Posted on 05/15/2015 8:00:05 PM PDT by Lorianne
About 10% of adults of working age have at best marginal ties with the economy ___ Last month, when Baltimore was burning after a young African-American man died in police custody (six officers were subsequently charged), I did a Google search to find what David Simon thought about it.
Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, was the creator and show runner of “The Wire,” which ran for five seasons on HBO and which Entertainment Weekly called the greatest television show ever. It was a brilliant narrative of the struggle for survival in a violent, drug-riddled Baltimore neighborhood much like the one that went up in flames.
In my search, I came across an interview Simon did with Bill Moyers a few years ago in which he declared: “ ‘The Wire’ was not a story about America; it’s about the America that got left behind. … These really are the excess people in America. Our economy doesn’t need them — we don’t need 10% or 15% of our population.”
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
So why are we bringing in 1.1 million legal permanent immigrants a year along with 640,000 guest workers annually?
And why aren’t blacks rioting over these people taking the entry level jobs from them? Where are their leaders taking this on. For example the Black Caucuses in Congress who have power.
And why aren’t blacks rioting over these people taking the entry level jobs from them? Where are their leaders taking this on. For example the Black Caucuses in Congress who have power.
Try 40 million to 60 million - at least
Voting booth fodder. Bulk up a permanent majority dependent class to keep the collectivists in power. You and I are just the new slave labor class that pays for them to sit on their asses and collect cradle-to-grave benefits in exchange for their votes.
The Black Caucus has sold them out just like the Dems and Reps who have abandoned the American worker. They obey their corporate paymasters.
Because the base, mostly blacks and union members, the people who are hurt most by immigration, believe everything that’s fed to them by their masters.
This was feared since the days of Ned Ludd. However it is becoming true only now. As efficiency of an individual worker is increasing, he is producing more and more products. However the society cannot consume proportionally more products - in part because simply they are not needed. You cannot eat at fast food restaurants five times per day. (You'd do well if you go there once every two weeks.) As restaurants don't need lots of people anymore, they are dropping them. Those workers do not have money to buy products - and that becomes another reason why the vast amount of potential products is not produced.
If we extrapolate a bit, a restaurant in the year 2020 will be fully roboticized. It will be probably a hole in the wall, like an ATM, where you scan your credit card and it disburses a sandwich. This reduces the personnel expenses to the minimum, as you need at most one person at each restaurant to fill the hoppers of robots. Or maybe even that will be automated, with hermetic containers that take care of the contents all by themselves and can be replaced by another robot. Then the only necessary service would be to deliver new containers with ingredients and to collect empty ones - a perfect job for a robot car.
Who is going to afford this product? Only those who have money to buy it. That would be the remaining few workers. Nobody else is needed, technically. However the owner of the restaurant will not be satisfied with meager income from 0.1% of workers in the country. Here the government would step in. It would tax the restaurant, and give some of the taxes to those who do not work. They will come and buy food at the restaurant.
One would ask: what's the point for the restaurant to feed, through the government, those who do not work? First, the restaurant has no choice. It will be taxed, and the taxes will be disbursed to those who have no jobs. Second, the only alternative is to kill all the unnecessary people. As automation progresses, more and more workers will become unnecessary, until they are all killed. This is, obviously, not a good solution, so the government will make sure that it doesn't happen.
Futurists do not see a clear way out of this situation. Even if we accept communism - at least in the part that everyone gets whatever he wants for free - this does not solve the problem of billions of idle hands that are itching to do something. Those idle hands will quickly figure out that food is now as free as air, and it is not necessary to fight for it. What is then necessary to fight for? Primarily, for power over others. You cannot control people by withholding food, but you can control them by withholding life. Street gangs of the future, well fed and well equipped by robotic factories, will be fighting for the same thing they fight today - for street cred, for respect, and just for pleasure. Older, peaceful people will be doing what they can to defend themselves. In other words, we will revert to dark ages, with the only difference that food and clothes and trinkets are now as free as air. You can see how it all begins here and now, in Ferguson and in Baltimore. Rioters are not fighting for food or clothes - they are fighting *because* they are well fed and well clothed already. They have no need to work, they have no fear of losing the job, and they are not tired from laboring 8 hours every weekday. They have plenty of energy to overturn police vehicles, to run, to loot. Most of the looting is done not because the guy can't afford a few rolls of paper towels or a box of beer. They are looting because it is exciting. Same old same old.
This is horseshit.
I have 3 jobs - I with for a software company during the week, at Home Depot on the weekends. I also work as an Uber driver during the week. My wife had two jobs also.
It’s been tough but we’re putting our son through college, so we deal with it.
The point is, WORK IS ALWAYS AVALIABLE IF YOU WANT IT.
Screw the lazy bastards if they don’t want to work!
Sounds similar to what I wrote about this. We have two choices. One is what you said, basically everyone will get a guaranteed living wage and that will be funded by either a punitive tax on profits made by robotic labor and/or punitive licensing fees for the use of robots over people. The other choice is basically from the novelization of “Battlestar Galactica” where robot use will be outlawed with the exception of truly dangerous jobs (i.e., inspecting the insides of an atomic reactor) when a human can do it. Of course in the story, there is a thing about the Cylons as well but Cylons or not, we might need to go the second route much like India does now where they would rather employ a hundred men with shovels than a steam shovel or two whenever possible just to keep people working. As you pointed out and as grandma puts it, “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop” so I think out of pragmatism, we will need to do one of these things, preferable the latter. Maybe this is how societies die, when we get to automated and so on, it is like the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, it will come crashing down and we are taken down several pegs.
Brilliant! Irrefutable logic! I hope that you continue posting this elsewhere, too!
Regards,
Mainly because their absentee fathers looted their mother. They are using the skills passed down to them. The other reason for looting is the war between civilization and anarchy, the "haves" and "have-nots".
As you point out the have-nots have plenty of the essentials and even non-essentials . But they are taught by the militant anarchists on the left to despise the gilded class, who in the future you describe, will be the robot owners. The leftists will be just as gilded of course, but they won't produce anything and won't own the means of production. Therefore I would anticipate that even heavily guarded means of production and distribution: robots and robotic conveniences, will be the first to be smashed.
That is why I do not see as rosy a robotic future of plenty as you might. The robots have to remain unsmashed. The goods produced by the robots have to make it to the recipients without being hijacked along the way. Since smashing a robotic truck won't result in any loss of life, the crime will not be prosecuted vigorously. I predict a future of random, nonsensical scarcity within an overall relatively efficient supply chain. Maybe the latest iPhone, stolen or looted will be traded for a sandwich looted from the automated restaurant. The restaurant will be rebuilt, but even more automated with even fewer human jobs, lower quality, more government cheese as the main ingredient, etc.
The destruction of the Black Family is caused by the Great Society. With Uncle Sam, who needs Daddy?
Why get upset over entry level jobs which pay you less than what the government gives you for nothing? Besides, if you don't have to work, you have more time to sell drugs, loaf on the couch with some good weed, and hang out with the Homies and Ho's.
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