I don't have a lot of enthusiasm for any of the Democratic candidates so far. But any of them would be a VAST improvement over the current occupant of The White House. I hate the party system. I want publicly-funded elections and no private money. I will still vote for whoever the Democrats nominate, because the alternative is unthinkable.

 Red_Dragon wrote:  

So far, I like Pete.

 kurtster wrote: 

Cat got your tongue?

Your photo of James Comey's tweet saying that he's "in" for 2020 isn't showing. Here's a link to the tweet:

https://twitter.com/Comey/status/1112798033320796160

Thoughts: 

1. Thank God it's April Fools Day. 

2. Can someone persuade Jim to take his towering ass somewhere else for a while? 'Cause I think we've all had enough of him. 

 kcar wrote:
 

I'm just saying that I mentioned the font issue when the site was under construction and Bill disagreed that it was indistinguishable and said it looks fine on a phone. So whattya gonna do?  It works as designed. :shrug:

Powell Wyoming has 3 traditional coffeehouses plus some drive-up huts. 

Ours was Parlor News Coffeehouse. We sold it, the buyers were drunks who ran up a deficit with every supplier, then somehow sold it for a pretty fair chunk of change. Those new buyers soon found out that the creditors were going to call every day; they didn't care that the place had changed hands. So they changed the name of the business and got a new phone number. Uncommon Grounds :roll eyes: was in the location for several years while the building ownership changed 3 times... the new owners are not nice people; told Meredith that they had to move out because someone else had offered more money. Meredith said okay, moved to a new location on main street, and the old landlords tried to say "we want to keep you" but she lol'd. So the new people installed their own coffeehouse. I don't expect them to succeed in any way but anyway there's still a coffeehouse in the location we created. And one on the main street. And the one I go to, in the old meat locker near my house. They don't have very good photos, but the coffee bar is in the old wooden ice box where they'd hang meat... a great space.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 

"It works, it just uses a font that is barely discernable from the standard weight."


If you struggle to tell which words have been bolded...how well does that tool work? 

I see your point but I am fed up with this new editor. I was cursing earlier today when trying to post from my phone. My post included a quote from westslope; the box of quoted text pushed the area where my words appeared downwards and practically off the window of the phone. I could only see the top 1/3 of the letters I was typing so I had to repeatedly stop typing, push the words I'd just typed into full view, correct any mistakes and start typing again. Epic fail. 

I was using an iPhone 6 to compose and that offers its own special treat when listening to RP using the RP app. RP is famous for its brilliant segues (Bill? Rebecca? BiBecca? There's genius at work, I'll say that) but on fairly recent versions of the app, the songs run over each over for about 5 seconds. Those beautifully timed and themed segues turn into sonic car crashes. The developer of the app (a nice Italian guy, I believe) told me in a response to my bug report that there wasn't much he could do (I think. His English was not entirely understandable). Maybe the problem has been fixed, I don't know. 

Sorry for grumping. I hate February and I have a cold. Which coffee house in Powell is yours? Yellow Pages claims that there's only one but that doesn't seem right. 

 kcar wrote:
 

It works, it just uses a font that is barely discernable from the standard weight. Apparently, it's clearer on that phone...

 westslope wrote:




These new excerpts from the piece might clarify. I think the Times allows non-subscribers to read 5 articles for free each month, and this one is definitely worth reading from start to end.

I would highlight the main points with boldface but this new text editor on the new site has a boldface tool that DOES NOT WORK. At least I didn't have to compose this post on my phone...






By reducing prices and improving quality, technology was expected to raise demand, which would require more jobs. What’s more, economists thought, more productive workers would have higher incomes. This would create demand for new, unheard-of things that somebody would have to make.

To prove their case, economists pointed confidently to one of the greatest technological leaps of the last few hundred years, when the rural economy gave way to the industrial era.

In 1900, agriculture employed 12 million Americans. By 2014, tractors, combines and other equipment had flushed 10 million people out of the sector. But as farm labor declined, the industrial economy added jobs even faster. What happened? As the new farm machines boosted food production and made produce cheaper, demand for agricultural products grew. And farmers used their higher incomes to purchase newfangled industrial goods.

The new industries were highly productive and also subject to furious technological advancement. Weavers lost their jobs to automated looms; secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft Windows. But each new spin of the technological wheel, from plastic toys to televisions to computers, yielded higher incomes for workers and more sophisticated products and services for them to buy.

Something different is going on in our current technological revolution. In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.


...


Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.


...


The growing awareness of robots’ impact on the working class raises anew a very old question: Could automation go too far? Mr. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University argue that businesses are not even reaping large rewards for the money they are spending to replace their workers with machines.



 

 westslope wrote:
 
The economists quoted in the piece had the same reaction. Give me a few hours and I will quote further from the piece for clarification.

