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From the New York Times:
The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite
This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where business leaders’ public positions on automation’s impact on workers did not match the views they shared privately.
By Kevin Roose, Jan. 25, 2019
DAVOS, Switzerland — They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.
I know this because, for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening.
In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. …
But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.
… They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.
… Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”
… Kai-Fu Lee, the author of “AI Superpowers” and a longtime technology executive, predicts that artificial intelligence will eliminate 40 percent of the world’s jobs within 15 years. …
But at a time of political unrest and anti-elite movements on the progressive left and the nationalist right, it’s probably not surprising that all of this automation is happening quietly, out of public view….
One common argument made by executives is that workers whose jobs are eliminated by automation can be “reskilled” to perform other jobs in an organization.
Learn to code!
Also, we need more immigrants! Why? Just because …
Yeah, that way you eliminate the profits you were going to make by automating the first position. This is exactly what they said about NAFTA! All those auto workers were going to become lawyers and ethnobotanists! Do they think nobody now living was alive at the time? How, beyond owning stuff, are these lazy idiots elite?
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1005005-player-pianoIn Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan" he presents a race of robots which killed and replaced their builders:
“Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough. So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, 'Tralfamadore.'”
― Kurt Vonnegut, "The Sirens of Titan"Skynet, Georgia Guidestones, and depopulation agenda, y'all. "Brave New World", "The Machine Stops", "The Marching Morons" . . . the sentient crystal ball of speculative fiction. If only it were tradeable on Nasdaq. SHORT THE FUTURE!Replies: @ziggurat
I played my own bit part in eliminating the humans in auto assembly plant paint lines. I’m pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of the workers I displaced with robots in the late 80’s are now in custody of the MDOC or dead from overdoses. There’s not much “labor” left in a modern factory in America today. There are electricians, pipefitters, and technicians to service the robots. Even tool & die makers now use robots to build robots.Replies: @AndrewR, @J.Ross
In any case it's unrealistic due to IQ distributions and the fact that it's a cognitively-demanding job, at least to be able to do it competently and well. When complete idiots make Luddite analogies when talking about this, or talk about how most of the population used to live in a rural area and work on agriculture, they of course conveniently skip over the fact that at best, this was a horizontal movement in terms of cognitive requirements. Moving from farming work to simplified, easy-to-use machinery and factory work was sometimes even easier than the farm work. Your average coal miner, truck driver or activist posing as a credible journalist cannot learn to code. The idea that most people are going to "retrain" to a higher cognitive-level job was just word wizardry to sell you on disastrous "free trade" nonsense.Replies: @J.Ross, @Alden
But these guys are your buddies, Libertarians. Because you believe that stinking rich guys should have the “freedom” (hahahahahahahahahahaha, I can’t stop laughing, hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahah–etc.), yeah, I said, “freedom” (hahahahaha you assholes), to do anything they want. So if they want to turn you into dog food, well, that’s their right. That’s their freedom.
Anyone who doesn’t hate rich people is either stupid or rich.
Try finding someone who is mire buddy-buddy with State Power.
Impossible.
Seriously, the focus just on "the rich" misses the boat. Most of the evil perpetrated the last 100 years wasn't caused by "the rich" but by ideologues--politicians, journalists, academics, bureaucrats--i.e. "the new class", for their own "new class" interests.
And I certainly don't hate automating away jobs. Producing more with less labor--either through better organization or better technology--is precisely why we have living standards so much higher than our ancestors. I'll take a combine over a scythe.
I don't mind the rich who are pushing forward with that. The evil rich are those that try and cheat and instead of out innovating or out organizing their competition are trying to cheat their way to profits by importing foreigners for cheap labor. I want to see a ditch getting dug by some guy operating a backhoe getting paid a decent wage, not by ten Mexicans with picks and shovels.
The rich pushing to flood their nations with foreigners, those are the rich who deserve to be killed, roasted and eaten. Actually they deserve to be roasted alive and eaten. They are the lowest form of life.Replies: @J.Ross
Lots of people are richer than me, younger than me, more beautiful than me, more popular than me. Good for them. Envy is generally an ugly emotion.
Envy and resentment is not what I'm about and not what Steve Sailer is about.
There are also no Never-Trump National Review Jeb Bush Republicans.
Nor free market anti-labor Paleocons.
Or invade the world, invite the world neocons.
I know you are African, and maybe English isn’t your first language, but even fighting those handicaps I would have thought that after reading so much material on this site, reality would have sunk in even with you. Instead you keep posting these comments directed at people who aren’t even in the building.
Try going over to the site for Reason magazine, or NRO, and copy and paste your comments there where they will be read by people to whom they apply.Replies: @Dtbb
Rich people are much more likely than working and poor people to believe that the death penalty is wrong, that abortion should be legal, that immigrants are good for a country, that evolution is science and should be taught in schools, that gun possession should be strictly controlled, even eliminated, that climate change is real, that vaccinations should be mandatory, that avoiding people of color is wrong, that women should have the vote but not cigarettes, and on and on...
We can rest assured, though, that you, Obw., are willing to testify that the rich are dead wrong on every single one of these.Replies: @obwandiyag
LEARN TO CODE
Realistically, which jobs are hot and remunerative and which are not, changes, it's somewhat unpredictable.
Also, even within programming jobs, there has been lots of change, the skills that were hot ten years ago are not hot today. The good programmers adapt and do well. But lots of mediocre programmers get unpleasant outcomes when the market isn't so great. Right now, the market seems good enough that even mediocre programmers have nice opportunities. But it never stays this good for long.Replies: @Steve Sailer
I chuckled reading about the CEO of Ford lambasting his employees for only delivering $ 7 billion in profits last year. Not good enough he said. He was right by Wall St. standards too. Everyone at Ford must do better he continued. He offered no suggestions as to how this might be done but I imagine the workers caught the menace in his words and it left no doubt that they were ‘John Henry’ and ‘the steel driving machine’ was who they were up against.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/04/26/ford-has-been-synonymous-with-cars-for-more-than-a-century-thats-about-to-change/
But part of the reason it makes so much money on trucks is the "chicken tax" - the 25% tariff LBJ imposed on foreign trucks more than 50 years ago in response to tariffs Europe imposed on US chicken imports. These executives have no problems with government restrictions that help their profits. But they're against immigration restrictions that would protect ordinary people's wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_taxReplies: @European-American, @ben tillman, @Kyle
The story goes that Henry showed Walter the automated sections of the line and sarcastically asked Reuther how he’d collect union dues from the machines.
Reuther paused for a minute and was said to reply “Very impressive Henry. By the way, how many new Ford cars will the machines buy?”
At the very least can we at least have a national debate on what our population requirements will be based upon predictions like this? When someone predicts we have 12 years to address climate change or else, the media demands we take action. But when more and more people point out the future of automation, we don’t hear any debate about what our future population needs should be.
Additionally we already know the environmentalists are missing in action when it comes to discussing population growth and the sustainability of our environment.
Whatever field there is, no one wants to have the conservation on what our population needs should be because that would involve discussing immigration and defending the current wave of mass immigration.
So long as the only real reason for mass immigration is the replacement of Whites, none of the other issues will ever be addressed.
? The wealthy elite who will profit from this will need lots of cheap, docile, agreeably submissive servants.
Does that describe you? Hence, immigration.Replies: @bomag, @Counterinsurgency, @Saxon
Learn to code. Good advice but half a century late.
This sadly applies to a lot of "coders" plying their trade these days.
There definitely is much value in teaching people "what computers are" (theoretically) and "what computers are made of" (engineering wise) and what the deal is with software, and there is probably value in teaching people about how to reason algorithmically, but lashing that to an generic IT education bandwagon would be bad.
Peter Denning writes in
Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational ThinkingReplies: @Counterinsurgency
it’s probably not surprising that all of this automation is happening quietly, out of public view….
I’m sure there are people trying to automate all sorts of stuff, but I don’t see any real robots in my daily routine. For God’s sake they haven’t built a car wash that doesn’t need 20 Mexicans at the end of the line to dry the windows on my car.
I left a comment in the thread about truck drivers that essentially says that I see tech improving the lives of workers that have shitty jobs. I believe those jobs will still exist, but they will be far less unpleasant due to the judicious application of technology that makes sense.
Besides… When has anybody at Davos been correct about anything?
The whole Climate Change schtick is an example of their genius.
If you work for a corporation, your paycheck is likely deposited directly to your account via an automated billing system that replaces dozens of clerks and accountants. Your payroll withholding, W-2 generation, insurance enrollement, premium calculation and deduction, 401k, etc., are all handled almost completely automatically.
You use your computer and maybe occasionally a scanner or your phone to store virtually all work-related documents, replacing filing clerks and secretaries/
Unless you are very top management, you don't have a secretary. You write and edit all your own business correspondence, replacing many secretary roles in the company.
You are likely to take your annual compliance training, if you're at a corporation that requires such -- ethics, legal issues, workplace safety, etc., via an online system, replacing all in-person training classes.
In most industries, if you have customer support, staff has been greatly reduced via automated response systems. And if the customer does get to a real person, they're pretty likely to be in India, speaking in one of those obviously fake American accents.
Your grocery store has automated checkout scanners.
The fast food restaurant you visited is likely to have machines that automatically pour the drinks and cook the burgers.
Your local video store has closed down, and maybe some of your local movie theaters, too, because provision of movies has been almost entirely replaced by automated home delivery.
Automation -- robots -- are creeping up on you everywhere.
This…
Reminds me of this…
Tip of the Iceberg…
Our insane, corrupt elite is flooding the country with low IQ unskilled, uneducated immigrants. Meanwhile they’re well aware that jobs for this cohort are being automated.
So we can deduce that they want them here to do something other than work.
Trump is so rhetorically sloppy and he misses so many debate angles but this omission by him is huge. He should be pounding “the robot future won’t have jobs for unskilled laborers” argument. I think people really get this argument.
Especially because it is already happening. I read in 2015 that Norway took ads in Syria and elsewhere, advising: Don't come. We've heavily automated, fewer jobs and we are restructuring social welfare for newcomers.
Anyone who doesn't realise many jobs are going away, that restructuring is ruthless and any coming economic down turn will speed up automation. Not new concepts.Replies: @El Dato, @Anonymous, @Buffalo Joe
Automation is an issue avoided by Nancy Pelosi and her ilk, which seek to import more and more unskilled laborers who will vote for Pelosi’s cohorts. In an increasing automated economy, what is the United States supposed to do with ever larger numbers of unskilled workers?
I’ve been hearing this “in 10 years, 50% of jobs will be gone” for 10 years. It never happens.
Right now, unemployment is at record lows and the most advanced technological societies, like Singapore, have full employment and a wide differentiation of jobs and careers.
Something about this story just doesn’t compute.
For comparison, your labor force participation rate is the same as my country right now, a capital and tech poor place whose industry was literally scrapped and which suffered economic collapse from a relatively low base just a generation ago.Replies: @Paco Wové
"Automation" is just another name for increased productivity. The problem is, it may be good for the economy as a whole, but it has a disruptive, redistributive effect on the demand for different types of workers.Replies: @Sean
I add that the jobs now available have a _higher_ minimum IQ (far and away above the IQ 83 DOD uses) than the old jobs did. Those who can't meet the IQ cutoff tend to become homeless, or go to enclaves and collect some kind of government subsidy.
Homeless people tend to be insane. Living in a society that has utterly nothing productive that you can do that anybody cares about would make quite a few people insane, those with a strong need for social approval as well as those who would retreat into psychosis under severe stress.
Some homeless people are also very smart people who see that they are being worked with no chance at a family. They sometimes end up in a shack on marginal land out in the country, or end up taking a mid-tier job that _does_ permit them to have a family [2]. Like overtaxed rich, middle tier people can also drop out of the game.
Counterinsurgency
1] http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts .
2] Yes, I have examples and reports of examples, but no, I have no citations.
The Singapore government thinks the world will end if it can't maintain a decent economic growth rate so it encourages automation to 'maintain competitiveness'.
I think you have to drill into the numbers in each country. Thailand officially has very low unemployment but there are serried ranks of workers living precariously or underemployed. Automation is being introduced even into Thailand because employers can't find the workers they want at cheap enough wages.Replies: @Massimo Heitor
Fortran favors the old.
Somebody set a fire at Comet Ping Pong.
From the same feed: maybe this happened, but I have a hard time not seeing this as obvious, clumsy and scripted.
Dear Colin Powell: the screaming is so that any blacks can ever get a job again.
Actually, it has been going on for years. Check out the homeless who are everywhere in the downtowns of major cities now. I used to be shocked when I first saw the increasing prevalence. People who have given up are not counted as being unemployed.
So we can deduce that they want them here to do something other than work.
Trump is so rhetorically sloppy and he misses so many debate angles but this omission by him is huge. He should be pounding "the robot future won't have jobs for unskilled laborers" argument. I think people really get this argument.Replies: @Hidden Cat, @Bill B., @Thea, @unpc downunder, @Harry Baldwin
“He should be pounding “the robot future won’t have jobs for unskilled laborers” argument. I think people really get this argument.”
Especially because it is already happening. I read in 2015 that Norway took ads in Syria and elsewhere, advising: Don’t come. We’ve heavily automated, fewer jobs and we are restructuring social welfare for newcomers.
Anyone who doesn’t realise many jobs are going away, that restructuring is ruthless and any coming economic down turn will speed up automation. Not new concepts.
I don't believe the economic downturn will help move things along either. On the contrary, most companies will be busy servicing debt or trying to keep their pants up, they won't go into hare-brained schemes of putting unproven automation in production, which is adventurous, capital-intensive and needs serious servicing. Hell, even today a bog-standard horribad enterprise computer network has an eye-popping maintenance cost, and it doesn't even have any physical elements at all, except for the fans on the power supplies.
Better get some humans in there. But they need to have certain skill levels.Replies: @dvorak, @Anon
As an aside many of Norway's pioneer sat divers are now suffering from chronic health conditions induced by their work, work which built up the basis of Norway's generous welfare state which the browns are currently plundering with reckless abandon.Replies: @Anonymous
Ford only makes money on trucks. It loses money on cars, which is why it’s phasing out car production:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/04/26/ford-has-been-synonymous-with-cars-for-more-than-a-century-thats-about-to-change/
But part of the reason it makes so much money on trucks is the “chicken tax” – the 25% tariff LBJ imposed on foreign trucks more than 50 years ago in response to tariffs Europe imposed on US chicken imports. These executives have no problems with government restrictions that help their profits. But they’re against immigration restrictions that would protect ordinary people’s wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
I regret that, when discussing Trump's trade wars, no one ever mentions such important details. People just say they're against Trump's moves because they're no way to treat allies, or a threat to free trade, etc. But surely these details are important! It's not politics, it's policy.
But no one can be bothered to go into the details of the figures. Maybe we need AI helpers to give us the facts instead of having people say bla bla bla without any factual underpinnings. But it's easier to have flame wars that to talk facts.
As I recall, US cars imported to Europe face a 10% tax, European cars imported to the US have only a 2.5% tax.* Do German carmakers need that help? I don't think so.
Yup:Replies: @Stan d Mute
The feeling is mutual: I want the oligarchs replaced by machines, as the latter might actually be more humane.
It's those with more cerebral jobs who should be most afraid of automation. Like accountants, lawyers, and financial analysts.Replies: @Bill P
OT: I’ve got the feels, gentlemen. Do you remember Nov.8?
Smirkin' Larkin
Band of Bots?
We happy few who still have jobs?
About Agincourt
by Henry "The Wad" Wadsworth Longbow
I shot an arrow into the air
It struck the heart of savoir faire
C'est la guerre
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44624/the-arrow-and-the-song
Also see
"...And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled,
A sense of falling like an arrow shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
- sung on a lark in Billy Idol's "Nice day for a Whitsun Wedding"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAZQaYKZMTI
https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/whitsun-weddings
See also: Start your day with St. Quisp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuispReplies: @Counterinsurgency
Most people are unable to learn to code, and very much unable to code.
This sadly applies to a lot of “coders” plying their trade these days.
There definitely is much value in teaching people “what computers are” (theoretically) and “what computers are made of” (engineering wise) and what the deal is with software, and there is probably value in teaching people about how to reason algorithmically, but lashing that to an generic IT education bandwagon would be bad.
Peter Denning writes in
Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational Thinking
For those wondering what "object oriented" [1] is, it's just ordinary symbolic logic packaged in software. An "object" is a bunch of data (thoroughly specified as to format -- which bits mean what) and a bunch of code that can be applied to the bunch of data. _Only_ that code can be applied; you can't even look a the data except through the code.
It's right out of Kant. The data only "knows" what the "sensory organs" (the associated code that writes to the data) tell it, and the data format is the "a priori concept". Simple and direct.
And knowing object oriented code is useful, too, if only as a model of how limited human cognition can be in some cases (and how powerful in other cases). Useful unless, that is, your cognition (and interest) is limited to understanding things other than object oriented code, in which case it doesn't help at all.
And that's how simple learning to code is. Try teaching that to damned near anybody, and you'd best be prepared to leave quickly.
Counterinsurgency
1] https://www.techopedia.com/definition/3235/object-oriented-programming-oop
I’m sure that in the future, workers displaced by automation will find gainful employment as lackeys, prostitutes, and gladiators who will fight each other to the death, all for the amusement of those who still have jobs.
I do think elites are nervous and the unrest in France illustrates why: that is, the reaction to tax cuts for the rich and regressive fuel taxes (in the guise of combatting global warming) for the masses. The sales pitch that France acting alone could do very much about global warming didn’t fly.
I think elites only want to automate low level workers away in order to keep the rising tide of color away from their property and themselves. They're not allowed to discuss the current demographic disaster, not even privately with friends. That's crimethink. So they certainly can't do anything about it policy wise. Instead they come up with Rube Goldberg schemes to keep the colored tide out of economic centers, and therefore out of their lives.
Especially because it is already happening. I read in 2015 that Norway took ads in Syria and elsewhere, advising: Don't come. We've heavily automated, fewer jobs and we are restructuring social welfare for newcomers.
Anyone who doesn't realise many jobs are going away, that restructuring is ruthless and any coming economic down turn will speed up automation. Not new concepts.Replies: @El Dato, @Anonymous, @Buffalo Joe
Ok, what ARE those jobs that are being automated away exactly?
