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Artificial Intelligence May Cost US Millions Of Jobs, Increase Inequality, If Social Safety Nets Aren’t Strengthened, White House Report Warns; Maybe time to get that college degree after all, you free marketers
Topic Started: Dec 22 2016, 02:33 AM (2,392 Views)
BuckFan

Robert Stout
Dec 24 2016, 10:04 AM
Opinionated
Dec 23 2016, 08:35 PM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 23 2016, 01:26 PM
Housing costs have surged because of population increase. If all all Immigration ended, housing would decrease.
Yeah, that's pretty much not true. Immigration is at best a very small contributor to housing costs.
Illegal immigration, not legal immigration, is a root cause of many of our nation's problems...By eliminating illegal immigration highways, hospital emergency rooms, schools, and prisons would be less congested...This would eliminate the need to build more infrastructure to accommodate our unwanted guests...Housing rents would go down a little bit due to decreased demand....Rents would go down a lot if it wasn't for 20 illegals living in a one bedroom apartment....Perhaps most of all, neighborhoods would not be subjected to loud blaring mariachi music at 2AM on Sundays............. :popcorn:
Illegals represent maybe 3-4% of the population. So school and emergency rooms would recognize a 3-4% reduction in demand, hardly enough to even be noticed. Same for housing and roads and everything else you mentioned.

Now, in many cases the 3-4% is not evenly distributed so there would be localized impacts greater than this percentage but, again, the actual impact would be minimal.
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Harambe4Trump
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BuckFan
Dec 24 2016, 11:42 AM
Robert Stout
Dec 24 2016, 10:04 AM
Opinionated
Dec 23 2016, 08:35 PM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 23 2016, 01:26 PM
Housing costs have surged because of population increase. If all all Immigration ended, housing would decrease.
Yeah, that's pretty much not true. Immigration is at best a very small contributor to housing costs.
Illegal immigration, not legal immigration, is a root cause of many of our nation's problems...By eliminating illegal immigration highways, hospital emergency rooms, schools, and prisons would be less congested...This would eliminate the need to build more infrastructure to accommodate our unwanted guests...Housing rents would go down a little bit due to decreased demand....Rents would go down a lot if it wasn't for 20 illegals living in a one bedroom apartment....Perhaps most of all, neighborhoods would not be subjected to loud blaring mariachi music at 2AM on Sundays............. :popcorn:
Illegals represent maybe 3-4% of the population. So school and emergency rooms would recognize a 3-4% reduction in demand, hardly enough to even be noticed. Same for housing and roads and everything else you mentioned.

Now, in many cases the 3-4% is not evenly distributed so there would be localized impacts greater than this percentage but, again, the actual impact would be minimal.
Incorrect. The localized distribution is concentrated in NYC and LA. The removal of all illegals would drastically reduce housing prices.
Skipping leg day is the equivalent of a woman having an abortion. You're ashamed of it, and it was probably unnecessary.
#MAGA
#wallsnotwars
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jake58

ringotuna
Dec 24 2016, 07:52 AM
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 09:25 PM
ringotuna
Dec 22 2016, 08:14 PM
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 06:50 PM
ringotuna
Dec 22 2016, 03:21 PM

Quoting limited to 5 levels deep
My suggestion would be something you would almost undoubtedly oppose. I think that in the end what will have to happen is that those with the wealth will have sacrifice a portion of it in order to ensure that those without wealth and with no realistic chance to gain health, aren't left to slowly die of starvation and privation.

Because I personally don't see how we can continue down this road of fewer and fewer people benefiting from the creation of wealth without society eventually reaching a crisis point.

Maybe mine is not the only solution, maybe there are others that are just as good. Assuming, of course, that we agree that doing nothing will lead to serious social/economic problems, which we may not. But if you have an idea, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
We already have a serious social economic problem brought on in part by creating a nanny state in which segments of our population are dependent upon the government for sustenance. If there's to be any solution it involves investment in education and job creation. Your solution will only perpetuate the problem. Tax reform, sure, I'm good with that but passing it to those you believe have no chance of improving their economic lot only adds to the problem. Don't give up on them Opie. Have a little faith in the human spirit. With the right motivation and opportunity most people would prefer a greater sense of self reliance.
No man can create prosperity out of nothing. If all the land is owned by others. If all the means of production are owned by others. If even all the ideas are owned by others. And they have no work to offer, how do you propose someone generate their own prosperity, let alone the vast majority of people?

People can't fill jobs that don't exist. Training them for non-existent jobs isn't useful. How would you create these jobs? Pay people to move rocks from one large pile to another and then back? Are we going to create government provided make work in order to have something to pay people for?
Quote:
 
No man can create prosperity out of nothing. If all the land is owned by others. If all the means of production are owned by others. If even all the ideas are owned by others. And they have no work to offer, how do you propose someone generate their own prosperity, let alone the vast majority of people?

This is the kind of defeatist boxed in thinking that stagnates progress. The means of production are not finite. All the ideas have not been thought of, and land/property ownership is transferrable. Charles H. Duell the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899 allegedly stated that "everything that can be invented has been invented." He was as wrong then as you are today.

Education: Huffington Post points out, the US is currently experiencing a both a job surplus and a labor shortage, meaning that at one end of the spectrum there is an excess of skilled jobs available but vacant because at the other end is a deficit of people with the skills to fill them. Obviously the solution is to bridge the gap through education...Job training programs. This is where the public and private sectors can cooperate to tap into unused labor resources to fill these idle positions, by supplementing tuition, payroll and on the job training.
Job Creation: Innovation is another under tapped resource. New ideas come forth every day but are stifled by a lack of resources to bring them forward. Again here, the government could support the development of these ideas into jobs, with tax incentives, business loans for start ups, and job creating business supporting. Many local municipalities already recognize this and provide incentives to draw new and expanding businesses.
Insourcing: The greatest progress however is in returning existing jobs to the U.S. This is where our leaders need to take a more firm American's first position. And this is where the government can wield its greatest influence through balanced trade agreements and incentives, positive and negative, for manufacturing and service industries to remain or return.
Quote:
 
People can't fill jobs that don't exist. Training them for non-existent jobs isn't useful. How would you create these jobs? Pay people to move rocks from one large pile to another and then back? Are we going to create government provided make work in order to have something to pay people for?

This is a hyperbolic straw man fallacy which assumes the only means of implementing job growth is to create useless make-work.
The consequences of your 'solution' would be to continue to create a permanent state of ever growing multigenerational dependents out of a mass of valuable untapped potential. It has and will continue to create and deem a whole demograph of society useless, and unworthy of anything more than the scraps our government chooses to feed them. It assumes that they are incapable or unwilling to contribute to society and therefore should be taken as wards of the state. It's the very definition of defeatist.
It's the very definition of defeatist

It's simply a continuation of democratic social policy which has been a disaster for those it's trying to help as well as our country overall.

