The vast majority of the remaining farm jobs will be eliminated by factory-ization of food production and robotic crop tending in our lifetimes. The rest of the people are simply living in or near small towns doing things not much different than they could do in a suburb. Just doing it much more expensively once the increased per-capita infrastructure costs of low-density living are factored in.
Public (or at least very, very widespread individual) ownership of the means of production is certainly one way to ensure the collective fruits of everyone’s collective labors are divided more evenly. I anticipate that doctrinal approach will not be a popular option amongst the ranks of the Ruralians.
Ref your comment on economic displacements … Actually Clinton tried to talk of such things. Even in the (in)famous “deplorables” speech’s next several paragraphs. Since the whole topic wasn’t sound-bite friendly, it got zero media traction. If her election policy manifesto is still available online you can read all about it. No need to take my word for it.
To be sure, candidate’s pre-electoral talk is real cheap whereas creating and expending the political capital needed to accomplish substantive nationwide change is a much more expensive order. Regardless of who’s doing the talking and the changing.
Now, those are ideas I could get behind (other than the booting of immigrants). Anybody got Trump’s email addy? (No snark intended, those are actually really good ideas, my only concern is that the party that these people voted into power is not all that likely to implement them.)
Any chance of getting the white working class to clamor for these solutions to the people that they voted for? I know they won’t listen to me, but they may listen to them.
Can’t relocate them, but we can still retrain them, right? The only thing I can think of to add to that would be to train daycare workers, and then pay them, so that people have a place to leave their children when they go to their new jobs.
When the ACA was being debated, I remember seeing an article that claimed that the auto companies had lower labor costs at their Canadian plants because they have universal health care. Here, for instance, is an OpEd piece by Paul Krugman making that argument.
Yeah, creative destruction involves destruction. It’s going to be difficult for some people even with gov’t support, just like being a farmer has been difficult ever since crop yields started increasing significantly a few centuries ago or like it was difficult to be a middle-aged candle maker around the time of Thomas Edison.
Heh, thanks, I am glad you like that. Honestly I wrote that in a state of sort of snarky despair at the seeming political impossibility and social unpalatability of what could otherwise be viewed as practical ideas. I think the imposition of them would be viewed as the descent of liberal jack booted thugs by people who prefer actual thugs, only chasing those pesky brown people.
OTOH, my glimmer of hope for the coming administration is that many of the people who need the most help finally have a top level government figure that they actually believe in. People like me and a majority of dopers just Are Not Trump’s Target Audience.
So, when he says he’s going to get those Mexicans and Muslims, yes, it sure is appalling, but he has convinced millions of American sufferers that he is one of them and on their side. They obviously trust him- he made nothing but empty promises all through his campaign after all. So, once in office, if suddenly he changes his tune to, " hey, you guys. You know what I think is really cool? Physical fitness. It just has so many benefits, so many benefits, I have always admired fit people, they’re classy… and sobriety, remember in the old days, when America was great, how people weren’t all whacked out on heroin? Let’s go back to like it was. Americans used to help each other with problems, but then liberals broke the government, and now it is a disaster." And so on. I don’t think it matters if it is fact or fantasy.
I think it is possible that he could get his followers to believe almost anything. Trump on TV sipping lattes and munching arugula? “Boy, I wish I could get some arugula when I visit Rural America, which I just love by the way.” And suddenly people are ready to grow Arugula and take an interest in making great lattes. If anybody can sell solutions to rural America, it is Trump. We have seen that it is not the quality of the ideas that convinces these people, but rather their acceptance of the messenger.
So that’s my hope for the Trump administration- that he can change the minds of people who apparently can’t be reached any other way that we’ve tried.
Just read a heart-rendering piece about a poor woman in E KY who is worried about her health insurance.
Note: When ACA was implemented, part of it was an expansion of Medicaid to cover all poor adults. Predictably, the Dem Governors implemented this; the GOP, doing its damnest to scuttle anything Obama, did not.
Now, back to KY:
When the Medicaid expansion was implemented, KY had a Dem Governor; they switched to GOP in 2014. First order of GOP Governor? Petition to scrap Medicaid expansion.
How did Appalachia vote? Solid Red.
The poor woman is worried about her insurance.
You made your bed; sweet dreams, you ignorant bitch.
To add to the picture of Trump as salesman of ideas to rural America, the effect could be enhanced by strategic cooperation from the right Democrats.
For instance, let’s say my best case scenario comes to pass and Trump begins to stump for things that are actual worthwhile solutions. Trump: drug addiction is out of control, out of control. It is the role of government to fix that. I want to train drug counselors and build treatment centers, and subsidize that treatment with government money. It will be so worth it, believe me.
Ok. The catch is that if Trump starts making smart proposals, it will be the impulse of Democratic leaders to applaud and try to get on board. Wrong! Smart proposals need to be seen to be scorned and opposed by people who are considered major liberals.
Say Obama is willing to be a good sport. So he goes on Fox news and says, “Trump is unfit to implement drug treatment. It will cost too much and accomplish nothing. He is taking our country down exactly the wrong path. Trump supporters should see this for the con that it really is.” Keep in mind that Trump supporters and many on the right seem to have taken on a vaudvillian view of things. Obama is the liberal villain to them, no matter what, so his coming out against sensible Trump proposals will be met with, “Boo! Hiss! Obama’s against it? Screw him! WE DEMAND GOVERNMENT DRUG TREATMENT!!”