I don’t believe the economic downturn will help move things along either. On the contrary, most companies will be busy servicing debt or trying to keep their pants up, they won’t go into hare-brained schemes of putting unproven automation in production, which is adventurous, capital-intensive and needs serious servicing. Hell, even today a bog-standard horribad enterprise computer network has an eye-popping maintenance cost, and it doesn’t even have any physical elements at all, except for the fans on the power supplies.
Better get some humans in there. But they need to have certain skill levels.
A thought occurred to me reading the comments. There was a TV show not long ago that featured metal ‘robots’ trying to destroy one another. They were operated by humans but gave the appearance of autonomous fighting machines as they attempted to smash, saw apart or turn over and paralyze their opponent. It was pretty popular at first but quickly disappeared as it had no ‘fan’ base. People don’t ‘root’ for robots otherwise boxing or MLB would turn into Twilight Zone episodes and replace humans with machines.
We see the same phenomenon with industry. Machine made goods are cheap but valued as crap. A Casio watch keeps better time than a Piaget but we value the Piaget more because it is made by craftsmen. A handmade car is valued far more than a, perhaps, equally mass produced vehicle beyond its deluxe appointments because people value human labor more than they do the work of machines.
A three D printing machine might turn out a Ferrari for $50,000 but would people pay $50,000 for a printed clone of the real thing? No doubt some would but the genuine article, IMO , would command the higher price because of its rarity and the fact that it was built and designed by humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYTcKk4gwyA
So does LISP.
Additionally we already know the environmentalists are missing in action when it comes to discussing population growth and the sustainability of our environment.
Whatever field there is, no one wants to have the conservation on what our population needs should be because that would involve discussing immigration and defending the current wave of mass immigration.
So long as the only real reason for mass immigration is the replacement of Whites, none of the other issues will ever be addressed.Replies: @dvorak, @Colin Wright, @ben tillman
Our elites are genuinely perplexed as to why Act II of the population replacement plan is meeting with increasing push-back. But they still know who to blame: Nazis and Southerners.
Of course, once you learn to code, you realize you’re now competing with half of India … thanks to the H1-B visa regime.
At some point the Indians will wonder "Why are we renting people out to US companies? By now the skills have all been transferred to India - nobody in the US knows how to make these products anymore." And they'll cut US software companies out of the market, just like Chinese manufacturers did to US manufacturers. Not just software companies, either, since software is the implementation of your company's business process. There's an Indian subsidiary that collectively knows more about how my old company works than the people in the US do.
You'd be a fool to waste your time learning how to code unless you live in India or China.
Additionally we already know the environmentalists are missing in action when it comes to discussing population growth and the sustainability of our environment.
Whatever field there is, no one wants to have the conservation on what our population needs should be because that would involve discussing immigration and defending the current wave of mass immigration.
So long as the only real reason for mass immigration is the replacement of Whites, none of the other issues will ever be addressed.Replies: @dvorak, @Colin Wright, @ben tillman
‘…But when more and more people point out the future of automation, we don’t hear any debate about what our future population needs should be…’
? The wealthy elite who will profit from this will need lots of cheap, docile, agreeably submissive servants.
Does that describe you? Hence, immigration.
Servants, my foot.
Dumb, dumber, dumbest, rich.
Counterinsurgency
1] "At a low point in this spring's California primary campaign against Goldwater, political operative Stuart Spencer had pressed his candidate to summon that fabled nexus of money, influence, and condescension known as the Eastern Establishment.
"You're looking at it, buddy," Rockerfeller told Spencer. "I'm all that's left."
From:
Richard Norton Smith.
_On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockerfeller_; Prologue: July 1964, pg. xxi, bottom of page.
Available from several publishers as a used book.
https://books.google.com/books?id=fzeODQAAQBAJ&pg=PR21&lpg=PR21&dq=rockefeller+Eastern+Establishment+%22I%27m+all+that%27s+left%22&source=bl&ots=IvcElt6wPg&sig=ACfU3U20sudHIjv8iTO9AM-TM_xiXl8AQw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjp85vT54vgAhVl_IMKHWCJBLIQ6AEwBHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=rockefeller%20Eastern%20Establishment%20%22I'm%20all%20that's%20left%22&f=false
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvMReplies: @reactionry
[BenKenobi: You’ve got the feels – and King Henry carried the field!]
Smirkin’ Larkin
Band of Bots?
We happy few who still have jobs?
About Agincourt
by Henry “The Wad” Wadsworth Longbow
I shot an arrow into the air
It struck the heart of savoir faire
C’est la guerre
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44624/the-arrow-and-the-song
Also see
“…And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled,
A sense of falling like an arrow shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.”
– sung on a lark in Billy Idol’s “Nice day for a Whitsun Wedding”
https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/whitsun-weddings
See also: Start your day with St. Quisp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quisp
Readers will find themselves a bit better sustained by the St. Crispins day speech than by attempts to destroy its meaning. The attempts to destroy its meaning imply that one can walk away from attempts to preserve Western civilization.
_Nobody_ gets to walk away from the current fight. Be carried, sure, maybe run, but no walk. The Left alliance guarantees it.
Counterinsurgency
1] Philip Rieff.
_My Life Among the Deathworks_.
University of Virginia Press, 2006.
2] Philip Rieff.
The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
Harper & Row, 1966.
2] Tom Wolfe.
_The Painted Word_.
Originally Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975
Now available in reprints from several publishers.
At some point, practically every type of traditional job will be automated away. I no longer need an accountant due to software improvements, for example. This will not increase inequality, however, as, after reaching a certain level of consumption wealth, it is all about status. This means the rich need everyone else to be consenting. It also creates new jobs – Instagram personality is a hint of the future of employment. – as long as the technological advancement and economic development wheels keep turning…
You can also!
I imagine new civilization where we all code and program for each other.
The accounting will no longer tediously compile tables.
But you will need someone who is able to handle the software that takes over the task of tediously compiling tables.
That must be why the CEO of Ford and other Ford execs have all taken a big pay cut. We all have to tighten our belts.
If 40% of the workforce are eliminated then, on average, 40% of the market for the products/services of those automated businesses are gone too.
Yeah buggy whips blah blah but how is the economy supposed to function then?
In Malthusian societies [1], in which food and disease limits population, labor is essentially free -- it's just the cost of food and rudimentary housing and clothing. Pomeranz [2] pointed out that 8se investment of capital could not compete with almost free labor (even when the capital goods purchased were known to be productive), the more so when that capital was spent trying to control the great mass of sick and nearly starving population:Turned out that there was much more to it than that. Clarke [4] attributed the difference also to HBD, and gave a pretty convincing argument in favor of HBD [5]. Clarke's arguments are consistent with Weber's [6].
If Clarke is correct, well, the current Western system gives populations that have no economic value a great demographic advantage, and we can pretty much kiss industrialization goodbye and wish it better luck next time it's tried [7].
Counterinsurgency
1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap
2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199002.The_Great_Divergence#
3] Pomeranz, Kenneth (2000). The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. ISBN 978-0-691-09010-8.
4] Clarke.
_A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World _.
Princeton University Press; 2009/01/18.
5] Quote from Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150437.A_Farewell_to_Alms:6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism
7]Note the "appear (and then disappear) " part. That could be industrial society.
Source is in the abstract of:
Kim Sterelny.
"From hominins to humans: how sapiens became behaviourally modern".
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Mar 27.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048993/
Have A “Nice” Day!
Or: Days of Rage- Days of Hollande-Daze
Or: The Naked Truth of “Oh! (My Goodness!*) Calcutta!**”
The use of an autonomous vehicle would likely not have prevented “a Tunisian*** resident of France” from celebrating the intersection nationality of Bastille Day with 86 to 458 Frenchmen in his “Nice ride.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack
Questions have been raised about the prospect of “ethical” decisions made by self-driving vehicles when fatalities appear to be unavoidable:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07135-0
For example, should an automatic automobile put on the brakes when approaching a throng of POC who are blocking a road in protest – or instead, accelerate into a crowd of smirking white teenagers?
Also, it’s possible that there will be severe job losses even in heavily-accented* call centers in, say, Calcutta due to displacement by AI (Artificial Indian).
* https://books.google.com/books?id=-vABLzN3_bUC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=India+accent+oh+my+goodness&source=bl&ots=EvhKy7-a4c&sig=ACfU3U3c8AvMGKmAIvgd4JZLl2jNaseV_g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi4_I6N8IrgAhXHoYMKHXRoDRIQ6AEwE3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=India%20accent%20oh%20my%20goodness&f=false
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh!_Calcutta!
*** Ad from Star & Crescent-Kist Tuna: Sorry, Charlie Martel****, I thought you wanted a Tunisian with good taste!
*** Martel – as in French for “hammer” -as in M.C. Hammer Time – or a road-raged “putting the ‘hammer’ down”
See also Jean-Marie Le Pen’s famous post Charlie Hebdo massacre – “Je suis, Charlie Martel.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_suis_Charlie
It’s not just H-1B, either. Product development is being moved to India and China wholesale. My last company (which just had a huge layoff) moved literally hundreds of software jobs to India over the last few years.
At some point the Indians will wonder “Why are we renting people out to US companies? By now the skills have all been transferred to India – nobody in the US knows how to make these products anymore.” And they’ll cut US software companies out of the market, just like Chinese manufacturers did to US manufacturers. Not just software companies, either, since software is the implementation of your company’s business process. There’s an Indian subsidiary that collectively knows more about how my old company works than the people in the US do.
You’d be a fool to waste your time learning how to code unless you live in India or China.
As Nicky Machiavelli also pointed out,” Fortran is a woman; she must be jogged and beaten in order to be mastered”.
‘We need more immigrants, why?’.
Well, how else do you induce another human being to wipe a stranger’s ass for a living at $10 per hour?
Especially because it is already happening. I read in 2015 that Norway took ads in Syria and elsewhere, advising: Don't come. We've heavily automated, fewer jobs and we are restructuring social welfare for newcomers.
Anyone who doesn't realise many jobs are going away, that restructuring is ruthless and any coming economic down turn will speed up automation. Not new concepts.Replies: @El Dato, @Anonymous, @Buffalo Joe
Just out of curiosity, I just wonder how many of the brown hordes who have flooded Norway work as deep sea divers in the oil/gas industry? – the physical basis of Norway’s wealth.
As an aside many of Norway’s pioneer sat divers are now suffering from chronic health conditions induced by their work, work which built up the basis of Norway’s generous welfare state which the browns are currently plundering with reckless abandon.
I think the plan is a guaranteed minimum income for about half the population at least, and private gated residential areas with 30-foot Trump walls and military grade security forces for the top 1 percent, until orbital space colonies and space elevators can be developed to remove the elite from the terrestrial surface, which will be swarming with Africans.
You are at historic lows for labor force participation rates. You were at 95% in the 1970s and are at 65% today. Maybe some of that is made up of people who are able to work but had comfy early retirement from government and security like pokice and firefighters. But most of those people are from Charles Murray’s Fishtown and your stockholm syndrome minority, the African-Americans.
For comparison, your labor force participation rate is the same as my country right now, a capital and tech poor place whose industry was literally scrapped and which suffered economic collapse from a relatively low base just a generation ago.
According to this source, that is incorrect. It shows the peak participation rate (since the 1950s) as being around 67% right around the year 2000 or so. The lowest rate during the period was in 1963, at around 58.5%.Replies: @Romanian, @Romanian
In most cases, if these guys have their way, automation is going to be like self-checkout at the grocery: you pay the same for less service. That’s why it’s so attractive to Davos people, and that’s why it will change little in the long run.
I’m all for automation where it cuts costs for the consumer and improves products, but businessmen don’t really care about that stuff unless they are forced to care due to competition. So the key to making automation beneficial is making sure that businessmen are forced to compete and cannot cook up insider schemes in places like Davos.
If we can bring our capitalists to heel, automation will provide cool stuff like cheaper precision optics, better aftermarket parts, more affordable housing, better traffic flow through coordinating streetlights, etc. However, if we leave it up to them they’ll just make it a race to the bottom like they did with manufacturing during the great industrial transfer to China, and most of us will end up worse off with crappier products and services while they blow their extra billions on yachts, hookers and private jets.
In fact, probably the only way to prevent automation is thru aggressive government regulation. And then the country that automates will drive the country that doesn't out of business.
Actually stopping this drive would require an all-powerful world government, quite arguably a cure worse than the disease.
Stalin, is that you?Replies: @Bill P
We need more immigrants because… because it results in White people being in a weaker position.
I mean, isn’t it obvious by now that’s what it’s really about?
They really dislike us and they want us to be outnumbered, with all that will mean.
Hmm... In that case racism and civil strife is just what "they" want.
I'm all for automation where it cuts costs for the consumer and improves products, but businessmen don't really care about that stuff unless they are forced to care due to competition. So the key to making automation beneficial is making sure that businessmen are forced to compete and cannot cook up insider schemes in places like Davos.
If we can bring our capitalists to heel, automation will provide cool stuff like cheaper precision optics, better aftermarket parts, more affordable housing, better traffic flow through coordinating streetlights, etc. However, if we leave it up to them they'll just make it a race to the bottom like they did with manufacturing during the great industrial transfer to China, and most of us will end up worse off with crappier products and services while they blow their extra billions on yachts, hookers and private jets.Replies: @Logan, @Clyde, @Cloudbuster, @Cloudbuster
Competition is what will ensure that automonlation takes place. Any business that doesn’t automate as fast as the competition will be driven out of business.
In fact, probably the only way to prevent automation is thru aggressive government regulation. And then the country that automates will drive the country that doesn’t out of business.
Actually stopping this drive would require an all-powerful world government, quite arguably a cure worse than the disease.
I'm all for automation where it cuts costs for the consumer and improves products, but businessmen don't really care about that stuff unless they are forced to care due to competition. So the key to making automation beneficial is making sure that businessmen are forced to compete and cannot cook up insider schemes in places like Davos.
If we can bring our capitalists to heel, automation will provide cool stuff like cheaper precision optics, better aftermarket parts, more affordable housing, better traffic flow through coordinating streetlights, etc. However, if we leave it up to them they'll just make it a race to the bottom like they did with manufacturing during the great industrial transfer to China, and most of us will end up worse off with crappier products and services while they blow their extra billions on yachts, hookers and private jets.Replies: @Logan, @Clyde, @Cloudbuster, @Cloudbuster
They don’t care if they collectively kill off half their customer base so that many fewer can buy their products. Because this will be a race to the bottom, meaning make your millions and billions faster than the others and get out. To New Zealand preferably. Your other billionaire emperors of robot empires are not a factor. You making yr million billions fast as possible before the deluge, is the only game in town..
There is nothing anti-elite about the progressive left.
And this applies to the left and the right. The left/liberals/ethnics exert pressure to flood us with their co-ethnics. Indians (dot) are a prime example with their H1Bs. On the Republican right we have the cheap labor express bastards, while many cheap laborites are nominally, liberal capitalists.
I trust an autonomous vehicle as much as I trust a robot surgeon:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/21/robot_surgery_kills_americans/
The issue is not whether either is worthy of trust, clearly neither is.
The question is which is more dangerous. That's an empirical question with a statistical answer.
We know beyond a shadow of doubt, that the vast majority of accidents are caused by driver error. If computers drove those cars, would the accident rate go up or down? We don't really know the answer to that. Yet.
The silver lining to all of this will be the inevitable (algorithm generated) thinkpiece about how the ‘coding jobs’ just aren’t coming back and how we need to ignore, accept, and ultimately celebrate the blight of the Bay Area, Acela Corridor etc.
Economists were quite spectacularly wrong.
New and hot: Learn to trim hedges for the rich.
OT: Naomi Osaka just defeated Petra Kvitova at the Australian Open
In the ’90s and early 2000’s, there was broad consensus among economists that computer programming jobs would all move overseas and programming jobs would completely vanish from the developed world.
Economists were quite spectacularly wrong.
Business owners don’t stand in public and play this cartoon villain and cackle about cutting jobs. But the automation agenda isn’t hidden, it’s pretty well known.
We’ve seen lots of automation and efficiency gains in the past. The market finds new demands for labor and the overall standard of living rises.
Many skilled workers continue to earn high salaries through waves of automation and change. As a programmer, myself, I’ve been through many changes, all of the jobs I did ten/twenty years ago don’t exist today, but I’ve continued to do well.
And the accountant went to learn how to code, and made a lot of money.
You can also!
I imagine new civilization where we all code and program for each other.
Coding won’t save you. There’s an AI for that.
OT but…
It looks to me that TPTB are angling to have Watson and Crick’s Nobels withdrawn and given posthumously to Franklin.
Rewriting history to suit the Jew and feminist agenda.
The BBC did a docudrama ( i.e. a lie ) a few years ago where Franklin was the real discoverer, lots of ignorant people will have believed it.
These powerful interest groups are good at re-writing history to suit themselves.
Any takers that this is the agenda?
Nightingale used to be a feminist heroine, and still has a lot of admirers in those quarters, but the decision has clearly been made that her reputation must be blackened and Seacole's boosted.
The BBC has been dutifully putting out documentaries vilifying Nightingale, which has caused much angst among the older generation of feminists.
Insurance (policy price/adjusting/fighting lawsuits) is almost completely automated.
For insurance companies that write through brokers and independent agents, risk control specialists are the only company employees to meet with insureds on a regular basis.
That sounds like a good science-fiction plot, but a lot closer to now than the stories in the books I used to read seemed. Those last people getting into a cab on that space elevator will feel like the last ones onto the Hueys on top of the US Embassy in Saigon, circa 1973.
In I think the first volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (fascinating on the tech and social speculation, but long and boring) a space elevator is built down to the Martian surface from an asteroid, using iron mined from the asteroid, which then became the stationary anchor satellite (not the terminus, because space elevators would have to have a long section extending beyond the anchor satellite, with the cable hanging down via gravity to the surface, and the other cable whipping outward via centrifugal force with the satellite at the equilibrium point). In Robinson's book some revolutionaries, I forget if they were commies or eco-terrorists ("Keep Mars natural!) blew up the anchor point at the satellite and the cable wrapped around the equator of Mars a few times, landing at supersonic speed and destroying everything in its path.
If you blow up a space elevator at the earth's surface or close to it, it can be repaired, and in fact the cable would just hang there in the air even if not anchored, as long as the satellite can make small altitude adjustments. A space elevator is just a geostationary satellite that happens to be very, very, very long, including the cables, and the center of mass of the whole system is the orbital point, which would be configured as a docking station.
If you blow up the docking station itself you you have a $100 quintillion replacement job on your hands.