A) What's driving the increase in costs is the cost of govt and the increase in its size and reach. The cure is not to keep increasing govt regs admin after admin. After a devastating earthquake in CA back in the day, Pete Wilson was told it would take more than a year to repair CA bridges and highways. He declared a state of emergency, waved all the nonsensical regs, handed out no bid contracts with incentives for finishing ahead of schedule and within approved engineering requirements and within a couple of months CA was up and running. Do you need a feasibility study, a workforce diversity requirement, a supplier diversity requirement and an environmental impact study to repave an existing road?

B) Education - while I'm sure that degree in Women's Studies is going to be useful, wouldn't it have been better to spend 4 months training in a D10 or learning how to operate a crane or maybe some engineering or data courses so we aren't importing a million H1B visa holders? We have plenty of job openings and plenty of unemployed, our educational system simply doesn't provide the workers we need for the jobs that are available. Progs usual answer, hand them a check, further destroying what's left of the work ethic in this country that they haven't already destroyed.
That which can be asserted without evidence; can be dismissed without evidence- Christopher Hitchens
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Robert Stout
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George Aligator
Dec 24 2016, 11:32 AM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 24 2016, 11:24 AM
Robert Stout
Dec 24 2016, 10:04 AM
Opinionated
Dec 23 2016, 08:35 PM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 23 2016, 01:26 PM
Housing costs have surged because of population increase. If all all Immigration ended, housing would decrease.
Yeah, that's pretty much not true. Immigration is at best a very small contributor to housing costs.
Illegal immigration, not legal immigration, is a root cause of many of our nation's problems...By eliminating illegal immigration highways, hospital emergency rooms, schools, and prisons would be less congested...This would eliminate the need to build more infrastructure to accommodate our unwanted guests...Housing rents would go down a little bit due to decreased demand....Rents would go down a lot if it wasn't for 20 illegals living in a one bedroom apartment....Perhaps most of all, neighborhoods would not be subjected to loud blaring mariachi music at 2AM on Sundays............. :popcorn:
In fact legal immigration is far more destructive.
Crowded apartments and loud music in your neighborhood may be a real problem but the national impact of so-called illegal immigration doesn't scale up from that local experience. Illegal immigration is a net plus to the GNP, hard as it may be to believe that when the mariachi is blaring. That doesn't mean illegal immigration should be tolerated or than nothing should be done about adversely impacted neighborhoods, but until we recognize the economic impact of illegal immigration on the over-all economy and the billionaires who own it, the government will continue to slow walk cleaning up your neighborhood. It's the money Bro, where the big guys live there aren't any cheap apartments or loud music, and they don't give a crap about your problems.
Spend a few nights in my shoes and neighborhood so you can acquire more empathy for commoners in America...You are absolutely correct that the "big guys" don't give a damn about the opinions and tribulations of the "little people"....They want an unlimited supply of cheap immigrant labor to help restrain all wage scale increases............. :)
Edited by Robert Stout, Dec 24 2016, 12:51 PM.
Jesus can raise the dead, but he can't fix stupid
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Eddo26
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BuckFan
Dec 23 2016, 10:49 PM
Eddo36
Dec 23 2016, 01:25 PM
BuckFan
Dec 23 2016, 01:21 PM
Eddo36
Dec 23 2016, 12:45 PM
BuckFan
Dec 23 2016, 11:31 AM

Quoting limited to 5 levels deep
All a drop in the bucket when compared with the rising inflation and increase costs of a living wage.
Inflation is not rising that much. Why? Because prices like these are going down to offset costs like medical that are going up significantly. Costs have not really gone up that much in general but wages have depressed or stagnated. But then the cost of labor also influences inflation and increased prices. So that drop in a bucket is actually a drop on the same bucket.
I see, quite insightful. So people today complaining of not having a living wage is due more to depressed/stagnated wages rather than prices increases?
Yep
http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/19/pf/minimum-wage-increases/index.html

Minimum wage is being increased in 21 states, yet I don't think it will reduce inflation but opposite.
We believe only what we want to believe.
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BuckFan

Harambe4Trump
Dec 24 2016, 11:50 AM
BuckFan
Dec 24 2016, 11:42 AM
Robert Stout
Dec 24 2016, 10:04 AM
Opinionated
Dec 23 2016, 08:35 PM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 23 2016, 01:26 PM
Housing costs have surged because of population increase. If all all Immigration ended, housing would decrease.
Yeah, that's pretty much not true. Immigration is at best a very small contributor to housing costs.
Illegal immigration, not legal immigration, is a root cause of many of our nation's problems...By eliminating illegal immigration highways, hospital emergency rooms, schools, and prisons would be less congested...This would eliminate the need to build more infrastructure to accommodate our unwanted guests...Housing rents would go down a little bit due to decreased demand....Rents would go down a lot if it wasn't for 20 illegals living in a one bedroom apartment....Perhaps most of all, neighborhoods would not be subjected to loud blaring mariachi music at 2AM on Sundays............. :popcorn:
Illegals represent maybe 3-4% of the population. So school and emergency rooms would recognize a 3-4% reduction in demand, hardly enough to even be noticed. Same for housing and roads and everything else you mentioned.

Now, in many cases the 3-4% is not evenly distributed so there would be localized impacts greater than this percentage but, again, the actual impact would be minimal.
Incorrect. The localized distribution is concentrated in NYC and LA. The removal of all illegals would drastically reduce housing prices.
Sorry, estimates for LA is 10% and NYC are 6%. As you said they tend to live in high density and lower cost housing so removing 10% or 6% is not going to have a significant impact.
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Opinionated
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ringotuna
Dec 24 2016, 07:52 AM
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 09:25 PM
ringotuna
Dec 22 2016, 08:14 PM
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 06:50 PM
ringotuna
Dec 22 2016, 03:21 PM

Quoting limited to 5 levels deep
My suggestion would be something you would almost undoubtedly oppose. I think that in the end what will have to happen is that those with the wealth will have sacrifice a portion of it in order to ensure that those without wealth and with no realistic chance to gain health, aren't left to slowly die of starvation and privation.

Because I personally don't see how we can continue down this road of fewer and fewer people benefiting from the creation of wealth without society eventually reaching a crisis point.

Maybe mine is not the only solution, maybe there are others that are just as good. Assuming, of course, that we agree that doing nothing will lead to serious social/economic problems, which we may not. But if you have an idea, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
We already have a serious social economic problem brought on in part by creating a nanny state in which segments of our population are dependent upon the government for sustenance. If there's to be any solution it involves investment in education and job creation. Your solution will only perpetuate the problem. Tax reform, sure, I'm good with that but passing it to those you believe have no chance of improving their economic lot only adds to the problem. Don't give up on them Opie. Have a little faith in the human spirit. With the right motivation and opportunity most people would prefer a greater sense of self reliance.
No man can create prosperity out of nothing. If all the land is owned by others. If all the means of production are owned by others. If even all the ideas are owned by others. And they have no work to offer, how do you propose someone generate their own prosperity, let alone the vast majority of people?