I am not usually this Machiavellian, but this seems to be the way it is now. Can’t fight it, so use it instead.
Nitpick, but Accenture was formerly Andersen Consulting, which was spun off as the consulting arm of the now defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen.
But even I can’t keep track of all the mergers and divestitures now. What’s the difference between Booz Allen Hamilton and Booz & Co? Not that it matters since one (both?) became Strategy& and were acquired by PwC.
It is interesting to note how the old consulting firms and Big-4 accounting firms used to have “partner” names like law firms up until the 90s - Ernst & Young, Deloitte & Touche, Booz Allen Hamilton, Andersen Consulting, Price Waterhouse Coopers, etc. Then they rebranding to dot com sounding names consisting of acronyms, symbols and nonsensical words - EY, Deloitte. , Strategy&, Accenture, PwC, etc.
Fortunately the management consulting industry can apply to pretty much anything.
I’m of two minds about the profession. One the one hand, “practical skills” are overrated. Management consultants typically work with executives and senior management to solve large, complex, strategic and operational problems. It’s not like being a doctor, engineer or computer programmer where you have to learn how to “do” something extremely technical. But a lot of those technical skills are being automated or outsourced.
Management consulting is like investment banking, big law, venture capital and a few other “white shoe” industries. It’s less about “skills” as it is about gaining access to an upper echelon of the business world.
OTOH, I studied structural engineering in undergrad. And I started my consulting career as a computer programmer. So to a certain extent, my view of the business world is that the only people who matter are the people who own the capital and those who actually design, invent, build and maintain the products people actually use. Everyone else is just useless middlemen and salespeople trying to justify their bullshit existence.
But ultimately that is what is happening to the working world. Eventually we will just create millions of bullshit middle-jobs to keep the masses working, content and busy enough to not revolt against those who own most of the capital.
LOL, that sounds about right. My boutique strategy form was hired to help one of the Big 4 run a “PMO” for some post merger integration with a big utility. I’m like “so do any of these idiots know how to test the software or is it pretty much just layers of consultants and dumb middle managers passing status reports back and forth?”
The problem with completely outsourcing those skills is that when they are too abstracted from the management a basic understanding of the problems and how to solve them are beyond the abilities of managers to comprehend. When you have managers who begin their careers not by starting at a functional level and working up to management but instead immediately start on a “management track” of learning bullshit ‘leadership’ skills largely consisting of mouthing appropriate slogans at one another there is a massive disconnect between ‘leadership’ and reality. This isn’t to say that it isn’t critical to have a hierarchy of people who are able to make strategic decisions and give direction without having to oversee the operational details, and in fact, in a large scale program it is critical, but what often happens is that you have layers of flappers who control the access and information flow between working and senior executive levels without having any input or influence themselves. And it is structures like this, and the institutional dissonance they create that lead to the 2007 meltdown with people being shocked that their market valued fictional investment vehicles were actually worthless if the market didn’t value them.
Yeah, in most organizations it seems like 20% of the people are doing 80% of the work and everyone else is kind of shuffling around reports. For what it is worth, I’ve seen even worse in several of the government agencies I’ve had to deal with to the point that we’ll have calls with fifty people on the line and only three or four people actually talking or taking actions, and I finish my call thinking to myself, “What the fuck do the rest of these people do?” Then I think about what I’m doing with my day and realize that whatever I’m doing isn’t going to amount to shit, either. At most I’ll do some analysis, create a few charts for someone to drop into their PowerPoint deck, and then they’ll make the same decision we knew they were going to make week ago regardless of the data.
Jesus, I really want to quit and just do Japanese carpentry. Or be an international hit man, whichever is more stable and offers better benefits.
You missed one. Move the whole company to a country like Canada or Ireland, which welcomes high-tech design jobs (and their associated taxes), and doesn’t have such idiotic repatriation and other tech-hostile laws which re-tax money that’s already been taxed in the country it was earned.
And that makes leaving the US a no-brainer. Most of the companies that have been starved for H1-B workers are already just hiring them in more tech-friendly places and doing less hiring in the US, period. The US political and educational system has been anti-science for so long now that there just aren’t enough Americans with the skill sets necessary. Paying lower wages to the H1-Bs (which in my experience is limited to a relatively few companies; the rest pay them as well or better than their American coutnerparts) is just a bonus when it happens – the option is often between hiring an H1-B or not hiring for the position at all.
ISTM the real point of the H1B folks, at least in IT, is to set up the long term complete outsourcing of the whatever. They form the in-country liaison force to the offshore contractors that do the work.
To be sure, that’s not the case with the world-class superstars working for the world-class companies. They’re also a tiny minority of the H1B population.
To be fair, you only noted how her region as a whole voted…not how she personally voted. It could be that she was one of the enlightened minority in that region.
Ya’ know, if it was just “suckered in by Trump lies”, it’d be one thing.
She and the rest of her solid-red county had already seen what the GOP wants to do with health insurance for the poor - cancel it as soon as you take office.
How many other states voted in GOP Governors after having Medicaid expanded by a Dem Governor?
No sympathy for anyone who votes in somebody who promptly does exactly what he said he would do.
“You knew damned well I was a snake,
When you took me in”
you know something that’s gonna happen too is what happened when a lot of factories tried to unionize in the 30s … they’ll just shut down due to being not worth the expense …