There's a nice space elevator element in Neal Stephenson's SevenEves, a more readable book than Robinson's. I don't read much science fiction since I don't like fantasy, and most science fiction includes stuff that just is never going to happen, like interstellar travel.
As long as there are numbers to crunch, like the poor, FORTRAN will always be with us.
Automation assisted. Not nearly totally automated. I know; I had a claim recently.
OT but LOL
RT: Congresswoman who fixed Democratic primary for Clinton now ‘fixing’ democracy in Venezuela
The world is a permanent dark comedy.
For non-technical, human-factor stories on the elimination of jobs by automation, it behooves one to read the hundreds of articles by Brenda Walker, here on VDare, on the subject. She writes with particularly with an eye on immigration and the stupidity much of it, as these changes occur (well, she writes for VDare, so you’d figure ..)
I’ve written before, in Peak Stupidity, that it is a real shame that the science fiction stories in my youth about the idyllic society in which automation has replaced all of the drugery, and we few and spread-out humans spend our time on intellectual pursuits can’t come true (not enough REAL intellectuals, and too many people):
Yeah, the chance of that bright future got squandered, at least for the human population in general.
The rest do not have the temperament or the intellect to do so.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/04/26/ford-has-been-synonymous-with-cars-for-more-than-a-century-thats-about-to-change/
But part of the reason it makes so much money on trucks is the "chicken tax" - the 25% tariff LBJ imposed on foreign trucks more than 50 years ago in response to tariffs Europe imposed on US chicken imports. These executives have no problems with government restrictions that help their profits. But they're against immigration restrictions that would protect ordinary people's wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_taxReplies: @European-American, @ben tillman, @Kyle
Fascinating.
I regret that, when discussing Trump’s trade wars, no one ever mentions such important details. People just say they’re against Trump’s moves because they’re no way to treat allies, or a threat to free trade, etc. But surely these details are important! It’s not politics, it’s policy.
But no one can be bothered to go into the details of the figures. Maybe we need AI helpers to give us the facts instead of having people say bla bla bla without any factual underpinnings. But it’s easier to have flame wars that to talk facts.
As I recall, US cars imported to Europe face a 10% tax, European cars imported to the US have only a 2.5% tax.* Do German carmakers need that help? I don’t think so.
Yup:
It doesn’t have to be hate for white people. It can just be “divide and rule” or strikebreaking. Who cares what race the people are. What you want is to keep them from uniting.
Hmm… In that case racism and civil strife is just what “they” want.
? The wealthy elite who will profit from this will need lots of cheap, docile, agreeably submissive servants.
Does that describe you? Hence, immigration.Replies: @bomag, @Counterinsurgency, @Saxon
This, too, can be coded into existence.
One wonders if they’re really thinking this thing out.
To take just the most obvious example, if you expel more and more people from the economy,who will be your customers?
I don’t care how cheaply you produce something, if there is nobody with the money to buy it you aren’t going to make money.
Plus, they'll be spending a lot of money on security to keep the rest of us out of their gated communities.
They’re elite in a law-of-the-jungle sense. A committee of alpha animals, dominating humanity via a techno-Panopticon: https://www.technocracy.news/
Here are quotes from Kurt Vonnegut in 1952 on his doubts on automation:
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1005005-player-piano
In Vonnegut’s “Sirens of Titan” he presents a race of robots which killed and replaced their builders:
“Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough. So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, ‘Tralfamadore.’”
― Kurt Vonnegut, “The Sirens of Titan”
Skynet, Georgia Guidestones, and depopulation agenda, y’all. “Brave New World”, “The Machine Stops”, “The Marching Morons” . . . the sentient crystal ball of speculative fiction. If only it were tradeable on Nasdaq. SHORT THE FUTURE!
Maybe go long on the stock called "Politics" and go short the stock called "The Future"?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/21/robot_surgery_kills_americans/Replies: @Logan, @Jack D
But do you trust a human driver?
The issue is not whether either is worthy of trust, clearly neither is.
The question is which is more dangerous. That’s an empirical question with a statistical answer.
We know beyond a shadow of doubt, that the vast majority of accidents are caused by driver error. If computers drove those cars, would the accident rate go up or down? We don’t really know the answer to that. Yet.
Kai fu lee is simultaneously on the board at both apple and microsoft
I’m sure there are people trying to automate all sorts of stuff, but I don’t see any real robots in my daily routine.
If you work for a corporation, your paycheck is likely deposited directly to your account via an automated billing system that replaces dozens of clerks and accountants. Your payroll withholding, W-2 generation, insurance enrollement, premium calculation and deduction, 401k, etc., are all handled almost completely automatically.
You use your computer and maybe occasionally a scanner or your phone to store virtually all work-related documents, replacing filing clerks and secretaries/
Unless you are very top management, you don’t have a secretary. You write and edit all your own business correspondence, replacing many secretary roles in the company.
You are likely to take your annual compliance training, if you’re at a corporation that requires such — ethics, legal issues, workplace safety, etc., via an online system, replacing all in-person training classes.
In most industries, if you have customer support, staff has been greatly reduced via automated response systems. And if the customer does get to a real person, they’re pretty likely to be in India, speaking in one of those obviously fake American accents.
Your grocery store has automated checkout scanners.
The fast food restaurant you visited is likely to have machines that automatically pour the drinks and cook the burgers.
Your local video store has closed down, and maybe some of your local movie theaters, too, because provision of movies has been almost entirely replaced by automated home delivery.
Automation — robots — are creeping up on you everywhere.
Old and cold: Learn to code.
New and hot: Learn to trim hedges for the rich.
I'm all for automation where it cuts costs for the consumer and improves products, but businessmen don't really care about that stuff unless they are forced to care due to competition. So the key to making automation beneficial is making sure that businessmen are forced to compete and cannot cook up insider schemes in places like Davos.
If we can bring our capitalists to heel, automation will provide cool stuff like cheaper precision optics, better aftermarket parts, more affordable housing, better traffic flow through coordinating streetlights, etc. However, if we leave it up to them they'll just make it a race to the bottom like they did with manufacturing during the great industrial transfer to China, and most of us will end up worse off with crappier products and services while they blow their extra billions on yachts, hookers and private jets.Replies: @Logan, @Clyde, @Cloudbuster, @Cloudbuster
If we can bring our capitalists to heel…
Stalin, is that you?
I'm all for automation where it cuts costs for the consumer and improves products, but businessmen don't really care about that stuff unless they are forced to care due to competition. So the key to making automation beneficial is making sure that businessmen are forced to compete and cannot cook up insider schemes in places like Davos.
If we can bring our capitalists to heel, automation will provide cool stuff like cheaper precision optics, better aftermarket parts, more affordable housing, better traffic flow through coordinating streetlights, etc. However, if we leave it up to them they'll just make it a race to the bottom like they did with manufacturing during the great industrial transfer to China, and most of us will end up worse off with crappier products and services while they blow their extra billions on yachts, hookers and private jets.Replies: @Logan, @Clyde, @Cloudbuster, @Cloudbuster
Sounds like a boon to the hooker, yacht and private jet industries!
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
How are these people “Libertarians” exactly?
Try finding someone who is mire buddy-buddy with State Power.
Impossible.
“Also, we need more immigrants! Why? Just because …”
Because…because…er…well, because it’s…it’s… BECAUSE IT’S WHO WE ARE!!!
For simple levels of accounting.
The accounting will no longer tediously compile tables.
But you will need someone who is able to handle the software that takes over the task of tediously compiling tables.
I am trying to think about what makes Davos so annoying?
I think maybe it’s the unholy alliance of profit seeking and virtue signalling.
I can totally appreciate rapaciatious moneymaking. I can also appreciate earnest academics pontificating about how to save the world. But the two groups need to stay in their respective lanes.
Its especially grating when corporate executives and bankers try to act like policy gurus. I guess it strokes their already large egos to think of themselves that way. But as soon as they open their mouths it’s usually clear they are just repeating the conventional wisdom they have absorbed from somewhere else.
So Davos is rich people trying to get richer by networking with other rich people who are pretending to be smarter than they are. It’s hard to get more annoying than that.
I think maybe it's the unholy alliance of profit seeking and virtue signalling.
I can totally appreciate rapaciatious moneymaking. I can also appreciate earnest academics pontificating about how to save the world. But the two groups need to stay in their respective lanes.
Its especially grating when corporate executives and bankers try to act like policy gurus. I guess it strokes their already large egos to think of themselves that way. But as soon as they open their mouths it's usually clear they are just repeating the conventional wisdom they have absorbed from somewhere else.
So Davos is rich people trying to get richer by networking with other rich people who are pretending to be smarter than they are. It's hard to get more annoying than that.Replies: @Spaulding Smails
Semi-related, I do wonder whether or not the legions of queers (I so miss that word being pejorative), minorities, immigrants etc. who seem to get just tickled absolutely pink about being “represented” in media and advertising realize they’re being played. It’s a gigantic sales pitch; the only value corporate America sees in the coalition of the fringes is their purchasing power. Human dignity isn’t even remotely in the equation. I seem to remember Obama’s announcement about how he had “evolved” on gay marriage was essentially crashed by Joe Biden blurting out support for it on some Sunday morning talk show or something. The media even chastised him over it for essentially ruining Obama’s big reveal. It struck me as nakedly cynical; clearly the guy supported it all along (or likely didn’t really care either way) but was waiting until the Overton window was open far enough to the left for it to be acceptable to say out loud.
I have exposure to the cutting edge of some of these technologies. Machine vision/ computer vision is a big one. Lots of stuff can be done by an eye in the sky that knows what its looking at i.e. loss prevention, frictionless checkout, inventory management etc….autonomous driving. There is a lot of stuff on the chopping block.
How thoughtful of them to include that without even asking us!
https://www.rt.com/news/449530-newsguard-edge-browser-media-integrated/
Because of intuit/ quickbooks lots of book keepers lost their jobs, but we now have a much greater need for accountants. However book keepers can’t all just become accountants as accounting requires higher intelligence than book keeping so not everyone can easily switch.
I stole this observation from Charles Murray, but its a good insight on technology. It destroys jobs while also creating other jobs. However, the people who lost their jobs aren’t always capable of switching.
robots dont mean physical automation. Software is a robot. And software can replace a significant potion of the digital work that *many* white collar workers perform.
Automation will improve the lives of truck drivers by eliminating their jobs. Long distance self driving (electric) trucks on interstate highways is low hanging fruit – they could have these tomorrow. Interstate highways are pretty constrained environments that make it much easier on the self-driving algorithm – you don’t have to worry about drug addled homeless people stepping into the path of the vehicle, etc. (big controversy last year about one of the self-driving cars that killed one of those as if anyone could stop if someone like that jumped out in front of you – the company had to stop their trial). The interstate is the same every day and has nice big lane stripes. You could have local guys at either end to do the last mile from the highway exit to the destination and back to the exit. This would reduce the # of labor hours (and employees) needed by 90%.
Somehow the proximity sensors on the car had been disabled -- software foulup. Systems that brake for obstacles have been around a long time.
Doesn't mean the problem is trivial -- if the software is large enough, well, relations between N software modules increase as roughly as N squared [1]. Even if the modules (to include proximity sensors) are all correct, you can end up with too many module interactions to keep track of.
CounterinsurgencyReplies: @Mr. Anon
This is a ridiculous claim. The tech exists to roll out electric trucks on interstate highways but the tech companies just haven't felt like doing it? Also what difference does it make whether they are electric or not? Petroleum is used in the production of electric cars, about as much petroleum as a regular car would use in its entire lifespan. And electricity relies on natural gas. Fossil fuel savings is virtually nil. It's all eco virtue signaling.
I was looking at an old typesetting machine a few days ago and thinking there’s perhaps a dozen guys in the HBD Mitten who even know what it is much less how to operate the thing.
Not only will the majority of the population have nothing to do alarmingly soon, one good EMP or solar flare and 3/4 of the country will die. But by all means, let’s just keep importing by the tens of millions people one generation past cannibalism. This way lies Utopia..
Am I the only conspiratard here? Is it not a possibility that goal is population reduction? Does Global Bolshevism/Judaism truly require global markets?
Does the Jew master race require market based transaction in order to achieve Tikun Olam? Don’t they just need to be served either by Goy or Machine?
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
Hating rich people is not a political philosophy. At least not a good one. It’s easy to hate rich people – even Jesus did (camel, needle, etc.). It’s even easy to take away their riches – after all they are heavily outnumbered. The problem is what you do then. We are never going to have equality. If you reshuffle the deck and give everyone the same number of chips, once you play a few hands some people are going to have more chips again. If you keep taking away their chips they are going to stop playing or find a new poker game.
We see the same phenomenon with industry. Machine made goods are cheap but valued as crap. A Casio watch keeps better time than a Piaget but we value the Piaget more because it is made by craftsmen. A handmade car is valued far more than a, perhaps, equally mass produced vehicle beyond its deluxe appointments because people value human labor more than they do the work of machines.
A three D printing machine might turn out a Ferrari for $50,000 but would people pay $50,000 for a printed clone of the real thing? No doubt some would but the genuine article, IMO , would command the higher price because of its rarity and the fact that it was built and designed by humans.Replies: @Jack D, @Bubba, @Henry Bowman
Expensive Swiss watches are valued because they are “Veblen goods” – people want them BECAUSE they are expensive. Wearing one signals status. The image is kept up through advertising. Perfume is similar. The LEAST important (and often the least costly to produce) aspect is the product itself, especially what’s inside the bottle/case (the packaging is very important to the sale).
It’s pretty much impossible to make a watch “by hand” – you can use less or more automated machine tools but one way or another a watch has to be made by machines. And generally the MORE automated and advanced the tools the BETTER the watch is going to run – craftsmanship is counter productive. The US (before we lost our shit) was once a world leader in watch production because we made watches in automated factories while Swiss farmers worked at their kitchen tables during the long winter (the Swiss used to make fake American watches the way Chinese make Swiss fakes now – karma is a bitch). However, the ILLUSION of craftsmanship is important to making the sale.
The same thing is true in cars, which is why you can buy a used Rolls Royce for the price of a new Honda Accord (which is in fact a better car). No one will be impressed if you roll up to the country club in a 9 year old Bentley and if you can’t impress people there’s no point.
I agree about automation replacing shitty jobs. They don’t pay enough to live on unless the wage is greatly inflated. The answers to the problem of jobs lie elsewhere.
I think the guy who invented the wheel was criticized for putting the people who carried stuff on their backs out of work.
“Automation” is just another name for increased productivity. The problem is, it may be good for the economy as a whole, but it has a disruptive, redistributive effect on the demand for different types of workers.
For comparison, your labor force participation rate is the same as my country right now, a capital and tech poor place whose industry was literally scrapped and which suffered economic collapse from a relatively low base just a generation ago.Replies: @Paco Wové
“You are at historic lows for labor force participation rates.”
According to this source, that is incorrect. It shows the peak participation rate (since the 1950s) as being around 67% right around the year 2000 or so. The lowest rate during the period was in 1963, at around 58.5%.
? The wealthy elite who will profit from this will need lots of cheap, docile, agreeably submissive servants.
Does that describe you? Hence, immigration.Replies: @bomag, @Counterinsurgency, @Saxon
The strange thing is that they’ve been through this once already — great immigration of AD 1845- AD 1924. The endgame there was that the elite was in fear of its individual lives by AD 1924 (immigration’s end) more or less displaced and impoverished (relatively) by AD 1945, and gone by Goldwater’s election [1].
Servants, my foot.
Dumb, dumber, dumbest, rich.
Counterinsurgency
1] “At a low point in this spring’s California primary campaign against Goldwater, political operative Stuart Spencer had pressed his candidate to summon that fabled nexus of money, influence, and condescension known as the Eastern Establishment.
“You’re looking at it, buddy,” Rockerfeller told Spencer. “I’m all that’s left.”
From:
Richard Norton Smith.
_On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockerfeller_; Prologue: July 1964, pg. xxi, bottom of page.
Available from several publishers as a used book.
https://books.google.com/books?id=fzeODQAAQBAJ&pg=PR21&lpg=PR21&dq=rockefeller+Eastern+Establishment+%22I%27m+all+that%27s+left%22&source=bl&ots=IvcElt6wPg&sig=ACfU3U20sudHIjv8iTO9AM-TM_xiXl8AQw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjp85vT54vgAhVl_IMKHWCJBLIQ6AEwBHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=rockefeller%20Eastern%20Establishment%20%22I’m%20all%20that’s%20left%22&f=false
"Automation" is just another name for increased productivity. The problem is, it may be good for the economy as a whole, but it has a disruptive, redistributive effect on the demand for different types of workers.Replies: @Sean
Wheels can’t think.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/21/robot_surgery_kills_americans/Replies: @Logan, @Jack D
People have this idea that robot cars have to be perfect and not kill ANYONE. Not true. They just need to kill fewer people than human drivers. Even with the tech we have right now, robot cars could probably cut the death rate in half because so many human drivers are impaired – drunk, on drugs, texting while driving, testosterone poisoned, inexperienced, elderly, etc. But there is this stupid mentality that we can’t allow automated cars on the road until they never make a single mistake.
Part of me thinks Dougherty is the fool here, not realizing these people are planning on crushing any revolts by the peasants harshly and ruling over the coming police/surveillance state as a permanent ruling class. We also have to consider the sources of the comments, are dullards like Tony Blair capable of sustaining that system?
He is many things but not dull or dumb.Replies: @Anonymous
I don't believe the economic downturn will help move things along either. On the contrary, most companies will be busy servicing debt or trying to keep their pants up, they won't go into hare-brained schemes of putting unproven automation in production, which is adventurous, capital-intensive and needs serious servicing. Hell, even today a bog-standard horribad enterprise computer network has an eye-popping maintenance cost, and it doesn't even have any physical elements at all, except for the fans on the power supplies.
Better get some humans in there. But they need to have certain skill levels.Replies: @dvorak, @Anon
And a bog-standard automation attempt requires high-priced consultants at the start, plus new software/hardware. So a recession would slash at these attempts. A recession (which may have already begun) would mean plenty of layoffs and no additional automation.
For the really ambitious midsize companies, they could fund the consulting/software/hardware with even deeper layoffs. But these would be exceptions.
Smirkin' Larkin
Band of Bots?
We happy few who still have jobs?
