Blue-Collar Workers Are Screwed

[California Girl]

Wouldn't it be cool if people could resize pics?

 

[eagleseven]

Wouldn't it be cool if people could resize pics?

 

[editec]

Wouldn't it be cool if people could resize pics?

It might help if people didn't mindlessly use the quote function that includes the same picture again and again, too.

If you want to comment on one sentence Iand not the images, parce it out and quote it, ya' lazy bastards.

 

[whaleboat]

The US can be globally competitive , the US can be more prosperous than it ever has been . It only takes a little effort to discover what things are a hindrance to our economic situation . Whether we will as a nation prosper again rests solely in the hands of our populace . If they dig for their own information and form an opinion based on the information they've gathered , then we'll do allright . If they remain too lazy to form their own opinion , and keep relying on politicians and TV to form an opinion for them , we are screwed . As for robots , you can't program a robot to have free will .

 

[uscitizen]

The US can be globally competitive , the US can be more prosperous than it ever has been . It only takes a little effort to discover what things are a hindrance to our economic situation . Whether we will as a nation prosper again rests solely in the hands of our populace . If they dig for their own information and form an opinion based on the information they've gathered , then we'll do allright . If they remain too lazy to form their own opinion , and keep relying on politicians and TV to form an opinion for them , we are screwed . As for robots , you can't program a robot to have free will .

Higher pay and higher standard of living are them primary hindrances to our global competitiveness.

But we are working on those.

 

[whaleboat]

Rather than raise pay , how about lower expenses ? We could start with 0 tax on corporations and small businesses , no fuel tax , no road use tax , no death tax , no windfall tax , no tax . Just a flat tax of say , 15% . Everybody plays , everybody pays . No fair tax , that's a shell and ball game , a con .

 

[antagon]

Rather than raise pay , how about lower expenses ? We could start with 0 tax on corporations and small businesses , no fuel tax , no road use tax , no death tax , no windfall tax , no tax . Just a flat tax of say , 15% . Everybody plays , everybody pays . No fair tax , that's a shell and ball game , a con .

sigh

that was well thought out.

 

[uscitizen]

Rather than raise pay , how about lower expenses ? We could start with 0 tax on corporations and small businesses , no fuel tax , no road use tax , no death tax , no windfall tax , no tax . Just a flat tax of say , 15% . Everybody plays , everybody pays . No fair tax , that's a shell and ball game , a con .

On all income, wages, investment, etc. With NO deductions.
After all, deductions are a way of a nanny state govt.

 

[blu]

About 80% of them have already.
For instance if we made cars without robots it would take 10X the manpower to produce what we now produce.
.

yes everything is being pushed to robots. as usual the usa military is leading the technological push, currently to militarize the entire armed forces, but with everything else all this R&D trickles down to the private sector. if people think drones and killer military bees are bad wait until the entire army is robotic which will happen in most's peoples lifetime who are reading this.

I'm sorry, I can't tell if you're joking or not.

Robots only become feasible if they are doing something that makes many thousands or millions. Like cars.

If it's only a few hundred, then the time it takes to program the robot and verify it's doing the task correctly, you could have the job already finished. So robots are limited.

not joking. I have seen a bunch of places that say it costs 1mil per year to send a troop to iraq. don't you think a mass produced robot would be cost much less than that, be easier to replace, etc?

 

[uscitizen]

yes everything is being pushed to robots. as usual the usa military is leading the technological push, currently to militarize the entire armed forces, but with everything else all this R&D trickles down to the private sector. if people think drones and killer military bees are bad wait until the entire army is robotic which will happen in most's peoples lifetime who are reading this.

I'm sorry, I can't tell if you're joking or not.

Robots only become feasible if they are doing something that makes many thousands or millions. Like cars.

If it's only a few hundred, then the time it takes to program the robot and verify it's doing the task correctly, you could have the job already finished. So robots are limited.

not joking. I have seen a bunch of places that say it costs 1mil per year to send a troop to iraq. don't you think a mass produced robot would be cost much less than that, be easier to replace, etc?

