n/t

We're not your warning signal. We're not some expendable bird whose death means nothing more than a sign to YOU. I'm sick of people acting like "well it's just Detroit, but what if it happens somewhere important!"

The people here matter because they're people. They're not an abstract notion of failed policy that may one day affect others. It's affecting us NOW. The canary died a long ass time ago and no one much gave a shit.

It just means people do other jobs.

and if he/she could, wouldn't appreciate Vonnegut anyway.

Tell me why you mentioned it.

Last edited Mon Jul 22, 2013, 05:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Excepting engineers and plant managers.

and the failure is not in automation, but what to do with the displaced workers. We have completely failed in replacing the good jobs with better, or even just as good, jobs.

Instead of work being fueled by a few sandwiches in a belly, now it has to be fueled by hydrocarbons mined and delivered by an enormous supply chain, that requires its own energy backbone.

According to BLS statistics. See table 10 http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsa2012.pdf

So automation cannot have much impact on total employment of production workers.

Automation of business processes will have significant effect on clerical, sales and administrative occupations.

..whatever that is

Automation could and should mean more leisure and less labor for all of us - not just profits for the wealthy few

anyone ever noticve the irony of people who say 'Protectionism is bad', yet support endless trillions on the pentagon?!?!

PROTECTING WHAT?!?!?!?

You want access our markets and economy? You gotta pay. It's that simple.

and the wealth that the market's true value represented, was transfered overseas almost immediatly

just like Perot said it would, in the 1992 Presidential debate with himself, Bush and Clinton

Q: Yes, I'd like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.

PEROT: That's right at the top of my agenda. We've shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you've served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who've got these one-way trade agreements that we've negotiated over the years and say, "Fellows, we'll take the same deal we gave you." And they'll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we've got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply -- you see, if it was a two-way street -- just couldn't do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided i was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out.


http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/the-1992-campaign-transcript-of-2d-tv-debate-between-bush-clinton-and-perot.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Automation and outsourcing was the first fix, to squeeze out profits by making labor costs negligible when other costs of production were rising? What if this is the new normal simply because we aren't advancing into a new age, but declining into an old one. Perhaps our current infrastructure cannot continually be maintained, and new growth achieved, without black gold pouring out of every hole we drill in the ground.