About Agincourt
by Henry "The Wad" Wadsworth Longbow
I shot an arrow into the air
It struck the heart of savoir faire
C'est la guerre
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44624/the-arrow-and-the-song
Also see
"...And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled,
A sense of falling like an arrow shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
- sung on a lark in Billy Idol's "Nice day for a Whitsun Wedding"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAZQaYKZMTI
https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/whitsun-weddings
See also: Start your day with St. Quisp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuispReplies: @Counterinsurgency
The purpose of modern art is to destroy the effect of the art that expresses and sustains Western civilization [1]. Same with modern pop culture. Vicious attack.
Readers will find themselves a bit better sustained by the St. Crispins day speech than by attempts to destroy its meaning. The attempts to destroy its meaning imply that one can walk away from attempts to preserve Western civilization.
_Nobody_ gets to walk away from the current fight. Be carried, sure, maybe run, but no walk. The Left alliance guarantees it.
Counterinsurgency
1] Philip Rieff.
_My Life Among the Deathworks_.
University of Virginia Press, 2006.
2] Philip Rieff.
The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
Harper & Row, 1966.
2] Tom Wolfe.
_The Painted Word_.
Originally Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975
Now available in reprints from several publishers.
This sadly applies to a lot of "coders" plying their trade these days.
There definitely is much value in teaching people "what computers are" (theoretically) and "what computers are made of" (engineering wise) and what the deal is with software, and there is probably value in teaching people about how to reason algorithmically, but lashing that to an generic IT education bandwagon would be bad.
Peter Denning writes in
Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational ThinkingReplies: @Counterinsurgency
Yep. If you can’t do it, it isn’t a useful technique.
For those wondering what “object oriented” [1] is, it’s just ordinary symbolic logic packaged in software. An “object” is a bunch of data (thoroughly specified as to format — which bits mean what) and a bunch of code that can be applied to the bunch of data. _Only_ that code can be applied; you can’t even look a the data except through the code.
It’s right out of Kant. The data only “knows” what the “sensory organs” (the associated code that writes to the data) tell it, and the data format is the “a priori concept”. Simple and direct.
And knowing object oriented code is useful, too, if only as a model of how limited human cognition can be in some cases (and how powerful in other cases). Useful unless, that is, your cognition (and interest) is limited to understanding things other than object oriented code, in which case it doesn’t help at all.
And that’s how simple learning to code is. Try teaching that to damned near anybody, and you’d best be prepared to leave quickly.
Counterinsurgency
1] https://www.techopedia.com/definition/3235/object-oriented-programming-oop
Additionally we already know the environmentalists are missing in action when it comes to discussing population growth and the sustainability of our environment.
Whatever field there is, no one wants to have the conservation on what our population needs should be because that would involve discussing immigration and defending the current wave of mass immigration.
So long as the only real reason for mass immigration is the replacement of Whites, none of the other issues will ever be addressed.Replies: @dvorak, @Colin Wright, @ben tillman
The only population requirement anywhere, ever, is that the population be large enough and resourceful enough to exclude others from the territory.
When automation springs to the mind, the scenario I like to fancy foremost is self-driving vehicles, ridding the enterprise of being on the road on one’s car of the frustrations and dangers from the behaviour of innumerable ≤90 IQ/MQ/DQ/MAQ motorists.
(Technology should control car horns, also.)
[MQ = Mindfulness quotient
DQ = Decency quotient
MAQ = Maturity quotient]
big controversy last year about one of the self-driving cars that killed one of those as if anyone could stop if someone like that jumped out in front of you
Somehow the proximity sensors on the car had been disabled — software foulup. Systems that brake for obstacles have been around a long time.
Doesn’t mean the problem is trivial — if the software is large enough, well, relations between N software modules increase as roughly as N squared [1]. Even if the modules (to include proximity sensors) are all correct, you can end up with too many module interactions to keep track of.
Counterinsurgency
At this point, indifference to our fates by the elite would be an improvement?
More automation frees up labor to perform other tasks. Automation is good wherever possible. But some things are hard to automate. It’s easier to automate things built in factories. Home building methods seem to be stuck in the 19th century. Other than sky tracks and cordless impact drivers, there hasn’t been much advancement in home building techniques in the tech age. On top of that nobody wants to buy prefabricated homes. People who do purchase pre fabricated homes are derided as backwards and low class. The challenge for the nerds will be automating home building techniques. I’m not saying that it can’t be done. But it’s going to take someone who has skills in coding and skills in grueling manual labor.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/04/26/ford-has-been-synonymous-with-cars-for-more-than-a-century-thats-about-to-change/
But part of the reason it makes so much money on trucks is the "chicken tax" - the 25% tariff LBJ imposed on foreign trucks more than 50 years ago in response to tariffs Europe imposed on US chicken imports. These executives have no problems with government restrictions that help their profits. But they're against immigration restrictions that would protect ordinary people's wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_taxReplies: @European-American, @ben tillman, @Kyle
Delete
I concur with other commenters, particularly the comment concerning joblessness and labor force participation. Once, a few decades ago, radio news (propaganda even back then) emphasized that an increase in business activity could _increase_ the unemployment percentage _because news off the increase would attract many more people into seeking work than there were real new jobs_. If you want a different look at economic statistics, try shadowstats [1].
I add that the jobs now available have a _higher_ minimum IQ (far and away above the IQ 83 DOD uses) than the old jobs did. Those who can’t meet the IQ cutoff tend to become homeless, or go to enclaves and collect some kind of government subsidy.
Homeless people tend to be insane. Living in a society that has utterly nothing productive that you can do that anybody cares about would make quite a few people insane, those with a strong need for social approval as well as those who would retreat into psychosis under severe stress.
Some homeless people are also very smart people who see that they are being worked with no chance at a family. They sometimes end up in a shack on marginal land out in the country, or end up taking a mid-tier job that _does_ permit them to have a family [2]. Like overtaxed rich, middle tier people can also drop out of the game.
Counterinsurgency
1] http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts .
2] Yes, I have examples and reports of examples, but no, I have no citations.
So we can deduce that they want them here to do something other than work.
Trump is so rhetorically sloppy and he misses so many debate angles but this omission by him is huge. He should be pounding "the robot future won't have jobs for unskilled laborers" argument. I think people really get this argument.Replies: @Hidden Cat, @Bill B., @Thea, @unpc downunder, @Harry Baldwin
If you want to be extremely cynical the floods of immigrants fuels the transition of coherent nation-states peopled by citizens with common interests and a sense of community towards Airstrip-One* type locations where humans are atomized units teased and trained by a cosmopolitan elite to be uncomplaining helots.
Charles Murray’s key point in The Bell Curve was that the new cognitive elite should recognize the importance of noblesse oblige, at the very least. Instead our diabolical betters use TBC to beat “racists” who object to importing a vast sea of left-hand-side-of-the-curve serfs and mediocre-but-docile technicians to break any claims of the original citizens to ownership rights.
The pain is the process. What do our techno-Dukes and posturing Milord’s care for our future as workers.
*1984 reference of course.
A couple of minor disagreements, though:
Instead of:I'd say:is naive. They will not. Or, better, not without having "skin in the game".
The key is make them having that "skin in the game".
Well, they did sit on their asses for a few years doing nothing of use and getting an MBA.
I played my own bit part in eliminating the humans in auto assembly plant paint lines. I’m pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of the workers I displaced with robots in the late 80’s are now in custody of the MDOC or dead from overdoses. There’s not much “labor” left in a modern factory in America today. There are electricians, pipefitters, and technicians to service the robots. Even tool & die makers now use robots to build robots.
>a guy who to all credit got himself an MBA
Not sure what they told you at graduation but those aren't the same thing.
>there's more automation than there used to be
Sure and some of it is good.
>workers hardly exist any more
Laughably nonsensical.
>the workers will not trade up (or over) to better (or alternate) work, they will die or be imprisoned, ha ha ha
Oh so you agree with my essential point anyway: this idea that we are not just gutting our own people was an obvious lie for NAFTA and is a recycled obvious lie now. And there's nothing wrong with gutting our own people if they are beyond-strangers to whom we owe less than xenia. All the people who want the workers to die or be imprisoned are, conciously or effectively, socialists.
Actually COBOL. I have a 60 year old friend who is a COBOL programmer and the youngest worker at her very busy consulting company.
How would that improve their lives?
In Singapore the birth rate is nearly the lowest in the world so the government imports (ethically similar) Chinese. Singaporeans tell me that for non-elite citizens life is quite tough and it can be difficult to save much.
The Singapore government thinks the world will end if it can’t maintain a decent economic growth rate so it encourages automation to ‘maintain competitiveness’.
I think you have to drill into the numbers in each country. Thailand officially has very low unemployment but there are serried ranks of workers living precariously or underemployed. Automation is being introduced even into Thailand because employers can’t find the workers they want at cheap enough wages.
If I had a few silos of nuclear missiles at my disposal, there are three places I would target – Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and especially Davos when all the big-wigs are there. I would try to use neutron bombs though, just to kill the people – so long as the electromagnetic pulses can destroy all their demonic computer code.
Yeah buggy whips blah blah but how is the economy supposed to function then?Replies: @Counterinsurgency, @JerseyJeffersonian
Well, it works like this:
In Malthusian societies [1], in which food and disease limits population, labor is essentially free — it’s just the cost of food and rudimentary housing and clothing. Pomeranz [2] pointed out that 8se investment of capital could not compete with almost free labor (even when the capital goods purchased were known to be productive), the more so when that capital was spent trying to control the great mass of sick and nearly starving population:
Turned out that there was much more to it than that. Clarke [4] attributed the difference also to HBD, and gave a pretty convincing argument in favor of HBD [5]. Clarke’s arguments are consistent with Weber’s [6].
If Clarke is correct, well, the current Western system gives populations that have no economic value a great demographic advantage, and we can pretty much kiss industrialization goodbye and wish it better luck next time it’s tried [7].
Counterinsurgency
1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap
2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199002.The_Great_Divergence#
3] Pomeranz, Kenneth (2000). The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. ISBN 978-0-691-09010-8.
4] Clarke.
_A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World _.
Princeton University Press; 2009/01/18.
5] Quote from Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150437.A_Farewell_to_Alms:
6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism
7]
Note the “appear (and then disappear) ” part. That could be industrial society.
Source is in the abstract of:
Kim Sterelny.
“From hominins to humans: how sapiens became behaviourally modern”.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Mar 27.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048993/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/04/26/ford-has-been-synonymous-with-cars-for-more-than-a-century-thats-about-to-change/
But part of the reason it makes so much money on trucks is the "chicken tax" - the 25% tariff LBJ imposed on foreign trucks more than 50 years ago in response to tariffs Europe imposed on US chicken imports. These executives have no problems with government restrictions that help their profits. But they're against immigration restrictions that would protect ordinary people's wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_taxReplies: @European-American, @ben tillman, @Kyle
Phasing our cars is genius. Buy ford stock now.
JRoss, “Re-skilling” people isn’t a bad idea, but in America the push is for everyone, and I mean everyone to go to college, not trade school. In Buffalo they just completed a training center to prepare students, many of whom are first time or marginally employed unskilled, to become machinists and electricians. They have an entrance test, 70% of the first 600 applicants failed. Many were reading at second grade level. These results show why many employers would rather have a robot or automated machine as opposed to a human. A young,qualified, tech savvy person can probably have a long career servicing robots and automation, see any auto plant assembly line for examples of these workers. I can foresee a time when the libs will push for robot aides, similar to teachers aides, so that the unskilled have jobs. Seems laughable, but in NY, with a lib majority in all houses of State government, the first order of business, proposed and passed already, new pro choice abortion law, expanded voters rights, including longer voting time and registration and free in state college tuition for illegals.
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
Obie, I think my dog would gag on you, so you’re safe. Maybe make fertilizer from you has you are pretty much all BS
Especially because it is already happening. I read in 2015 that Norway took ads in Syria and elsewhere, advising: Don't come. We've heavily automated, fewer jobs and we are restructuring social welfare for newcomers.
Anyone who doesn't realise many jobs are going away, that restructuring is ruthless and any coming economic down turn will speed up automation. Not new concepts.Replies: @El Dato, @Anonymous, @Buffalo Joe
Hidden, You mean that ads saying don’t come work better than a wall? Who knew. Does DJT know this?
Not the only place building new walls
Mexico obviously needs a wall on their S border
Jack, Substitute the word envy for hate and it works the same.
To all the people who believe automation will lead to mass unemployment: if this prediction never pans out in real numbers or real life examples, and you have to rely on crap like “shadowstats” to make your point, could you consider you’re wrong?
you sound like liberals explaining NAM failure at schools.
The Singapore government thinks the world will end if it can't maintain a decent economic growth rate so it encourages automation to 'maintain competitiveness'.
I think you have to drill into the numbers in each country. Thailand officially has very low unemployment but there are serried ranks of workers living precariously or underemployed. Automation is being introduced even into Thailand because employers can't find the workers they want at cheap enough wages.Replies: @Massimo Heitor
Is there any evidence that Singapore deliberately chooses immigrants from China as opposed to other countries?
Arguably, everywhere is like that.
Governments should push for economic growth and fear economic stagnation. That isn’t unique to Singapore, that is what all good governments are trying to do.
Singapore officials have confirmed to me privately that there is a very strict policy of maintaining an ethnic Chinese share fairly close to what it was at independence.
I think this is one of those Asian political facts that is never written down and indeed almost never discussed (except by the extraordinary LKY) but is understood by everyone.
Really though how could it be otherwise for a relatively tiny nation slap-bang in the middles of a great sea of Muslim humanity. Singapore's hard-nosed attitude will be a hard nettle for Europe to grasp.
Tony Blair, at his prime, was actually a very formidable politician. I recently attended a lecture by him on nationalism. Came off as charming and intelligent. His solution for dealing with discontent: “domesticate nationalism (redefine it to mean anyone who speaks our language & shares our “values”) such that it is compatible with open society.”
He is many things but not dull or dumb.
Can’t say for certain how it worked. However the EU has pitched in cash money to help build the new wall (either completed or soon to b) between Syria and Turkey
Not the only place building new walls
Mexico obviously needs a wall on their S border
Learn to code!
I wonder what they will be telling unemployed people to do once the computers are able to code themselves?
“They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver”
In the business world, if you don’t crave fat profit margins you go out of business to your more efficient competitors who don’t share your squeamishness. Ditto if your don’t manufacture in low wage countries if there are no barriers to doing so.
Both of these examples point up the need to subsidize the wages of working people out of the winnings of capital if everyone is going to be made better off by these changes. Unfortunately that is something we don’t know how to do that is both and efficient. But, foolish me, I think I may have figured out a way to approach the problem, at least in theory. Feel free to criticize:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WIdVnQEWdYgYYly9iKkesWCVhfINvbtwuVq2GMOxMbw/edit?usp=sharing
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
I don’t “hate rich people”, but certainly many of them got rich by cheating others out of their fair share, usually in a lawful manner. Libertarians do tend to be useful idiots for plutocracy and excessive income inequality.
Corrected comment: “that is both fair and efficient” in place of “that is both efficient”
“They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver”
In the business world, if you don’t crave fat profit margins you go out of business to your more efficient competitors who don’t share your squeamishness. Ditto if your don’t manufacture in low wage countries if there are no barriers to doing so.
Both of these examples point up the need to subsidize the wages of working people out of the winnings of capital if everyone is going to be made better off by these changes. Unfortunately that is something we don’t know how to do that is both fair and efficient. But, foolish me, I think I may have figured out a way to approach the problem, at least in theory. Feel free to criticize:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WIdVnQEWdYgYYly9iKkesWCVhfINvbtwuVq2GMOxMbw/edit?usp=sharing
I played my own bit part in eliminating the humans in auto assembly plant paint lines. I’m pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of the workers I displaced with robots in the late 80’s are now in custody of the MDOC or dead from overdoses. There’s not much “labor” left in a modern factory in America today. There are electricians, pipefitters, and technicians to service the robots. Even tool & die makers now use robots to build robots.Replies: @AndrewR, @J.Ross
https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/01/16/us/gm-toledo-racism-lawsuit/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F
Obviously I take allegations of anti-black racism, and anything from the mainstream media, with a large grain of salt, but this story doesn’t set off my BS detector. If the people you helped lay off were anything like the workers described in this story, then we’re all better off if they’ve opioided themselves out of existence.
I didn't see anything in that article that couldn't also be construed as a misunderstanding or couldn't have just been an outright fabrication.Replies: @AndrewR
My robots replaced 6-8 “workers” per shift and had an ROI of less than a year. The only human job left (other than maintaining the robot - which they also failed to do) was inserting a plastic block to hold the doors open preventing them from being painted shut. This was too much work for them. Either the cars would be painted shut or doors flung wide and stripped off the hinges causing line stoppage and mayhem. I assume today that inserting the blocks is now also automated and better proximity sensors prevent the door flung wide problem.Replies: @AndrewR
America media and PC dogma in a microcosm.
Imagine the automation crises that will occur when we develop a machine that can take instruction in common language, repair itself at little or no cost, and can easily replicate itself. The danger will be compounded when we couple it with general AI so that t’s functions will not be limited to a pre-determined set of operations set at the design stage.
I call these hypothetical machines Human Beings.
The human being concept has always been one of my chief sources of skepticism toward wide spread automation, such as self driving cars. Everyone that buys a car already gets an almost perfect driving algorithm thrown in for free- they already know how to drive. You might argue that actually driving is taxing on the car owner and dangerous, but economically self-driving software makers are up against FREE. It’s hard to undercut free in the open market. Also, the liability of accident is assumed by the driver, and not an algorithm programmer. Only a fool would assume liability for an entire traffic system.
Furthermore, the elite are already using these Human Beings to get the same benefits they would through automation by taking advantage of their cheap reproductive capacity. It’s called immigration.
Sure, those local guys will end up with much improved life circumstances:
https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/
One thing, these drivers have no income after paying for the loans and to keeping the trucks operating They live off the welfare and section 8 of their women and anchor baby children.
Take a look at the federal and social security deductions on your paycheck. Much of that goes for housing and food for these immigrant drivers. It’s a subsidy for the truck companies. They get essentially free labor because their drivers live off their anchor babies welfare.
Another point; if they can’t read a contract, how were they able to pass the written part of the truck driver license?
These companies will never buy self driving trucks. They’d have to pay for the gas oil insurance licenses and maintenance that are now paid for by the drivers. Plus they won’t be able to repossess the trucks and sell them to the next sucker. Capitalist scum
The situation is sooooo California; a gazillion liberal do gooder laws but never enforced.
