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[smjjames]

O'Malley could have a shot at the VP position. He's also doing well money wise, not on the level of Sanders and Clinton, but it looks like he'll survive for a while.

[Flying Dice]

Huh, look at that income data. The middle class aren't particularly content with Clinton, at least by those numbers.

[smjjames]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/the-freedom-caucus-historic-rebellion-213256?o=0
Just some history behind the whole freedom caucus thing.

[evilcherry]

Not over time, especially if you're trying to prove/disprove a theory comparing resource usage in two periods 80 years apart.

You might as well say the laws of thermodynamics have been disproven because a dollar today doesn't buy as much horsepower (based on one gallon of gas in a Model T engine) as it did in 1930.

A dollar in 1930 is considerably more than a dollar in 2015, for most resources. Conversely, many of the products we use regularly now require materials, processing and especially logistical chains that Keynes probably could scarcely have imagined then. How many people regularly ate food imported from halfway around the world on a daily basis then? How many had advanced electronics that were the end result of hundreds of chains of production in a dozen or more countries?

Compared to the 1930s, we ALL live like royalty.

And how much advanced electronics actually NEED the labour for its production? How much business actually NEED the people in making decisions? Without a physical storefront why would you need anyone other than a fully mechanized warehouse?

[Frumple]

Logistics, to a fair degree. It's actually something of a bitch to coordinate a workforce without something to sit them in, and the warehouse/manufacturing facility is often not an option just due to where it ends up being put compared to where the workers are. We're doing a lot better on the telecommuting front these days, but we've still got a long damn way to go before our businesses and whatnot have that really worked out and working as well as workers on site, and that may just never happen. Lot of the time the employees you have access to just can't work with remote operations, for whatever reason, and "fire them and get someone who can" is often not really an option.

To the decision making thing, s'just... look. People shit on managerial and administrative positions a lot, and yeah, we could probably manage (possibly better) with fewer than we have, but they're still seriously bloody helpful and do a tremendous amount to help businesses and organizations. Often the workers that have the skills you need for ground level work are terrible at decision making, or would become cripplingly unproductive if they had to spare the time to do that part of the job, or any number of things along those lines. Support staff and admin and whatnot are not going to go anywhere anytime soon.

[RedKing]

Also, because of natural human tendencies towards risk-aversion, nobody wants to make a fucking decision in business these days. Because if you make a bad choice, your ass is toast and you will be blamed. Unless you're an executive, in which case you'll get a bonus and they'll handwave it off as "market conditions". Because seriously, there are NO personal repercussions for CEOs making poor decisions, other than in cases of gross negligence/criminal activity (see: VW). Even if you shit your company straight into the tank with a series of bewildering public announcements (see: Leo Apoetheker) at worst the Board buys out your contract and you get shown the door with several million dollars as a parting gift.

The 1% live in a different world from the rest of us. Different rules for how we're evalutated, different legal systems, different expectations, different everything.


Back to the original point, there are also cultural problems with decision-making in many of the countries where labor is outsourced to. Rarely does one of my delivery teams in India want to make a decision. I think in 15-20 years time (maybe less), the IT industry in the US is going to be almost entirely management and maybe some high-level design/creative jobs. All the brute-force coding and operations and such will be offshore. But management will stay here, because if there's two things Americans are good at, it's having an opinion and telling people what to do.

[Mephansteras]

Back to the original point, there are also cultural problems with decision-making in many of the countries where labor is outsourced to. Rarely does one of my delivery teams in India want to make a decision. I think in 15-20 years time (maybe less), the IT industry in the US is going to be almost entirely management and maybe some high-level design/creative jobs. All the brute-force coding and operations and such will be offshore. But management will stay here, because if there's two things Americans are good at, it's having an opinion and telling people what to do.

I disagree with the bolded part. I've seen quite a few companies in the past few years go back to having on-site IT because they get so fed up dealing with offshore teams. It's too difficult to manage them and get decent quality/response times in a lot of cases. Which isn't to say that a lot of companies won't stick with it anyway due to costs, but I highly doubt we'll see anything even close to a total shift.

[mainiac]

And how much advanced electronics actually NEED the labour for its production? How much business actually NEED the people in making decisions? Without a physical storefront why would you need anyone other than a fully mechanized warehouse?

Well all that mechanization stuff is very expensive to setup.  It's probably cheaper to hire humans for the length of time it would take for your automated process to become obsolete.

At one point I was doing plastic and metal work using equipment that was holdovers from the 70s.  I as I remember, that the market value of the parts I was making was upwards of 100 dollars an hour.  But I was only doing it part time because the market for these parts was pretty small.  There was no need to setup a super automated process for all this stuff when you could instead hire one semi-skilled laborer.  Certain a robot could have done that job better then me, but a robot wasn't needed.  The same thing holds to a lesser extent with any production.  A robot CAN drive a car, but the price of a robot needs to be low enough to replace a given driver.  A robot can replace an assembly line worker but different tasks have different robotic and non robotic costs.

[Descan]

The problem with that is that the costs of robotics are falling every day. >_>

[mainiac]

But there isn't a line we cross where we automate everything at once.  It's a bunch of incremental things that have been going on for a long time.  Even if we automate the trucks and the grocery stores there will still be things like those tent parts I used to make that will be unautomated.

[Baffler]

Plus you can't really automate an inspection, and that's what a good deal of manufacturing jobs boil down to.

[Descan]

If you can split it into a 1-2-3 process, which you can with inspection (does it have X? yes? good, go through. No? poof it) then you can automate it.

[i2amroy]

Plus you can't really automate an inspection, and that's what a good deal of manufacturing jobs boil down to.

Actually I'd say that inspections are honestly one of the easiest things to automate. A machine set up with some basic sensors and a list of requirements can make sure that every single part meets those requirements every single time, or can even randomly select from a group if that's what it needs to do, and will do so with much more reliability than a human inspector will.

On the other hand yeah, low demand objects are going to be the last automated things, especially in fields that might have changing designs over time; simply because it's much cheaper to hire a human to do a small amount of work that may change than it is to buy a new robot every now and then when each robot might only make a tiny handful of product.

[mainiac]

If you can split it into a 1-2-3 process, which you can with inspection (does it have X? yes? good, go through. No? poof it) then you can automate it.

Yes you can but the costs vary widely.

[Baffler]

I think the forum ate my post, so possible double post incoming.

It's easy to automate a 1-2-3 parameter check, but it may or may not be economical to do so. That's also not the only thing that's going on. Someone has to load and unload the machine doing the actual fabrication (which is enormous, costs millions of dollars, and isn't about to be replaced), sort the products, and take them to the next step for further processing. Someone will also have to oversee the whole process and give the machine the attention it requires to keep running properly. Someone will have to be there either way, and if they're only doing one of those tasks there's gonna be a whole lot of standing around going on. So rather than buying some ridiculously expensive robot, they'll just give those tasks to the guy who has to be there either way.