7 ms·

"Who will benefit from automation?" Easy answer the companies profits and the automation machine manufacturer and support companies. Additionally the "Made in

by boznz 10y ago

"Who will benefit from automation?" Easy answer the companies profits and the automation machine manufacturer and support companies. Additionally the "Made in good old USA" sticker or wherever you happen to be brings up images of a local using timeless traditional methods making the garment, apart from a very few very expensive items that image is obviously a joke but it certainly works for sales and marketing to manipulate peoples perception and many will pay more for the sticker.

chrischen 10y ago
Let's get rid of the factories for cars, silicon, and electronics while we are at it. Efficiency is not conducive to jobs and prosperity. Workers must unite to protect livelihoods! (end sarcasm).
- dmix 10y ago
  And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. There's a reason many pro-market people want smaller gov and it's not just personal selfish gain to save a few dollars in taxes but to prevent the predictable selfish incentives of the power players from exploiting the absolute power of the state for the benefit of a limited few. No wonder there is a backlash against globalism and 'free trade' agreements when this same group of insular regulators and powerful market leaders are designing the agreements and calling all of the shots. Sweatshops are hardly the result of free trade but government controlled/financed trade that only prioritizes the interests of the mega corps, sometimes pushed to the point of exploitation in countries with poor legal systems and weak concepts of human rights. The process of creating the TPP made this even more apparent to the public, they hardly even tried to hide the obvious favoritism and complete lack of openness. Clearly it has become so status quo that they didn't even bother with pretense.
  - jbicha 10y ago
    How does smaller government help with sweatshops or unemployment or income inequality?
    - gozur88 10y ago
      Regulatory capture allows large companies (espeically multinationals) to exclude competition.
    - pjkundert 10y ago
      Less regulatory capture. When companies reach the scale of increasing inefficiency of communication and regression to the mean, the natural barrier to their growth, they replace innovation and competitiveness with erecting barriers to entry into their markets. Try staring a business in a market with large established players. You'll find that you cannot do many of the things they themselves did to get started -- they have erected legislative barriers preventing replication. Easy -- just write "think of the children" legislation demanding egregious safety, accounting and legal overhead, trivial to bear at scale, but lethal to new entrants...
    - dmix 10y ago
      Basic income and small government can coexist IMO. As can a healthy legal system and charter of rights. The level of government involvment in everyone's day to day life has risen astronomically since the 1950s. That doesn't mean we have to sacrifice all social safety nets and human rights in order to have a healthy functional government. Running a non-megacorp business and surviving without a job has not been made easier at all since the 50-60s. It's actually harder than ever as a result of government intervention and wasteful resource consumption for very little benefit to society. It makes you wonder who the government has been busy serving all of those years. (Hint: the kind of business who wouldn't think twice about running a sweatshop via trade deals that never seem to involve clauses to require following the laws of the parent country) .
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. The reason is that capitalists (the economic class, not "advocates of capitalism"; the two have substantial overlap, but aren't identical) tend to be the power behind both business and government in capitalist systems.
- cnfjdnx 10y ago
  See you at the soup lines!
- good_gnu 10y ago
  Or we could keep the factories, accept unemployment as a result of technical progress, realize that the total amount of goods created has not diminished at all and stop tieing the right to consume to participation in the production process. The "human in the production process" paradigm is doomed to fail as technology progresses anyway.
  - dmix 10y ago
    All the more reason basic income makes economic sense. When the alternative is inefficient and costly human labor.
    - afarrell 10y ago
      We should figure out a way create some sort of dividend that skims some money off of the benefits of automation and adds it to social security income. I'd say we should distribute it across age groups, but this lets you use the existing Social Security Infrastructure. Plus, young people don't vote in legislative and local elections, so that wouldn't be as useful for preserving the freedom to automate.
      - nikanj 10y ago
        We have this, it's called "taxes". Not many large corporations pay any, though
    - chris_va 10y ago
      Just to be picky, this is one of the weakest arguments of UBI. This gets into a "what is money" kind of discussion, but paying people because they are incapable of employment is not a good outcome. That money reprents scarcity, which traditionally has entirely been labor. In a post labor economy, what is money?
      - afarrell 10y ago
        Money represents obligation. Either to give somebody a puns of silver or to provide a negotiated amount of value. That value need not be scarce, as in the case of say, a downloadable audiobook or music file.
- andrepd 10y ago
  That's a frankly pointless comment. Did you miss the point of the parent? I don't think so, I think you deliberately attacked an issue that wasn't even the parent's point. This concern is a valid one: keeping the current paradigm, automation will lead to unemployment on a massive scale which will wreak havoc everywhere especially in underdeveloped countries with little to no social safety net or worker and citizen protection. Keeping the current paradigm, the capitalists will reap even more obscene profits by absorbing the difference between the current salaries and the much lower automation costs, while potentially tens to hundreds of millions of people (in the short term only) will be out of jobs and left with no means of survival. This is very concerning to me, and attacking a straw man with a ridiculous "oh let's close the factories then shall we" is childish.
sliverstorm 10y ago
Actually, that's interesting to think- the more automated the factory, the less sense it makes to overseas for low labor costs. (tarriffs and other legal structures are a different matter) So, other pressures (like being near raw materials, or near the end market, become stronger factors.
WillPostForFood 10y ago
High prices on necessities (food/housing/clothing) are like a regressive tax on the poor. Cheaper clothing will primarily benefit poor people who buy clothes.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Only if those poor can actually afford those cheaper clothes.