Is hating poor people a good political philosophy? Once you strip morality out of political philosophy (where it seldom enough resides anyway), what is left to distinguish one from the other? Rich people exploit poor people. So, why shouldn’t poor exploit the rich when they are able? In the long run, it might not be good, but poor people don’t always live in the long run. Often then can’t.
“Long distance self driving (electric) trucks on interstate highways is low hanging fruit – they could have these tomorrow.”
This is a ridiculous claim. The tech exists to roll out electric trucks on interstate highways but the tech companies just haven’t felt like doing it? Also what difference does it make whether they are electric or not? Petroleum is used in the production of electric cars, about as much petroleum as a regular car would use in its entire lifespan. And electricity relies on natural gas. Fossil fuel savings is virtually nil. It’s all eco virtue signaling.
Microsoft is looking out for all of us. Its new version of the Edge browser includes a ‘news filter’ which will help prevent people from seeing things they shouldn’t –like UNZ.COM.
How thoughtful of them to include that without even asking us!
https://www.rt.com/news/449530-newsguard-edge-browser-media-integrated/
I don't believe the economic downturn will help move things along either. On the contrary, most companies will be busy servicing debt or trying to keep their pants up, they won't go into hare-brained schemes of putting unproven automation in production, which is adventurous, capital-intensive and needs serious servicing. Hell, even today a bog-standard horribad enterprise computer network has an eye-popping maintenance cost, and it doesn't even have any physical elements at all, except for the fans on the power supplies.
Better get some humans in there. But they need to have certain skill levels.Replies: @dvorak, @Anon
It’s often cheaper just to get humans to do something than to use fancy dancy computers. People just assume that if you can remove labor costs out of the equation it’s automatically cheaper.
Here’s a hint – it was reported by CNN.
I didn’t see anything in that article that couldn’t also be construed as a misunderstanding or couldn’t have just been an outright fabrication.
Good comment.
A couple of minor disagreements, though:
Instead of:
I’d say:
is naive. They will not. Or, better, not without having “skin in the game”.
The key is make them having that “skin in the game”.
How about a synopsis, for those of us who don’t want to visit Google Docs?
While the theoretical virtues and practical difficulties of a graduated expenditure tax are well known (Fisher, 1943; Kaldor, 1955), less attention has been paid to the number of parameters required to fully specify such a tax. Here we describe a single parameter version of a graduated expenditure tax that is at once simple, transparent, and continuously progressive over the entire range of consumer spending.
For a given society’s unit of currency, let the integer n denote the total number of units of spending for a given taxpayer in a given tax period. We then specify the parameter m (a very small number of order 10-6) to be the marginal tax rate applied to the first unit of expenditure, 2m the marginal rate applied to the second unit, 3m the marginal rate applied to the third, and so on. In other words, instead of being arbitrarily defined each successive tax bracket is exactly one unit of currency wide and the marginal tax rates on successive brackets form an arithmetic sequence, each term of which increases by the amount of the parameter m.
With this information in hand it is an easy matter to compute every taxpayer’s total tax liability using the formula for the sum of an arithmetic sequence that we all learned in high school, namely, tn=mn(n+1)/2 where tn denotes the total tax owed on n units of spending in a given tax period.We naturally assume that the parameter m can be adjusted (“tuned”) by the taxing authority depending on the target revenue it is aiming to raise, which we denote with the letter T. Then for a given society’s current distributions of income and wealth and its propensities to consume (all of which can be estimated on the basis of recent historical experience, assuming such a tax was in place in the preceding tax periods) m is clearly a function of T. In other words, once the target revenue has been set there are no free parameters to be put in by hand.To get a sense of what such a tax would look like in practice consider the United States as it exists today. Here the unit of currency is the dollar and for purposes of illustration we choose the parameter m, the marginal tax rate applied to the first dollar of consumer spending, to be exactly 6×10-6. The graphs below plot the total tax individual taxpayers would owe on personal expenditures ranging from $10,000 to $2,000,000 in a given tax period.
Notes: The spreadsheet from which these graphs have been constructed is here. A companion paper describing a single parameter version of the earned income tax credit is below.
A One Parameter Earned Income Tax Credit
As a companion to the one parameter graduated expenditure tax [1], we here describe a one parameter version of the earned income tax credit, only in this case the marginal tax credits that apply to successive units of earned income form a geometric as opposed to an arithmetic sequence (differ by a common ratio as opposed to a common sum).
Thus for a given unit of currency, let be a very small number of order 10-5. We then define 1- to be the tax credit a wage worker receives for the first unit of currency he earns in a given tax period, 1-2the credit he receives for the second unit of currency earned, 1-3 the credit for the third unit, and so on. It is then a simple matter to compute a wage worker’s total tax credit for that period using the formula for the sum of a geometric sequence that we all learned in high school, namely, tcrn = 1--1- n+1 where tcrn denotes the total credit on n units of wages received.To get a sense of what this version of an earned income tax credit would look like in practice, consider the United States as it exists today. Here the unit of currency is the dollar and for purposes of illustration we choose the parameter to be exactly 510-5. The table and chart below show what the total credits would be, both absolutely and as a percentage of wages, for workers earning between $5000 and $100,000 a year.
DiscussionThe first thing we note is that the lower a wage worker’s total earnings the larger his tax credit will be as a percentage of his wages. In this it is like the current EITC and is in keeping with the purpose of an earned income tax credit, which is to enable low income workers to enjoy significantly higher standards of living than their market wages alone can support.
On the other hand, we also note an anomaly: unlike today, workers whose total earnings are the highest and who, presumably, are least in need of a subsidy, would in fact receive the biggest credits of all in absolute amount. There is no threshold beyond which the size of their credits begins to decline.
This anomaly can be reduced, however, and in some cases eliminated completely, if there were also in place a one parameter graduated expenditure tax like the one we previously constructed. For two reasons:
Firstly, because as a rule workers who earn more will also consume more and will therefore face higher marginal tax rates on any part of their credits they use to further increase their consumption. Thus even though the size of their credits would be larger absolutely, its after-tax purchasing power in the present tax period (and quite likely in future periods as well) would be less, in some cases much less.And secondly, because additional revenue will be required to finance this (or any) system of earned income tax credits, which means that the parameter m would have to be dialed up to increase the marginal tax rates on consumption. And since by definition those rates increase arithmetically over the entire range of consumer spending, workers whose earnings are too high will as a rule choose or (if their propensities to save are too low, but not less than zero) actually be forced to consume less than they did before the system of credits became law. For them “what the right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away.” Or to put it another way, for any value of there exists an earnings threshold, call it point p, beyond which every wage worker’s disposable income becomes less even after receiving his credit. Where that threshold lies is an empirical question the answer to which will vary depending upon a society’s distributions of income and wealth, the distribution of its propensities to consume, and the revenues it requires for other public purposes. Without any data the most we can say is that, these variables being held constant, the closer the parameter is to zero the higher the parameter m must be set, and the lower that threshold will be.We leave it to mathematical economists to describe the range of possible Gini coefficients of consumption in a society as a function of these variables. Tax Credit Table for e = 5 x 10^-5
Earnings
Tax Credit
Credit as % of Earnings
$5,000
$4,424
88%
$10,000
$7,869
79%
$20,000
$12,642
63%
$30,000
$15,537
52%
$40,000
$17,203
43%
$50,000
$18,357
37%
$60,000
$19,003
32%
$70,000
$19,395
28%
$80,000
$19,633
25%
$90,000
$19,777
22%
$100,000
$19,864
20%
Somehow the proximity sensors on the car had been disabled -- software foulup. Systems that brake for obstacles have been around a long time.
Doesn't mean the problem is trivial -- if the software is large enough, well, relations between N software modules increase as roughly as N squared [1]. Even if the modules (to include proximity sensors) are all correct, you can end up with too many module interactions to keep track of.
CounterinsurgencyReplies: @Mr. Anon
For Davos Man, any fatalities arising from self-driving cars are a feature, not a bug. Robot cars and trucks are mowing people down? So what? There are too many surplus workers anyway since they lost their jobs driving cars and trucks. It’s a self-correcting problem.
Aha!
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
I love rich people. Slow cooked then served with a good barbeque sauce.
Seriously, the focus just on “the rich” misses the boat. Most of the evil perpetrated the last 100 years wasn’t caused by “the rich” but by ideologues–politicians, journalists, academics, bureaucrats–i.e. “the new class”, for their own “new class” interests.
And I certainly don’t hate automating away jobs. Producing more with less labor–either through better organization or better technology–is precisely why we have living standards so much higher than our ancestors. I’ll take a combine over a scythe.
I don’t mind the rich who are pushing forward with that. The evil rich are those that try and cheat and instead of out innovating or out organizing their competition are trying to cheat their way to profits by importing foreigners for cheap labor. I want to see a ditch getting dug by some guy operating a backhoe getting paid a decent wage, not by ten Mexicans with picks and shovels.
The rich pushing to flood their nations with foreigners, those are the rich who deserve to be killed, roasted and eaten. Actually they deserve to be roasted alive and eaten. They are the lowest form of life.
So we can deduce that they want them here to do something other than work.
Trump is so rhetorically sloppy and he misses so many debate angles but this omission by him is huge. He should be pounding "the robot future won't have jobs for unskilled laborers" argument. I think people really get this argument.Replies: @Hidden Cat, @Bill B., @Thea, @unpc downunder, @Harry Baldwin
Replacing politicians with robots would solve our problems.
I’m not so sure. Yes, the market preference has shifted to trucks and SUVs but car companies are around for a long time and fashions are fickle. The most successful car companies are the ones with the most volume because of economy of scale and the only way to get volume is to be a full line mfr. No questions that Ford will make more in the short run by phasing out unprofitable models but that’s a tactic, not a strategy.
Airlines make the all their profits in the premium sections but they can’t fly business class only planes (it’s been tried) because there’s not enough volume.
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
That’s rather mean spirited. I suspect most people here (including myself) would frown upon this.
Lots of people are richer than me, younger than me, more beautiful than me, more popular than me. Good for them. Envy is generally an ugly emotion.
Envy and resentment is not what I’m about and not what Steve Sailer is about.
Happy Austalia Day to all you aussies out there!
Not hookers but high priced call girls, escorts etc. $5000 per evening on up. Subtract 20 years from Jeff Bezos’ spell caster and this is what she looks like.
He is many things but not dull or dumb.Replies: @Anonymous
…..but he’s full of shit.
Yeah buggy whips blah blah but how is the economy supposed to function then?Replies: @Counterinsurgency, @JerseyJeffersonian
Ah, but then there is the Useless Eater Remediation Program to help with that resultant mismatch. Don’t know if they have thought through all of the potential for blowback, though.
We see the same phenomenon with industry. Machine made goods are cheap but valued as crap. A Casio watch keeps better time than a Piaget but we value the Piaget more because it is made by craftsmen. A handmade car is valued far more than a, perhaps, equally mass produced vehicle beyond its deluxe appointments because people value human labor more than they do the work of machines.
A three D printing machine might turn out a Ferrari for $50,000 but would people pay $50,000 for a printed clone of the real thing? No doubt some would but the genuine article, IMO , would command the higher price because of its rarity and the fact that it was built and designed by humans.Replies: @Jack D, @Bubba, @Henry Bowman
After reading the 1st paragraph of your comment I couldn’t help but think of this Twilight Zone episode with Jack Warden and Lee Marvin. It was the future in 1974 (according to 1963) after human boxing is banned in 1968.
According to this source, that is incorrect. It shows the peak participation rate (since the 1950s) as being around 67% right around the year 2000 or so. The lowest rate during the period was in 1963, at around 58.5%.Replies: @Romanian, @Romanian
Thank you for pointing out the problem. I was talking about men. My mistake.
The early labor force participation rate referred to men only, or it did in the material I saw it, because it was one by Charles Murray. The more recent ones were for men and women together, but you can find them separated.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2007/jan/wk2/art03.htm
What happened was that the men started from a higher base – 90% in the 1950s (I cannot find the yearly ones) with over 95% in the main age groups. It is in the 60s today. And women started from a much lower base (33%) in the 1950s and have almost converged with men though the indicator will apparently diverge again, possibly on account of ethnic drift, with lower female labor participation rates among the Hispanics, Muslims and so on. Of course, if you project the definition today back in the past, the female labor force participation rate is going to pull it way down. You’ve gone from basically full male employment and a third female to a basic tie in the low 60s.
Look at table 4, page 22.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf
Yes, the report is old. But it is way past my bedtime and I cannot track down an honest pdf report with such tables.
Thanks!
That’s only in North America, though. In China, Ford’s sedans and hatchbacks are still going strong. I expect the phaseout is just a way to get out from under the CAW/UAW. Cars simply do not generate enough profit to justify assembling them in North America. In the future, Ford’s sedans and hatchbacks will all be imported if the demand is there:
And in Europe, where gas is anywhere from $6 to $8 a gallon, thanks to taxes to finance “free” universal health care, Ford is definitely not phasing out sedans. Not if it wants to continue selling about 1m cars a year there.
Anon, Will they interview Serena while they toss the medal to Naomi?
It looks to me that TPTB are angling to have Watson and Crick's Nobels withdrawn and given posthumously to Franklin.
Rewriting history to suit the Jew and feminist agenda.
The BBC did a docudrama ( i.e. a lie ) a few years ago where Franklin was the real discoverer, lots of ignorant people will have believed it.
These powerful interest groups are good at re-writing history to suit themselves.
Any takers that this is the agenda?Replies: @Buffalo Joe, @J.Ross, @Anonymous
Gordo, I’m cool with Watson and Crick being stripped of their Medals, as soon as Obama surrenders his. Shameless that he accepted it.
According to this source, that is incorrect. It shows the peak participation rate (since the 1950s) as being around 67% right around the year 2000 or so. The lowest rate during the period was in 1963, at around 58.5%.Replies: @Romanian, @Romanian
Coming back to the comparison with my country, we started moving women into the formal workforce much more heavily during Communist times, because of the need to mobilize all resources of society for development and, potentially, warfare. A lot of household work in our peasant society was converted into formal work through the collectivization of agriculture, wherein subsistence farming for men and women became industrial farming with the man and woman as employees of the Agricultural Production Cooperatives. So, the homemaker relying on a single income was very much the exception. Some of this was a liberal’s dream, like pretty high rates of female entry into STEM positions, though the Commies practiced benign neglect when it came to proportions, which means that our rates likely reflected the actual interest of women in pursuing traditionally male fields like engineering and such.
But that all changed after 1989. Industries were quickly gutted, privatized, sold for scrap and employment fell like a rock. The commies practiced inefficient underemployment, but Romania still had a youngish population and 11 million workers in the 1980s. The big news for 2018 was that we would finally have 5 million workers again for the first time in decades. The absolute minimum was 4 million in January 2011. A third of these are state employees (teachers, doctors, bureaucrats local and national, soldiers). Mind you, the population is stated to be 19.5 million as opposed to 23 million in 1989, but some of those are working in the EU without meeting the criteria for having permanently moved, so the real numbers are already much lower.
Seriously, the focus just on "the rich" misses the boat. Most of the evil perpetrated the last 100 years wasn't caused by "the rich" but by ideologues--politicians, journalists, academics, bureaucrats--i.e. "the new class", for their own "new class" interests.
And I certainly don't hate automating away jobs. Producing more with less labor--either through better organization or better technology--is precisely why we have living standards so much higher than our ancestors. I'll take a combine over a scythe.
I don't mind the rich who are pushing forward with that. The evil rich are those that try and cheat and instead of out innovating or out organizing their competition are trying to cheat their way to profits by importing foreigners for cheap labor. I want to see a ditch getting dug by some guy operating a backhoe getting paid a decent wage, not by ten Mexicans with picks and shovels.
The rich pushing to flood their nations with foreigners, those are the rich who deserve to be killed, roasted and eaten. Actually they deserve to be roasted alive and eaten. They are the lowest form of life.Replies: @J.Ross
Modifier: anyone whose idea of “the rich” is “richer than me” should not be worried about. Their opinions are ignorant and, after all [haughty laughter], they’re poor. The “new class” are the servants of the one percent of the one percent, who feel about “the rich” the same as they feel about the working poor.
Kyle,How about the air driven nail gun, magazine fed drywall screw guns, self elevating brick scaffolding and laser levels ,
Interestingly, what oligarchs do is more easily automated than what a hotel maid does, for example. See Moravec’s paradox.
It’s those with more cerebral jobs who should be most afraid of automation. Like accountants, lawyers, and financial analysts.
I don’t think automating low level workers is economical in most cases. If it were we’d see more development in this direction, but actually we see little.
I think elites only want to automate low level workers away in order to keep the rising tide of color away from their property and themselves. They’re not allowed to discuss the current demographic disaster, not even privately with friends. That’s crimethink. So they certainly can’t do anything about it policy wise. Instead they come up with Rube Goldberg schemes to keep the colored tide out of economic centers, and therefore out of their lives.
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
There are no Libertarians on this blog.
There are also no Never-Trump National Review Jeb Bush Republicans.
Nor free market anti-labor Paleocons.
Or invade the world, invite the world neocons.
I know you are African, and maybe English isn’t your first language, but even fighting those handicaps I would have thought that after reading so much material on this site, reality would have sunk in even with you. Instead you keep posting these comments directed at people who aren’t even in the building.
Try going over to the site for Reason magazine, or NRO, and copy and paste your comments there where they will be read by people to whom they apply.
So we can deduce that they want them here to do something other than work.
Trump is so rhetorically sloppy and he misses so many debate angles but this omission by him is huge. He should be pounding "the robot future won't have jobs for unskilled laborers" argument. I think people really get this argument.Replies: @Hidden Cat, @Bill B., @Thea, @unpc downunder, @Harry Baldwin
In a FIRE economy like the US, the main role of low-skilled immigrants is to provide service labour for the wealthy urbanites who create (or redistribute) the wealth. The locals won’t do these urban service jobs because living costs in FIRE cities are too high.
This is why western countries should still hold onto some provincial manufacturing jobs. They may not employ many people directly, but they help generate economic activity in more affordable provincial towns. Better to mow lawns for a robot technician in Fish town than clean hotel rooms in rip off New York or London.
Additionally, some sectors of the economy benefit. For example, if you own a rental property your rents will go higher as immigrants move to your area. Even if the immigrant can't afford the rent, the government will subsidize them and you will get more money. Or the poor locals will have to pony up more. Either way, your rent income increases.
Stores like Walmart see increased sales. Even if the new immigrants have no money of their own, government EBT cards enable them to shop at your store and purchase the necessities of life. So your sales go up and probably too your stock price.