This text editor for the new site is atrociously bad when it comes to composing on an iPhone. I can't even see the results of my typing unless I stop typing and push the text field into view.

Kcar wrote:  Something different is going on in our current technological revolution. In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.


Does anybody else see a problem with this statement?   If not, you should.....

If you agree with the statement, then please explain the math to me because obviously I do not get it.  

 Lazy8 wrote: 

There probably is a long history of dire warnings ("This time it's different") when it comes to automation and technology changing the composition of the employment market in advanced countries. Your post notes that workers in the past have adapted to job-replacing technological advances by learning new skills that work with the new technologies or by moving into another field. 

You're right about this historical pattern of successful human adaptation or exit but before I point this conversation to a NYT article that challenges your thinking regarding the present day, I'd like to point out something that the field of economics doesn't seem to talk about much: the difficulty and relatively low level of success when it comes to job-retraining in this country. The draftsmen and teamsters and cobblers you mention often struggled to adapt to changes in the economy and often never regained the level of pre-change income they enjoyed. The US may have a strong and dynamic economy but it largely provides scant attention and insufficient response to the problems of workers caught on the wrong side of change. That's why the Pittsburgh area was still languishing long after the fall of Big Steel. The city is now becoming an economic powerhouse again thanks to research done at schools like Carnegie-Mellon in AI and self-driving cars but that decades-long transition succeeded largely through happenstance, not long-term planning between schools and the local government. 

To the NYT piece: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

The piece notes that the American economy is bifurcating between well-paying jobs in technology that aren't actually increasing dramatically in numbers and jobs in traditional service sectors such as retail that are more numerous but steadily paying less and less. We may not see or hear of people being too poor to own shoes as you point out, but the appearance and increase of working homeless people is a relatively new phenomenon in this country. 

The article does NOT bring up ScottFromWyoming's point about the concentration of wealth and control at the very top of companies gaining control over their sectors, e.g. Google and Amazon. 

"(A)utomation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.

...

Recent research has concluded that robots are reducing the demand for workers and weighing down wages, which have been rising more slowly than the productivity of workers. Some economists have concluded that the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades.

Because it pushes workers to the less productive parts of the economy, automation also helps explain one of the economy’s thorniest paradoxes: Despite the spread of information technology, robots and artificial intelligence breakthroughs, overall productivity growth remains sluggish.

“The view that we should not worry about any of these things and follow technology to wherever it will go is insane,” said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The most productive sectors of the economy are generally in high tech which has not generated lots of new jobs, thanks in part to reliance on increased automation in a quest to maintain or boost productivity. The least productive sectors are in service sectors that create a lot of new jobs but don't use much automation—or when they do, automation doesn't decrease the number of jobs that much. 

"Economists have a hard time getting their heads around this...“In the standard economic canon, the proposition that you can increase productivity and harm labor is bunkum,” Mr. Acemoglu said.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 

I apologize for the "oh shit my carpool's here" postscript this morning. 

ScottFromWyoming wrote:

Could've sworn I heard my bell rung here. Maybe it was the coffee talking.

I'd be happy to put out a blizzard of links...but you wouldn't read them. Besides I still owe noenz a response to his fine condescension and I haven't done my Italian homework and I have a zillion thank-yous to write and books to close on the year and I'm exhausted from travel and two glasses into a fine bottle of Nero Marone but maybe, since the world is ending (there's a link! It said so!) I'll just respond with an anecdote or two.

For pretty much the entirety of human history we humans have been advancing technology to get more done with less labor. The first stone tools meant more-efficient hunting, the domestication of animals meant less brute labor to move things and feed ourselves, wind and water power meant more production with less effort, the harnessing of steam, fossil fuels, the atom—all these things let machines of one form or another replace human labor with something faster and more efficient. And I'm sure at every step there was someone complaining that this new invention—basketry, say—would lead to root gatherers being out of work and what would they do and we'll have to feed them even if they aren't carrying their own food in their bare hands.

It used to take the labor of more than half of us farming to feed the earth's population. It now takes under 5% in all but the most backward parts of the world. Somehow those displaced ox wranglers found something to do.

When I started my career as an engineer the skills required by employers were quite different from what they look for now. When I started work every engineer had a drafting table at which one did drawings of parts for manufacture. Ironically I was working for a company that made drafting plotters—robots that drew—so that the new discipline of Computer-Aided Design could relieve some of the tedium of that chore.

By the time I left all but a few dinosaur holdouts had learned CAD and designed on computers. One of the CAD support staff did a survey of the R&D lab (which was roughly the same size it had been when I joined the company—about 150 people) and counted drafting tables. Fewer than 25% still had one, and of those only a couple were actually doing drawings on them. The rest were work spaces for assembling tests and prototypes.

