> The US still has a big manufacturing sector and it has an unemployment rate of 3.5%. It could definitely absorb a small number of displaced workers.
If you think the skills acquired as a dockworker translate directly to being able to get a job in manufacturing, you don't know anything about either one.
That there are jobs available is only one part of the problem. Where are the jobs relative to the people about to be unemployed? How many people are we about to, under the threat of starvation, tell to move possibly across the country for work? How many communities will be destroyed? How many people will be utterly severed from any and all social support systems that they now have?
For that matter, how many of those jobs are themselves stable? Or will they need to repeat this traumatic process in another ten years after another industry "disruption" leads to yet more automation?
This whole system was supposed to be for people, right? Because it sure seems to me that the human factors in all these discussions get shockingly lost quite quickly and we revert to treating people like rack nodes that can be moved to a different part of our server farm at a moment's notice, should the need for compute be higher over there than it is here, and there are no side effects to that, nothing lost in the transition. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you're the type of person who's comfortable moving cross country to chase a higher salary or a dream job, more power to you. I certainly was. Now ask yourself if you would be so enthusiastic if it wasn't your decision and was, in fact, imposed on you by the actions of your employer. I wonder if automation would make so much tremendous sense to you if you yourself were the one on the chopping block, who's livelihood and life was about to be upended so widgets could be made 80 cents cheaper each.
I don't have a problem with automation on principle: I think any labor saving tech is unambiguously a good thing. I am however thoroughly tired of self-appointed, unelected leaders of private industry laying waste to the communities that built the companies they run so cavalierly, simply because they can now make their products either with the hands of more exploitable people overseas, or with robots.
>If you think the skills acquired as a dockworker translate directly to being able to get a job in manufacturing, you don't know anything about either one.
This is exactly what he meant by "you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills." You don't start at the same rank when you change careers. You start at the bottom.
The reason you can move across the nation for a good wage is in part that jobs were shit canned when they become economically or technologically disadvantaged to more efficient alternatives. Your high wage was made possible due to firing lots of people.
We should thank our lucky stars if a robot takes all their job. That's progress.
Er no, not really (past results != future results).. This high pay has worked out because there are jobs to move people to because demand has so far been expanding. If we are sick of the new output then your job will be filled by someone willing to take minimum wage.
Apparently the nature of markets is offensive when the description of them doesn't go along with pavlovian expectations?
I've met a lot of people who couldn't find the job they wanted in the place they wanted anymore and joined Tech along the US coast, for the predominant wages which are a factor of supply and demand.
Think bigger - we are about to automate driving. That’s like 20 Million of people. Where do they go?
Look at top 10 jobs by employment, all of them are 100+ years old. Name a job that was created in the last 50 years - real jobs that employ at least 1 million people, not ‘leveraged crypto-equity portfolio manager’
Home health and personal care aide is the largest employment category in the US. As other sectors become more efficient, you can direct more people into healthcare, entertainment, etc.
Programming is one of the only truly new job fields in the last century. But despite growing up right alongside the automation/offshoring of manufacturing, it wasn’t able to absorb the labor coming from that sector. Labor is not a fungible thing that can easily move from one column to another, that’s a big part of the problem with any sudden massive change in the nature of labor.
The fields you just listed are extremely cutthroat highly desired high-skill jobs that are currently being threatened by automation. We also don’t have jobs for the people being forced out of those fields, it’s not like there’s room in there to absorb millions of laid off laborers.
Slavery is horrifically evil. Ending it freed 4 million people from daily robbery, abuse, and a life of subsistence poverty.
Banning slavery eliminated massive dead weight loss. Slavery used violence to force labor from people below the clearing price - it compelled them to work for free.
All liberals should oppose slavery. We should want free people, free markets, and a generous social safety net for all.
I think the ports will just pass along the cost. Whatever bargain the union strikes will be uniform across all of the ports and so they won't be able to undercut one another.
Formally, that's not the correct analogy, but very creepy, as it sounds pretty similar (however not equivalent) to asking for 8% of the world population to be his project slaves.
You could be lucky but you could also just have a bad dentist who does not x-ray or the x-ray might be old and with insufficient picture quality. (Source, GF is a highly specialized dental hygienist and we talk a lot about some cases. I was even at Euro Perio with her...)
Cheaper software may be a short term benefit, but gutting the domestic tech industry and putting our future in the hands of China is ultimately a massive negative.
Seems difficult to ban TikTok alone without violating the First Amendment. If you more generally banned exploitative data practices then you’d interfere with other social media companies as well.
That is the issue, no one whats to change their life style and people do not like change.
MAGA people will not change, even the many environmental left wing people will not change their life styles all that much. Never mind changing your life style is difficult in many places due to Infrastructure in the US.
So, unless politicians make the hard choices, nothing will be done to address Climate Change in time to even keep under 2C.
There’s something very depressing when your credential for teaching people how to be a successful entrepreneur is that you created a popular course on “how to be a successful entrepreneur.”
You can actually fire people with only two weeks notice during the first 6 months. I think the risk really is that nay inherent flaws in a highly paid employee are not detected early, and to fire them later is indeed very costly and complicated.
2 weeks notice in the first 3 months, 4 weeks in the second 3 months. This works both ways, both sides are free to terminate without stating the reason.
I think the bigger problem is that folks often take wage cuts whenever they change sectors - you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills.
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