People can't fill jobs that don't exist. Training them for non-existent jobs isn't useful. How would you create these jobs? Pay people to move rocks from one large pile to another and then back? Are we going to create government provided make work in order to have something to pay people for?
Quote:
 
No man can create prosperity out of nothing. If all the land is owned by others. If all the means of production are owned by others. If even all the ideas are owned by others. And they have no work to offer, how do you propose someone generate their own prosperity, let alone the vast majority of people?

This is the kind of defeatist boxed in thinking that stagnates progress. The means of production are not finite. All the ideas have not been thought of, and land/property ownership is transferrable. Charles H. Duell the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899 allegedly stated that "everything that can be invented has been invented." He was as wrong then as you are today.

Education: Huffington Post points out, the US is currently experiencing a both a job surplus and a labor shortage, meaning that at one end of the spectrum there is an excess of skilled jobs available but vacant because at the other end is a deficit of people with the skills to fill them. Obviously the solution is to bridge the gap through education...Job training programs. This is where the public and private sectors can cooperate to tap into unused labor resources to fill these idle positions, by supplementing tuition, payroll and on the job training.
Job Creation: Innovation is another under tapped resource. New ideas come forth every day but are stifled by a lack of resources to bring them forward. Again here, the government could support the development of these ideas into jobs, with tax incentives, business loans for start ups, and job creating business supporting. Many local municipalities already recognize this and provide incentives to draw new and expanding businesses.
Insourcing: The greatest progress however is in returning existing jobs to the U.S. This is where our leaders need to take a more firm American's first position. And this is where the government can wield its greatest influence through balanced trade agreements and incentives, positive and negative, for manufacturing and service industries to remain or return.
Quote:
 
People can't fill jobs that don't exist. Training them for non-existent jobs isn't useful. How would you create these jobs? Pay people to move rocks from one large pile to another and then back? Are we going to create government provided make work in order to have something to pay people for?

This is a hyperbolic straw man fallacy which assumes the only means of implementing job growth is to create useless make-work.
The consequences of your 'solution' would be to continue to create a permanent state of ever growing multigenerational dependents out of a mass of valuable untapped potential. It has and will continue to create and deem a whole demograph of society useless, and unworthy of anything more than the scraps our government chooses to feed them. It assumes that they are incapable or unwilling to contribute to society and therefore should be taken as wards of the state. It's the very definition of defeatist.
If your theory of how things work was reflected by reality, we wouldn't have large numbers of people just dropping off the employment radar because they're unable to find work they can perform that pays enough to survive.

See, that's the thing. I'd like to think the best of my fellow humans. That they have an infinite amount of creativity and adaptability. And some do, I must admit. But not all. Or even most. And even those without creativity and adaptability need to eat.

And what you're calling a straw man fallacy is what I would call a realistic evaluation of the probable future. The "job creators" are going to replace their living, breathing employees with automation just as quickly as they realistically can. Because machines don't grumble about being overworked. They don't protest low wages and no benefits. They don't demand wage increases. They don't require the employer to pay into Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance. So, where machines can do the job, machines will do the job unless there is some compelling reason why they won't.

That's pretty much inevitable.

And your talking about how we shouldn't be defeatist and a positive attitude will make it all work out, seems rather airy fairy, magical thinking. Not what I'm used to seeing from you. What do you have in the way of practical proposals?

And as far as all the ideas already being owned, I'm not arguing that new ideas won't be created. But they'll mostly come from people who under contract to one company or another, because those are the ones who will have the resources to develop new ideas. Sure, perhaps someone will come up with something radically new on their own from time to time, but that's going to be the exception, not the rule.

The majority of the nation simply cannot build prosperity on having to come up with new and innovative ideas that aren't already company owned. That's just not realistic.
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StillCrazy1
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!!!!
Harambe4Trump
Dec 24 2016, 11:23 AM
Opinionated
Dec 23 2016, 08:35 PM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 23 2016, 01:26 PM
Housing costs have surged because of population increase. If all all Immigration ended, housing would decrease.
Yeah, that's pretty much not true. Immigration is at best a very small contributor to housing costs.
Immigration is the determinative factor and is why Los Angeles and New York have rediculous housing costs. If there were no immigration, the demand factor of housing would collapse.
LA has rediculous housing prices due to scarcity.
Ever notice the only 2 people Trump refuses to speak ill of are Stormy Daniels and Vladimir Putin?
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Robert Stout
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StillCrazy1
Dec 25 2016, 02:18 AM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 24 2016, 11:23 AM
Opinionated
Dec 23 2016, 08:35 PM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 23 2016, 01:26 PM
Housing costs have surged because of population increase. If all all Immigration ended, housing would decrease.
Yeah, that's pretty much not true. Immigration is at best a very small contributor to housing costs.
Immigration is the determinative factor and is why Los Angeles and New York have rediculous housing costs. If there were no immigration, the demand factor of housing would collapse.
LA has rediculous housing prices due to scarcity.
If illegal immigrants were all housed in tents at detention camps, housing supply would increase and rents would decrease....You go Trump............ :nana:
Jesus can raise the dead, but he can't fix stupid
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ringotuna
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Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 09:25 PM
If your theory of how things work was reflected by reality, we wouldn't have large numbers of people just dropping off the employment radar because they're unable to find work they can perform that pays enough to survive.

My theory is one proposed to address and change the problems reflected in todays reality, not throw up our hands and give up. We're coming out of a recession. Jobs are returning albeit at a slow but steady rate. Around here, it's common knowledge that "if you can't find a job, you aren't looking". Construction is leading the way, followed by new and expanding manufacturing, agriculture and service businesses. Help wanted signs are everywhere, and contractors are in dire need of both skilled and unskilled laborers. Multi-national corporations are moving in, taking advantage of short term tax incentives and an abundance of cheap real estate. One in particular is investing over 22 million dollars in a new processing plant that is expected to employ just short of 100 employees. They're here because they were incentivized to move here.
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 09:25 PM
See, that's the thing. I'd like to think the best of my fellow humans. That they have an infinite amount of creativity and adaptability. And some do, I must admit. But not all. Or even most. And even those without creativity and adaptability need to eat.