Yeah and it coud distinguish between enemy and friend?
It could als be reprogrammed to kill us.
Kinda like teabaggers.

 

[blu]

they will be really screwed in the next 20-50 years as they are replaced by robots

Not just factory workers, either.

Eventually you'll be initially screened at the hospital by a computer program, too.

There is almost nothing that people can do that sooner or later a robot or computer program won't be able to do better and or cheaper.

And you know what that really means?

The end of capitalism as we know it.

Seriously, you cannot have capitalism when 80% or more of the population isn't employable because tecnology is doing the jobs they once did.

And no, this problem we're just now beginning to face is magnitudes larger in terms of disrupting our labor patterns than the industrial revolution ever was.

Because in that revolution, farming help went to work in factories. They STILL had jobs.

In the technolgical revolution, factory workers (and the mangament which once oversaw their work) and highly skilled workers (like Doctors, lawyers, and other professional INCLUDING SOFTWARE ENGINEERS) are going to find that they cannot compete with technology, and AI pprograms either.

Then how does our economic system work?

Do we continue to only reward those elements of our society who OWN the technology?

And who will be the consumers buying all this techologically made wealth when nobody has a job to make the money to buy it all, anyway?


Remember now, this problem is aleady starting to include highly educated people whose jobs are better done by machines and programs.

Should we let the majority of the society starve?

Our technology is going to change our economic system, folks.

Count on that.


And the transition from industrial capitalism to technology capitalism isn't going to be easy on the MAJORITY of us regardless of how well we educate ourselves.

yes you are close, but not all poisitons in science and engineering will be overtaken. AI is not to where a robot learn say a physics undergrad worth of knowledge without it being programmed into him (which isn't learning obviously). unless there is a major breakthrough in AI or robots can be programmed to learn on their own, the high end science & engineering jobs will still be human done. the resst of the population as you say, probably greather than 80% will be replaced by machines with no jobs available whetehr its because tehy are too old to learn the science needed or just refused to learn science along the way.

 

[blu]

(sorry..cannot get the quote function to work)

As we can now plainly see thanls to Youtube and the rest of the internet, creativity in humans isn't all that rare.

We can see people who are amazinginly talented who will never make any money for their talents.

So even assuming we are all Michelanglo's, our creativity doesn't amount to a hill of beans as far as making a living.

We're either going to change the way we reward people, or we're going to end up with a huge percentage of the population who cannot find work that they can do, that anybody will pay them to do.

Those of you who are sitting back thinking your skills are so special that they cannot be done by AI programs and or robots are in for a BIG SHOCK.

That is EXACTLY what skilled industrial machninists used to tell me, too. That their jobs reqired so much training and experience that they could never be replaced, either.

They are mostly now unemployed, (well many of them are retired, but nobody replaced them at the lathes, either) working at McJobs and trying to cope with their losses in incomes.

yes it is a hard thing to swallow for most poeple, that is that they can be replaced with something that barely has a brain as we use ours. it basically boils down to if your job requires critical though or not. if it doesn't you will be replaced. I do comptuer security & forensics research so I think I will be safe for a long time or possibly ever unless the major AI breakthrough I talked about in my last post happens.

 

[blu]

Those of you who are sitting back thinking your skills are so special that they cannot be done by AI programs and or robots are in for a BIG SHOCK.

Can a human produce an AI that is more intelligent, in every measure, than himself?

If he cannot, his job is secure.

If he can, we ought to be welcoming our robot overlords.

see my posts... it will only be high end/high education science and engineering jobs left.

 

[blu]

I'm sorry, I can't tell if you're joking or not.

Robots only become feasible if they are doing something that makes many thousands or millions. Like cars.

If it's only a few hundred, then the time it takes to program the robot and verify it's doing the task correctly, you could have the job already finished. So robots are limited.

not joking. I have seen a bunch of places that say it costs 1mil per year to send a troop to iraq. don't you think a mass produced robot would be cost much less than that, be easier to replace, etc?

