[quote=jeff303][quote=bearishgurl]
America needs and will continue to need all kinds of workers, not just “creative types.” It’s not for elitest-types (or wanna-be elitest-types) living in SoCal (where fresh produce is in abundance and relatively cheap) to decide whether a midwestern diet of home-canned fruits and vegetables from a home garden, meat butchered and packaged locally or fish caught locally, milk pasteurized locally and real mashed potatoes with homemade gravy isn’t “nutritional.” Nor are they qualified to decide whether most Americans possess the “raw life enrichment experiences” or “family dynamic” necessary to develop the “raw mental horsepower” or whether they might already possess the “raw mental horsepower” to begin with.
Get up at 4:00 am 6-7 days per week to start chores on your “working farm or ranch” and tell me how much “raw mental horsepower” is needed to sustain that type of discipline, year in and year out.
Sorry, but it’s not the same thing as stopping off at Starbucks on your commute to a desk job in SoCal where you will report to a cubicle between 8 and 9 am, immediately put your flip-flopped feet on the desk and pipe up your laptop for the day in your supposedly “creative job.”[/quote]
I don’t think anyone is disparaging people who obviously work very hard in more physically-oriented jobs, or discounting their discipline or worth to society. The point is that like it or not, these jobs will gradually go away. The free market demands that profits continue to grow every quarter, and the easiest way to achieve that growth is to reduce labor costs via automation. It has been happening throughout history and will continue to do so. Whereas many farmers used to be required to tend to one farm, now a single farmer can manage a much larger land area through the use of technology. And one day, almost no farmers will even be out physically on the fields; a small number of them will just be overseeing the operations of robots harvesting the fields.
I agree with others that say there will be some sort of major upheaval, probably in my lifetime. The only hope I can see to alleviating this outcome is something like essentially free universal power (fusion or similar), or mass rollout/usage/hacking of 3D printing. For the time being, wealth will continue to flow upward at an ever increasing pace, since the already wealthy are the ones who will own the profits from increased automation.[/quote]
I disagree on a couple of your points, jeff.
First of all, jobs such as a police officer and a teacher are not going away. There are MANY jobs working with PEOPLE where a human needs to report to work and interact with PEOPLE all day. Most of these jobs are not “creative” but have procedures which have been laid out for decades.
And I don’t see where owning robots will be more economical for farms than paying the (mostly) migrant farmworkers the wages that they currently earn. Especially since humans will have to “oversee” the work of robots.
Contrary to popular belief on this forum, “wealthy” people come in all stripes, jeff. For example, “wealthy” or even “extremely wealthy” people may be those who control leases for thousands of acres of ranchland passed down through their families. “Wealthy” people also control 2-12 separate mineral rights (gas and oil) leases passed down through a family which may generate a monthly annuity for life for a dozen or more family members.
I have such relatives in both categories and can assure you that they would be considered “wealthy” or even “extremely wealthy” by the Piggs. What do they look like? They’re dressed in Levi 501’s and a flannel shirt today with a t-shirt on to strip down to if it gets too hot. They left home this morning at 7:00 am and hit the road in their 2002 dually pickup with their circa 1964 plaid coffee Thermos, a packed ice chest, gallon push-button drink cooler, safety glasses and hardhat in tow 🙂
In a lineup, you might not be able to tell them from the Walmart SNAP/EBT crowd.
They don’t have time to sit and blog with you and me because they’re busy checking on and even supervising their many “biz enterprises” and will arrive back home between 5:30 and 6:00 pm this evening to a home-cooked dinner.
And some of them are past retirement age but enjoy what they are doing.
And, to my knowledge, they never had any problems with “family dynamics” or lack of “raw life enrichment experiences.”
