were brought in, the mill has less than one hundred full time employees (I think it's below 80 now), and each iteration brings that number down. In my town, the only real solution has been a drop in population, which is normal.
In reality, the town's population had grown massively during the 1940s as the forest industry became a major employer, but of course for many of the workers in their 50s, who came in to the industry at the cusp of the changes, they don't see the big picture, that they came in at the end of a manufacturing bubble, and they do the same thing up here in Canada that Trump's supporters do in the States, just lash out at the immigrants and the Asians. They want to hear politicians that will tell them nice fantasies about how the elites are out to get them, because that's better than facing the fact that, at the end of the day, we all have to bear responsibility for our life choices, and any of us who found good pay in what amounts to a relatively low skill position, well, that was lucky, but the luck has run out, and no amount of posturing by politicians will make those jobs come back.
Slashdot Mirror
The laws of physics are not bound by political ideology.
Translation: I'm a coward who doesn't want to hear bad news
Exactly. There's nothing innovative about a corporate tax rate race to the bottom.
I think a lot of people have a fairly exaggerated view of what the President of the United States can do. Everything I'm reading here suggests there's no implied threat, but rather that Apple will receive vast amounts of taxpayer-funded largess, in the form of big tax breaks. Considering that manufacturing is more and more automated all the time, even if Apple bites, I'm still not exactly clear what benefit any of this will have for the average American worker. None of them would work for the wages that someone in China would, but no American consumer is going to pay ten times what they pay now for an iPhone, so it really does amount to the US government blowing a hole in its own finances for a marginally better position as per manufacturing.
In other words, Cook, like any CEO, will happily build factories in the US, providing the US government subsidizes them.
Let's be pretty clear here. It will be American robots manufacturing iPhones, instead of Asian ones.
If the factories reopen, they will only employ a fraction of their traditional work force. You're living in a fantasy.
Most states have some sort of faithless elector law. Whatever the Founding Fathers' vision for the EC, Walter Bagehot called it right nearly 150 years ago:
Walter Bagehot - The English Constitution
Look at Trump's cabinet picks. It looks to me like the Establishment is alive and well.
He wants to defund NASA's climate monitoring department, so I have yet to be convinced that even if he admits a "connection" that he fully understands the only way you study that connection is by gathering data, and that NASA is in a unique position to do just that.
In other words, we are the wealthiest people that have ever lived, and yet we're miserable because we squander that wealth and then struggle to pay for it.
How many ditch diggers were put out of work by steam shovels? How many were put out of work by bulldozers and backhoes? By your logic, either mechanization should have been outlawed or people should have continued to be employed digging ditches nobody wanted.
Not every ditch digger is going to be a computer programmer, but the fact is we need a LOT less ditch diggers now than we did 100 years ago, and 100 years ago they needed a lot less ditch diggers than they did 200 years ago. At the end of the day, my suspicion is that we will have to use UBI to guarantee that those who cannot by any reasonable measure find sustainable employment are not left starving, but that's just my view. One thing is certain, there are lots of occupations that are as threatened as the proverbial ditchdiggers, and that is only going to pick up the pace over the next few decades. Raw resource extraction, manufacturing, and even distribution are increasingly automated, and as someone pointed out, even truck drivers could find themselves out of work in a couple of decades with much long haul trucking being done by driverless vehicles. So you have observed a problem, but I don't think you quite grasp that the solution isn't just to keep paying people to do jobs that people no longer need to do.
Actually that's the scary part. It's one thing when Freddie Kruger is trying to kill you and eat your soul, it's quite another when he starts giving you solid stock tips.
The Rust Belt didnt fade because of vaginas.
And how will raising tariffs, leading to other nations raising tariffs as well, aid in full time employment.
And yes, for chrissakes, lots of people may have to learn new skill sets. And it's hardly the first time it happened. During the Industrial Revolution and the steady mechanization of agriculture, huge portions of the populations of many industrializing countries quite literally picked up and left their traditional work. Is there some reason you think the youngest Baby Boomers and the Gen Xers should be immune from these forces.
Do you really seriously imagine that economic protectionism is going to make all the factories come back and start employing all the people that don't work there any more? Do you understand that even in the jurisdictions like China where that manufacturing has now gone to, that those workers are probably within a decade or two of being turned out on the street.