Yeah and it coud distinguish between enemy and friend?
It could als be reprogrammed to kill us.
Kinda like teabaggers.

distinguish - yes
robots to kill us - they already have those
lame comment about teabaggers

 

[blu]

honestly it will be awesome when humans become more like robots (programmable). it is really assine that you have to spend 20+ years (1/3 to 1/4 of many people's lives) learning stuff that is already written and that millions of other people already know. what its figured out how our knowledge is stored in our body, and then they figure out how to write to/modify it, you could litteraly just scan books worth of knowledge into yourself or say copy all of wikipedia into your brain. Imagine if everyone starting at 5-10 years old was capable of PHD level research. what kind of breakthroughs would their be in math, science, and engineering?

 

[Care4all]

Wally World stocks more cheap stuff than just about anyone else. Most of the crap is made off shore in Asia, or some other place where they can realize the highest profits. But, I don't hear the masses bitching about the lack of jobs. Most Americans are just to dumb to realize that their way of life is going to be changing for the worse and we are barely seeing the results of their apathy. Until Americans can stem the flow of US greenbacks down, and slow the tide of cheap off shore junk coming in, having Hamburger Helper may start to seem like a celebration.

I suspect we are going to see the standard of living, for blue collar workers, to plummet even deeper. In the meantime, these BCWs will stop at Wally Workd for a new Chinese flat screen so that they can look at their REALITY shows, basketball tournaments, etc at 1080p.

Wonderful.

I'm no real fan of Walmart, but their marketing strategy is not to make the MOST PROFIT as let's say the oil companies....

Their strategy is to value price their merchandise, so to capture all of the market share available to capture...

Their profit marins are consistently around 3.6%....3.6% is a modest amount of profit to be making...so YES, they are getting their labor costs for dirt cheap by producing in China, BUT...they are passing the savings on to the customer....they are not pocketing all of their savings from overseas production and just paying their shareholders more.

Exxon/Mobile has a profit margin that is nearly 300% higher than Walmart's profit margin...

When I saw that they consistently ran at around a modest 3.6% profit margin, is when I stopped bashing walmart for their profits....

 

[Si modo]

Wally World stocks more cheap stuff than just about anyone else. Most of the crap is made off shore in Asia, or some other place where they can realize the highest profits. But, I don't hear the masses bitching about the lack of jobs. Most Americans are just to dumb to realize that their way of life is going to be changing for the worse and we are barely seeing the results of their apathy. Until Americans can stem the flow of US greenbacks down, and slow the tide of cheap off shore junk coming in, having Hamburger Helper may start to seem like a celebration.

I suspect we are going to see the standard of living, for blue collar workers, to plummet even deeper. In the meantime, these BCWs will stop at Wally Workd for a new Chinese flat screen so that they can look at their REALITY shows, basketball tournaments, etc at 1080p.

Wonderful.

I'm no real fan of Walmart, but their marketing strategy is not to make the MOST PROFIT as let's say the oil companies....

....

Oil is not all that attractive with respect to profits.

Oil Profit Margins vs. Other Industries The Everyday Economist

 

[antagon]

Those of you who are sitting back thinking your skills are so special that they cannot be done by AI programs and or robots are in for a BIG SHOCK.

Can a human produce an AI that is more intelligent, in every measure, than himself?

If he cannot, his job is secure.

If he can, we ought to be welcoming our robot overlords.

see my posts... it will only be high end/high education science and engineering jobs left.

bollocks.

they'd only be salespeople and hustlers. everyone else would probably by on welfare or in jail. this if the current trends play out.

 

[Wry Catcher]

Help Win the Trade War with China, Japan, India and the 3rd World! Join the Fair Tax Coalition - Repeal the 16h Amendment! http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServ...name=about_faq

Well, reducing our taxes would increase our international competitiveness.

And our public debt, and our interest payments on said debt, and not produce jobs (or the Bush tax cuts would have so proved).

 

[antagon]

seems if you reduce taxes, big firms only ramp up the outsourcing