No one says EVERYONE should or can be innovative. What I'm saying is, with proper training in areas of marketable job skills, those without the ability to innovate, can capitalize on the jobs created by those who do. That's how it works. My son's 60 odd employees are not required to be innovative, yet they fill the positions that allow them all to benefit. A fledgling 3 man operation, 5 years ago has grown exponentially across the state with ambitions to franchise nationally and internationally. These are NEW jobs that benefit not only the inventor and partners, but the dozens of employees in those positions It's a growing (job creating) company built on very simple idea that has caught attention and was featured last summer in Newsweek Magazine.
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 09:25 PM
And what you're calling a straw man fallacy is what I would call a realistic evaluation of the probable future. The "job creators" are going to replace their living, breathing employees with automation just as quickly as they realistically can. Because machines don't grumble about being overworked. They don't protest low wages and no benefits. They don't demand wage increases. They don't require the employer to pay into Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance. So, where machines can do the job, machines will do the job unless there is some compelling reason why they won't. That's pretty much inevitable.

It is a strawman fallacy, a silly sarcastic projection, because it suggests that the alternative to a nanny state is to train employees for useless 'make work' jobs or jobs that don't exist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Disagree with me if you like, but at least disagree with what I'm actually proposing, not the hyperbole you imply. A successful idea must have a purpose, a return on investment. In this case, the purpose is to transform those who are a drain on our economy to those who contribute to both society and the economy. Furthermore I find it curious that you suggest my proposal is to pay people for pointless work, all the while yours proposes to pay them for no work at all. LOL, Seriously WTF? :)
Nearly nothing is inevitable. The pessimistic notion that "No man can create prosperity out of nothing" is both absurd and absolutely defeatist. A friend of mine who about 12 years ago was languishing in prison for cooking meth, today owns and operates the largest electrical contracting business in the region, with over a 100 employees, 4 locations, millions of dollars in vehicles and equipment. I'd love to see the grin on his face if you were to tell him "no man can create prosperity from nothing." His story is not unique.
Yours is a formula for failure which in simplest terms disassociates people from society by paying them to be unproductive as opposed to paying them to be productive and more self reliant members of society.
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 09:25 PM
And your talking about how we shouldn't be defeatist and a positive attitude will make it all work out, seems rather airy fairy, magical thinking. Not what I'm used to seeing from you. What do you have in the way of practical proposals?

One thing that's for sure Opie, ..."if you expect failure, you won't be disappointed.".There is no guarantee that a positive attitude will "make it all work out" for everyone, however a negative attitude is a guarantee that it won't. It's not the positive attitude, it's what results from a positive attitude. I think that's pretty obvious.
You challenge me for 'practical proposals' yet you've offered none yourself. Government can play a significant role in developing training programs with businesses, education institutions and job seekers, by way of payroll/income and tuition supplements, towards training for specific skills required by the employer. Rather than writing a check and writing them off, as you propose, redirect a portion of those pay-outs towards educating individuals with the marketable skills. In a community in Kansas for example, I know of two agricultural manufacturers who collaborate with the local community college to design curriculum targeting their specific manufacturing needs. The companies supplement the student's tuition costs and provide paid 'on the job' training internships. The colleges develop specific curriculums as needed. Everybody wins. Cooperative programs like this are scalable, but only with the involvement of state and federal governments which would involve redirecting from wasted funds going to create a dependent class to the more sustainable investment of providing individuals with marketable job skills.
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 09:25 PM
And as far as all the ideas already being owned, I'm not arguing that new ideas won't be created. But they'll mostly come from people who under contract to one company or another, because those are the ones who will have the resources to develop new ideas. Sure, perhaps someone will come up with something radically new on their own from time to time, but that's going to be the exception, not the rule.
The majority of the nation simply cannot build prosperity on having to come up with new and innovative ideas that aren't already company owned. That's just not realistic.

No one is expecting to save the world on a few innovative ideas. I'm talking more generally about a multi angle approach to job creation, involving job training, incentives to return jobs to the U.S. as well as immigration reform.
Like my old man used to say..."can't never did do nothing." Saying it's unrealistic does not make it unrealistic. That's an intangible argument born in pessimism. Ideas, whether from corporations, individuals or otherwise have the potential to create jobs. It takes people to develop those ideas and people to implement them. Indeed corporations have greater resources to capitalize on those ideas but it's employees who exploit them and they benefit from those 'corporate owned' ideas in the form of income and job security created by those ideas.
Now my friend....where are YOUR practical proposals?
Ringoism: Never underestimate the advantages of being underestimated.
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BuckFan

Opinionated
Dec 25 2016, 01:34 AM
ringotuna
Dec 24 2016, 07:52 AM
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 09:25 PM
ringotuna
Dec 22 2016, 08:14 PM
Opinionated
Dec 22 2016, 06:50 PM

Quoting limited to 5 levels deep
We already have a serious social economic problem brought on in part by creating a nanny state in which segments of our population are dependent upon the government for sustenance. If there's to be any solution it involves investment in education and job creation. Your solution will only perpetuate the problem. Tax reform, sure, I'm good with that but passing it to those you believe have no chance of improving their economic lot only adds to the problem. Don't give up on them Opie. Have a little faith in the human spirit. With the right motivation and opportunity most people would prefer a greater sense of self reliance.
No man can create prosperity out of nothing. If all the land is owned by others. If all the means of production are owned by others. If even all the ideas are owned by others. And they have no work to offer, how do you propose someone generate their own prosperity, let alone the vast majority of people?

People can't fill jobs that don't exist. Training them for non-existent jobs isn't useful. How would you create these jobs? Pay people to move rocks from one large pile to another and then back? Are we going to create government provided make work in order to have something to pay people for?
Quote:
 
No man can create prosperity out of nothing. If all the land is owned by others. If all the means of production are owned by others. If even all the ideas are owned by others. And they have no work to offer, how do you propose someone generate their own prosperity, let alone the vast majority of people?

This is the kind of defeatist boxed in thinking that stagnates progress. The means of production are not finite. All the ideas have not been thought of, and land/property ownership is transferrable. Charles H. Duell the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899 allegedly stated that "everything that can be invented has been invented." He was as wrong then as you are today.

Education: Huffington Post points out, the US is currently experiencing a both a job surplus and a labor shortage, meaning that at one end of the spectrum there is an excess of skilled jobs available but vacant because at the other end is a deficit of people with the skills to fill them. Obviously the solution is to bridge the gap through education...Job training programs. This is where the public and private sectors can cooperate to tap into unused labor resources to fill these idle positions, by supplementing tuition, payroll and on the job training.
Job Creation: Innovation is another under tapped resource. New ideas come forth every day but are stifled by a lack of resources to bring them forward. Again here, the government could support the development of these ideas into jobs, with tax incentives, business loans for start ups, and job creating business supporting. Many local municipalities already recognize this and provide incentives to draw new and expanding businesses.
Insourcing: The greatest progress however is in returning existing jobs to the U.S. This is where our leaders need to take a more firm American's first position. And this is where the government can wield its greatest influence through balanced trade agreements and incentives, positive and negative, for manufacturing and service industries to remain or return.
Quote:
 
People can't fill jobs that don't exist. Training them for non-existent jobs isn't useful. How would you create these jobs? Pay people to move rocks from one large pile to another and then back? Are we going to create government provided make work in order to have something to pay people for?