Manufacturing and the low skilled high paying jobs that it provided over the last seventy or eighty years is done, and trying to artificially bring that kind of manufacturing back to life would be exactly like how the Soviets used to keep factories open for no other reason than to create employment. It isn't economically sustainable, and it's not like the rest of the world is so small that a protectionist and isolationist US wouldn't just force them to find a way around the US.
You're living in a naive fantasy land where somehow the 1950s can be resurrected and made real again. Somebody here was even talking about how even if Trump deregulates coal, mining companies are pushing so heavily towards automation that it wouldn't likely make very much of a difference at all in employment levels in those coal production areas.
Or to put this bluntly and simply, those particularly parties are over, and perhaps it's time for political leaders to stop lying to their voters, and start telling them straight up "It's time to move on." In a hundred years, hell probably in thirty years, the idea that manufacturing will be a large scale employer will be laughed at as much as someone asserting that 19th century governments should have continued promoting building wooden ships.
So trade with other nations is a cancer? You realize, of course, that the United States has been a trading nation since its inception, right?
And again, we see people who think trade is a zero sum game, which it is not. Just because there aren't as many low skilled manufacturing jobs available, doesn't mean there are no jobs.
And you know the poster isn't a US citizen how? Your Alt-right detector going off? Maybe just paint a swastika on their car, you know, just in case.
He has altered the deal. Pray he does not alter it further.
I think we all know there is little to no likelihood of Clinton being investigated, much as there isn't going to be a wall or a Muslim registry.
The thing is that there are things that could be done. Putting money into retraining or relocation programs would be at the top of my list. The fact is that many of the very people who have been idled are the children, grandchildren or even great-grandchildren of people who moved to the area at the height of manufacturing in the area, so if these peoples' forebears could pick up stakes from where ever they were from and move to places like Ohio, then perhaps they should take a lesson from them.
But promising to reopen shuttered factories, or throwing large amounts of infrastructure into areas that simply do not have the long term economic viability is literally nothing more than building bridges to nowhere. Sometimes industrial areas do scale back. My favorite example is the Maritime Provinces in Canada, that, during the 17th and 18th century, grew prosperous on the shipbuilding industry, but by the 19th century, as shipbuilding technology was transitioning. Other parts of the British Empire could build better ships for cheaper, and the region went into a decline that some might argue continues to this very day.
He's even waffling on the Paris deal, so it's quite possible that many of the people that supported him may find he's not as keen to fulfill all his campaign promises as they hoped.
No, you can't really argue with someone who will just basically say "I don't want to hear what you say, let's try this insane thing because it might work." At the same time, who are they going to go to when Trump inevitably fails, and in some cases, if he actually carries out many of his promises, actually makes things worse? That's what scares me. If Trump fails, then where do they turn, a real Nazi?
That's my view completely. Western economies are in many transition, and really, have been for a while. If I blame governments for anything, it's for not better preparing workers in these areas for the decline, and for the what they will do in the post-decline. The fact is that the pace of automation has been picking up for several decades now, and the vision of many industries has been to minimize the number of workers on the floor. In some cases, like Japan, this has as much to do with a shrinking population and a lack of actual workers, but in other jurisdictions, it is really about profitability. Even Foxxcon is retooling in China, with more automation, which means all those Asians that the Trump squad believe stole their jobs will soon be on the unemployment line themselves.
I grew up and still live in a manufacturing town in British Columbia, here it's forestry. When my father got his job at a sawmill in the late 1960s, the mill itself employed something like 700-900 people. When the first major retooling came in the late 1970s, with the then state of the art computers, there were significant job losses. The recession of the early 1980s saw those numbers drop due to economic circumstances, and by the time the economy recovered, most of the lost jobs never came back. Now, forty years after the first automation systems were brought in, the mill has less than one hundred full time employees (I think it's below 80 now), and each iteration brings that number down. In my town, the only real solution has been a drop in population, which is normal.
In reality, the town's population had grown massively during the 1940s as the forest industry became a major employer, but of course for many of the workers in their 50s, who came in to the industry at the cusp of the changes, they don't see the big picture, that they came in at the end of a manufacturing bubble, and they do the same thing up here in Canada that Trump's supporters do in the States, just lash out at the immigrants and the Asians. They want to hear politicians that will tell them nice fantasies about how the elites are out to get them, because that's better than facing the fact that, at the end of the day, we all have to bear responsibility for our life choices, and any of us who found good pay in what amounts to a relatively low skill position, well, that was lucky, but the luck has run out, and no amount of posturing by politicians will make those jobs come back.
The entire Arctic circle being warmer isn't merely a weather disturbance.