But if we just hand out money, doesn’t that devalue the money? (I apologize, I’m very stupid about economics, so I could be blathering here.) If everyone gets, say, $10,000, isn’t that like no one got anything?
I had read that the Romans hindered the development of automation so as not to take jobs away from Romans.
What futurologists failed to take into account is that work tends to fill the available workday. If your company is profitable working 3 days a week, what’s to stop me from being 5/3 a profitable staying open all week long?
Apologies in advance 
What do you do with a stupid person,
What do you do with a stupid person earl-eye in the mornin’?
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises, earl-eye in the mornin’!
Shave his belly with a rusty razor,
Shave his belly with a rusty razor,
Shave his belly with a rusty razor earl-eye in the mornin’!
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises, earl-eye in the mornin’!
Throw him in the back of the paddy wagon,
Throw him in the back of the paddy wagon,
Throw him in the back of the paddy wagon earl-eye in the mornin’!
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises, earl-eye in the mornin’!
What do you do with a stupid person,
What do you do with a stupid person,
What do you do with a stupid person earl-eye in the mornin’?
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises, earl-eye in the mornin’!
Throw him in a hole with the captain’s daughter,
Throw him in a hole with the captain’s daughter,
Throw him in a hole with the captain’s daughter earl-eye in the mornin’!
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises, earl-eye in the mornin’!
Throw him in the lock-up 'till he’s sober,
Throw him in the lock-up 'till he’s sober,
Throw him in the lock-up ‘till he’s sober earl-eye in the mornin’!
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises, earl-eye in the mornin’!
Hey!
(Piccolo solo)
Hey!
What do you do with a stupid person,
What do you do with a stupid person,
What do you do with a stupid person earl-eye in the mornin’?
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises, earl-eye in the mornin’!
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises,
Way-hey, and up she rises, earl-eye in the mornin’!
What do you do with a stupid person,
What do you do with a stupid person,
What do you do with a stupid person earl-eye in the mornin’?
I’m glad I decided to sleep on it, because my initial reading of the OP was that “Stupid People” was more the “Uneducated/Lazy” rather than people who are just Unintelligent and I have some controversial theories that say that the Uneducated/Lazy Stupid should be punished for inconveniencing the rest of us.
The Unintelligent are a different kettle of fish, though- IMHO they should be steered towards Trades; they might not be a nuclear physicist but there’s no reason they can’t be an excellent locksmith or plumber or builder or working in the mines or whatever; Trades pay really well in Australia so it works out pretty well for everyone, IMHO.
I don’t think so; it all spends. Without that money, in this scenario, those people will either starve, flee the country, or commit crimes to survive; there being no fourth option. None of those benefits the economy; people spending money does.
Please define a stupid person. My father worked in a Ford factory for 35 years. Was he book smart? Hell no. I’m not even sure if he has ever read a book. He can come over and replace my garbage disposal in less than 2 hours. I would be in tears if I attempted that. Same thing with my ceiling fan in my office at home.
Plumbers are in very high demand even if it is considered a low end job, even though they make way more on average than a IT position.
Stupid people still have a way to support their families.
Yes, you are right. I apologize.
I don’t know if the second page is considered a “zombie thread”, I just had to escape from politics for a bit.
The question of when automation will replace human labor has been an obsession of mine for a few years. I believe that any job that can be economically automated, will be. If it can’t be automated, but can be exported, it will be. I can’t understand how anyone can claim that this trend will reverse it’s self.
The entire history of the human race has been to accomplish more labor with fewer people. The transition from hunter/gatherer to farmer was to provide more food with fewer people. The domestication of animals allowed a few people to provide meat, eggs, wool and milk to dozens or even hundreds of others. Up to this point, new categories of work have appeared to employ people. But automation replaces workers without producing new jobs.
People have become used to “blue collar” jobs being automated out of existence. But the white and “pink collar” ones are disappearing as well. Most of the time I call a business, I expect that I’ll go through a voice mail system. That’s replacing one or more receptionists. You can get a very good open source PBX/voice mail system and get it fully configured for a few thousand dollars - less than the cost of a years wages for a receptionist. Most folks no longer deal with bank tellers. Instead, they do it all via their banks web site, or ATM.
Even the worst jobs are being automated. The McDonald’s near me has a system that automatically fills all the drinks, feeding them to the person manning the window on a conveyor belt. It doesn’t overfill the drink with ice and doesn’t give me the wrong flavor. There is a machine to automatically make fries. They are testing a system to flip the hamburgers in their corporate kitchens. They’ve tested a customer touch screen system to enter your own order, in any number of languages. Anyone who has worked at McDonald’s knows that the secret of their success is to, as much as possible, turn fallible humans into an assembly line.