This is a hyperbolic straw man fallacy which assumes the only means of implementing job growth is to create useless make-work.
The consequences of your 'solution' would be to continue to create a permanent state of ever growing multigenerational dependents out of a mass of valuable untapped potential. It has and will continue to create and deem a whole demograph of society useless, and unworthy of anything more than the scraps our government chooses to feed them. It assumes that they are incapable or unwilling to contribute to society and therefore should be taken as wards of the state. It's the very definition of defeatist.
If your theory of how things work was reflected by reality, we wouldn't have large numbers of people just dropping off the employment radar because they're unable to find work they can perform that pays enough to survive.

See, that's the thing. I'd like to think the best of my fellow humans. That they have an infinite amount of creativity and adaptability. And some do, I must admit. But not all. Or even most. And even those without creativity and adaptability need to eat.

And what you're calling a straw man fallacy is what I would call a realistic evaluation of the probable future. The "job creators" are going to replace their living, breathing employees with automation just as quickly as they realistically can. Because machines don't grumble about being overworked. They don't protest low wages and no benefits. They don't demand wage increases. They don't require the employer to pay into Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance. So, where machines can do the job, machines will do the job unless there is some compelling reason why they won't.

That's pretty much inevitable.

And your talking about how we shouldn't be defeatist and a positive attitude will make it all work out, seems rather airy fairy, magical thinking. Not what I'm used to seeing from you. What do you have in the way of practical proposals?

And as far as all the ideas already being owned, I'm not arguing that new ideas won't be created. But they'll mostly come from people who under contract to one company or another, because those are the ones who will have the resources to develop new ideas. Sure, perhaps someone will come up with something radically new on their own from time to time, but that's going to be the exception, not the rule.

The majority of the nation simply cannot build prosperity on having to come up with new and innovative ideas that aren't already company owned. That's just not realistic.
I disagree a large number are dropping out of the workforce. "large" is a relative term but at best a few percentage is or has dropped out and that is not really "large". We should be worried about them and work to bring them back to where they want to be but I'm not going to pull a Rightie and freak out over those numbers.

We should be concerned about the evolving economy and what it means. Automation and productivity enhancement is changing the work landscape and we run the risk of leaving a whole workforce behind. I would like to see our politicians, including our President-elect, address those issues and not act like they can freeze or reverse time and the constant evolution of industry.
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CautionaryTales
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Robert Stout
Dec 24 2016, 10:04 AM
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Dec 23 2016, 08:35 PM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 23 2016, 01:26 PM
Housing costs have surged because of population increase. If all all Immigration ended, housing would decrease.
Yeah, that's pretty much not true. Immigration is at best a very small contributor to housing costs.
Illegal immigration, not legal immigration, is a root cause of many of our nation's problems...By eliminating illegal immigration highways, hospital emergency rooms, schools, and prisons would be less congested...This would eliminate the need to build more infrastructure to accommodate our unwanted guests...Housing rents would go down a little bit due to decreased demand....Rents would go down a lot if it wasn't for 20 illegals living in a one bedroom apartment....Perhaps most of all, neighborhoods would not be subjected to loud blaring mariachi music at 2AM on Sundays............. :popcorn:
Sounds like you have the answer to all the problems in this country.
You also have a President that ran on that notion and a Congress that will soon give us the perfect society.

Can't wait to see it!
There is no excuse for failure.


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George Aligator
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Our economy is a circulatory system. Wealth produced has to circulate or the system freezes. The wealth produced by labor circulates in the form of wages. Wealth produced by capital circulates in the form of profit. For over a generation there has been a steady growth in the share of wealth assigned to capital and a declining share assigned to labor. This has reached the point were a large number of families and the over-all economy are feeling the pinch.

The dynamics of the process are complex and multi-faceted. The mechanisms for adjusting the capital/labor wealth flow are few and simple, at least in the current context. Trump seems to have intuited the issues; whether he can lead the Congress in applying the measures needed remains to be seen.

Politically speaking, he has one foot in the door because those white, working-class men who have put him in the White House are feeling the pinch as never before and want relief. Trump may be more of a performer than a politician, but he sure understands ratings. We'll see fairly soon if he can get over the obstacles posed by his own Republican Party and deliver more jobs and better wages to his base. The Dems, at least, are ready to help him on this one.
Conservatism is a social disease
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estonianman
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Eddo36
Dec 23 2016, 04:16 AM
estonianman
Dec 22 2016, 07:52 PM
automation brings prices down eliminating the need to work long hours.

Thank you capitalism.
Still waiting on your response. When has prices of goods ever gone down voluntarily and not due to regulation?
Dude. Had stuff going on, explaining the economics of price deflation to you isn't on the top of my list.

Automation (technological improvement) increases both efficiency and productivity, thereby lowering the cost of manufacturing a good. People are expensive, slow and inefficient. They can't work 24/7 and require lots of maintenance. People are better off using their brains to create new ways of making lives easier - in the marketplace of ideas.

The only hurdle is the initial cost of capital investment, which is overcome by the same economical effects. Within decades people will laugh at us who cooked, cleaned - did laundry etc. Cars will be built locally in completely automated factories while automated vertical aero-ponic farms will produce food in the most arid of deserts. Purchasing construction materials to build that end-table will be buried in the past, where 3D printing will make what you need, probably from waste carbon or silica.

These are all good things that will come in this century - thanks to capitalism.
Edited by estonianman, Dec 25 2016, 01:06 PM.
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No one says EVERYONE should or can be innovative. What I'm saying is, with proper training in areas of marketable job skills, those without the ability to innovate, can capitalize on the jobs created by those who do. That's how it works. My son's 60 odd employees are not required to be innovative, yet they fill the positions that allow them all to benefit. A fledgling 3 man operation, 5 years ago has grown exponentially across the state with ambitions to franchise nationally and internationally. These are NEW jobs that benefit not only the inventor and partners, but the dozens of employees in those positions It's a growing (job creating) company built on very simple idea that has caught attention and was featured last summer in Newsweek Magazine.


That's how it currently works today, more or less. My point is that it looks like we're headed to a place where that is going to break down. It's starting already. Let's take truck drivers for example. There are currently 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. Once driverless vehicles are perfected, that's 3.5 million jobs on the chopping block. And that's not even including taxi drivers and limousine services. Let's say, for the sake of discussion that the process takes a while and the jobs are lost over a period of time. If it takes us a decade to lose all those jobs, that's 350,000 jobs a year. And where do we now employ 350,000 people? How do they make a living? Into what fields are the retrained?