And as schools become overcrowded construction firms are retained to build new ones. They are retained to build new apartment complexes and so on.
So to a lot of people in the top 1 percent whether immigrants have jobs or not is immaterial. Warm bodies help them financially, and the dilution in voting power of the White trash, of which I am a proud member, is further extended. That, coupled with the vast spaces of America for which to build gated communities, ensures a continued reign over the nation in luxurious abodes.Replies: @Clyde
Not so hidden, this agenda.
As someone who once worked in large organizations, I formulated the idea that business only used human beings to instantiate their organization functions until computers could be designed to do their jobs perfectly in the early 1980’s, so this is old news to me.
I started applying microcomputers to administrative functions in the late 1970’s; it quickly became apparent to me that clerks and other low-level people would be among the first to go, but that soon middle management would follow with artificial intelligence. I recall scaring the crap out of my boss with that one; he felt better when I said that it probably wouldn’t affect him, because he’d be retired by then.
After a while, it became clear to everyone that a PC on every desk would kill off the secretary function for all but top executives (“what, you can’t use email?”). Also, we began to realize that the obsessive use of data bases meant that white collar employees would no longer be necessary. Back in the day, if the boss had a question about the organization, he would ask the question of a white collar manager, who would delegate it to a supervisor, who would organize some college-educated white collar employees who would go throughout the organization gathering information.
Now, a manager just types some SQL into a database and has a pretty good answer in ten seconds.
Serena was eliminated relatively early.
This is Naomi Osaka’s second Grand Slam title, and she is only 21!
She seems unstoppable now. Even better for the fans – she was
a model of decorum, civility, and even kindness in her victory speech
(John Isner) among the top 30 players, and in the women’s category
only Sloane Stephens in the top 10. How did we come to this? The U.S.
used to dominate tennis. People used to be glued to the TV sets in
the ‘90s to watch the rivalry between Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras.
Those were the days! Not anymore.
Stalin, is that you?Replies: @Bill P
No way. Stalin was a monopolist. State monopoly on everything. I think we should treat our big companies kind of like professional sports teams — ensure fair competition and prevent one or two from cornering the market on anything, including talent. With more competition there will be more excellence, and more benefit to the worker and the consumer.
It looks to me that TPTB are angling to have Watson and Crick's Nobels withdrawn and given posthumously to Franklin.
Rewriting history to suit the Jew and feminist agenda.
The BBC did a docudrama ( i.e. a lie ) a few years ago where Franklin was the real discoverer, lots of ignorant people will have believed it.
These powerful interest groups are good at re-writing history to suit themselves.
Any takers that this is the agenda?Replies: @Buffalo Joe, @J.Ross, @Anonymous
Somewhere online is a very good high school essay by a feminist but honest student who studied Franklin but concluded that she cannot be owed credit because she had the evidence right in front of her, she had been looking directly at the structure from long before Watson amd Crick got interested in it, and could not see what was before her eyes.
It's those with more cerebral jobs who should be most afraid of automation. Like accountants, lawyers, and financial analysts.Replies: @Bill P
It’s not so much of a paradox for those of us who’ve played sports or worked in physical occupations. Sinking a three-pointer or hitting a curveball is a lot more complicated than calculus, even though a lot of people who can perform the former have trouble with the latter. Conscious reason, which is unique to humans among all species on earth, is only recently evolved and “in development” in our species, whereas the subconscious ability to interact with the physical world has been honed for billions of years.
There are also no Never-Trump National Review Jeb Bush Republicans.
Nor free market anti-labor Paleocons.
Or invade the world, invite the world neocons.
I know you are African, and maybe English isn’t your first language, but even fighting those handicaps I would have thought that after reading so much material on this site, reality would have sunk in even with you. Instead you keep posting these comments directed at people who aren’t even in the building.
Try going over to the site for Reason magazine, or NRO, and copy and paste your comments there where they will be read by people to whom they apply.Replies: @Dtbb
Obwandiyag is another name for Chief Pontiac. My guess is he is from Michigan.
Especially not Pekin:
https://www.nikkeiview.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/PEKIN-CHINKS-300x290.jpg
Business lines of insurance still use risk control specialists to evaluate potential policyholders, to keep underwriting informed of insured operations, exposures and controls, and to provide safety consulting services to insureds. Many states mandate that safety services be provided to insureds at no charge.
For insurance companies that write through brokers and independent agents, risk control specialists are the only company employees to meet with insureds on a regular basis.
This...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXvzhYnlTU0
Reminds me of this...
https://youtu.be/Z8eKxVCFoUk?t=61
Tip of the Iceberg...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8Replies: @Philip Owen
I couldn’t make out what the Russian guy was saying at the “click” farm.
“Learn to code” is another ‘bootstraps’ platitude of ignorant boomers with humanities degrees from State Directional.
You are competing with Indian freelancers in India delivering via the net anyway.
I've written before, in Peak Stupidity, that it is a real shame that the science fiction stories in my youth about the idyllic society in which automation has replaced all of the drugery, and we few and spread-out humans spend our time on intellectual pursuits can't come true (not enough REAL intellectuals, and too many people):Yeah, the chance of that bright future got squandered, at least for the human population in general.Replies: @Stan d Mute, @Logan
Until the strong and rational discontinue feeding the weak and stupid, there’s zero chance of any utopian future. Without care and feeding the planet’s population drops to Malthusian limits but who has the stomach for watching that process unfold really? Instead we will, like an ill-trained lifeguard, let the drowning bastards take us down with them.
Other bright people will come up with vaccines, but not before the plague has worked its way through many of the more vulnerable populations of the world.
I think the odds of this happening are so high that it is dumb to not be prepared.
Humans have probably been self-domesticating for about 2 million years* - that means self-selecting. That's a pretty long trend to bet against.
* Although very slowly at first, but with accelerations at ca 100ka and 10ka.Replies: @Stan d Mute
I regret that, when discussing Trump's trade wars, no one ever mentions such important details. People just say they're against Trump's moves because they're no way to treat allies, or a threat to free trade, etc. But surely these details are important! It's not politics, it's policy.
But no one can be bothered to go into the details of the figures. Maybe we need AI helpers to give us the facts instead of having people say bla bla bla without any factual underpinnings. But it's easier to have flame wars that to talk facts.
As I recall, US cars imported to Europe face a 10% tax, European cars imported to the US have only a 2.5% tax.* Do German carmakers need that help? I don't think so.
Yup:Replies: @Stan d Mute
This crap is endemic. Even when we have “free” trade, our partners screw us by subsidizing industries like we subsidize farming.
To take just the most obvious example, if you expel more and more people from the economy,who will be your customers?
I don't care how cheaply you produce something, if there is nobody with the money to buy it you aren't going to make money.Replies: @tsotha
They’ll have customers. It’s just that the mix of goods changes. Instead of having millions buying wide-screen televisions you’ll have thousands installing full-size theaters in their mansions. Sedan sales will flag and private jet sales will boom. Etc.
Plus, they’ll be spending a lot of money on security to keep the rest of us out of their gated communities.
More good news from Davos! Our oligarchs will soon make magic muchrooms and ecstasy available to the proles!
https://www.businessinsider.com/davos-top-psychedelic-scientist-mdma-magic-mushrooms-medicine-2019-1
Steve, I’m not sure whether I should reference soma or Victory Gin. You pick.
I played my own bit part in eliminating the humans in auto assembly plant paint lines. I’m pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of the workers I displaced with robots in the late 80’s are now in custody of the MDOC or dead from overdoses. There’s not much “labor” left in a modern factory in America today. There are electricians, pipefitters, and technicians to service the robots. Even tool & die makers now use robots to build robots.Replies: @AndrewR, @J.Ross
>elites meeting at davos
>a guy who to all credit got himself an MBA
Not sure what they told you at graduation but those aren’t the same thing.
>there’s more automation than there used to be
Sure and some of it is good.
>workers hardly exist any more
Laughably nonsensical.
>the workers will not trade up (or over) to better (or alternate) work, they will die or be imprisoned, ha ha ha
Oh so you agree with my essential point anyway: this idea that we are not just gutting our own people was an obvious lie for NAFTA and is a recycled obvious lie now. And there’s nothing wrong with gutting our own people if they are beyond-strangers to whom we owe less than xenia. All the people who want the workers to die or be imprisoned are, conciously or effectively, socialists.
This doesn’t work, scale cannot be stretched so that luxury goods replace and outperform consumer goods. We are dancing around the fact that the elites left capitalism long ago and all their really big projects are half or mostly government, or are tied into the government enough to act as insurance against the market.
Mr. Sailer, You almost always end your columns abruptly. Answer your own (rhetorical?) question. Why do our betters, our brilliant elite, simultaneously press for both automation and increased Third World immigration? I understand the former, but not the latter-particularly while pressing immigration. What’s your best answer?
https://www.amren.com/news/2019/01/time-to-update-the-pledge-of-allegiance/
“Upgraded version” should pledge “allegiance and love to our indigenous and immigrant heritage.”
Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Indigenous and Immigrant heritage?
But it was mass immigration from the Old World that destroyed indigenous communities.
Imperialism = immigration = destruction of Indigenous folks.
Same happened in Palestine. Mass immigration of Zionist led to demise of indigenous Palestinians who now live under Occupation in West Bank.
Only a sick mind honors indigenous folks by associating them with immigration that replaced them.
Interesting discussion. Two points earlier commentators mostly missed.
First, each year since World World II an additional 80 million net humans have been added to the world population, and the world labor force, with total world population tripling. There is no way such a rapid increase in the labor force can do anything but create, at least temporarily, a labor glut. This was widely predicted in the 1970s and 1980s, when we were allowed to discuss over-population and, except for Japan, countries with low birthrates have been more than willing to import more people from high birthrate countries to keep wages down. The labor glut would have happened and keep happening if there was no automation, or if automation had been a hoax. A lot of American jobs have not been automated but simply relocated to sweatshops in higher birthrate countries.
Second, the response to the elites to automation and the labor glut seems to have been mainly the creation of more make-work jobs, and the transformation of formerly productive jobs that would have been eliminated in an automated world into make-work jobs. See David Graeber’s essay on “Bullshit Jobs” (https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).
No, Jack D, Jesus does not hate the rich. He hates evil, and therefore its embodiment, Satan, but no one else.
He told us to love our neighbour and he told us how: as ourselves. How do we love ourselves? By wanting the best for ourselves. What is that best? Eternal life.
What we desire for ourselves, eternal life, we are commanded to desire for our neighbour too, rich or poor.
Jesus is warning the rich of the danger of a misuse of their riches. Why? Because he desires their salvation. Why? Because he loves them, and all men, rich or poor.
The idea that He loves the poor more is a grotesque lie, popular with mythomanes like, alas, the present pope.
The Marxist-inspired hijacking of the Gospel by liberation theologians is an ongoing tragedy. Poor people are deceived: instead of being told the truth -- that Jesus came to proclaim salvation to even the poorest among us if they repent and believe in him -- they are persuaded that their identity as a member of the group labeled 'the poor' will assure their (collective) salvation.
The corollary of this diabolical axiom is that an individual's beliefs and decisions don't matter, when in fact each of us must answer the question of eternity on our own.Replies: @Old Palo Altan, @obwandiyag
? The wealthy elite who will profit from this will need lots of cheap, docile, agreeably submissive servants.
Does that describe you? Hence, immigration.Replies: @bomag, @Counterinsurgency, @Saxon
Doesn’t describe the third world populations they’re bringing in, either. In fact, those people are more likely to ruin it all and tear it all down.
“Learn to code” is only funny today because the very same journos who were screaming it at working class nobodies they said deserve to starve and die and need to “learn to code” are now being unemployed and being told learn to code by internet trolls fucking with them.
In any case it’s unrealistic due to IQ distributions and the fact that it’s a cognitively-demanding job, at least to be able to do it competently and well. When complete idiots make Luddite analogies when talking about this, or talk about how most of the population used to live in a rural area and work on agriculture, they of course conveniently skip over the fact that at best, this was a horizontal movement in terms of cognitive requirements. Moving from farming work to simplified, easy-to-use machinery and factory work was sometimes even easier than the farm work. Your average coal miner, truck driver or activist posing as a credible journalist cannot learn to code. The idea that most people are going to “retrain” to a higher cognitive-level job was just word wizardry to sell you on disastrous “free trade” nonsense.
Regarding those journalists, they are claiming that "brigading 4chan trolls" (who were almost certainly of Finno-Tatar extraction and enjoy sour cream a great deal) e-mailed them death threats.
E-mailed? What e-mail? We know it's not their work e-mail. And why would you send death threats to a neutralized party?
Many became high school math teachers.
I assumed it was the employers sending out press releases to the idiot journalists who wrote for the business sections with the object of creating a glut of programmers.
I’m such a cynic
It’s called expand the franchise.
Curiously, Vox Day wrote a science fiction novel called Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted where a key concept was expanding the franchise to AIs:
If you don’t like the humans who wont vote for you, replace them.
This is Naomi Osaka’s second Grand Slam title, and she is only 21!
She seems unstoppable now. Even better for the fans - she was
a model of decorum, civility, and even kindness in her victory speechReplies: @Anon 2, @Buffalo Joe
Among the top tennis players there is currently only one American
(John Isner) among the top 30 players, and in the women’s category
only Sloane Stephens in the top 10. How did we come to this? The U.S.
used to dominate tennis. People used to be glued to the TV sets in
the ‘90s to watch the rivalry between Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras.
Those were the days! Not anymore.
Indeed.
They’re not indifferent. They need to get the phosphorus back.
Democrat Andrew Yang is running for President with a focus on job losses caused by automation.
Silicon Valley types love universal basic income, but not sure if that addresses the long term problem. I hope he introduces some out of the box ideas to the Democratic primary.
https://www.yang2020.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=192&v=grciW239bp0
There’s the apocryphal tale of Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther (the original head of the UAW) touring Ford’s Cleveland engine plant.
The story goes that Henry showed Walter the automated sections of the line and sarcastically asked Reuther how he’d collect union dues from the machines.
Reuther paused for a minute and was said to reply “Very impressive Henry. By the way, how many new Ford cars will the machines buy?”
Much like shipping is today with GPS auto navigation on the open seas and harbor/bar pilots navigating/docking the tricky bits. Flying too is mostly automated with pilots doing little but standing by in case of emergency and only really flying on takeoff and approach/landing. Most modern cars are already drive-by-wire with no mechanical links between gas, brakes, steering inputs and responses. Jobs like lumberjack are being rapidly replaced by felling, trimming, and skidding machines. Rapid prototyping is done by 3D printing and tool/die making with water jet robots, robotic lathes, etc.
I was looking at an old typesetting machine a few days ago and thinking there’s perhaps a dozen guys in the HBD Mitten who even know what it is much less how to operate the thing.
Not only will the majority of the population have nothing to do alarmingly soon, one good EMP or solar flare and 3/4 of the country will die. But by all means, let’s just keep importing by the tens of millions people one generation past cannibalism. This way lies Utopia..
To a car guy like me, that’s blasphemy. But to everyone else it’s self-evidently true.
This is Naomi Osaka’s second Grand Slam title, and she is only 21!
She seems unstoppable now. Even better for the fans - she was
a model of decorum, civility, and even kindness in her victory speechReplies: @Anon 2, @Buffalo Joe
A2, Nice that she got to speak. When she defeated Serena, at the US Open I think, they interviewed Serena about her loss, while Osaka stood meekly to the side. It was sad.
OPA, nice homily.
In any case it's unrealistic due to IQ distributions and the fact that it's a cognitively-demanding job, at least to be able to do it competently and well. When complete idiots make Luddite analogies when talking about this, or talk about how most of the population used to live in a rural area and work on agriculture, they of course conveniently skip over the fact that at best, this was a horizontal movement in terms of cognitive requirements. Moving from farming work to simplified, easy-to-use machinery and factory work was sometimes even easier than the farm work. Your average coal miner, truck driver or activist posing as a credible journalist cannot learn to code. The idea that most people are going to "retrain" to a higher cognitive-level job was just word wizardry to sell you on disastrous "free trade" nonsense.Replies: @J.Ross, @Alden
And re-training sidesteps the issue of Mittromneying, which is the real purpose here anyway.
Regarding those journalists, they are claiming that “brigading 4chan trolls” (who were almost certainly of Finno-Tatar extraction and enjoy sour cream a great deal) e-mailed them death threats.
E-mailed? What e-mail? We know it’s not their work e-mail. And why would you send death threats to a neutralized party?
In our economy government spending is part of the calculation of GDP:
So bringing in immigrants can boost GDP even if they go on welfare since the government will presumably spend more to provide assistance. More government spending leads to higher GDP. Note, I am referring to GDP not per capita GDP which is the important statistic.
Additionally, some sectors of the economy benefit. For example, if you own a rental property your rents will go higher as immigrants move to your area. Even if the immigrant can’t afford the rent, the government will subsidize them and you will get more money. Or the poor locals will have to pony up more. Either way, your rent income increases.
Stores like Walmart see increased sales. Even if the new immigrants have no money of their own, government EBT cards enable them to shop at your store and purchase the necessities of life. So your sales go up and probably too your stock price.
And as schools become overcrowded construction firms are retained to build new ones. They are retained to build new apartment complexes and so on.
So to a lot of people in the top 1 percent whether immigrants have jobs or not is immaterial. Warm bodies help them financially, and the dilution in voting power of the White trash, of which I am a proud member, is further extended. That, coupled with the vast spaces of America for which to build gated communities, ensures a continued reign over the nation in luxurious abodes.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1005005-player-pianoIn Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan" he presents a race of robots which killed and replaced their builders:
“Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough. So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, 'Tralfamadore.'”
― Kurt Vonnegut, "The Sirens of Titan"Skynet, Georgia Guidestones, and depopulation agenda, y'all. "Brave New World", "The Machine Stops", "The Marching Morons" . . . the sentient crystal ball of speculative fiction. If only it were tradeable on Nasdaq. SHORT THE FUTURE!Replies: @ziggurat
Peter Thiel said we are entering a bull market on Politics, which sounds like a volatile situation. And the Future looks like a venture with diminishing returns and a potential terminus.
Maybe go long on the stock called “Politics” and go short the stock called “The Future”?