If a company that works hard to only pay minimum wage and has lobbied to abolish it has invested that much in automation, why would anyone think that non-automated jobs are going to make a comeback?
To get back to the OP, the local Wendy’s employs a kid with Down’s Syndrome to clean up the dining room. From what I can see, he’s the hardest working and most effective employee.
Well, that’s not going to be easy when they’re constantly subjected to a barrage of propaganda in the form of advertising urging them to consume, consume, consume and telling them they just can’t be cool without all the latest electronic gizmos, designer clothing and a late model car. Corporations spend billions of advertising dollars a year to generate demand. Consumerism just doesn’t go well with living simply.
It’s not the blue collar workers that are a problem, nothing wrong with working in a factory, both of my parents did that, it’s the people that have never worked and will never work that are the problem. Whether this is through lack of intelligence or institutionally encouraged laziness I don’t know. Combine this with the fact that they have little else to do but stay at home and breed and that’s where the problem lies.
I live in a city in the UK and on my lunch break sometimes go into the town centre, I see large groups of youths hanging around, people drinking special brew on street corners, large groups of single mothers and I wonder, who pays for all of these people to sit around doing nothing all day?
I agree that too many people go to College/University, it’s not necessary, I’m not being elitist or snobby, I sometimes think I’d have been better off without so much education. Soon it will get to the stage where you need a degree to do almost any job, just to limit the number of applicants.
Yep. I think, seriously and without hyperbole, that someday most current advertising techniques will be looked back on as evil and unethical, the way we now look back at 50’s cigarette ads within news shows as abhorrent.
I think that our "post-industrial’ economy is going to find it hard to employ a lot of people. I see jobs for unskilled people, but you cannot survive on what thyey pay. the odd thing-as we increasingly make less and less (and import more and more) our cost of production is going up!
case in point: my wife is a skilled seamstress. She used to make her own clothes. Now, it is cheaper to buy clothes (the cost of material is out of sight!).
So don’t look for any revival of manufacturing here-suppose you were to set up a clothing fatory-the Chinese could undersell you even if your raw materials costs were zero!
Along with this is the rise of the "super rich’-like the execs at Lehmann Brothers-these guys were making 15-20$million/year! They are getting wealthier every day, as the middle class disappears!
Actually, the Chinese are being undersold by the Vietnamese. Singapore used to be a source of cheap labor - now it is expensive. Remember, the factories moved to the South from New Engand because of cheap labor. As a place becomes more popular, wages go up, and production moves again. But we’re running out of places to move.
Automation only makes sense if the cost of workers is more than the depreciation on the machines, and the cost of the power it takes to run them. If low cost labor gets expensive, it will pay to automate again, and once you automate enough, the cost of labor is no longer a factor. If the price difference between the skilled manufacturing engineer and technicians is less than the cost of shipping production all around the world, manufacturing will come back. There are lots of advantages to producing close to your markets. I know of cases in the toy industry where last minute unexpected demand for a toy forced the manufacturer to air freight stuff to the US from China, which was very expensive. If they produced in the US, they could have saved a lot of money.
That doesn’t help people whose skills don’t match this kind of environment, though. That’s the real issue, right, not “stupidity.”
If we don’t bring more low-skill set jobs back to the US, the only option is for the government to support those who have few marketable skills. I don’t see that as a palatable option. That’s why I believe those jobs will come back to some degree, in some fashion. Will it be like it was in the 60s and 70s? I doubt it. But I do not see how we can survive without a larger pool of jobs for the unskilled-to-low-skilled to draw a paycheck from. These citizens aren’t going to disappear.
I wouldn’t call a surgical nurse unintelligent. The vast majority of nurses now either have their BSN (4+ years of uni) or their Associate’s (a 2 year degree that can take as long to get as the BSN, but is cheaper). There are very, very few “trade” (diploma) schools left.
So, most nurses have a college degree of some kind or another. I accept that most nurses are intellectually incurious-nursing can be called a pink collar ghetto of sorts, but that is usually due to flat wages, hard effing work and very little prestige-and most definitely nurses are middle class. But competition to get into nursing school is very intense and most schools get the best of all applicants. (which can be a scary thought, given the lack of critical thinking demonstrated by many nurses. But that doesn’t make them “stupid” by the criteria of the OP).