Quote:
 
It is a strawman fallacy, a silly sarcastic projection, because it suggests that the alternative to a nanny state is to train employees for useless 'make work' jobs or jobs that don't exist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Disagree with me if you like, but at least disagree with what I'm actually proposing, not the hyperbole you imply. A successful idea must have a purpose, a return on investment. In this case, the purpose is to transform those who are a drain on our economy to those who contribute to both society and the economy. Furthermore I find it curious that you suggest my proposal is to pay people for pointless work, all the while yours proposes to pay them for no work at all. LOL, Seriously WTF? :)


Not all. Truly, no sarcasm is intended. I had a conversation with a coworker not long ago. And he made the point that if we just give people a "base income" that the majority would simply sit at home watching TV and playing video games, effectively of no benefit to society. I suggested that many people might actually find things they wanted to do, rather than things they had to do to make a living. And that some of those things would be of benefit to society. And besides, who decides what is or is not beneficial to society? He argued that perhaps we should have them working on things like building roads with simple tools, to at least keep them occupied. I asked how having people building roads that could be done faster and easier by machines, just so they had something to do, regardless of whether or not they wanted to be doing it, was beneficial to society?

My point being is that if we force people to work at things they don't want to be doing, just so they can survive, how is this really any different then slave labor? And if we're going to offer retraining, something we haven't really been very good at for the last several decades as jobs have moved away or disappeared, how are we to determine which jobs will actually still be available in five or ten years? Because short of the jobs that require the most skill and talent, any and all jobs could be on the chopping block. We just can't know for sure which.


Quote:
 
Nearly nothing is inevitable. The pessimistic notion that "No man can create prosperity out of nothing" is both absurd and absolutely defeatist. A friend of mine who about 12 years ago was languishing in prison for cooking meth, today owns and operates the largest electrical contracting business in the region, with over a 100 employees, 4 locations, millions of dollars in vehicles and equipment. I'd love to see the grin on his face if you were to tell him "no man can create prosperity from nothing." His story is not unique.

Yours is a formula for failure which in simplest terms disassociates people from society by paying them to be unproductive as opposed to paying them to be productive and more self reliant members of society.


On an individual basis that's true. But if we consider all the convicts who were languishing in jail 12 years ago cooking meth and look at how many turned their lives around, I'd think we'd find that your friend is an exception and not the rule. You can't design a system around exceptional people.

As far as disassociating people from society by paying them to be unproductive, I ask you this. How productive do you honestly believe that billionaires like Donald Trump are? How much real "work" do they do? If productivity is measured by the manual labor one does that could be done by machines, Trump and those like him are probably some of the most unproductive people on the planet.


Quote:
 
One thing that's for sure Opie, ..."if you expect failure, you won't be disappointed.".There is no guarantee that a positive attitude will "make it all work out" for everyone, however a negative attitude is a guarantee that it won't. It's not the positive attitude, it's what results from a positive attitude. I think that's pretty obvious.


Planning on everything working out based on having a positive attitude without planning or preparation doesn't seem very likely to garner the desired results. You must first identify the problem before you can work on addressing the problem. Whistling a happy tune and ignoring the issue is a good way to fail in a massive way.

Quote:
 
You challenge me for 'practical proposals' yet you've offered none yourself. Government can play a significant role in developing training programs with businesses, education institutions and job seekers, by way of payroll/income and tuition supplements, towards training for specific skills required by the employer. Rather than writing a check and writing them off, as you propose, redirect a portion of those pay-outs towards educating individuals with the marketable skills. In a community in Kansas for example, I know of two agricultural manufacturers who collaborate with the local community college to design curriculum targeting their specific manufacturing needs. The companies supplement the student's tuition costs and provide paid 'on the job' training internships. The colleges develop specific curriculums as needed. Everybody wins. Cooperative programs like this are scalable, but only with the involvement of state and federal governments which would involve redirecting from wasted funds going to create a dependent class to the more sustainable investment of providing individuals with marketable job skills.


You appear to still believe that there will be plenty of jobs to go around and that all that has to happen is that people need to be retrained from what they were doing to what they will be doing. I'm saying that there just won't be enough jobs. Period. We have a work force in neighborhood of 161 million people. What happens when 30% can't find work? What if the percentage grows to 50%?

In the short term, yes, coordinating training between industries looking for workers and workers looking for work can certainly help. But I see that as a 10 or maybe 20 year band aid, at best. We need to start thinking now about what happens when there just aren't enough jobs to go around.


Quote:
 
No one is expecting to save the world on a few innovative ideas. I'm talking more generally about a multi angle approach to job creation, involving job training, incentives to return jobs to the U.S. as well as immigration reform.
Like my old man used to say..."can't never did do nothing." Saying it's unrealistic does not make it unrealistic. That's an intangible argument born in pessimism. Ideas, whether from corporations, individuals or otherwise have the potential to create jobs. It takes people to develop those ideas and people to implement them. Indeed corporations have greater resources to capitalize on those ideas but it's employees who exploit them and they benefit from those 'corporate owned' ideas in the form of income and job security created by those ideas.
Now my friend....where are YOUR practical proposals?


I agree with your old man, "can't never did do nothing." So, I would support many of the suggestions you've made regarding training. The problem is, I don't see those as a long term answer to the problem. As far as practical solutions, well you don't like the one I've made but humor me by allowing me to elaborate.

Let's say for the sake of discussion that very few people work in manufacturing any more because most of the work is done by automation. Few people are working as vehicle drivers for the same reasons. Fewer people are needed in retail and grocery sales because of the same. And let's say that people are given a base income for "doing nothing", like you see it. What do they do now, since they have to fill up their time?

Well, I think some would do just what my coworker suggested, and sit at home watching TV and playing video games. But certainly not all. So what might people do, who no longer have to join the rat race and scurry all day long just to bring home the cheese? Perhaps you might have more people involved in making music, lord knows there are plenty of musicians who would love to be making music rather than working a 9 to 5 job. Maybe more people become involved in art and theater. I know, speaking for myself, if I didn't have to work for a living, I'd be involved in community theater. Maybe they volunteer to work with the elderly. To help care for the homeless and forgotten of our society. Maybe they just spend time socializing with each other and enjoying each other's company. Humanity is, after all, a social species. Most of us do not do well without regular social interaction. Maybe we contribute to society not with our labor that can easily be duplicated by a machine that does it faster and cheaper, but by what a machine can't do. Simply being a human being and finding ways to meaningfully interact with our fellow human beings.
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Robert Stout
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CautionaryTales
Dec 25 2016, 10:59 AM
Robert Stout
Dec 24 2016, 10:04 AM
Opinionated
Dec 23 2016, 08:35 PM
Harambe4Trump
Dec 23 2016, 01:26 PM
Housing costs have surged because of population increase. If all all Immigration ended, housing would decrease.
Yeah, that's pretty much not true. Immigration is at best a very small contributor to housing costs.
Illegal immigration, not legal immigration, is a root cause of many of our nation's problems...By eliminating illegal immigration highways, hospital emergency rooms, schools, and prisons would be less congested...This would eliminate the need to build more infrastructure to accommodate our unwanted guests...Housing rents would go down a little bit due to decreased demand....Rents would go down a lot if it wasn't for 20 illegals living in a one bedroom apartment....Perhaps most of all, neighborhoods would not be subjected to loud blaring mariachi music at 2AM on Sundays............. :popcorn:
Sounds like you have the answer to all the problems in this country.
You also have a President that ran on that notion and a Congress that will soon give us the perfect society.

