Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shadowlord]

So, apparently, the Trump supporters call themselves "centipedes".

What?!

From twitter I thought they called themselves deplorables. I mean, I saw/see people who are named things like "Deplorable Joe" on twitter.

[Frumple]

It was both, among other things. Folks can have different appellations for themselves, heh. The supporters weren't exactly homogeneous, either.

[Guardian G.I.]

So, apparently, the Trump supporters call themselves "centipedes".

What?!

It's a reference to the long-running series of YT videos/MLG remixes called "You Can't Stump the Trump", which mostly covered the GOP primaries and had the track "Centipede" by Knife Party as its opening theme. It became famous after Trump himself retweeted the link to the fourth episode, with a Trump Pepe added for good measure. The phrases from that song such as "nimble navigator", "this ... is a predator", and others also became memes among many Trump supporters on the Internet.

[EnigmaticHat]

The thing is that even if they bring every single factory back, so much is automated now that it still won't bring all of the jobs back.

But yes, I agree that having affordable, if not free, higher education would help immensely.

Part of the issue is that labor in the US is expensive due to minimum wage jobs.  Makes automation appealing compared to hiring workers.  On the other hand, you can't just pretend that the cost of living in China or India is the same as in the US.  Our minimum wage is already not enough, to the point where couples with kids can have both parents working significantly more than 40 hours a week and still be losing money if their situation is bad enough (say, with medical expenses or car breakdowns or whatever).  Take away the minimum wage and I don't know what the hell people are going to do.  Go home from their job to live in a car and eat in a soup kitchen I guess.

If I were to speculate more than a person without an economics degree really should, I would say part of the issue is how our exports work.  With a few exceptions, we don't export things aimed at the common consumer.  We export weapons, advanced software/hardware for computers, drugs for difficult to cure diseases, airplane and spaceship/satellite parts, those kind of things.  All the money that enters our economy, enters it in industries that prefer a small amount of well paid people over a large amount of low paid people.  Add that to the unchecked greed, rent-seeking, and income inequality that's been going on in our economy for decades, and you have an economy that's naturally geared towards a higher income than the average American actually has.

[Amperzand]

I suppose one way of helping things get a little less bad would be a generation or two of one-child law or similar, basically reduce our population enough that it makes sense for most of us to be engineers.

Probably has many, many issues I haven't thought of, of course.

[smjjames]

I suppose one way of helping things get a little less bad would be a generation or two of one-child law or similar, basically reduce our population enough that it makes sense for most of us to be engineers.

Probably has many, many issues I haven't thought of, of course.

Uh, our population is already below the replacement rate without immigration. Besides, it does nothing to solve the problems of RIGHT NOW. It makes no sense overall anyway.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The population is also too high regardless. Alternatively, we could reduce our quality of life by 50% and keep the current population.

[smjjames]

Well, if we didn't have the immigration that we get, we actually would be below the replacement rate like Europe is finding themselves in.

[Rolepgeek]

It seems extremely counter-intuitive to me to say that productivity gains are the cause of decreasing quality of life for so many Americans.

No, seriously, just think about how the interaction should go.

It shouldn't be Flat Production Amount that we need a certain number of people to support.

It should be Flat People Amount that we can produce a certain amount of goods with, no?

The ideal and rationale behind productivity gains being a good thing overall is that because you need fewer people to produce the same amount of goods, you can produce more with the same amount of people. Thereby, you increase the amount of goods available to everyone, and the value in the system as a whole goes up.

So, where is the loss going? Why isn't new industry starting to grab those individuals with skills, out of a job, who would be willing to take somewhat below standard wages for their position, as long as they can have a job?

@MSH: I dunno about how true that is for the US, which really doesn't have a very high pop. density.

[alway]

The thing is that even if they bring every single factory back, so much is automated now that it still won't bring all of the jobs back.

But yes, I agree that having affordable, if not free, higher education would help immensely.

Part of the issue is that labor in the US is expensive due to minimum wage jobs.  Makes automation appealing compared to hiring workers.  On the other hand, you can't just pretend that the cost of living in China or India is the same as in the US.  Our minimum wage is already not enough, to the point where couples with kids can have both parents working significantly more than 40 hours a week and still be losing money if their situation is bad enough (say, with medical expenses or car breakdowns or whatever).  Take away the minimum wage and I don't know what the hell people are going to do.  Go home from their job to live in a car and eat in a soup kitchen I guess.

If I were to speculate more than a person without an economics degree really should, I would say part of the issue is how our exports work.  With a few exceptions, we don't export things aimed at the common consumer.  We export weapons, advanced software/hardware for computers, drugs for difficult to cure diseases, airplane and spaceship/satellite parts, those kind of things.  All the money that enters our economy, enters it in industries that prefer a small amount of well paid people over a large amount of low paid people.  Add that to the unchecked greed, rent-seeking, and income inequality that's been going on in our economy for decades, and you have an economy that's naturally geared towards a higher income than the average American actually has.

It's actually a good deal worse than the first part. Even outsourced jobs are being replaced by automation in a lot of cases; we just don't hear as much about that since it's 7000 miles away. Automation will only get better and cheaper, and there are two sides to this:

First and most obvious are the direct costs. A human taking higher pay; the "solution" proposed by some is to eliminate minimum wages, but this falls apart utterly because of the second (hidden) side of things.