If learning to code ensured employment in tbe field, the USA would not have so many citizens who are STEM grads, but working in other fields, underemployed or unemployed. We have a lot of noncitizen visa holders taking those positions, and except for the crémé de la crémé, they are the choice of employers for exact same reason they prefer robots: cheapness. If they keep on automating, they won’t be rich for long. The 1% of approved employees that meet their standards do not add up to a sufficient consumer market to keep them in $6-million-dollar ranch houses, jetsetting global vacations and private schools. Even the top 20% won’t do it.
Nancy and her husband make millions a year from their ranches restaurants and hotels in Napa and Sonoma that employ thousands of farm restaurant and hotel Employees. somebody still has to make beds and scrub bathrooms and carry cases of flowers around.
I agree, AI will free workers from mind-numbing repetitive tasks and force all uneducated JOE 6-pack’s on opioids to get reskilled.
Have psychometricians ever arrived at a fixed IQ number below which people cannot code well enough to do it for a living(dumber people may be able to learn Hello World, but that’s far below the level of savvy needed to be a productive professional programmer)?
If not, you’d think they could arrive at a rough number using cognitive induction tests from places with universal male conscription like Israel, South Korea, Singapore, and Finland. The latter in particular would be a good candidate due to decades worth of records, a longstanding demand for coders and free or near free tuition. So if you want to be a professional programmer in Finland you’re only limited by your brainpower(this may be the case for the other countries, but I’m not sure).
What percentage of the population is capable of doing this? 5%? 10%? And we also have to take into account that some of the people who are cognitively capable of programming professionally are also smart enough to be physicians, chemical engineers, executives, and other professionals needed to run a modern society.
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
I learned long ago that if I scratch people like you deeply enough, I’ll always find guilt or envy.
Anyone who doesn't hate rich people is either stupid or rich.Replies: @El Dato, @Jack D, @Buffalo Joe, @AndrewR, @AnotherDad, @Massimo Heitor, @Alfa158, @Stripes Duncan, @Reg Cæsar
By world standards, almost everyone in America is rich. That’s the lesson Soviet peasants took from seeing the Joads riding in their own truck. Not exactly what Uncle Joe had in mind when he showed it to them. So you hate almost all Americans. Thanks for the heads-up.
Rich people are much more likely than working and poor people to believe that the death penalty is wrong, that abortion should be legal, that immigrants are good for a country, that evolution is science and should be taught in schools, that gun possession should be strictly controlled, even eliminated, that climate change is real, that vaccinations should be mandatory, that avoiding people of color is wrong, that women should have the vote but not cigarettes, and on and on…
We can rest assured, though, that you, Obw., are willing to testify that the rich are dead wrong on every single one of these.
I used to deliver baked goods to markets and restaurants in the middle of the night.
Every time I picture a robot trying to negotiate mispacked orders, bent keys, doors only partially attached to their frames, dumpsters and trash cans that get put away in a different place every time, crap piled surprisingly and without notice in doorways, bums sleeping in the stairwells, and roving packs of hungry youths, I get a good chuckle.
Assembly line workers who install the #5 piston at Ford or put the green screw in seat 15A at Boeing for 50 dollars an hour should maybe get nervous, but for the most part the only people who think robots will replace manual labor are people who have never done it before.
https://youtu.be/V2V3Cu0nWvg?t=46
The average car nowadays has less than 15 hours of assembly labor in it because the factories are so highly automated, so even if the UAW guys are costing $70/hr on a fully loaded basis, there's less than $1,000 of labor in that $30K sticker price. Of course even saving $1,000 (when you multiply that times millions of cars) is enough to give Ford strong motivation to move the car factory to Mexico.Replies: @Johann Ricke, @Stan d Mute
There is a Pontiac in Illinois as well. It’s near, but not be confused with, Peru, Peotone, Peoria, and Pekin.
Especially not Pekin:
Why not automate Davos itself? It already comes across like Chuck E Cheese’s anyway.
I think the problem with space colonies is that it will be quite a while before orbital space habitats, or the moon or Mars, for that matter, will be able to sustainably support human residents, indefinitely, with no shipments of food, water, raw materials, medicines, or tools from the earth. So those space elevators would have to work continuously, but would be targets for vandalism by malcontents, and when things go south on the surface it would be hard to protect the cable landing point, or the cable itself from missiles.
In I think the first volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (fascinating on the tech and social speculation, but long and boring) a space elevator is built down to the Martian surface from an asteroid, using iron mined from the asteroid, which then became the stationary anchor satellite (not the terminus, because space elevators would have to have a long section extending beyond the anchor satellite, with the cable hanging down via gravity to the surface, and the other cable whipping outward via centrifugal force with the satellite at the equilibrium point). In Robinson’s book some revolutionaries, I forget if they were commies or eco-terrorists (“Keep Mars natural!) blew up the anchor point at the satellite and the cable wrapped around the equator of Mars a few times, landing at supersonic speed and destroying everything in its path.
If you blow up a space elevator at the earth’s surface or close to it, it can be repaired, and in fact the cable would just hang there in the air even if not anchored, as long as the satellite can make small altitude adjustments. A space elevator is just a geostationary satellite that happens to be very, very, very long, including the cables, and the center of mass of the whole system is the orbital point, which would be configured as a docking station.
If you blow up the docking station itself you you have a $100 quintillion replacement job on your hands.
There’s a nice space elevator element in Neal Stephenson’s SevenEves, a more readable book than Robinson’s. I don’t read much science fiction since I don’t like fantasy, and most science fiction includes stuff that just is never going to happen, like interstellar travel.
Additionally, some sectors of the economy benefit. For example, if you own a rental property your rents will go higher as immigrants move to your area. Even if the immigrant can't afford the rent, the government will subsidize them and you will get more money. Or the poor locals will have to pony up more. Either way, your rent income increases.
Stores like Walmart see increased sales. Even if the new immigrants have no money of their own, government EBT cards enable them to shop at your store and purchase the necessities of life. So your sales go up and probably too your stock price.
And as schools become overcrowded construction firms are retained to build new ones. They are retained to build new apartment complexes and so on.
So to a lot of people in the top 1 percent whether immigrants have jobs or not is immaterial. Warm bodies help them financially, and the dilution in voting power of the White trash, of which I am a proud member, is further extended. That, coupled with the vast spaces of America for which to build gated communities, ensures a continued reign over the nation in luxurious abodes.Replies: @Clyde
Lets not forget that the toilet paper sector and the diaper sector depend on a flow of third world immigrants into America. Not that they had much occasion to use flush toilets in the Indian highlands of Guatemala before they got here. None the less….
If not, you'd think they could arrive at a rough number using cognitive induction tests from places with universal male conscription like Israel, South Korea, Singapore, and Finland. The latter in particular would be a good candidate due to decades worth of records, a longstanding demand for coders and free or near free tuition. So if you want to be a professional programmer in Finland you're only limited by your brainpower(this may be the case for the other countries, but I'm not sure).
What percentage of the population is capable of doing this? 5%? 10%? And we also have to take into account that some of the people who are cognitively capable of programming professionally are also smart enough to be physicians, chemical engineers, executives, and other professionals needed to run a modern society.Replies: @Anon
I don’t remember the numbers, but I’ve seen a list of IQs that supposedly are what is required for mastering various math classes with a certain grade, algebra I, algebra II, differential calculus, integral calculus, etc.
The provisos were:
— Real, rigorous classes based on normal, challenging texts, and the whole text, not some subset
— No remediation or teaching to the test. The way that duller kids are pushed through math classes is that the scope to be tested is circumscribed by coordinating with the teacher (i.e., the black high school administrators let the white math teachers know that they better get with the diversity spirit), and then there is teaching to the test based on teaching “recipes” on how to solve certain problems written a certain way. You don’t have to understand what you are doing to use these recipes. Duller kids are not able to remember the recipes any better than they can remember anything else, so this tutoring goes up to the day before any test.
— The IQs are probabalistic, the center of a bell curve around which the IQs of students who are able to master the class cluster, not precise cutoff points (since IQ measurement itself is not that precise, among other factors).
With this in mind, the idea of remedial math classes for community college students is silly. If they passed high school and its math requirements and then flunk the community college entrance math placement test, they are just not math material, and if you believe in the general intelligence factor and IQ, they are not going to be any better in language skills. You are just pushing people into college who have nothing to gain from it other than a certificate, which is then devalued in its meaning because employers trust their lying eyes and they notice that kids with those degrees are not that bright.
Don’t worry about Osaka at age 21. She is 5ft 1o inches which is amazing for a Japanese woman. So she is half Haitian? Her winning attitude and grace is Japanese. A very interesting case of hybrid vigor? Her Japanese mother exerted the most influence.
American tennis player, male or female, who is worth watching. Only 20 years
ago we had many. How did this happen?
Currently in a relationship with a (non-Han) Singaporean lady.
1) Yes. The posters and papers of all the new citizens for each year are invariably majority from the PRC. It’s not even close. Downtown, you’ll see Sichuanese and Dongbei joints proliferating everywhere to reflect this new trend over the past couple of decades.
Singapore’s government does not joke around when it comes to keeping the ethnic ratio stable, given its history. And there is indeed an unapologetic, if unstated, racial hierarchy at work for prospective immigrants, right along with the socioeconomic one. With his Social Darwinian late empire background, LKY was never much one for political correctness. He was one, however, for distinguishing between official and policy reality: note that Singapore’s government doesn’t publish exact statistics about anything related to race.
2) It is. Like any other country, Singapore has its own unique set of challenges and perks.
On one hand, social services are second to none, crime is nonexistent, schools are orderly and will actually teach your kids stuff even if you are working class and living up near the Malaysian border, and the food is cheap, sublime, and plentiful. On the other hand, the “up or out” economy can be brutal if you don’t land your footing correctly, the hours are long and the bosses have near carte blanche, and you are more or less hemmed in with century-long leases on your flat and the government encouraging you to further enmesh yourself at every turn.
It’s also difficult to do anything too radical in Singapore: but on the other hand, evolutionary stuff, Singapore does very well. You’ll see this dynamic with startups in Asia. They’ll often HQ in Singapore, but if you want to do something wacky, you’d be better off in Shenzhen/Hong Kong.
I didn't see anything in that article that couldn't also be construed as a misunderstanding or couldn't have just been an outright fabrication.Replies: @AndrewR
I certainly don’t discount the possibility, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
As an aside many of Norway's pioneer sat divers are now suffering from chronic health conditions induced by their work, work which built up the basis of Norway's generous welfare state which the browns are currently plundering with reckless abandon.Replies: @Anonymous
The diving have mostly been taken over by robots. Some of them even work on their own:
https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2018/12/05/worlds-first-autonomous-offshore-robot-tested-in-north-sea/20087/
No explanation needed. Great reference. “Air-Strip-One” is the perfect simile for what the elites want.
There were big signs posted around the plant that workers caught using drugs at work would be suspended (with pay). UAW forbade firing them so manufacturers paid them to go to rehab. Rinse, lather, repeat ad nauseum. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d see them napping (or doped up nodding) under a newspaper or paint mask while car bodies rolled past destined for the rework shop. And yes, overwhelmingly they were of the negroid persuasion, not all – not all (to quite Jesse Lee Peterson), but overwhelmingly.
My robots replaced 6-8 “workers” per shift and had an ROI of less than a year. The only human job left (other than maintaining the robot – which they also failed to do) was inserting a plastic block to hold the doors open preventing them from being painted shut. This was too much work for them. Either the cars would be painted shut or doors flung wide and stripped off the hinges causing line stoppage and mayhem. I assume today that inserting the blocks is now also automated and better proximity sensors prevent the door flung wide problem.
Yeah people like that are also better off permanently nodding off.
What’s depressing is that for the first time… in history, there’s not a single
American tennis player, male or female, who is worth watching. Only 20 years
ago we had many. How did this happen?
“Upgraded version” should pledge “allegiance and love to our indigenous and immigrant heritage.”Talk about cognitive dissonance. Indigenous and Immigrant heritage? But it was mass immigration from the Old World that destroyed indigenous communities.Imperialism = immigration = destruction of Indigenous folks. Same happened in Palestine. Mass immigration of Zionist led to demise of indigenous Palestinians who now live under Occupation in West Bank.Only a sick mind honors indigenous folks by associating them with immigration that replaced them.Replies: @Corn
I think you’ve touched on why the poverty, addiction, all the problems facing Indians and Indian reservations are so rarely mentioned by the left. You can’t really scream too much about whitey stealing the land when your political position is to basically continue packing the place with non-“Indigenous” and continuing the theft.
That’s the thing about a designer plague. Humanity does not have to agree or work together, all it takes is one dedicated, intelligent person in a lab,. Imagine Ted Kaczynski with a different set of tools.
Other bright people will come up with vaccines, but not before the plague has worked its way through many of the more vulnerable populations of the world.
I think the odds of this happening are so high that it is dumb to not be prepared.
Humans have probably been self-domesticating for about 2 million years* – that means self-selecting. That’s a pretty long trend to bet against.
* Although very slowly at first, but with accelerations at ca 100ka and 10ka.
There is a Twilight Zone episode with Richard Deacon, The Brain Center at Whipple’s, that this all reminds me of.
Every time I picture a robot trying to negotiate mispacked orders, bent keys, doors only partially attached to their frames, dumpsters and trash cans that get put away in a different place every time, crap piled surprisingly and without notice in doorways, bums sleeping in the stairwells, and roving packs of hungry youths, I get a good chuckle.
Assembly line workers who install the #5 piston at Ford or put the green screw in seat 15A at Boeing for 50 dollars an hour should maybe get nervous, but for the most part the only people who think robots will replace manual labor are people who have never done it before.Replies: @Jack D, @Jack D
Those guys at Ford were replaced long ago. Here is a “guy” who is installing pistons:
The average car nowadays has less than 15 hours of assembly labor in it because the factories are so highly automated, so even if the UAW guys are costing $70/hr on a fully loaded basis, there’s less than $1,000 of labor in that $30K sticker price. Of course even saving $1,000 (when you multiply that times millions of cars) is enough to give Ford strong motivation to move the car factory to Mexico.
Every time I picture a robot trying to negotiate mispacked orders, bent keys, doors only partially attached to their frames, dumpsters and trash cans that get put away in a different place every time, crap piled surprisingly and without notice in doorways, bums sleeping in the stairwells, and roving packs of hungry youths, I get a good chuckle.
Assembly line workers who install the #5 piston at Ford or put the green screw in seat 15A at Boeing for 50 dollars an hour should maybe get nervous, but for the most part the only people who think robots will replace manual labor are people who have never done it before.Replies: @Jack D, @Jack D
The low hanging fruit will be picked first – Amazon warehouses are now highly automated (and getting more automated) but (for now) a human still drops the box on your steps.
But there is really not much that is beyond reach in the long run, not even your bakery delivery job. Longshoremen used to think that there was no way a machine could unload a ship’s cargo. All sorts of odd shaped stuff was stuffed below deck – a bunch of bananas, a piece of furniture, a car – you needed humans to figure out how to rig up and hoist each object out of the hold. Then they forced everything into standardized containers and there went 90% of the longshoreman jobs. Trash is also no longer put out in random sized cans but in standardized dumpsters that get emptied by machine. At one time chicken feed was delivered in 100 lb. burlap sacks but then they developed pneumatic trucks that would blow it in in bulk by air pressure.
Sure if the job is carrying armsful of paper bags of various baked goods then it’s hard for a machine, but sometimes you have to rethink the paradigm a little. You could have some kind of standardized delivery container or bin that would get pushed thru a standard doggie door – that kind of thing. Not just for bread but for all deliveries. You might have to rearrange the physical environment somewhat to accommodate the machines – this will be done if there is enough potential savings. Maybe you don’t eliminate all humans but most of them. Instead of a delivery driver and a helper, you just have a driver. Maybe at 90% of the stops he never has to get out of the truck and the average time per stop goes from 3 minutes to 1 so you need 2/3 fewer drivers. If the driver has to get out because there is crap blocking the automated delivery port, the customer gets fined and so the next day he is damn sure that the path is clear. Etc.
Each time a machine takes a job away from a human that job is not coming back and so over the decades there are fewer and fewer jobs for humans.
Jobs eliminated by automation usually won't come back. However, the dynamic market finds new jobs for humans to do. Most jobs of one hundred years ago are automated out of existence and most jobs of today didn't exist one hundred years ago.Replies: @obwandiyag
They’d better get their terminators into production in a decentralized manner or they’ll all be maggot food before long. People are already waking up.
Nebulafox has got this covered but I can add that the late Lee Kwan Yew was absolutely adamantine in his belief that Singapore should remain essentially a Chinese city-state and I do not believe that his successors have changed this one iota.
Singapore officials have confirmed to me privately that there is a very strict policy of maintaining an ethnic Chinese share fairly close to what it was at independence.
I think this is one of those Asian political facts that is never written down and indeed almost never discussed (except by the extraordinary LKY) but is understood by everyone.
Really though how could it be otherwise for a relatively tiny nation slap-bang in the middles of a great sea of Muslim humanity. Singapore’s hard-nosed attitude will be a hard nettle for Europe to grasp.
“How about a synopsis, for those of us who don’t want to visit Google Docs?”
Is there is risk clicking on a link to somebody’s Google Drive? I wasn’t aware. Anyway, below I will try to post copies of the pair of papers involved, though I doubt the math and charts will appear:
A One Parameter Graduated Expenditure Tax
While the theoretical virtues and practical difficulties of a graduated expenditure tax are well known (Fisher, 1943; Kaldor, 1955), less attention has been paid to the number of parameters required to fully specify such a tax. Here we describe a single parameter version of a graduated expenditure tax that is at once simple, transparent, and continuously progressive over the entire range of consumer spending.
For a given society’s unit of currency, let the integer n denote the total number of units of spending for a given taxpayer in a given tax period. We then specify the parameter m (a very small number of order 10-6) to be the marginal tax rate applied to the first unit of expenditure, 2m the marginal rate applied to the second unit, 3m the marginal rate applied to the third, and so on. In other words, instead of being arbitrarily defined each successive tax bracket is exactly one unit of currency wide and the marginal tax rates on successive brackets form an arithmetic sequence, each term of which increases by the amount of the parameter m.
With this information in hand it is an easy matter to compute every taxpayer’s total tax liability using the formula for the sum of an arithmetic sequence that we all learned in high school, namely, tn=mn(n+1)/2 where tn denotes the total tax owed on n units of spending in a given tax period.