Can't wait to see it!
There is no excuse for failure.
Watch and learn............. :tongue:
Jesus can raise the dead, but he can't fix stupid
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Eddo26
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estonianman
Dec 25 2016, 01:06 PM
Eddo36
Dec 23 2016, 04:16 AM
estonianman
Dec 22 2016, 07:52 PM
automation brings prices down eliminating the need to work long hours.

Thank you capitalism.
Still waiting on your response. When has prices of goods ever gone down voluntarily and not due to regulation?
Dude. Had stuff going on, explaining the economics of price deflation to you isn't on the top of my list.

Automation (technological improvement) increases both efficiency and productivity, thereby lowering the cost of manufacturing a good. People are expensive, slow and inefficient. They can't work 24/7 and require lots of maintenance. People are better off using their brains to create new ways of making lives easier - in the marketplace of ideas.

The only hurdle is the initial cost of capital investment, which is overcome by the same economical effects. Within decades people will laugh at us who cooked, cleaned - did laundry etc. Cars will be built locally in completely automated factories while automated vertical aero-ponic farms will produce food in the most arid of deserts. Purchasing construction materials to build that end-table will be buried in the past, where 3D printing will make what you need, probably from waste carbon or silica.

These are all good things that will come in this century - thanks to capitalism.
Fair point, been a long time since I took economics in high school but it was only theory. In practice, if I owned a business I wouldn't lower prices instead conspire with my "competitors" to agree to a set minimum price for the consumers since it seems everyone else is doing the same thing hence inflation and costs of things always going up without regulations especially after minimum wage increase in 21 states that is about to happen.
We believe only what we want to believe.
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ringotuna
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That's how it currently works today, more or less. My point is that it looks like we're headed to a place where that is going to break down. It's starting already. Let's take truck drivers for example. There are currently 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. Once driverless vehicles are perfected, that's 3.5 million jobs on the chopping block. And that's not even including taxi drivers and limousine services. Let's say, for the sake of discussion that the process takes a while and the jobs are lost over a period of time. If it takes us a decade to lose all those jobs, that's 350,000 jobs a year. And where do we now employ 350,000 people? How do they make a living? Into what fields are the retrained?
In the late 50's and 60's they promised us flying hover cars. I'm still waiting. I don't see the adoption of driverless cars to be as broad as you predict. At the very least your time line is more science fiction than reality. It's pretty unrealistic to think that all those drivers will be out of work within 10 years if at all. I think your expectations far outreach the current state of the technology and social acceptance. Asking me what fields they would be retrained for is like asking how many is blue. Was it rhetorical? How am I, or you supposed to know what choices someone else is going to make in the future?
Not all. Truly, no sarcasm is intended. I had a conversation with a coworker not long ago. And he made the point that if we just give people a "base income" that the majority would simply sit at home watching TV and playing video games, effectively of no benefit to society. I suggested that many people might actually find things they wanted to do, rather than things they had to do to make a living. And that some of those things would be of benefit to society. And besides, who decides what is or is not beneficial to society? He argued that perhaps we should have them working on things like building roads with simple tools, to at least keep them occupied. I asked how having people building roads that could be done faster and easier by machines, just so they had something to do, regardless of whether or not they wanted to be doing it, was beneficial to society?
My point being is that if we force people to work at things they don't want to be doing, just so they can survive, how is this really any different then slave labor? And if we're going to offer retraining, something we haven't really been very good at for the last several decades as jobs have moved away or disappeared, how are we to determine which jobs will actually still be available in five or ten years? Because short of the jobs that require the most skill and talent, any and all jobs could be on the chopping block. We just can't know for sure which.