The second part is that robots are not only *cheaper* but they are much more *predictable.* During the auto bailout, there was talk about how there were often small mistakes on the assembly lines which would then require either tearing apart vehicles to fix, or shutting down the line temporarily. Human error resulted in both machines and humans sitting idle. If you can eliminate these mistakes entirely by automating the entire process (or as much as is feasible) you get additional productivity gains beyond simply paying less for the robots than the humans. In such cases, replacing a single robot with a human worker, *even if they worked for free* would cost the company significantly more money than the cost of the robot.
Self-driving vehicles are similar; they don't make the vehicles much *cheaper,* but by eliminating the human error, practically eliminate the costs resulting from human error.

Well, if we didn't have the immigration that we get, we actually would be below the replacement rate like Europe is finding themselves in.

This is why immigration is critical for developed societies. You always hear about how Japan has a low birth rate, which will result in terrible social crises down the road. But Germany has an even lower birth rate while being a powerhouse of Europe's economic wellbeing. Immigration keeping the population growing is pretty much all that is preventing them from turning into a shrinking has-been as Japan currently seems doomed to, with expectations that Japan's population will shrink by 1/3 within 50 years.

[smjjames]

Part of the loss is from automation and efficiency improvements, what used to take 100 people could take maybe 50 to do now. But that can't explain all of it.

edit: Ninja'd by alway.

[Rolan7]

It seems extremely counter-intuitive to me to say that productivity gains are the cause of decreasing quality of life for so many Americans.

No, seriously, just think about how the interaction should go.

It shouldn't be Flat Production Amount that we need a certain number of people to support.

It should be Flat People Amount that we can produce a certain amount of goods with, no?

The ideal and rationale behind productivity gains being a good thing overall is that because you need fewer people to produce the same amount of goods, you can produce more with the same amount of people. Thereby, you increase the amount of goods available to everyone, and the value in the system as a whole goes up.

So, where is the loss going? Why isn't new industry starting to grab those individuals with skills, out of a job, who would be willing to take somewhat below standard wages for their position, as long as they can have a job?

@MSH: I dunno about how true that is for the US, which really doesn't have a very high pop. density.

I really hate that too, and I think maybe I just don't understand it.  Maybe I'm being simplistic, but it's just hard for me to understand how automation could possibly lower quality of life.  With so much more to go around, shouldn't everyone live easier?  Don't unnecessary service and entertainment positions pick up the slack?  Currency collects in the 1%, but there's only so much they can *use up* with it, right?

Bottom line:  I don't understand economics.
Maybe communism will become not only possible, but necessary, once we reach post-scarcity efficiency?  Maybe we're already there and we haven't noticed due to capitalism?  Honestly, I just don't know.

[andrea]

Automation can result in lower quality of life because our system is built on the need to work.
A need which is rapidly decreasing.

[smjjames]

Automation can result in lower quality of life because our system is built on the need to work.
A need which is rapidly decreasing.

Yeah, we're transitioning from a 'lower tech' system (as in a low need for higher education) to a 'higher tech' system (as in a need for more specialized workers with specific training). There will always be jobs that require a human face and other things that automation just can't replace (at least not yet). Also, there's an idea/concept going around that instead of completely replacing with robots, some things can be robot assisted or work alongside.

Though the transition would be made a hell of a lot easier for people if College/University was affordable.

edit: Also, Trump has picked Reince Priebus to be his Chief of Staff. It may be pandering to the same 'swamp' that Trump has pledged to drain, but he'd be a heck of a lot stabler than Bannon.

[Frumple]

And... that's right, rol. There is only so much they can use up. Andrea taps that, too, just now. It's a major part of why increasing production efficiency hasn't resulted in an increasing workforce.

To supplement some of what 's said above, some of y'all seem to be forgetting demand and market saturation. You can't just infinitely ramp up your production and expect things to turn out well -- if no one's buying, or no one's willing to buy for more than it costs you to make, pumping out more stuff does sod all except lose you money and the ability to support what workers you did. If it's reached the point where the market just doesn't need the gubbin(s) your factory is tooled to build, or doesn't need nearly as much of it, or has stopping growing as quickly and no longer can support you increasing production as quickly, again, pumping out more does sod all.

Sometimes retooling is an option but there's a whole host of new variables that brings in, and it all it does is kick the can down the road a bit. The human population and especially those with the resources to buy stuff by and large hasn't been growing faster than our improvement in making crap -- that's one (of the myriad) reason(s) manufacturing et al caps, just hard, flat caps at a point and stops being able to keep up with increases in potential new workers. It certainly wouldn't keep up if we had been increasing workforce and subsequent output hand in hand with production.

It's, like. Materially, workforce, etc., etc. We could ramp up vehicle production, just as an example. We could ramp up vehicle production so much we would have literal mountains of vehicles (well, more of them, anyway) with no one to sell to and nothing to do with them, sitting there rotting, and then what? Broken window theory and the resulting mess of rusting steel only does so much, and there's other issues to consider as well (limited resources, mostly).

Or to point to something RP said, they were wrong when they flipped it. Flat Production Amount that we need a certain number of people to support is exactly what's going on, because more production past a certain point is less than useless.

... all that said, productivity gains isn't what's been causing QoL life loss in the areas manufacturing et al changes are hitting the hardest. Not adapting to it is what's causing that. Not retraining, not moving, not using the existent infrastructure (what there is) and expertise to dig out new markets, not having prepared for what was coming before the work started leaving. Far from all of that is even remotely the workers' fault (again, note everything I've mentioned previously re: funding, and add on to that the next to zero incentive businesses that more or less own towns have to future proof them), but... the QoL drop could have been avoided, or at least significantly mitigated. "All" it would have taken was everyone that had been working to reduce the funding and resources aimed at fixing the problem dropping dead, or at least out of politics, about fifty or sixty years ago.