They have been around for a long time. They populate the inner cities. You tell them to go to school and they will get ahead. They know better. They are born with barriers between them and a productive life that only a chosen few can leap. They live a depressing life that forces them to prey off each other to survive. They are not stupid. They know from an early age that they are trapped, outsiders looking in. Funny how they have a drug problem and a crime problem, isn’t it?
It is a brutal and tough life with fear at every noise and death is a constant companion.
They are religious because why should such a hardscrabble existence be theirs. Perhaps the next life will treat them more kindly. This is hell on earth.
This pools grows every year in America. My neighbor had a sign put on his door saying his home is up for auction for non payment of property taxes. He is old and has 2 daughters in college and 2 younger kids. I knew nothing about it until I saw the sign . What is to happen to him? I see empty houses all over. I was walking the streets in the suburbs for a friends campaign a couple months ago. I saw a streak of 5 empty homes in a row. All suburban and nice houses. Each one I am sure has a horror story that comes with it. i feel pretty sad and I don’t know any reason it will not continue.
So leaving millions of Americans permanently unemployed and collecting Government benefits (or starving if we cut off their benefits) is better than securing for them a job threading needles through running shoe uppers? In the economy we have right now four out of five Americans absolutely MUST go without a job no matter what skills they learn.
Where’s the comparative advantage of having a persistent minimum of 8% of your workforce (like in Europe, and soon in America) out of work?
Question for everyone:
You have 6.3 million long term unemployed.
If all of these people get the latest and greatest training there are still not enough jobs for them.
Which is better? To give them jobs threading shoes, or leave them unemployed and put them through training for jobs that most of them will not be able to get because said field will become overly impacted? (Because 5 people are fighting for every 1 available job.)
So far what we really want, judging by our actions, is for them to sit idle, unemployed, begging us for Government benefits.
What did we do with the ‘useless’ farm workers that lost their jobs to factory farming? Tens of millions of jobs in agriculture vanished in the 20th century in the United States, yet there is no giant glut of displaced farm workers.
What did we do with the ‘useless’ telephone operators, who lost their jobs in the hundreds of thousands when automated switching gear appeared? They were women with little to no education in other fields, at a time when women had had a harder time than men finding employment. Where did they all go?
Let’s cut to the chase: You think these people are useless if they aren’t given jobs doing exactly what they already do. But people are resilient. They retrain, they take new jobs. The smartest or hardest working ones move off the factory floor and become supervisors, or retrain to be machine operators and automation specialists. The ones who can’t or won’t retrain within the industry get laid off, and learn to do something else.
The majority of people don’t just train for one career and stay in it their entire lives, you know. They adapt. They go where the jobs are. They reinvent themselves. As jobs become more specialized and compartmentalized, this trend will accelerate.
Of course, the best way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to tell people that they are helpless in the face of powerful forces, that someone owes them a living, that their poor circumstances are due to someone else taking away from them what is rightfully theirs, and that their path to prosperity is political activism to force others to give them jobs and money.
Cultivating a atmosphere of dependency does wonders for the careers of politicians who promise to take care of the dependent, and it keeps the community organizers and union bosses in silk, but it really sucks for the people who might have stood on their own but were convinced to stand down so the benevolent people in the government could look after them.
Talking about ‘useless’ people who have no options once a job is lost to automation and how they must be helped by government or be cast into the ranks of the impoverished feeds into the worst impulses in people. It promotes class division, resentment, helplessness and a belief that one can only get ahead by taking from others. It’s among the worst things that liberals do.
How about we fast-forward to today, shall we?
Europe, for one, has a chronic problem with long-term joblessness. America is settling into this situation as well. We have 6.3 million Americans who’ve been out of work over 6 months, and a few million that haven’t been able to find a job in 2 years.
We have 5 people out there fighting for every 1 available job. That means that no matter how much you adapt and train, the math dictates clearly that 4 out of 5 unemployed Americans have no job no matter what training they get.
This is the reality right now.
What do we do when there are ZERO jobs available for 4 out of 5 unemployed Americans? Training will not get them a job. Because no jobs exist for them. The sheer mathematics dictates that.
Found a new windmill to tilt at, I see. Well, actually, it appears that you’re just coming at the same windmill from a different angle.
There are no jobs as of yet for the displaced workers to migrate to. The expulsion of workers is still going on. Programmers, engineers, and middle class jobs are being moved abroad. We have not yet reached the bottom.
