Elucidator…
You aren’t serious, are you? That pulling levers and diggin holes in basically the same job as running a company or managing the floor of a factory?
PLEASE tell me you aren’t saying that we should abandon technology and return to the fields.
Job markets change in a technological society. People change with it. If people don’t change with it, people don’t have a job. This isn’t some scheme out to keep the poor man down for god’s sake. Its about raising the standard of living. Some of us crazy bastards find that less work = more time for fun and we praise these labor-saving devices. Sorry if you have to increase your stinking education to keep up with the market, but that’s life if you want cheap beer and good meat.
“I ain’t gonna work in no rice paddie.”~~aynrandlover
in 1970 i was taking some useless “elective” course about greek pseudo-intellectual garbage. is time linear or is time circular. 65 years after special relativity. so i tell the instructor time is like a helix, a slinky, look at it from the end it’s circular, look at it from the side it’s a sine wave, and you can stretch and compress it like gravity affects time. he stands there with a blank expression on his face. duh, that’s not what the ancient greeks said. these courses could almost all be on video tape by now. the education costs to much because of obsolete campuses and useless teachers.
oh, i forgot. capitalism needs a class that’s discriminated against in order to work. that’s no problem as long as you aren’t in that class.
i take it you don’t think you are, aynrandlover.
i dropped out of electrical engineering, went to work for panasonic as a repair tech. got to concentrate on electronics all day and they paid me. switched to IBM and computers in 1978. but now things are really interesting. it is obvious that Macrosh!t is making bloated software that slows down even ridiculously powerful computers. i’m working on a videotape computer training course. bought a Canon ZR-10 digital camera. we’ll see if i can blow away some of the so called teachers i’ve had. computer education is strange the way they seperate hardware and software. some programmers haven’t a clue how hardware works.
Dal Timgar, neo-Smithian techno-Marxist Economic Wargamer
EVERYBODY has to be enlightened for the invisible hand to work.
See, you are shifting with the times. You can obviously work in different fields and you can clearly demonstrate you can be trained. Sorry if that doesn’t make you a millionare, but it keeps you from being starving.
I am definitely not a member of the “upper” class. Nowhere near it, really.
Capitalism doesn’t need a class that is discriminated against. Capitalism doesn’t need classes at all. It merely creates them as a byproduct. IF THERE ARE NO CLASSES THERE IS NO WEALTH. That much is clear, I hope. If you would like to eliminate wealth then please offer an alternate motivation. This isn’t merely to attack you, of course, just throwing it out there.
So we have a system that inherently creates classes. That doesn’t even mean these classes are permanent in the sense that once a class always a class. I see no reason why any one individual needs to stay a member of any particular economic group that isn’t of their own design or a natural one. That is, I can’t see that anyone actively keeps poor people poor. Perhaps, as I am sometimes told, I am completely blind. Then again, perhaps I had the good fortune to take advantage of what programs are available to go from lower class to lower middle class. Hopefully on my way to regular-old middle class within a few years.
That said, Dal, are we arguing about this or agreeing?
And the “invisible hand” doesn’t need everyone to be enlightened, just the ones who want to get something for their efforts.
No, of course not. The barb is aimed at people who give themselve self-righteous airs because they work pushing paper or some such and think that they deserve more of the worlds goodies than the poor shmuck who actually produces the worlds goodies. And who frequently works under conditions that are at best tedious, at worse personally destructive. How much an hour is black lung worth? I mean, compared with something really useful like Human Resources?
Labor saving devices do just that, they save labor. So if we insist that only those who work deserve things, we have to either come up with bullshit and pointless work to do (the plan that seems to be in operations at the moment) or everybody works a whole lot less.
Theres always the Morloch and Eloi option, I suppose.
Well, elucidator, I think I addressed those things in my post to tigmar…the job market changes. That is, you aren’t going to make any money nowadays buildin portable oil laterns, but work on a propane one and you’ve got a deal. Horse-drawn carraige makers isn’t the booming field you might hope, so go work for Honda (f ford ;)).
As well, when we build a robot to replace a segment of assembly line workers, someone had to build the robot. Someone else needs to repair it, service it, program it, etc etc. Every new invention eliminates some jobs and creates others. the more we replace physical labor with time-saving devices the more paper-pushers and snooty bastards we will have, true true. Ain’t a bad thing IMO.
But ARL, you say, that robot removes more jobs than it creates! Ahhhh, now we’ve got a problem. Buuuuut, I dunno. This is terribly cruel to say, but I see 1001 help wanted signs every day all over the place. The paper is filled with classifieds looking for employees. If you want the jobs they are out there. The question just becomes, what are you willing to do for it? Living wage? Obviously you are not willing to do much or you’d have your “living wage,” forgive me for saying so. I’ve lived on my own since I was old enough to legally do it working in either the military or frigging fast food. That was enough of a “living wage” for me to own a TV, a car, rent a decent apartment, and smoke a pack of cigs a day. Living like a prince, in other words.
Man, am I rambling or what? I’ll stop now before I start discussing the finer points of video gaming as a microcosm of philsophically looking at quantum theory. And believe me, I could make it relative to the OP
one problem with communicating over the internet is that you can’t put all that you think in a post or even a few posts.
frankly ARLover you read like an upper-middle class prig to me. sorry if that is inaccurate but that is the distorted impression i get via the net, or maybe it’s my personal prejudices.
on an emotional level i’m inclined to adopt the perspective of Elucidator but i don’t see what practical means he suggests to deal with the situation.
i look at history as the interaction of human beings playing power games, of which there are five. Economic, Political, Military, Religious and Sexual. if you look at the wars for the last 200 years it is obvious that technology has made the development of new strategies and tactics necessary. the same applies to economic power games. the social class structure can block peoples economic efforts regardless of knowledge of technology. you don’t speak properly, you don’t dress properly, morons that kiss a$$ get promoted. so capitalism doesn’t create the class structure, the class structure interferes with capitalism, if you insist on using that obsolete term. i think capitalism got phased out around 1900. what we have now i call corporate consumerism. adam smith objected to what he called “joint-stock” companies, what we now call corporations. in 1886 the supreme court decided that a corporation was a person so we ain’t in Kansas anymore.
i wrote ECONOMIC WARGAMES to wake people up, my version of the re(a)d pill, a la THE MATRIX.
the poor get ripped off and kept poor by people hiding information, psychological sabotage by teachers. had a nun tell me i would get into a good highschool but wouldn’t do well. she was mad because i refused to be a patrol boy. i got straight A’s in math but straight D’s in religion my freshman year. maybe she was right.
anyway the internet is a new way to go to war. the internet essay is more powerful than the hydrogen bomb. ROFL!
I have to say, I believe the WORKING poor are just that, working. These people have to want to work. I know. I was one. When my girlfriend (now wife) got pregnant, I had an OK job for a single guy. But it had no benefits. So I had to take a job further away and for less money just for the benefits. When my daughter was born, my wife couldn’t work because she needed surgery. So we needed to go on assistance, including foodstamps, WIC, and heat. I was working about 60 hours a week and we still couldn’t make enough for a basic living. Luckily, the assistance also offered school for my girlfriend. When she finished, she was able to get a better job than the average unmarried 20 yr. old mom. When she finally started working, we still qualified for assistance. Other than WIC, we gave it all back. We worked our asses off to get a better life. There are a lot of people who do. Thats why they are called the working poor. We had people look down at us, and talk down to us whe