by boznz 10y ago

chrischen 10y ago

Let's get rid of the factories for cars, silicon, and electronics while we are at it. Efficiency is not conducive to jobs and prosperity. Workers must unite to protect livelihoods! (end sarcasm).

dmix 10y ago
And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. There's a reason many pro-market people want smaller gov and it's not just personal selfish gain to save a few dollars in taxes but to prevent the predictable selfish incentives of the power players from exploiting the absolute power of the state for the benefit of a limited few. No wonder there is a backlash against globalism and 'free trade' agreements when this same group of insular regulators and powerful market leaders are designing the agreements and calling all of the shots. Sweatshops are hardly the result of free trade but government controlled/financed trade that only prioritizes the interests of the mega corps, sometimes pushed to the point of exploitation in countries with poor legal systems and weak concepts of human rights. The process of creating the TPP made this even more apparent to the public, they hardly even tried to hide the obvious favoritism and complete lack of openness. Clearly it has become so status quo that they didn't even bother with pretense.
- jbicha 10y ago
  How does smaller government help with sweatshops or unemployment or income inequality?
  - gozur88 10y ago
    Regulatory capture allows large companies (espeically multinationals) to exclude competition.
  - pjkundert 10y ago
    Less regulatory capture. When companies reach the scale of increasing inefficiency of communication and regression to the mean, the natural barrier to their growth, they replace innovation and competitiveness with erecting barriers to entry into their markets. Try staring a business in a market with large established players. You'll find that you cannot do many of the things they themselves did to get started -- they have erected legislative barriers preventing replication. Easy -- just write "think of the children" legislation demanding egregious safety, accounting and legal overhead, trivial to bear at scale, but lethal to new entrants...
  - dmix 10y ago
    Basic income and small government can coexist IMO. As can a healthy legal system and charter of rights. The level of government involvment in everyone's day to day life has risen astronomically since the 1950s. That doesn't mean we have to sacrifice all social safety nets and human rights in order to have a healthy functional government. Running a non-megacorp business and surviving without a job has not been made easier at all since the 50-60s. It's actually harder than ever as a result of government intervention and wasteful resource consumption for very little benefit to society. It makes you wonder who the government has been busy serving all of those years. (Hint: the kind of business who wouldn't think twice about running a sweatshop via trade deals that never seem to involve clauses to require following the laws of the parent country) .
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. The reason is that capitalists (the economic class, not "advocates of capitalism"; the two have substantial overlap, but aren't identical) tend to be the power behind both business and government in capitalist systems.
cnfjdnx 10y ago
See you at the soup lines!
good_gnu 10y ago
Or we could keep the factories, accept unemployment as a result of technical progress, realize that the total amount of goods created has not diminished at all and stop tieing the right to consume to participation in the production process. The "human in the production process" paradigm is doomed to fail as technology progresses anyway.
- dmix 10y ago
  All the more reason basic income makes economic sense. When the alternative is inefficient and costly human labor.
  - afarrell 10y ago
    We should figure out a way create some sort of dividend that skims some money off of the benefits of automation and adds it to social security income. I'd say we should distribute it across age groups, but this lets you use the existing Social Security Infrastructure. Plus, young people don't vote in legislative and local elections, so that wouldn't be as useful for preserving the freedom to automate.
    - nikanj 10y ago
      We have this, it's called "taxes". Not many large corporations pay any, though
  - chris_va 10y ago
    Just to be picky, this is one of the weakest arguments of UBI. This gets into a "what is money" kind of discussion, but paying people because they are incapable of employment is not a good outcome. That money reprents scarcity, which traditionally has entirely been labor. In a post labor economy, what is money?
    - afarrell 10y ago
      Money represents obligation. Either to give somebody a puns of silver or to provide a negotiated amount of value. That value need not be scarce, as in the case of say, a downloadable audiobook or music file.
andrepd 10y ago
That's a frankly pointless comment. Did you miss the point of the parent? I don't think so, I think you deliberately attacked an issue that wasn't even the parent's point. This concern is a valid one: keeping the current paradigm, automation will lead to unemployment on a massive scale which will wreak havoc everywhere especially in underdeveloped countries with little to no social safety net or worker and citizen protection. Keeping the current paradigm, the capitalists will reap even more obscene profits by absorbing the difference between the current salaries and the much lower automation costs, while potentially tens to hundreds of millions of people (in the short term only) will be out of jobs and left with no means of survival. This is very concerning to me, and attacking a straw man with a ridiculous "oh let's close the factories then shall we" is childish.

sliverstorm 10y ago

Actually, that's interesting to think- the more automated the factory, the less sense it makes to overseas for low labor costs. (tarriffs and other legal structures are a different matter) So, other pressures (like being near raw materials, or near the end market, become stronger factors.

WillPostForFood 10y ago

High prices on necessities (food/housing/clothing) are like a regressive tax on the poor. Cheaper clothing will primarily benefit poor people who buy clothes.

st3v3r 10y ago
Only if those poor can actually afford those cheaper clothes.