This is not a righty lefty thing, no matter how much that colors your perspectives. It is a lot of people from all walks of life who did nothing wrong and their world has been turned over.
There are generations of people with no skills. They get neighborhood jobs and work at manual labor. But those who have committed themselves to education and training in a field, suddenly are on the street. They are not looking for dependency . But they may wind up that way for quite some time though.
It must be nice you live in such a comfortable spot that you don’t see how desperate people are becoming. there is a lot of pain being visited on a lot of families.
Who are you talking to? I am certainly not unsympathetic to the plight of unemployed workers; I supported the auto industry bailouts solely because I didn’t want the economy of Michigan imploding (though frankly, I can’t think of anything that comes from Michigan I like).
What I am is unswayed by the views of economic illiterati like Jacquelope.
The latest facilities in some industries are already exactly this. I helped build a large flour mill three years ago that only employs about three people per shift, excluding the loading dock.
The argument that the jobless people need to get new skills is a smoke screen.
Acquiring new skills is a virtue; but we’re growing here is a generation of college graduates who are unemployed. We probably have one of the biggest well-educated yet unemployed populations in the world.
We’re moving knowledge based jobs overseas. That’s the FINAL frontier. Economists are predicting that we could have a permanent 8% unemployment after the dust settles… long after all the high school-only grads have dropped dead.
You don’t even want to know what global unemployment figures are.
Who cares if idiots like you are unswayed?
(Oh wait, I bet a moderator will come along and say you calling me an illiterati is okay but calling you an idiot is not… not like that hasn’t happened before…)
Since there’s already large scale factory automation, the answer to the OP is somewhere below the wages commanded by typical American factory workers.
Not entirely true. There are line workers at all the Toyota plants in the US (how many now? 7 or so?). There are lots of robots out there… but are they actually taking away jobs? It just doesn’t look like they are.
In the distant future, though, things could well change. We could see a whole lot of factories like the one spark240 spoke of.
If you ever want your ideas to go beyond a message board where people will immediately point out that they don’t make any sense, you should care.
Also, perhaps you should consider the difference between an illiteratus and an idiot.
Not an insulting term? Really?
That sounds more like it fits you, “Really Not All That Bright”.
You say that to someone’s face some time and see if they don’t act like you’re trash talking.
Of course there are line workers. But there aren’t as many, not nearly as many, as there would be if there were no robots. So they are obviously taking away jobs. To take the most obvious example, all (or very nearly all) of the welding on modern automobiles is done by robots. Robots have cost a whole lot of line welders their jobs.
Unless I’m misunderstanding your point, you’re committing an excluded middle fallacy here. “If there are line workers, then the plant isn’t automated.” No. The plant is automated to some degree, and to the degree it is automated it requires fewer human employees. In fact, auto manufacturers perform studies to determine the optimal level of automation. As you can see from the graph on page 2, one of the primary considerations is decreased labour costs.
Both of you need to stop this right now. Insults aren’t allowed in this forum, period. Take this to the Pit if you want to go after each other personally.
You are such an odd duck,** Sam**. Your posts start sipping polite tea, pinkies akimbo, like you wouldn’t say “shit!” if you had a mouthful, but, by the time you’re done, you’re flinging slander and bearing false witness. A stern talking-to is in order.
I’m sure whole books have been written on the subject of labor migration patterns. Are you asking if I have read them, or implying that you have? At any rate, I don’t quite see what point you are offering here. Are you rebutting the unoffered argument that these people were trundled off to internment camps and made away with? Where did they go? Well, they probably went home, I suppose, for as long as they had one, and then wandered off in search of work. My own dear mother was one of those ladies, her reminiscences of the work and the conditions of employment were rather more salty than one might expect from such a tiny woman, but she had an insolent baby and a Naval drunkard for a husband, so she did what she must. Happily, her two years at Texas U entitled her to the fast track towards numbing, mindless drudgery.
But, no, just as you say, those people did not perish. Joy.
I don’t think you are entitled to use an expression like “you think”, I sincerely doubt you can peer into my mind. Firstly, of course, you don’t reel away stunned and dazzled by the brilliance. That’s a dead giveaway. But secondly, you cannot seem to understand my simplest declarative sentences, you mangle them beyond all recognition and present the tangled corpse of a thought as though it were the original. And then proceed to demolish the pale, twisted remains. As well you might, if I thought what you claim I think, I would be as stupid as you seem to think. One of use knows for sure I’m not, and the other is kidding himself.