I've already addressed your 'work for the sake of work' theory. It's as unsustainable and unrealistic as a pay check for doing nothing. Your friends argument is not mine, and is as regressive as it is to create and feed a permanent nonproductive class of citizen. But he does have a point in that our national infrastructure is in dire need of attention, all the while we have huge potential labor resources sitting idle. Don't you think it would benefit society as a whole to put those resources into play as opposed to paying them unconditionally to do nothing?
We can indeed predict which jobs are at greater risk. Generally speaking it's as you say, the low skilled positions that are most easily replaced. More specifically, all you have to do is look at the current technologies under development to predict where the deficit will occur.
A great number of individuals are currently receiving a 'base income' through the various government assistance programs. Do you know what percentage or how many of those are using their time to make their chosen contribution to society? All you have to do is look at the present reality to predict how things will go in the future. The whole 'Slave Labor' thing is silly melodramatic meme. If you really have to ask the difference, I suggest you educate yourself on both slavery and labor. It's as meaningless as the kid who claims daddy's a slave driver because he has to mow the lawn.
"Who decides what's beneficial to society?" I'm sure opinions vary on that question. I think a more relevant question is "What is beneficial to society?" On a personal level, I believe that our first responsibility to society is to not become a burden on that society. Think about that and let me know if you agree because your 'pay for nothing' theory is quite counterproductive to that end.
On an individual basis that's true. But if we consider all the convicts who were languishing in jail 12 years ago cooking meth and look at how many turned their lives around, I'd think we'd find that your friend is an exception and not the rule. You can't design a system around exceptional people.
I understand that anecdotes don't stand up to statistics, however it's a valid counterpoint to your claim that "no man can create prosperity from nothing". The rarity of his story may be true, however you shouldn't look at it through a keyhole. You've overlooked the broader point, which is that his innovation and drive benefits far more people than himself. He created good paying jobs for skilled and unskilled people. He's put money into the economy, which benefits not only his employees, but the businesses and employees of the businesses he deals with, not to mention the federal government by way of taxable income.
As far as disassociating people from society by paying them to be unproductive, I ask you this. How productive do you honestly believe that billionaires like Donald Trump are? How much real "work" do they do? If productivity is measured by the manual labor one does that could be done by machines, Trump and those like him are probably some of the most unproductive people on the planet.
LOL. No seriously...LMAO. Let's not muddy the waters here with unanswerable questions. The question invites gross speculation, and neither of us can give an educated answer. It's simply too silly to address aside from saying it's fallacious to assume, as the question does, that productivity is measured by manual labor.
Planning on everything working out based on having a positive attitude without planning or preparation doesn't seem very likely to garner the desired results. You must first identify the problem before you can work on addressing the problem. Whistling a happy tune and ignoring the issue is a good way to fail in a massive way.
Who said anything about NOT 'planning or preparing'? Does the fact that I didn't elaborate give you cause to assume my theory does not include planning? Once again you're projecting a silly straw man. Like I said before, a positive attitude is no guarantee of success but a negative attitude almost certainly guarantees failure. Not sure how you managed to overlook that. The first thing I ask my guys when considering changes is "what could go wrong?". We identify the potential problems and address them then address any unforeseen problems as they arise.
You appear to still believe that there will be plenty of jobs to go around and that all that has to happen is that people need to be retrained from what they were doing to what they will be doing. I'm saying that there just won't be enough jobs. Period. We have a work force in neighborhood of 161 million people. What happens when 30% can't find work? What if the percentage grows to 50%?
Planning my friend. Read the previous paragraph. You have a gross misunderstanding of what I believe. What I actually believe is that we should endeavor to both create jobs and return jobs that have migrated offshore as well as invest in training for both. We can most certainly avoid your doomsday numbers with proper foresight and planning.
In the short term, yes, coordinating training between industries looking for workers and workers looking for work can certainly help. But I see that as a 10 or maybe 20 year band aid, at best. We need to start thinking now about what happens when there just aren't enough jobs to go around.
A more practical endeavor is to start thinking about how to avoid the scenario you predict. A proactive approach is far more pragmatic than a reactive one. And while your theory has some inkling of planning, it's planning for failure. The result will be a further division of classes. The chasm between the haves and the have-not's will grow larger to the point that the haves can no longer support the have-nots.
I agree with your old man, "can't never did do nothing." So, I would support many of the suggestions you've made regarding training. The problem is, I don't see those as a long term answer to the problem. As far as practical solutions, well you don't like the one I've made but humor me by allowing me to elaborate.
It's not that I don't like your proposal, it's that I find it impractical, unrealistic and unachievable.
Let's say for the sake of discussion that very few people work in manufacturing any more because most of the work is done by automation. Few people are working as vehicle drivers for the same reasons. Fewer people are needed in retail and grocery sales because of the same. And let's say that people are given a base income for "doing nothing", like you see it. What do they do now, since they have to fill up their time?
Well, I think some would do just what my coworker suggested, and sit at home watching TV and playing video games. But certainly not all. So what might people do, who no longer have to join the rat race and scurry all day long just to bring home the cheese? Perhaps you might have more people involved in making music, lord knows there are plenty of musicians who would love to be making music rather than working a 9 to 5 job. Maybe more people become involved in art and theater. I know, speaking for myself, if I didn't have to work for a living, I'd be involved in community theater. Maybe they volunteer to work with the elderly. To help care for the homeless and forgotten of our society. Maybe they just spend time socializing with each other and enjoying each other's company. Humanity is, after all, a social species. Most of us do not do well without regular social interaction. Maybe we contribute to society not with our labor that can easily be duplicated by a machine that does it faster and cheaper, but by what a machine can't do. Simply being a human being and finding ways to meaningfully interact with our fellow human beings.

...and they all lived happily ever after. I understand the sentiment. "Oh how wonderful life would be if only someone ELSE would take care of my basic necessities". It's not like I "see it as paid to do nothing" It's that it IS "paid to do nothing". There's no other definition for receiving a stipend with no expectations for anything in return.
And where will the money come from Opie? Do you honestly think that the well is infinitely deep and will never run dry? And which wells would you tap? How far down the economic food chain must we go to finance your nanny state? A utopian fantasy such as yours would require a great number of individuals like my friend Juan the electrician to support a growing economic subclass pursuing self indulgency? For every individual on the dole, how many working/taxpaying individuals are necessary to support the handouts? Have you planned that out? The numbers would simply never add up.
Edited by ringotuna, Dec 26 2016, 08:12 AM.
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George Aligator
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Artificial Intelligence May Cost US Millions Of Jobs, But of course these are human jobs. being taken by smart machines. If these jobs were being taken by Mexicans, the right wing would be out there taking drastic action, but of course smart machines are not considered a race of foreigners. If you lose you job because the boss has hired an illegal immigrant willing to work longer hours for less money, you are ready to storm out and vote for Trump. If the boss buys a machine able to work longer hours for less money, you clap you little paws and chant USA! Number One! while god damning the unions for trying to destroy America. This is reaganomics for working people in the new era.
Conservatism is a social disease
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estonianman
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Eddo36
Dec 25 2016, 09:43 PM
estonianman
Dec 25 2016, 01:06 PM
Eddo36
Dec 23 2016, 04:16 AM
estonianman
Dec 22 2016, 07:52 PM
automation brings prices down eliminating the need to work long hours.

Thank you capitalism.
Still waiting on your response. When has prices of goods ever gone down voluntarily and not due to regulation?
Dude. Had stuff going on, explaining the economics of price deflation to you isn't on the top of my list.

Automation (technological improvement) increases both efficiency and productivity, thereby lowering the cost of manufacturing a good. People are expensive, slow and inefficient. They can't work 24/7 and require lots of maintenance. People are better off using their brains to create new ways of making lives easier - in the marketplace of ideas.

The only hurdle is the initial cost of capital investment, which is overcome by the same economical effects. Within decades people will laugh at us who cooked, cleaned - did laundry etc. Cars will be built locally in completely automated factories while automated vertical aero-ponic farms will produce food in the most arid of deserts. Purchasing construction materials to build that end-table will be buried in the past, where 3D printing will make what you need, probably from waste carbon or silica.

These are all good things that will come in this century - thanks to capitalism.
Fair point, been a long time since I took economics in high school but it was only theory. In practice, if I owned a business I wouldn't lower prices instead conspire with my "competitors" to agree to a set minimum price for the consumers since it seems everyone else is doing the same thing hence inflation and costs of things always going up without regulations especially after minimum wage increase in 21 states that is about to happen.
That's what happens with big government. That cartel creates a regulatory structure that limits competition from entering the market place and taking a piece of that profit. I understand why regulations exist so no need to go down the "LMAO you want poisoned food" road. Just pointing out that regulations have been abused to limit competition.

Look at the way UBER circumvented laws and entered the transportation sector despite colluding government officials trying to stop them. They automated the logistics of hired transport and implemented an ad hoc network of contractors deflating cost.. Consider the legacy taxi driver cartel that is now bitching that jobs are lost etc etc. In reality society is better off with UBER.
Edited by estonianman, Dec 26 2016, 12:56 PM.
MEEK AND MILD
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