There used to be people called draftsmen who did drawings for those deemed too important to do their own. That trade has pretty much vanished in manufacturing; I'm proud to say I helped kill it off. Draftsmen became, instead, designers—specialists in using cad systems to create difficult-to-model parts in ever-more-complex designs. Designs enabled by this new technology, that would have been prohibitively difficult and expensive using pencil and paper.

The trucks that need drivers now put a lot of teamsters (that is, people who drove teams of draft animals to haul freight) out of work. Somehow they found other things to do. Technology advances and people adapt; they use the new tools like leverage to get more done with their few hours on the earth. The more they get done the better off we all are. I mean, up to now. That's just the entirety of human history. This time is different, right? Maybe another example will help.

My grandfather never graduated from the 8th grade. They told him he couldn't attend the ceremony unless he wore shoes and he didn't own a pair. Couldn't afford them. So he went to work.

Back then shoes were made by cobblers, by hand. A lot of human labor went into a pair of shoes. My grandfather's father's labor wasn't worth any more than a cobbler's so the time it took a cobbler to make a pair of shoes had to be paid for by a similar (slightly larger) number of hours working at the lumber mill.

When was the last time you saw someone so poor they didn't have shoes? The replacement of a cobbler's labor with machine effort meant that shoes became cheap enough they aren't worth fixing when they wear out. And this isn't just true of shoes; when was the last time you darned a sock? Do you even know how? Do you even know anyone who knows how? Socks are too cheap to fix. We spend our labor buying the next-most-necessary thing because that basic human need is taken care of with a tiny amount of our own labor.

Did fewer people end up employed making shoes? Worldwide probably not. The lower price has driven demand up to the point that the that even more-efficient manufacturing (meaning more shoes for fewer hours of labor) still probably employs about the same number of people worldwide. Those people just make more shoes more of the world can afford.

Explain to me why that's a bad thing. Better yet, explain it to my grandfather.

Of my 3 kids (all recent college grads) two have jobs that existed when I graduated from college. My firstborn makes a living teaching and translating languages on the internet. She's working on her second self-published book. That would not have been a living back in the day, it would have been a hobby. She would have had to have a stultifying day job—maybe as a secretary, another position that has vanished, replaced by desktop software. Yet young women still find work somehow.

But yeah, this time is different.

There's another old anecdote that might help make sense of the coming robopocalypse:

Two old geezers are sitting on the porch, rocking their rocking chairs while rain falls. One turns to the other and says "Rainin' again."
"Yep."
"Think it'll stop?"
"Always has."

I can't say what kind of work our kids will be doing when the robots come to take our jobs any more than a blacksmith could predict what his kids would be doing when machines took over what he was doing. I also can't prove that those proclaiming this to be the end of work, that we have to immediately start paying people to sit idle because my god what will they all do are wrong...this time.

But they always have been.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
I've been studying UBI and while where the money comes from is an issue, I have seen a couple of scenarios where it is a good idea.

I'll put my thoughts on the UBI in a separate post.  This one kinda went in a different direction.

Time for a nap ...

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 

I think its a valid point, but just as going to renewable energy is not realistic quite yet, neither is the need to go to a guaranteed income society.  But we do need to plan and start implementing the movement towards both.  I think some of the singularity videos Miami posts refer to this as the dematerialization and demonetization of society.   As that continues, and we need to rely less on waiters, factory workers, truckers...the question shouldn't be how do we normalize cash flows (though we also need to engage the fact that income disparity is an issue), as much as how do we keep the growing population engaged in some form of work?  As noted, not all can be CEOs, or engineers (but even those jobs could be obsolete with AI),  but how do we keep people working?  Some central level planning needs to be done, or the failure of capitalism (the accumulation of excessive capital) will continue to grow.  

 sirdroseph wrote:
 
Be sure you understand the notion. Of course there are predictable and unpredictable downsides and implementation will be hamstrung by {insert villain}{or GOP}. But suppose we do lose 73 million jobs to technology in 10 years. Should the creator of Snapchat be among the only ones left standing? As technology removes the need for humans to do many jobs, should all profits flow to the owners of the technology, and you and Lazy and the rest of us be left to realize, "shit, I should have become CEO of a tech giant instead of an engineer, a doctor, or a whateveritisyoudo?"

Without UBI, this 2015 article on the effects of robot trucks on the economy says, the US economy will grind to a halt. By as soon as 2025. The end of Trump's next term.

It isn't that people who don't want to work will ask to be given a pass (they will), or that buggy and horse whip manufacturers will try to use it as a way to remain viable (they will). There will still be immense wealth at the top, don't worry. But there will be no need for most of the blue-collar, decent-paying jobs that buy TVs and cars and meals at Olive Garden.
 
===========

I am looking forward to rational (if possible) discussion of why it's bad.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
If this notion keeps gaining steam, I half joked to my wife I guess I will have to quit my job to be able to afford living.  Human nature is undefeated.