Ah, no. No, I don’t think that. Lets do it this way, I’ll tell you what I think, and you *won’t *tell me what I think. Yes, that should work much better. Can hardly fail.
They move off the factory floor, and become machine operators? Sam, the people on the factory floor are machine operators. That’s what people do in the modern factory, they operate machines. Or, perhaps they do become “automation specialists”, whatever the Hell that means. Is that like the guy who used to be a “file clerk” but now bears the proud title of “document storage and retrieval specialist”? (That actually happened to me, the title was bestowed with a minimum of ceremony. I might have been grateful at the advance in dignity, but most likely I thought it some perverse example of post-modernist irony. I don’t recall.)
Well, bless your heart, of course they do! Because they are resilient, and flexible! And they “reinvent” themselves, like Madonna singing country music. The difference being, of course, that they have absolutely no choice but to be flexible and adaptable. Praising people for making wise choices they don’t actually have is a tad disingenuous. But you’re just getting warmed up. And the “trend will accelerate”? Splendid news! Good thing these people are so flexible and adaptable, ever eager to take on the next “entry level” position, to have a fresh start, a new opportunity to work one’s way up. From the bottom. Again. Boy, sure a good thing they are so “flexible” and “adaptable”, huh, Sam?
Ah! Now we get there, at last! Finally, the cackling, evil liberal makes his appearance, up to no good, as usual. But I’m not at all sure that this is the “best way” to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen, though I’m sure we lefties appreciate your back-handed compliment. But, once again, you peer into our minds, pull out our thoughts and twist them like a mutant balloon animal, and offer us the result as if it were our very own.
Either they deserve it, or they don’t, that question is over my pay grade. But if they do deserve it, they don’t have it, and I want that changed. And if they don’t, then no one does any more or any less, and I want them to have it. God’s judgment on deserving, or Sam Stone’s, for that matter, is a question that need not concern me. And doesn’t.
Oh, those wretched, wicked community organizers and Union bosses! Have we not all born witness to their ruthless plundering of retirement savings and pension funds?! Those greedy community organizers at AIG, those grasping labor bosses at Goldman Sachs! Even now, we can hear the champagne corks popping in glee at AFL headquarters, and your local ACORN cell! When, oh when! will we ever rid ourselves of these greedy, wicked labor bosses!
Honestly, Sam, what in the bleeding Hell are you talking about, here? You do realize, don’t you, that you are offering us cartoon characters from a Fox Business Channel After School Special, hosted by “Uncle Sean” Hannity? That it bears not the slightest resemblance to reality? If you truly believe this, it is delusional, if you don’t, its slander.
And on to your crescendo, trumpets blaring, timpani thumping, the fat lady finally shuts the fuck up!
At last, the truth, the shining paladin from the North, riding forth to protect the working man from the evil machinations of those dastardly, dastardly liberals! And these are only a partial list their ghastly crimes. We are left to wonder, are these the worst, or just “among” them? Would you have given us the Top Fifty Insidious Plots, had you the time? How can I be properly abashed and ashamed, how can I adequately cringe before the harsh glare of Judgment, without knowing?
No, Sam, this is not argument, this is slander. I trust in your good nature, that you still retain the capacity for shame. Do work on that, won’t you, there’s a good fellow!
Nope. That is not what I am saying. Not. At. All.
What I am saying is that even at $30/hour, which anyone will agree is a pretty solidly middle class upwardly mobile wage, it isn’t high enough to wipe out the entire job class and replace it with machines.
If we took extraordinary steps to make sure all cars sold in the US were made here, even at $30/hour per worker that wouldn’t mean we’d lose all those jobs to automation. Some, at worst, but not all. There would be a net gain in jobs.
You need to zoom out the focus a bit. None of the car manufacturers make the stuff that becomes a car, all those guys that you are refering to, just do final assembly. As you drop down the automotive tiers, you find that the level of automation and semi-automation drops as well.
At some point the level of automation will reach the point were its feasible to begin to think about a no-human staff, but the upfront costs of full automation, as well as their reliability mean that there will be humans in the loop for the near to long term future.
Toyota is not paying for skill, they are paying for stability.
Declan