I keep asking the question.

Many people don't understand just how close we are to making humans obsolete in the workplace. It poses some very real questions as to how our future economy will function and how people in future generations will define themselves. What will humans do when the concept of getting a job to support yourself becomes obsolete?

Why do I have such a bleak outlook?

If there's one thing that 40-gibberish years of

a) electing religion-poisoned, laissez-faire addled politicians

b) corporations buying your media and infiltrating government

has taught us, it's that Republican voters, their politicians and their business leaders are addicted to this "rugged individualist Horatio Alger" heroin and will not let GO of it despite tons and tons of evidence that it does NOT work and will NOT save us. And unfortunately, folks, they run everything.

The average small business makes less than poverty income.

Automation and robots cannot buy products.

College is soon going to cost more than automobiles, and after that, housing.

Joe Sixpack doesn't invent things anymore. Any technological advancement is performed in corporate laboratories nowadays. Invention alone isn't going to save us, because not everyone can be an engineer.

There is never going to be a Guaranteed Minimum Income. Get that fantasyland crap out of here. Don't get me wrong . . . America NEEDS something like this and, with an economic future as bleak as ours is going to be, America is going to NEED a GMI.

Our Congress is never going to enact it because they, like their voters, are the REAL purveyors of the "politics of envy".

They're so insanely jealous of the supposed perks and benefits of the "system gaming poor" now that it's adamantly more important to them that all of America suffers rather than "one more lazy worthless freeloading (insert racial, ethnic or gender slur here) lives high on the hog off of MY TAX DOLLARS". They aren't going to put millions more on the Dole.

('course, if you bring up wealthy system gamers, there'll be more "THA'S DIFFRNT"s thrown out than escort cards on the Vegas strip).

The GOP NEVER has an answer for these problems. They never will. They just think "the spirit and motivation of talented individuals blah blah blah" will save us. You need money for that. You need money for ANYthing nowadays.

I'd love to see your citation on the average small business making less than poverty.

I worked for a small business in Chicago. A software engineering firm on Wacker Drive called Systemhouse. But they didn't last more than 10 years because EDS gobbled them up. Kept the engineers but laid off everyone in Sales, finance & accounting, legal, and marketing.

Gobble gobble

And if we're comparing it, I've worked with over 100 small businesses in the last 12 years helping them with labor and employment law compliance; and while I've seen a few of them take a smaller check than some of their lowest paid employees from time to time to make payroll, they do manage to keep their head above water and rarely question their decision to hang out their own shingle. They do it because they love what they do and still believe in their dream.

There's a bad apple in every bushel, but it doesn't poison the bunch, nor is it representative of the group as a whole.

Sounds like you're stuck in them. The OP looks at trends and forecasts the future.

Learn something about the world and get back with us, the post you replied to pushed your buttons...live with it.

Any other pieces of wisdom you'd like to impart?

You hit a nerve.

should be the primary goal of US foreign policy towards the Third World. The CIA Director was given substantial responsibility for its implementation. That CIA Director was George H.W. Bush.

NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture.

The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”

http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/kiss_nssm_jb_1995.html - emphasis added

They're just bringing the plan to home shores. The oligarchs want the masses dead. It's been in the planning stages for 40 years, as shown above.

Any questions?

that basically said they were (at the time) one of the largest dealerships in the world with tens of millions in revenue and it was operated by less than ten people.

(Numbers aren't exact, but you get the gist.)

550 Full-Time

Either capitalism or humanity survives. One or the other. Both cannot.

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And the law. No longer do they "hire" subcontractors, now they hire "Uber Super Proprietary Associates." No one knows what the fuck that is and it will take years to define before SuperUber creates a new tax exempt position called "Prime Minister of Proprietary Operations."

The government continues to subsidize SuperUber to the tune of $billions each year in lost revenue and the few part-time employees that actually exist receive no benefits.