We naturally assume that the parameter m can be adjusted (“tuned”) by the taxing authority depending on the target revenue it is aiming to raise, which we denote with the letter T. Then for a given society’s current distributions of income and wealth and its propensities to consume (all of which can be estimated on the basis of recent historical experience, assuming such a tax was in place in the preceding tax periods) m is clearly a function of T. In other words, once the target revenue has been set there are no free parameters to be put in by hand.
To get a sense of what such a tax would look like in practice consider the United States as it exists today. Here the unit of currency is the dollar and for purposes of illustration we choose the parameter m, the marginal tax rate applied to the first dollar of consumer spending, to be exactly 6×10-6. The graphs below plot the total tax individual taxpayers would owe on personal expenditures ranging from $10,000 to $2,000,000 in a given tax period.
Notes:
The spreadsheet from which these graphs have been constructed is here.
A companion paper describing a single parameter version of the earned income tax credit is below.
A One Parameter Earned Income Tax Credit
As a companion to the one parameter graduated expenditure tax [1], we here describe a one parameter version of the earned income tax credit, only in this case the marginal tax credits that apply to successive units of earned income form a geometric as opposed to an arithmetic sequence (differ by a common ratio as opposed to a common sum).
Thus for a given unit of currency, let be a very small number of order 10-5. We then define 1- to be the tax credit a wage worker receives for the first unit of currency he earns in a given tax period, 1-2the credit he receives for the second unit of currency earned, 1-3 the credit for the third unit, and so on. It is then a simple matter to compute a wage worker’s total tax credit for that period using the formula for the sum of a geometric sequence that we all learned in high school, namely,
tcrn = 1–1- n+1
where tcrn denotes the total credit on n units of wages received.
To get a sense of what this version of an earned income tax credit would look like in practice, consider the United States as it exists today. Here the unit of currency is the dollar and for purposes of illustration we choose the parameter to be exactly 510-5. The table and chart below show what the total credits would be, both absolutely and as a percentage of wages, for workers earning between $5000 and $100,000 a year.
Discussion
The first thing we note is that the lower a wage worker’s total earnings the larger his tax credit will be as a percentage of his wages. In this it is like the current EITC and is in keeping with the purpose of an earned income tax credit, which is to enable low income workers to enjoy significantly higher standards of living than their market wages alone can support.
On the other hand, we also note an anomaly: unlike today, workers whose total earnings are the highest and who, presumably, are least in need of a subsidy, would in fact receive the biggest credits of all in absolute amount. There is no threshold beyond which the size of their credits begins to decline.
This anomaly can be reduced, however, and in some cases eliminated completely, if there were also in place a one parameter graduated expenditure tax like the one we previously constructed. For two reasons:
Firstly, because as a rule workers who earn more will also consume more and will therefore face higher marginal tax rates on any part of their credits they use to further increase their consumption. Thus even though the size of their credits would be larger absolutely, its after-tax purchasing power in the present tax period (and quite likely in future periods as well) would be less, in some cases much less.
And secondly, because additional revenue will be required to finance this (or any) system of earned income tax credits, which means that the parameter m would have to be dialed up to increase the marginal tax rates on consumption. And since by definition those rates increase arithmetically over the entire range of consumer spending, workers whose earnings are too high will as a rule choose or (if their propensities to save are too low, but not less than zero) actually be forced to consume less than they did before the system of credits became law. For them “what the right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away.”
Or to put it another way, for any value of there exists an earnings threshold, call it point p, beyond which every wage worker’s disposable income becomes less even after receiving his credit. Where that threshold lies is an empirical question the answer to which will vary depending upon a society’s distributions of income and wealth, the distribution of its propensities to consume, and the revenues it requires for other public purposes. Without any data the most we can say is that, these variables being held constant, the closer the parameter is to zero the higher the parameter m must be set, and the lower that threshold will be.
We leave it to mathematical economists to describe the range of possible Gini coefficients of consumption in a society as a function of these variables.
Tax Credit Table for e = 5 x 10^-5
Earnings
Tax Credit
Credit as % of Earnings
$5,000
$4,424
88%
$10,000
$7,869
79%
$20,000
$12,642
63%
$30,000
$15,537
52%
$40,000
$17,203
43%
$50,000
$18,357
37%
$60,000
$19,003
32%
$70,000
$19,395
28%
$80,000
$19,633
25%
$90,000
$19,777
22%
$100,000
$19,864
20%
https://youtu.be/V2V3Cu0nWvg?t=46
The average car nowadays has less than 15 hours of assembly labor in it because the factories are so highly automated, so even if the UAW guys are costing $70/hr on a fully loaded basis, there's less than $1,000 of labor in that $30K sticker price. Of course even saving $1,000 (when you multiply that times millions of cars) is enough to give Ford strong motivation to move the car factory to Mexico.Replies: @Johann Ricke, @Stan d Mute
In a good year, Ford’s net margin is 5% of sales. A labor expense that’s 3.33% of revenues that could be cut down to 1% in a Mexican plant is a big, fat target. More to the point, a competitor could move to Mexico and underprice Ford by 2% during the kind of price war typically mounted during production gluts while still making money. That’s why, assuming quality isn’t affected, everyone tries to minimize his costs, whether labor or otherwise. Because that cost difference may decide whether your company gets liquidated during tough times.
So we can deduce that they want them here to do something other than work.
Trump is so rhetorically sloppy and he misses so many debate angles but this omission by him is huge. He should be pounding "the robot future won't have jobs for unskilled laborers" argument. I think people really get this argument.Replies: @Hidden Cat, @Bill B., @Thea, @unpc downunder, @Harry Baldwin
I tried using this argument on my SJW niece and hit the predictable roadblock. She and others like her would only understand it if they accepted the fact that the unskilled labor we’re talking about isn’t going to become skilled labor eventually because they are low IQ.
The first clause is correct. The implication is wrong.
Jobs eliminated by automation usually won’t come back. However, the dynamic market finds new jobs for humans to do. Most jobs of one hundred years ago are automated out of existence and most jobs of today didn’t exist one hundred years ago.
I find this fascinating. Bryan Caplan and the openborders.info movement cite Singapore as the world’s closest example to an open borders nation on the planet. Yet, immigration is very racially exclusive, and Singapore’s identity is fiercely racially specific and non-liberal. Guest workers can’t bring children, and aren’t allowed to marry or have children in Singapore, and those limits are very strictly and consistently enforced. There is a dishonesty in citing Singapore as a model western open borders nation in this sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neGdoqsuiN8Replies: @Massimo Heitor
Remember that fifteen years ago, there was very broad confident economic consensus that western programming jobs were destined to be automated and outsourced into oblivion. They were completely wrong.
Realistically, which jobs are hot and remunerative and which are not, changes, it’s somewhat unpredictable.
Also, even within programming jobs, there has been lots of change, the skills that were hot ten years ago are not hot today. The good programmers adapt and do well. But lots of mediocre programmers get unpleasant outcomes when the market isn’t so great. Right now, the market seems good enough that even mediocre programmers have nice opportunities. But it never stays this good for long.
I suggest it may be easier and more cost effective to replace the CEOs and The Human Resources department with automation.
There are often articles about the trucking companies operating out of San Pedro. The media weeps and sad about the horrendous exploitation of the drivers and on the OpEd page there’s an article advocating for more and more illegal immigrants
One thing, these drivers have no income after paying for the loans and to keeping the trucks operating They live off the welfare and section 8 of their women and anchor baby children.
Take a look at the federal and social security deductions on your paycheck. Much of that goes for housing and food for these immigrant drivers. It’s a subsidy for the truck companies. They get essentially free labor because their drivers live off their anchor babies welfare.
Another point; if they can’t read a contract, how were they able to pass the written part of the truck driver license?
These companies will never buy self driving trucks. They’d have to pay for the gas oil insurance licenses and maintenance that are now paid for by the drivers. Plus they won’t be able to repossess the trucks and sell them to the next sucker. Capitalist scum
The situation is sooooo California; a gazillion liberal do gooder laws but never enforced.
In any case it's unrealistic due to IQ distributions and the fact that it's a cognitively-demanding job, at least to be able to do it competently and well. When complete idiots make Luddite analogies when talking about this, or talk about how most of the population used to live in a rural area and work on agriculture, they of course conveniently skip over the fact that at best, this was a horizontal movement in terms of cognitive requirements. Moving from farming work to simplified, easy-to-use machinery and factory work was sometimes even easier than the farm work. Your average coal miner, truck driver or activist posing as a credible journalist cannot learn to code. The idea that most people are going to "retrain" to a higher cognitive-level job was just word wizardry to sell you on disastrous "free trade" nonsense.Replies: @J.Ross, @Alden
I remember learn to code around 1980. Many people did learn to code, graduated and found that there was a glut of programmers and no jobs in SV for anyone with less than 5 years experience in the exact speciality. The learn to code people apparently didn’t know that NASA was cutting back at the same time and laying people off.
Many became high school math teachers.
I assumed it was the employers sending out press releases to the idiot journalists who wrote for the business sections with the object of creating a glut of programmers.
I’m such a cynic
Jesus didn’t hate rich people. One of his actions that most infuriated his contemporaries was his willingness not just to talk to, but to dine at the homes of people like Zacchaeus, a tax collector for the Roman empire who became rich by defrauding Jewish people.
Jesus in some ways showed special concern for the rich, because he knew they would be most tempted to put their trust in their wealth instead of in God. That’s the point of the camel/needle metaphor, and it’s the theme of parables such as the rich farmer in Luke 12 who decides to relax, eat, drink, and be merry because he is secure in the abundance of his possessions. He is called to his eternal reckoning, but his sin is not the prospering of his farm. He trusts in his riches, so his relationship with God is broken, and for that he’s damned.
Realistically, which jobs are hot and remunerative and which are not, changes, it's somewhat unpredictable.
Also, even within programming jobs, there has been lots of change, the skills that were hot ten years ago are not hot today. The good programmers adapt and do well. But lots of mediocre programmers get unpleasant outcomes when the market isn't so great. Right now, the market seems good enough that even mediocre programmers have nice opportunities. But it never stays this good for long.Replies: @Steve Sailer
That was something that jumped out at me from Chetty’s work on upward economic mobility from the 1996 to 2012. The parents whose kids best made decisions that were seen as bad in the 1990s like move to North Dakota and the families that did worst made decisions that seemed smart in the 1990s, like move to North Carolina.
Thanks for this, OPA.
The Marxist-inspired hijacking of the Gospel by liberation theologians is an ongoing tragedy. Poor people are deceived: instead of being told the truth — that Jesus came to proclaim salvation to even the poorest among us if they repent and believe in him — they are persuaded that their identity as a member of the group labeled ‘the poor’ will assure their (collective) salvation.
The corollary of this diabolical axiom is that an individual’s beliefs and decisions don’t matter, when in fact each of us must answer the question of eternity on our own.
Other bright people will come up with vaccines, but not before the plague has worked its way through many of the more vulnerable populations of the world.
I think the odds of this happening are so high that it is dumb to not be prepared.
Humans have probably been self-domesticating for about 2 million years* - that means self-selecting. That's a pretty long trend to bet against.
* Although very slowly at first, but with accelerations at ca 100ka and 10ka.Replies: @Stan d Mute
Thinking about this is unpleasant. The question then becomes whether we or the Chinese develop such a microbe first doesn’t it? Africans are busy developing their own, but in their case it’s 100% accidental and will take them out first.
https://youtu.be/V2V3Cu0nWvg?t=46
The average car nowadays has less than 15 hours of assembly labor in it because the factories are so highly automated, so even if the UAW guys are costing $70/hr on a fully loaded basis, there's less than $1,000 of labor in that $30K sticker price. Of course even saving $1,000 (when you multiply that times millions of cars) is enough to give Ford strong motivation to move the car factory to Mexico.Replies: @Johann Ricke, @Stan d Mute
That’s a bit misleading as it reflects only finished vehicle assembly plant labor when the majority of the labor is in parts/component manufacturing and assembly. Tier One suppliers are also very highly automated, Tier Two somewhat less so, Tier Three less still, etc. Of course one must also account for the foreign parts/component percentage and labor cost at point of origin. Nevertheless, the numbers should be eye opening for the pollyannas who think that immigration, free trade, welfare, and automation are compatible.
My robots replaced 6-8 “workers” per shift and had an ROI of less than a year. The only human job left (other than maintaining the robot - which they also failed to do) was inserting a plastic block to hold the doors open preventing them from being painted shut. This was too much work for them. Either the cars would be painted shut or doors flung wide and stripped off the hinges causing line stoppage and mayhem. I assume today that inserting the blocks is now also automated and better proximity sensors prevent the door flung wide problem.Replies: @AndrewR
Wow.
Yeah people like that are also better off permanently nodding off.
The Marxist-inspired hijacking of the Gospel by liberation theologians is an ongoing tragedy. Poor people are deceived: instead of being told the truth -- that Jesus came to proclaim salvation to even the poorest among us if they repent and believe in him -- they are persuaded that their identity as a member of the group labeled 'the poor' will assure their (collective) salvation.
The corollary of this diabolical axiom is that an individual's beliefs and decisions don't matter, when in fact each of us must answer the question of eternity on our own.Replies: @Old Palo Altan, @obwandiyag
“each of us must answer the question of eternity on our own.”
The great tragedy of the Church of Rome is nowadays that its adherents in their great majority share a version of the heresy which would at least implicitly deny this. I speak of those whose papolatry has gone so far that they now say, almost with pride, certainly with assurance, that the pope makes the decisions (“answers the question of eternity”) and all that they need to do to be saved is to follow him blindly; indeed, that not following him blindly is a sure recipe for damnation. I have seen and heard this with increasing disgust since the election of Francis.
The sort of Catholic I mostly interact with will generally say, as I used to, that Vatican II destroyed the Church.
It is now clear to me that that honour was actually garnered by Vatican I.
Rich people are much more likely than working and poor people to believe that the death penalty is wrong, that abortion should be legal, that immigrants are good for a country, that evolution is science and should be taught in schools, that gun possession should be strictly controlled, even eliminated, that climate change is real, that vaccinations should be mandatory, that avoiding people of color is wrong, that women should have the vote but not cigarettes, and on and on...
We can rest assured, though, that you, Obw., are willing to testify that the rich are dead wrong on every single one of these.Replies: @obwandiyag
You are so stupid you don’t even know what I’m talking about.
The Marxist-inspired hijacking of the Gospel by liberation theologians is an ongoing tragedy. Poor people are deceived: instead of being told the truth -- that Jesus came to proclaim salvation to even the poorest among us if they repent and believe in him -- they are persuaded that their identity as a member of the group labeled 'the poor' will assure their (collective) salvation.
The corollary of this diabolical axiom is that an individual's beliefs and decisions don't matter, when in fact each of us must answer the question of eternity on our own.Replies: @Old Palo Altan, @obwandiyag
Idiot. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Jobs eliminated by automation usually won't come back. However, the dynamic market finds new jobs for humans to do. Most jobs of one hundred years ago are automated out of existence and most jobs of today didn't exist one hundred years ago.Replies: @obwandiyag
You live in a fallacious dream world. Just because something happened in the past doesn’t mean it’s going to happen in the future.
> Bryan Caplan and the openborders.info movement cite Singapore as the world’s closest example to an open borders nation on the planet.
That’s either profoundly dishonest, or just plain stupid. Singapore invites you in for actual citizenship if having you and your descendants as citizens is perceived by Singapore’s government as in their interests, full stop. They don’t admit refugees, going back to the Vietnam War, and illegal immigrants would be deported instantly-perhaps after being caned.
And yes, you are correct about how the guest worker system works. The mostly subcontinental Gastarbeiters that do the dirty and dangerous work live in their own closed-off, male-only dormitories, not unlike the Vietnamese in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. Also like the Vietnamese in East Germany (which, in a heavy dose of historical irony, was basically a proletarian, atheistic neo-Prussia, complete with the spit and polish parades and militarized society), they are allowed no interaction whatsoever with Singaporeans other than their direct bosses. When they go to work in the wee hours of the morning, they are shipped in open-ended trucks: the only people in Singapore allowed to travel that way, a pretty telling sign of how their lives are valued. They are socially segregated in every sense of the word. Needless to say, bringing family is completely out of the question. Indonesian maids that fall pregnant would be fired and shipped back immediately.
(Working-class jobs that do require social interaction-say, running a hawker stall-are tellingly more likely to be given to immigrants from the PRC, even to the point where you are beginning to see Indian joints being operated by mainland Chinese. Singapore is an advanced, 1st World country and generally a pretty pleasant place to live, but it is no liberal Western democracy, immigration-policy or otherwise.)
We see the same phenomenon with industry. Machine made goods are cheap but valued as crap. A Casio watch keeps better time than a Piaget but we value the Piaget more because it is made by craftsmen. A handmade car is valued far more than a, perhaps, equally mass produced vehicle beyond its deluxe appointments because people value human labor more than they do the work of machines.
A three D printing machine might turn out a Ferrari for $50,000 but would people pay $50,000 for a printed clone of the real thing? No doubt some would but the genuine article, IMO , would command the higher price because of its rarity and the fact that it was built and designed by humans.Replies: @Jack D, @Bubba, @Henry Bowman
If the end result is the same and none can tell, why would they NOT?
I've written before, in Peak Stupidity, that it is a real shame that the science fiction stories in my youth about the idyllic society in which automation has replaced all of the drugery, and we few and spread-out humans spend our time on intellectual pursuits can't come true (not enough REAL intellectuals, and too many people):Yeah, the chance of that bright future got squandered, at least for the human population in general.Replies: @Stan d Mute, @Logan
Relieved of the necessity to work to keep alive, some small percentage of the human population, I would estimate somewhere around 10 to possibly as much as 20%, will move happily into intellectual and artistic endeavors.
The rest do not have the temperament or the intellect to do so.
It looks to me that TPTB are angling to have Watson and Crick's Nobels withdrawn and given posthumously to Franklin.
Rewriting history to suit the Jew and feminist agenda.
The BBC did a docudrama ( i.e. a lie ) a few years ago where Franklin was the real discoverer, lots of ignorant people will have believed it.
These powerful interest groups are good at re-writing history to suit themselves.
Any takers that this is the agenda?Replies: @Buffalo Joe, @J.Ross, @Anonymous
That reminds me of the rivalry between the fans of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole in the U.K.
Nightingale used to be a feminist heroine, and still has a lot of admirers in those quarters, but the decision has clearly been made that her reputation must be blackened and Seacole’s boosted.
The BBC has been dutifully putting out documentaries vilifying Nightingale, which has caused much angst among the older generation of feminists.