Posted on 11/14/2011 5:04:36 PM PST by gitmo
>> If we were all subsistence level farmers, there would be
>> almost no unemployment.
But such existence is hard, brutal and a constant struggle. How many people you know actually live completely off the grid using 18th-19th century amenities?
One cannot look at employment and technology in isolation. There is still plenty, if not much more, manufacturing in the world today (somebody has to make the computers, industrial robots, and smart phones). But two factors have shifted this jobs offshore: the difference in labor costs and the difference in regulatory costs. One of those is hard to compete with, the other we simply ceded to the third world.
Another issue is how we catorgorize things. The person who assembles the industrial robot is considered in a manufacturing job, but the person who wrote the software controlling the robot is not. The same applies to the Foxconn Chinese slave laborers who assemble the iPhone and the workers in California who write iOS.
Finally, for those jobs that cannot be outsourced (agriculture), we have allowed these jobs to effectively be outsourced via illegal immigration.
We can talk all we want about agricultural jobs being low-paying, but to import an underclass to do this work when we have an in-place, unemployed underclass in the same geography suggests some unemployment is a choice.
Information technology has created tens of millions of jobs - in China, India, and other Third World pits. Not so many in the US, though. That not the fault of new technology. That's the direct result of government and corporate policy.
Thanks for sharing. I was not speaking for the Entire World, in case I neglected to make myself clear.
Damn kiosks! Is there any reason for hope that at least all the people put out of work are bitter clingers?? < / The Won mode >
LOL.
My wife asked me why I always go to the self checkout lines in the grocery store. I had never thought about it, but I answered, “So I don’t have to talk to people.”
I do it because I’m a better checker than they are. Disclaimer : when. I get done. I can leave. They just get another customer.
...low blood sugar and too much filtered news makes my commentary too vitriolic.... At least that’s what my spouse says.
"ATMs have destroyed the banking industry, which is too bad, because thousands of my stooges have spent the past month and a half attacking banks, and of course, our common enemy, the Jew."
Sigh. This is the crap that happens when you post from a mobile. D'oh!
bttt
Asimov explored this in his "Foundation" and "Robot" novels. Some of the implications aren't pretty.
Yeah, but those were science fiction novels, and our future with machines/robots/computers, is not about the worst of consequences.
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