3 ms·

>You are decades out of touch with reality, because I read years ago already that some guys estimated we hit the break even point (in the "western world") in th

by jml7c5 4y ago

>You are decades out of touch with reality, because I read years ago already that some guys estimated we hit the break even point (in the "western world") in the mid 90s already. And you are out of touch with the current reality. The "western world" is currently undergoing a labor shortage; in the United States, unemployment just hit its lowest point in 50 years! That runs completely counter to the thesis that increased automation will inevitably cause mass unemployent. You've also disregarded the obvious solution to any decreasing demand for labor: make the work week shorter and everyone simply works fewer hours. >The more we automate all these things, the less humans are involved, and following that it means the economy will shrink. You've conflated "the size of the economy" and "total hours of labor". By any reasonable definition of economic size, if you have two societies and one produces more economically valuable output than the other, then it is larger, regardless of how many hours of labor are involved. One worker with a spoon produces less than one worker with a shovel, and spending ten times as long to achieve the same result does not make that economy larger.

Sunspark 4y ago
Offshoring and automating contracts the economy because all the people who were employed were spending money on goods and services. Now what has happened is that they don't have a job or the job left to employ someone in a foreign country. Economy contracts. Sure, the owners of company X have a few more dollars, and sure, the economy of the foreign land grew a bit because now there is someone purchasing goods and services, but the domestic economy contracted. Then for a double whammy, because the people who ran the country were stupid and allow foreigners or foreign-controlled corporations to come in and buy up real-estate, this money then floods in and starts buying up residential properties creating a shortage of housing, which creates a double crunch because now these unemployed folks need to figure it out as supply and demand is causing purchase or rent of real estate to go up. Food is going up, everything is going up. The outside economy it's no problem for them because through economies of scale, they can just keep the money flowing in to take over, but it only benefits a few people, not everyone. It's not as if there's any sort of organized structure here to be "oh, let's all just employ people to build ghost cities one after the other so foreigners can park their money in empty real estate". People like the IBM CEO are part of the problem destroying society. I do not applaud him or his peers. They are parasites with vast multi-million dollar salaries. "IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and ex-exec-chairwoman Ginny Rometty were collectively awarded more than $38m in compensation for their services in fiscal 2020, a year in which Big Blue's revenues shrank and operating profit more than halved." Not bad eh? 2 people got more than $38 million in a single year. To do what? Golf and attend meetings.

by jml7c5 4y ago

Sunspark 4y ago

Offshoring and automating contracts the economy because all the people who were employed were spending money on goods and services. Now what has happened is that they don't have a job or the job left to employ someone in a foreign country. Economy contracts. Sure, the owners of company X have a few more dollars, and sure, the economy of the foreign land grew a bit because now there is someone purchasing goods and services, but the domestic economy contracted. Then for a double whammy, because the people who ran the country were stupid and allow foreigners or foreign-controlled corporations to come in and buy up real-estate, this money then floods in and starts buying up residential properties creating a shortage of housing, which creates a double crunch because now these unemployed folks need to figure it out as supply and demand is causing purchase or rent of real estate to go up. Food is going up, everything is going up. The outside economy it's no problem for them because through economies of scale, they can just keep the money flowing in to take over, but it only benefits a few people, not everyone. It's not as if there's any sort of organized structure here to be "oh, let's all just employ people to build ghost cities one after the other so foreigners can park their money in empty real estate". People like the IBM CEO are part of the problem destroying society. I do not applaud him or his peers. They are parasites with vast multi-million dollar salaries. "IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and ex-exec-chairwoman Ginny Rometty were collectively awarded more than $38m in compensation for their services in fiscal 2020, a year in which Big Blue's revenues shrank and operating profit more than halved." Not bad eh? 2 people got more than $38 million in a single year. To do what? Golf and attend meetings.