Jobs Lost

[indago]

Aaron Mamiit wrote for Tech Times 26 May 2016:
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Foxconn has replaced 60,000 employees in one of its factories with robots, drawing forth visions ranging from robots completely obsoleting human workers to a robot apocalypse. The robots will replace humans in many manufacturing processes associated with the company's operations, the company said.

...Manufacturing businesses in the United States have fallen off due to the lower costs and more advanced capabilities of suppliers abroad. However, with the continued rise of automation, manufacturing may soon be brought back to the United States, albeit with robots taking most of the mundane work instead of humans.
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[320 Years of History]

Aaron Mamiit wrote for Tech Times 26 May 2016:
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Foxconn has replaced 60,000 employees in one of its factories with robots, drawing forth visions ranging from robots completely obsoleting human workers to a robot apocalypse. The robots will replace humans in many manufacturing processes associated with the company's operations, the company said.

...Manufacturing businesses in the United States have fallen off due to the lower costs and more advanced capabilities of suppliers abroad. However, with the continued rise of automation, manufacturing may soon be brought back to the United States, albeit with robots taking most of the mundane work instead of humans.
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Red:
That should surprise nobody who's for the past decade been paying more attention to what's actually going on in the world than they have to their favorite partisan blow hards.

Blue:
First, "fallen off" is hardly what has happened to U.S. manufacturing. What has happened is that it's shifted away from unskilled labor and to highly skilled labor. In the transition, the millions of unskilled laborers who've not acted to enhance their skillsets to that which producers demand have gotten lost. It used to be that one needed only a pulse to get a job. That's just not so any longer, nor should it be.

Second, the U.S. is not by any means less advanced in its business practices, manufacturing approaches and technology implementations/innovations. On the contrary, the U.S. is number one in that arena. Where the U.S. is not number one is in the related dimension of the penetration rates throughout the society as a whole of leading edge technologies. For example, people, businesses even, in the U.S. still write checks whereas in Europe and Japan, they only do so in exceptional circumstances. The idea of actually carrying money around is so close to obsolete in some European and Asian countries that only hoary folks and antediluvians shop and travel with cash.

Indeed even some rather "low tech" tech is, in the U.S. eschewed in favor of less efficient alternatives. Case in point, the roundabout, yet we have more intersections than roundabouts, this even as our founding fathers understood well the increased efficiency of them in comparison to cross-intersections.

It's my speculation that if there's any "fall off," it's got more to do with American provincialism, presumption of infallibility and superiority, and isolationism (i.e., that the average American has never left the U.S. to see firsthand what else is in and goes on in the rest of the world) that has led to any ostensibly and statistically relevant "fall off."

Green:
That may be, but it's certainly not going to make things any better for unskilled workers whose ire and intransigence impede their intellectual improvement in areas industry demands.