Same with surgical techs–they are not unintelligent. “Unintelligent” folks in hospitals tend to be the cafeteria workers, the maintenance men (not their supervisors), the housekeeping people and the transporters. Most of these jobs are held by new immigrants, who may well be quite intelligent, but suffer from a language barrier. Our dept. transporter happens to be quite smart* and very good at his job–I have no idea how he would do on an IQ test, though.
*as defined by the demands of his job: he has social intelligence in that he is very respectful and courteous to pts and families, he has excellent time management skills can prioritze well and he’s a great preceptor to new transporters. He also supports a family of 6 children on his transporter’s salary. In many way, A. is amazing.
I wouldn’t call a surgical nurse unintelligent. The vast majority of nurses now either have their BSN (4+ years of uni) or their Associate’s (a 2 year degree that can take as long to get as the BSN, but is cheaper). There are very, very few “trade” (diploma) schools left.
So, most nurses have a college degree of some kind or another. I accept that most nurses are intellectually incurious-nursing can be called a pink collar ghetto of sorts, but that is usually due to flat wages, hard effing work and very little prestige-and most definitely nurses are middle class. But competition to get into nursing school is very intense and most schools get the best of all applicants. (which can be a scary thought, given the lack of critical thinking demonstrated by many nurses. But that doesn’t make them “stupid” by the criteria of the OP).
Same with surgical techs–they are not unintelligent. “Unintelligent” folks in hospitals tend to be the cafeteria workers, the maintenance men (not their supervisors), the housekeeping people and the transporters. Most of these jobs are held by new immigrants, who may well be quite intelligent, but suffer from a language barrier. Our dept. transporter happens to be quite smart* and very good at his job–I have no idea how he would do on an IQ test, though.
ETA: no idea how I posted twice. Sorry! Wanted to ad that A. is the exception and most “ancillary” personnel are not all that easy to work with. They have routines that they insist on sticking to, they don’t see the big picture–only to the end of their shifts, that sort of thing. No idea what to do about it, frankly.
*as defined by the demands of his job: he has social intelligence in that he is very respectful and courteous to pts and families, he has excellent time management skills can prioritze well and he’s a great preceptor to new transporters. He also supports a family of 6 children on his transporter’s salary. In many way, A. is amazing.
They are not going to disappear. Is the business community willing to go against a trend that defines the entire history of the human race? They have not exhibited the slightest willingness to pay wages for work they don’t need up till now (disregarding the occasional Japanese manufacturer willing to pay employees to sweep rather than being laid off). Capitalism requires a disposable work force.
You folks are talking about adults, right? In this democratic society where every legitimate adult gets a vote? Unless a professionally trained specialist has examined them and officially declared them mentally unfit to decide what happens to them, why not consider asking these “stupid” people what should be done with them? Or perhaps you don’t think they should have a say in the matter?
Or here’s another idea; ask these “stupid” people what should be done with highly intelligent elitist snobs who have the nerve to think they’re better than stupid people. Yeah, let them contemplate about what should be done with you. After all, it’s only fair IMO.:rolleyes:
Make them wear a sign?
Man, elitist much?
One of the harder lessons I’ve learned in life is that raw smarts doesn’t mean as much as I thought it meant.
The reason is that I’ve seen some people who aren’t really geniuses doing some amazing work helping around the world. It doesn’t take too much intelligence to help at an orphanage or teach AIDS prevention. It does take something else- love, patience, compassion- that is equally as valuable and equally as likely to lead to a better world. I’ve worked with some people who were sharp as nails and some who were just a little bit on the dull side, and honestly the dull people were probably a little more likely to actually do a good job at what they were doing. The sharp people were busy plotting and arranging while the duller people just went out and did it.
The second is that having a good job doesn’t mean you are smart. I worked at a video store for a while, and full half my customers had a failure to understand the basics of renting a movie- I mean, the couldn’t figure out why you’d need an account or why you’d need to turn the movie back in at the end. This was an upscale area. Many of these people were quite successful. Most people were reaching into designer purses. Smart will only get you so far in getting a good job. There are plenty of half-witted lawyers, upscale businessmen, etc. I don’t know how they got through the schooling, but it didn’t seem to make them much smarter. Dumb people exist in all life positions.
Anyway, multiple intelligences is not a myth. I’ve known people who could win Jeopardy but who lacked the street smarts to actually know much about this world. I’ve known people who weren’t that bright, but whose diligence, compassion, ability to adapt, love, skill or dedication made them absolutely brilliant at what they did.